Ambassador 4: Coming Home (17 page)

“We’re selected to perform this task.”

It sounded like it was an honour. “But isn’t it dangerous?”

“The survival of the main population is the most important aim of the mission. Some need to be awake to ensure that the ship is healthy.”

“But do you do anything special to protect yourself during these jumps?”

“We monitor the health of the crew. It’s very important.” Her voice acquired a slightly angry edge.

Was she deliberately not answering my question? “All right then. What happens when you go into a jump?”

“They take a long time. All the while, we adjust the pods.”

“Isn’t there a way to do this automatically?”

She gave me a startled look. “All the internals of the ship are completely powered down during a jump.” She sounded indignant. How stupid of me not to know this.

At the same time, I sensed something inherently horrible about these jumps. Having travelled through space myself, I had tasted the acute discomfort that comes with being locked in a tin can with no gravity. The forms of space travel I had tried had been controlled and relatively easy, but extensive safety briefings brought home the fact that when the system became stressed because something went wrong, crew might need to take desperate measures to stay alive. The emergency supplies contained items such as adult nappies for when confined to one’s room unable to go to the bathroom, and scrapers to take ice off the walls in case of heating failure and other items whose purpose I was happy not to know.

If the ship’s internals were powered off during a jump and a jump lasted days, the crew might be confined to a small compartment, where air, temperature and heating would slowly deteriorate. They might need to wear hard vacuum suits, and live, eat and shit in these suits. Shields would be off, so radiation might penetrate the ship.

Hell, maybe even half the non-frozen crew would not survive a jump, and they weren’t allowed to complain because it was an honour to serve the ship.

I shuddered, once more reminded how much we put our lives in the hands of technology even when travelling through the Exchange.

“I’m bound to the ship,” she said, and her voice sounded proud.

That declaration chilled me even more.

I had asked her before what that meant, and had received an incomprehensible reply about biometrics and some micro-technology to do with blood. It seemed a biological thing, like our feeders. I suspected that a lot of the terms she used were wrongly translated, but Coldi just didn’t offer a correct translation.

I imagined that if a modern human met a Neanderthal, the level of communication would be similar. True transfer of information was impossible.

As the train slowed down at the approach to the airport station, my overwhelming thought was that we were the Neanderthals, and they could pull out a magical weapon the likes of which we hadn’t begun to consider, and they would kill us all.

On the other hand, if a modern human and a Neanderthal faced each other in a stone axe fight, the Neanderthal would win.

Axe fights it was.

Welcome to the Stone Age.

On further consideration, if a modern human faced a Neanderthal in a modern home, the Neanderthal would strangle the human with a power cord.

As long as the Neanderthal could pick the time and place of the fight, he would win if no magical weapons were present.

All this assumed that they didn’t develop some form of mutually understood communication where the modern man could make it understood that there was no need for a fight and they could be sharing a beer instead. Did Neanderthals like beer?

All right, so we were the Neanderthals. I had tried very hard, but so far failed miserably, to see the hand holding out the beer. In fact, we seemed to be facing an entirely different situation. If three modern men walked into a Neanderthal village of two hundred with the intention to take the village, they’d bring guns and make short work of the whole tribe. That seemed closer to the situation we were facing. The guns were on that ship that was waking up and that, by his own admission, Asha might be unable to stop.

The comparison made my head hurt.

W
E GOT OFF
the train at the airport station with a big group of other people, most of whom looked like they were going to the markets. They were, for the most part, domestic staff dressed in grey with little splashes of blue or sometimes colours of whatever house they worked in. It was a happy, careless, chatting ensemble. We followed this group up the sloping road past the fence around the airport. This part of the path was exposed to the weather and right now facing the western sun. Lilona had to stop, wiping sweat from her forehead.

“Not used to the heat?” I asked, mentally chalking up the climate as a distinct advantage to the Neanderthals.

“It makes you wet.” That was clearly a great source of annoyance.

“Don’t you do exercise on board of your ship?”

Lilona gave me a blank look.

“Didn’t you see the pods for muscle stimulation?” Thayu asked.

“No, I didn’t.”

“They were in one of the labs to the side. You could see in through the open door. People were asleep while machines moved their arms and legs.”

“Sleep walking.” The ultimate solution for people who hated exercise. That would have been weird to see.

Lilona was looking at the aircraft on display at the airport. From here, we could see the private area, including Asha’s craft.

“Do they look anything like yours?” I asked her.
Keep trying, Delegate Wilson
. The more questions I asked, the more likely I would get an answer that gave away more than she intended to share.

“They’re flyers for use in the atmosphere. How can they look much different? They need an aerodynamic shape. They need a carrying area.”

“Tell me then what yours look like.” I had already seen some of their smaller ships, in the big hall where we had entered the ship. That whole docking hall had been dark and powered down, consistent with the fact that most of the crew was in stasis.

She was still squinting at the aircraft. “The wing area is bigger.”

Thinner atmosphere?
Thayu said through the feeder.

Or thicker, less need for engines, more friction, more gliding action
. I pictured the images I’d always seen as a child, of designs of colonies humans had planned but that had never been built in the cloud tops at Venus.

“They’re made from hardened resin.”

Thayu filled me in.
Some type of plastic, produced on board the ship
.

Lilona eyed us, as if sensing the conversation that went on through our feeders.

I started moving again, uncomfortable that the shuttle that was the subject of her scrutiny happened to be one that belonged to Asto’s military.

“What is the most important thing that you notice about being on a planet?” I tried a different, more comfortable angle.

“Everything stinks.” A surprisingly frank reply. It was as if, being away from the captain, she was coming out of her shell.

