Disappearing Act

by Margaret Ball

  The butterfly ladies had a fine time trying to show her how to pleat the shalin into her sash so that it would stay up, and Maris had a bit of trouble getting the thing adjusted so that she could walk in it. They seemed to feel that a "proper" length was trailing an inch or so of fabric on the floor; the first step Maris took like that, she tripped on her own hem and almost fell. She tugged the fabric up above her sash to ankle height.

  The middle-aged woman, whom Maris had privately christened "Boss Lady" promptly tugged it down again.

  "I can't walk like that," Maris said. She searched her brain for some scraps of Kalapriyan. "Sajja, meer sajja." That meant "much long." She pulled the pleats of the shalin up into her sash again.

  "Hai, hai, meer sajja," Boss Lady agreed, pulling the shalin down again.

  "Much" wasn't getting her meaning across. How in the name of the God of Minor Fuckups did you say "too long"? Demons take it, she'd have to rely on sign language. Maris pulled the shalin up again, not quite as high as before, and said, "Sajja?" When Boss Lady reached for her, she skipped back, shaking her head. "Uh-uh. This here is plenty bunu sajja enough, get me?"

  They compromised on a length hovering just below her ankles, which had the dubious virtue of leaving everybody dissatisfied; Maris felt constrained to take tiny, mincing steps, and Boss Lady clearly felt the occasional glimpses of bare toes verged on indecency.

  "This," she announced as soon as she was back in a room with Gabrel, "is the bunu weirdest country! They don't want me to wear me good hiking boots, but they throw a fit if me toes show under this thing. And all the while their midriffs are bare as an egg and what's up top might as well be the same, for all the cover this thing gives." She tugged at the neckline of the thin, tight-fitting bodice that was supposed to preserve decency while the upper folds of the shalin floated around like butterfly wings.

  "I've seen worse fashions," Gabrel said. His blue eyes were curiously light in his tanned face, as though some inner fire had been lit. "I won't complain if they concentrate on concealing the feet instead of . . . other areas."

  Maris felt uncomfortably warm up top, even though her feet were still freezing from walking barefoot over floors of polished wood and stone. She curled up on one of the oversized cushions that furnished the room and wrapped the free end of her shalin around her shoulders. "So. Are we still in jail, or what? And what happened back there? I couldn't understand more'n one word in ten," she confessed.

  Gabrel grinned at her; flash of white teeth against that tanned face, light sparking from blue eyes and gold in his hair . . . the man would cause a riot down in the levels on Tasman. Unfairly distracting, it was. "I know you couldn't follow the talk. That's partly what saved us. It seems the Udaran envoy has been filling the Vakil with terror-stories about the unearthly powers of Diplos and trying to convince him you're here to overthrow his throne. He relaxed considerably once I explained that you were no Diplo."

  Maris felt her stomach sinking as if she'd just been dropped into free fall without warning. "You did what?"

  "Oh, give it up," Gabrel said with a trace of impatience. "We haven't the luxury of playing games here. I know what you are and I can't afford to preserve your pride at the risk of my mission—and our lives."

  Worse than free fall, Maris thought. She'd never wanted to throw up in zero-g, as some less fortunate Tasmans did. Right now, though . . .

  "How—did you find out?" she managed through a mouth gone suddenly dry. And are you going to send me back to Tasman? No, he couldn't do that—not from here. She relaxed just a fraction.

  "I've had my suspicions for some time," Gabrel said. "You just didn't seem old enough—or sure enough—or knowledgeable enough for a Diplo. And you were too open-minded. Diplos usually think they know everything about everything and wouldn't be caught dead listening to a local's information; as soon as you asked my opinion on the Kalapriyan situation I began to wonder."

  And I thought I was being so clever, finding out enough from him to let me pass with the others. Maris shook her head at her own stupidity.

  "Oh well. I never really thought I could get away with it," she said, as much for her benefit as his.

  "You didn't have maps, your Kalapriyan was terrible, you just didn't have the prep a Diplo would require," Gabrel went on. "But what really clinched it was when I searched your pack—"

  Maris let out a hiss of outrage before remembering that she wasn't in a position to be outraged.

