Hasan kept his breathing controlled and remained outwardly steady, timing his steps against every inhalation of curiously flat, filtered air. The Tellers were silent now, still but for their limbs waving gently in the air—waiting, he felt.
He glanced at Kella. “If they react violently, no return fire. Just get me back to the ship.”
“Not my first rodeo, Ambassador.”
That wasn’t the same as agreement. Her file informed him that she had a habit of skirting rules like that. “Let me hear you say yes.”
Kella blew out a noise that was half amusement, half annoyance, and sounded like a wheeze through the filters. “No return fire.”
Hasan stopped at the same distance Xcanda had, which had been the one the probes first maintained. He genuflected in the best equivalent he could find to the gesture the Tellers used. He sank into the language file; he didn’t have enough context data to be able to switch over to thinking in it, but the implanted processors could take his words and run them instantly through the translator program and feed the results out through his mouth.
“We are here in peace,” he said. Standard words, which had done well when spoken by the probes and less so when spoken by Xcanda. It was a gamble, but he didn’t know how else to start.
Movement rippled through the Tellers, but it lacked the implied consternation he’d encountered in Xcanda’s observations.
He continued, “We regret what passed before, but we wish to correct it and continue in peace.”
Now they began to stir. Hasan simply waited, however, for a response, not moving.
One of the Tellers, its skin lined with pale scratches, drifted forward. “You cannot change it.” Hasan couldn’t find anything visually about them that set them apart from the rest, but their voice was tonally distinct. He made note of it.
“I—we—” a foolish misstep, forgetting that in this he was always we because he’d been sent to speak for the multitude that was the JEC “—know we cannot change the regrettable past. We offer you apology so we can move forward.”
He heard it again, in the crowd, the overlaying murmurs of “You are not them.” The Teller in front of him made a gesture he couldn’t quite translate. “You cannot return.”
Kella moved forward to stand next to him. “I strongly advise we return to the transport now,” she murmured.
Hasan eyed the crowd of Tellers, with the increasingly emphatic movements of their limbs. “Can you tell us what we can do, to make reparations?”
The Teller answered, “You cannot repair what has died.”
Xcanda hadn’t expected the ambassador to return so quickly. Xin took that as a sign of abject failure as soon as xin heard the docking time and wrote the appropriate report up. Xin just couldn’t send it until the ambassador had signed off on it as well, which was really an insult. Xcanda was perfectly capable of writing accurate reports.
Xin waited for the ambassador when they exited the transport, their bodyguard behind them. “My report is ready for your review,” xin said.
“What?” the ambassador said.
“My report. You have failed. The JEC requires swift response.” The ambassador’s failure had one positive side effect—it meant that Xcanda was not at fault either.
The ambassador looked at their bodyguard, though yet again, the bodyguard was right where they had been a moment ago. “I haven’t failed yet.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I need to find another angle of redress.”
It was as if every statement the human made was more nonsensical. “That will not be accomplished here.”
“Do you want this to be a failure?” the ambassador asked.
Xcanda hadn’t known a human, even an annoying one, had the power to be quite this insulting. “Be glad you are a JEC official,” xin said. “I would twist off the head of a menial that spoke to me like that.”
The ambassador went very still, and then bowed. “My apologies, Overcommander. I spoke without thinking. Please send your report to me and I will look it over. But I do have a few more efforts I must make before I can consider this matter closed.”
A thin apology, but Xcanda couldn’t actually twist the head off anyone not in xen crew. “Our resources are at your disposal, of course.”
There was a faintly metallic thump, which had to be Kella putting a mug of tea in front of him. Hasan couldn’t see it with his face buried in his hands. “Oh, I have screwed this up,” he moaned. The mess at the landing field, the hostility read loud and clear from Xcanda, none of it felt salvageable. He shouldn’t have to fight this on two fronts.
“Make you feel better to hear this isn’t the worst I’ve seen?”