Like the Coldi, Aghyrians had a keen sense of smell. “It stinks like what?”

“The recycling plants.”

“Are you familiar with them? Did you work there?”

“Everyone has to work there, especially the crew who are bound to the ship.”

“Is working there a form of punishment?”

She gave me her usual blank look. It was impossible to figure out what went on behind those blue eyes. Sure she would understand
punishment
?

“We do shifts,” she said, her voice soft. “It is very hot there and it stinks. Some of the equipment can malfunction and cause harm.”

It was the first time that any of them had said anything that could be remotely classified as emotional. “You don’t like working there?” I prompted.

She gave me a blank look. “It’s part of our tasks.”

“Does it scare you, working there?”

Another blank look.

I tried again, “Does it scare you, being out of your ship, with so much open air that stinks like a place you hate and where there are no safe places to hide?”

“We have the captain.”

Which, again, was not an answer.

It went on like this for a while. I asked innocent questions and Lilona replied in short sentences.

Thayu was meant to keep an interested expression and not act like security personnel, but she appeared to have given up trying a long time ago. I suspected that had he been here, even Veyada would have started fidgeting by now. Along with embarrassment, patience was another state of mind that Coldi seemed to be incapable of feeling.

Even though the conversation consisted of starts and stops punctuated with long silences, I was starting to see a pattern. Sometimes she replied in answer to my question, sometimes not. If she got to the point where she stopped replying, she always said something about the captain or the ship, as if that was a fallback answer when she was unsure of what to say.

I found out that most of the people that she looked after in stasis were women. She didn’t ever appear to have been in stasis herself. Maybe it was a long-term thing that you could do only once?

To my questions about jumps—how many they did, how far, how long they took—she answered that the captain knew about those, and my question about what they ate on board met with the same reply: the captain knows.

Both she and her male companion had beautiful teeth, so I asked if the food caused any problems, but that was also a matter for the captain.

As we walked onto the main square, past all the eating-houses towards the tramline, I confirmed my opinion that theirs was a closed society where one person had a lot to say and the others more or less blindly followed him. This didn’t make much sense for a people of the Aghyrian intellectual calibre, but at least I was getting answers, as long as my questions remained innocent, because I ran into a wall as soon as I slipped in a question about why they were doing certain things.

“What” or “How” questions were apparently all right, but “Why” questions were not.

Yes, of course I was recording all of this, although with the rumbling of the train, the city and aircraft noises and later the tram, I wasn’t sure how much I’d be able to decipher on the playback.

The hospital was on the northern side of the island at the end of the tramline from the main square. It stood on a little rise—and Barresh was extremely flat, so a little rise meant a knee-high hillock—surrounded by a new housing development built entirely on stilts over the water. Most of the stilts supported slabs of concrete that made up the ground and streets, but spaces had been left in between, where it looked as if water ran through canals. Right now, the development looked bare in the blazing western sunlight, but the slabs included large, wire-bottomed boxes filled with sand and mud where native trees had been planted in beds of rotting leaves and anchored with rope. Within a year the trees would send roots from the concrete to the muddy bottom, providing a natural anchor for the artificial structure.

We were met in the hospital foyer by a worker in the research division whom I had contacted before leaving the
gamra
island. Of course the Aghyrian compound had its own genetic research division—where we were not allowed to go—but they also funded a department in the hospital that collected genetic information from locals and anyone else who came in. Most importantly, they had access to the Aghyrians’ giant database of genetic material.

I had met Jacina Emiru before, when I had taken my compatibility tests and she had put me on the giant map of Aghyrian descendants that continued to be the research centre’s magnum opus.

She took us on a tour of the lab, a bright and airy facility which combined technology from Asto, from Asto’s
zeyshi
faction, from Damarq, Hedron and smatterings of techniques from other worlds. She explained to Lilona all the facilities they had and the type of research they did. Lilona asked to see the map. Jacina took us to the conference room, where she brought it up on the large three-dimensional projector.

It was an awesome sight, this giant tree with a multitude of branches that each held a multitude of little dots representing data points. One of those represented me; another was Thayu. Jacina herself probably had a dot, as did the tailed Pengali assistant who had been working in the lab and whose dot could probably be found on one of the tree’s lowest branches.

Lilona sat on the bench next to me. Her face didn’t show emotion, but I liked to think that she was at least mildly impressed. This graphic represented over a hundred years of work. Originally started by the Barresh Aghyrians under the initiative of Daya Ezmi, they had opened it up to the public when the value of this treasure became clear. Many people from all over
gamra
came to Barresh just to see and study this tree, and sometimes add to it. I considered it the pinnacle of human research, not for the level of difficulty or newness of technique, but for the fact that if everyone contributed, we could make something truly awesome.

Lilona finally unfolded her screen and brought it to life with a touch of her hand.

She asked Jacina if she could import one genome file, and when that was done, another, for reference. Then, with a few quick strokes, she translated the data to her notation, and then imported more files, including mine and Thayu’s. I felt a bit apprehensive about letting her have a copy of my genetic material, but in order to get her to answer a question, we needed to provide her with data. This entire tree relied on sharing data and openness. But that data defining my little chromosomes would go back on that big ship with her. Did I trust the ship Aghyrians not to do anything untoward with it?

Well, actually . . .

I hid my unease by offering to go and buy dinner because it looked like Lilona was going to be a while and it was that time of day.

I left the hospital in the dusk, walking over the bridge that connected the hospital to the surrounding new development, where I’d been assured I could buy dinner. A few stars already blinked in the purple sky above. The bright pink dot that was Asto hung low over the horizon, a tiny little crescent glowing in the light of the suns already below our horizon.