  "—and found the audio plugs of Kalapriyan for Dummies." Gabrel grinned unrepentantly. "You gave it a good try, Calandra, but that made the situation obvious."

  "It did?" Then why are you still calling me Calandra?

  "You might as well admit it, I've figured everything out. You haven't graduated yet, have you? You're still in training school. You haven't even had the surgery for the download implants. But Rezerval figured, it's only another complaint by that raving paranoiac Montoyasana, why waste a fully trained Diplo; we'll send out a trainee and let her get some practice and make it look like we're taking Montoyasana seriously. Put you in a hell of a spot, didn't it?"

  Maris slowly let out her breath. "You—could say that." What Johnivans had taught her was still true, even if Johnivans himself was a lying treacherous SOB. If you get caught out, say as little as possible. Let people make up their own stories about who you are and what you're doing off your proper level. Would she be in more trouble, or less, if she told him how far off his guesses were? Probably more. Gabrel wouldn't be pleased to find out he hadn't been that clever after all, and he probably would be furious to learn he'd been wasting Barents-style courtesy and chivalry on some ragamuffin from a Tasman smuggler's gang.

  He might be even more furious, later on, if he found out she was still lying.

  It was too dangerous. Once he found out the truth he'd probably despise her.

  Eventually he'd despise her anyway. Was it so bad to let him believe his own story for a little longer? To have him treating her like a person who deserved courtesy and respect? She'd probably never get that again. She wanted just a little more of it.

  They were in a dangerous situation, in foreign territory, and he deserved to know the exact truth of it.

  What difference did it make? He wouldn't be expecting her to do any magical Diplo-type stunts now, either way.

  Gabrel sat down beside her; his weight squashed the cushion down so that she slid against him, feeling the warmth and strength of his body. "What are you looking so worried about?"

  "What happens next," Maris said truthfully.

  She meant, what she did next, but Gabrel took it as a question for him and that let her off the hook for a while, anyway.

  "Well, we're not exactly in jail," Gabrel said. "But we're not exactly free to go either. I guess it's a kind of house arrest—but the house belongs to my friend Harsajjan Bharat. We'll be comfortable enough, and at the moment Yadleen—that's the Vakil—seems to be considerably more pissed off at the Udaran envoy than he is at us."

  He stretched his long legs out and leaned back into the cushion, hands behind his head. To avoid rolling onto his chest, Maris edged back until she was perched insecurely on the very edge of the mattress-sized cushion.

  "On the other hand," he went on, "the Udaran envoy seems to think we ought to be executed out of hand."

  "How can you be so calm about it?"

  "Oh, Yadleen isn't going to have us killed; he can't afford to be seen as giving in to Udaran demands. Half his council would resign in protest."

  "That makes me feel so safe. Can't we get out of here? We're not, like, under guard or anything, right?"

  "The other half of the council is pro-Udara. They'd resign in protest."

  "That," Maris said tartly, "strikes me as Yadleen's problem, not ours."

  Gabrel sighed. "Calandra, by the time you graduate from Diplo School, you'll hopefully understand a little more about not upsetting the balance of power in a region. It will be much easier to carry out our mission if we l
eave Dharampal with the Vakil's blessing. It will also make the Udarans think twice about assassinating us on the road. Unless," he added, his face falling, "they are ready to attack Dharampal. I hadn't thought about that . . . Yadleen letting us go, or even seeming to collude in our escape, would make an excellent casus belli."

  "Cassus belleye," Maris repeated. "And what might that be when it's at home, a Kalapriyan dessert? Thanks very much, but I don't want to be served up on the Bashir of Udara's dinner table. I vote we leave here, quietly, now."

  "Don't you understand anything about diplomacy? That would be the worst possible—"

  Gabrel broke off as the gold-brocaded hangings over the door stirred. A middle-aged Kalapriyan man in tunic and trousers as stiffly brocaded as the hangings parted the curtains. He looked tired.

  "Eskelinen! I had hoped to have more time to spend with you. I am sorry to be inhospitable, but you must leave here, quietly, at once," Harsajjan Bharat announced.