“Not really. This is my first assignment, and I’m failing it.” The spicy scent of the tea, loud to augmented senses he still wasn’t used to, was a welcome distraction all the same.
“I’ve been on a lot of these.” The bunk across from him in the tiny diplomatic transport creaked as Kella sat on it. “Most of them end in failure, and it’s expected. You’re here so the assholes in the JEC and back at the Sol Ethical Authority can shake their heads and say they tried everything.”
Hasan looked up so he could examine Kella’s sardonic expression more closely, but he knew she was right. The oceans of data he could access at a thought, thanks to the implants that still itched psychosomatically in his skull, guaranteed that. The percentage of new ambassadors sent on botched first contact missions was high. So was the failure rate, explained away with complete cultural incompatibility. “More reason to send someone who knows what they’re doing. There’s always a way.”
She snorted, the smile on her dark face one of utter cynicism. “You assume they want a peaceful outcome.”
He was reminded in an instant how many of these missions ended in military action. Kella had every reason to be cynical. She’d been on a few of those herself. And he thought about the novel biological samples flagged in the data dump he’d been given. “That’s sick,” he said.
“That’s politics, and the SEA Guard is grist for the mill.” She shrugged. “And you get to start your career with a failure under your belt, so you’ll know you can survive it. It’s healthy to fail.”
He wanted to argue. He didn’t want to play this game. And he hadn’t undergone years of training and the painful augmentation process just to play the rubber stamp for invasion.
But he detected something else in her smile: she was baiting him. He considered her psych evals, her history, her time as an instructor in the SEA Guard. Ah. She was pushing him to see if he’d give up.
To Hell with that. Hasan pressed his palms on the fold-down table and took a deep breath. His fingers, slim and light brown, looked strangely washed out against the dark metal. “First, find the problem,” he said. “The real problem, not what I think the problem is.”
“How are you going to do that?”
He’d gone to the surface assuming that Xcanda had made some diplomatic misstep and tried to pick things up where they’d been dropped. He had to move further back than that. The Tellers had understood Xcanda in a way not intended, perhaps, and no one was at fault. But then what had the understanding been? “I need more data. All the raw language processing files.”
Kella sipped her tea. “It’s your funeral, kiddo.”
Xcanda delicately took up the data thread, this one matte black, as it extruded, reeling it around one claw with practiced ease. The ambassador watched it closely.
“It’s very long,” the ambassador said.
“You asked for all of the data,” Xcanda answered. “I am complying.”
“What will you do if I find a peaceful resolution?”
It was a ridiculous question. “Write a different report.”
The ambassador brought their hand to their mouth. “I saw in the previous data there are some interesting compounds on this planet.”
The question the ambassador didn’t ask made itself apparent to Xcanda. It would have been a
n insult if given voice, but xin chose to answer under the principle that all resources were to be rendered to the ambassador. “It doesn’t make a difference to me, if those are acquired by trade or conquest.”
“Would conquest mean more economic gain?”
“It would also mean war,” Xcanda said. Xin wondered if this ambassador was very young, that they would need such things explained to them. “In the light of all Ro, the scars of victor and defeated are equally painful.” Xin offered the coiled data thread over.
The ambassador took the data thread. “Thank you, Overcommander. I required this reminder.”
Xcanda felt faintly bemused at that. Xin hadn’t known that the humans were even aware of even the smallest part of Ro’s light. “You are welcome.”
“I meant the funeral thing,” Kella said, eyeing the data thread as Hasan unwound it.
“There’s no theoretical limit to my processing capacity,” Hasan said. It was for his own comfort, not hers, and didn’t work in either direction. He leaned forward, pulling his collar down. “Start the feed.”
Kella sighed, then he heard a faint clunk. He glanced up to see she’d put her helmet on. “What are you doing?” he asked.
She waved a hand, and he bowed his head again. The data thread slithered cooly down the back of his neck. “Air filters,” Kella answered, her voice sounding more hollow and far away with each word. “I’m gonna need ’em.”