  Maris just managed not to say "I told you so," when Gabrel translated for her. She listened attentively while Gabrel and his Dharampal friend talked, and found that now she wasn't tied up and scared out of her wits it was a lot easier to catch bits of the conversation. Especially since she knew pretty much what it had to be about. Harsajjan Bharat thought the Udaran envoy was going to arrange to have them assassinated tonight, and he didn't want that to happen. She would have felt more grateful if it hadn't seemed to her that his main concern was the way such an event would affect the honor of his house. Oh well, maybe that wasn't true; it could be due to her not understanding court Kalapriyan real well. In any case, it appeared that they were going to get their traveling clothes and their packs back and that some of Harsajjan's people were going to smuggle them out to . . . there her limited Kalapriyan vocabulary gave out, because what came next wasn't what she was expecting. She'd thought he would say that his guides would set them on the way to Udara. Instead there was excited talk about some other place that she'd never heard of.

  When Harsajjan finally left, she pounced on Gabrel for explanations and details. "All right, I got that part," she cut him off when he started to translate the whole conversation word for word. "He wants us out of here so we don't get killed in his house. What I didn't get is where we're going from here. Not into Udara, I got that much, but why? Too dangerous?" Not going to Udara seemed like an excellent idea to her . . . but she sure didn't have any better ideas. Returning to Valentin would probably not work out real well; obviously she wasn't keeping up the Diplo act well enough to fool anybody for long. If Dharampal hadn't suffered from the minor defect of being, apparently, full of Udaran assassins, she thought she could have been happy to stay right here as an involuntary guest of Harsajjan Bharat. Hot baths and clean clothes and regular meals and not even having to steal anything to justify her existence—sounded pretty good.

  The likelihood of getting stabbed, beheaded, poisoned, or dismembered in the night was a definite drawback to that arrangement, though.

  "Where we're going may not be any safer than Udara," Gabrel said now, "and it'll definitely be a harder journey."

  Maris sighed. "More scrambling up forty-five-degree slope trails designed for goats, like we did to get here?"

  "Oh, much worse than that. If this world were ever opened to tourism, rock jockeys from all over the galaxy would be coming here to climb the High Jagirs." He sounded obnoxiously cheerful at the prospect.

  "Let me guess," Maris said, "rock climbing is one of your hobbies."

  "How did you know?"

  "Diplo intuition!" she snapped. "And in case you were wondering, mountaineering is not among my favorite sports."

  Gabrel shook his head. "Rezerval must have known what the interior of Kalapriya is like. Why didn't they send somebody who could—oh, well, I suppose they only expected you to poke around Valentin for a while and then report back that Montoyasana was raising a fuss about nothing as usual." His sudden smile warmed Maris down to her freezing toes. "You have done much more than Rezerval could possibly have expected of you. I hadn't thought even a fully trained and experienced Diplo would be willing to trek into the Jagirs, much less a kid who hasn't even finished the course work or had the surgeries yet." He looked thoughtful. "That's another thing that made me wonder about you. You're not thirty, Calandra. Nowhere near. How old are you really?"

  "Does it matter?" Maris fenced. Give Gabrel time and he'd probably tell her how old he thought she was, then all she'd have to do is agree.

  "Let's see, Diplo School doesn't take candidates under eighteen, and they wouldn't have let a first- or second-year student go out alone; you must be almost through with the classes and on a waiting list for surgery. So, twenty-three, twenty-four, something like that?"

  "Something like that," Maris agreed. Sounded a lot better than the truth, although she did wonder—briefly—how Gabrel would react to that. I'm almost seventeen . . . I think. Definitely not the right thing to say at this point. She kept her mouth shut and let him go on explaining their immediate plans.

  Apparently Harsajjan Bharat meant to smuggle them out of his compound as soon as it was dark, guiding them out of Dharamvai to meet a messenger from the Udaran resistance.

  "There's a resistance movement?"

  "Even the Bashir of Udara hasn't managed to kill everybody who disagrees with his methods."

  This messenger knew a Diplo was being sent to investigate the allegations of illegal weapons trading, and according to him, the place to look was not in Udara proper but in a remote complex of caves in the former state of Thamboon. There, he had told Harsajjan, the outlanders would find evidence and explanation of all that was going on.

  "Or a quick death," Maris suggested. "How do we know we can trust this guy?"

  "We don't," Gabrel admitted. "But Harsajjan seems to think he's genuine . . . and anyway, you have a better idea?"

  Maris shook her head.

  "Well then. Fortunately, they haven't washed our traveling clothes yet, so we can put them right back on."

  Mixed blessing, Maris thought. All that bathing and massaging and here she was going to smell like a goat again after ten minutes in that filthy outfit. On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to walk again.

  "And, Calandra . . ."

  It took Maris a moment to remember that Gabrel still didn't know her true name. "Yes?"

  "There's no need to let this Chulayen Vajjadara, the Udaran resistance contact, know you're not yet a fully trained Diplo. It might shake his confidence in us."

  "Understood," Maris murmured.

  She did wish, irrationally, that Gabrel would call her by her own name just once. But obviously this was no time to explain just how unlike a fully trained Diplo she really was, and he was too sharp for her to think she could confess to the one lie without getting into the whole tangle.

  Besides, she reminded herself, he wouldn't like or respect Maris Nobody from the slums of Tasman. It was "Calandra Vissi" he was being nice to.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Udara on Kalapriya

  Lorum van Vechten prodded his patient's bandage-swathed head gingerly. Everything seemed all right. Just to be on the safe side, though, he supposed he had better change the dressings. At least, he told himself as he unwrapped the strips of organic fabric, at least this wasn't one of those truly disgusting wounds that people in primitive areas tended to get. No great gaping slashes just begging for infection to set in; just the neat line of stitches holding the skin together over the hole he'd opened in the skull. And that wasn't a very big hole; just enough to let him insert a syringe full of fresh 'mats in solution.

  The physical results of the surgery were healing well enough. He contemplated sniffing the wound for a hint of gangrene, then decided that was really too gross, and besides, the skin tone was good and it looked clean enough. He settled for swabbing the shaved head with madira, which was foul stuff to drink but sufficiently alcoholic to be a reasonable disinfectant, and wrapping a somewhat lighter turban of fr
esh bandages over the old man's head. Gods, he didn't even have plasti-stik—in a decent hospital, this whole unwieldy contraption could have been replaced by a squirt of Disinfecto and a square of plasti-stik gauze right over the site of the incision! Primitives!

  "Well, boy?" Pundarik Zahin demanded in his usual testy tones. "How much longer do I have to look like a damned turbanned Rohini fetish t-talker?" His right hand twitched; the man must be even more impatient than usual.

  "Only a few more days, sir," Lorum promised.

  "You've been saying that for almost a week now."

  "In my medical judgment," Lorum said stiffly, "the site of the incision should remain covered until healing is complete. The risk of infection—"

  Pundarik Zahin snorted. "I've had incisions aplenty in my fighting days, boy. Back when the Bashir was making Udara, making a state out of a collection of miserable hill t-towns—you think everybody understood his vision, went along peacefully? Hah! One damned rebel laid my leg open from hip to knee, and if I'd taken to my bed to pour strong wine over the slash and wrap myself in bandages, why, Shatha t-town wouldn't be part of Udara now—there might not be a Greater Udara! None of my wounds ever festered. You know why? Because I've got clean flesh, boy! Clean flesh and a dove every t-torch festival to Red Radhana, the warriors' lady; that'll do more than all your outlander magics." His right knee jumped suddenly under the blanket that covered both withered legs. "Look at that! Mention Red Radhana and she sends a sign of healing!"

  "Doubtless, sir," Lorum van Vechten said woodenly. Dealing with General Zahin reminded him of what he'd really hated about studying under Dr. Hirvonen. The fear of screwing up during a surgery was bad enough, but even worse was her insistence that he follow up personally on the recuperation of each and every patient. The damned woman didn't seem to understand that the whole point of specializing in neurosurgery was that you didn't have to deal with patients at all, just with the immobile head in front of you on the operating table. Once the head regained consciousness and began talking again, you were supposed to be able to leave it to the nurses and go on to another interesting problem.