“I don’t—” Hasan began, but the sounds that came out of his mouth weren’t anything recognizable—a mix of Teller, Xurit, and Chengda.
He tried to move and found his muscles twitching at near random, too many inputs, too many—
Tellers circling the probe, touching its surface lightly. “We are here in peace.”
A Teller with pale scratches on its skin, in a circle touching limbs with four others, “I will cross the sea—”
“Not them. Not the beginning.” Silver and black blood atomizing in the air.
Falling.
Tellers circling the probe, “We are here to listen to your stories, traveler.”
A Teller with pale scratches on its skin, in the circle, “Your podmate crossed the sea.”
“One of you is a lie.” Black blood flowering as two Tellers, their skins pristine, fight.
Falling.
A Teller with pale scratches on its skin, encircled by its kind, “They ended, and I returned over the sea.”
Scroll back. The same Teller.
Scroll back. The same. The same.
The same voice. The same Teller.
No, not the same.
Fallingfallingfalling
Into pieces.
Xcanda was beyond irritated. Xen report had not been long at all. There was no reason it should take the ambassador four days to review. As far as xin could tell, the ambassador hadn’t done any work at all, just huddled in their ship and avoided their responsibilities.
When communication links continued to be refused, Xcanda walked to the airlock and rapped on it impatiently with xen claws. Xin wasn’t certain what xin would do if that summons wasn’t answered. Call on all Ro’s light in the form of a welding torch to cut the thing open, perhaps.
Maybe the humans inside were dead. That was a startlingly pleasant thought, for all it meant yet another report. It would be a report that didn’t require countersigning.
The airlock door slid open, revealing the SEA Guard in full armor, including helmet. Xcanda did not take a step back, but considered the option open.
“Yes, Overcommander?” the SEA Guard said.
“The ambassador has failed to countersign my report.”
“I understand. He is meditating on the problem and hasn’t been able to review it yet.”
Xcanda considered the wisdom of arguing with that pronouncement. It would have seemed a better idea if the SEA Guard hadn’t been heavily armed. “Will this meditation accomplish anything?”
“Of course,” the SEA Guard said. “He’ll have results for you shortly.” And without asking permission, the airlock door slid shut.
Xcanda was certain xin hadn’t done anything to deserve this level of incompetence.
Strong hands lifted him up into consciousness—no, they were lifting him up and away from the toilet in the diplomatic transport’s tiny, cramped head. Hasan groaned, and it was a ragged, awful sound. His throat felt like molten gravel and his mouth—his mouth wasn’t even worth considering.
“Still alive?” Kella boomed next to his ear.
“I must be,” he whispered. “There’s no pain in Paradise.”
“Could be hell,” she offered. She deposited him on a soft surface and slowly stretched out his badly cramped limbs. It was a new kind of torture she’d invented, he decided.
Hasan licked his lips with a tongue that felt like it had been covered in barnacles. “I’d expect the fires of Jahannam to be a lot brighter. What happened?”
“You finally stopped throwing up about ninety minutes ago. I timed you. So I deemed you safe to retrieve.” He felt her wipe his face, surprisingly gently. He tried to open his eyes and focus on her, but the lashes seemed to be badly gummed up. “You’ve looked better.”
“I’ve felt better.”
“Think you can drink something?”
He considered every part of the husk that was left of his body—skull pounding with red-hot spikes, trembling muscles, his chest and stomach and throat aching, sinuses afire, skeleton like water—and concluded: “No.”
“That’s the spirit. Sip slowly.” She tucked a straw between his lips and he complied, very slowly. It felt like a liquefied blessing, flowing down his throat. “It’s been four days. I hope you got something worthwhile out of that.”
It said a lot about the state of him that he couldn’t manage more than a dull sort of shock at the revelation of how long it had been. “I think …” Oh, it hurt to think. It hurt to anything. But he had a job, he reminded himself. All the more important because he’d apparently been completely incoherent for four days while he processed. “I think so. Imagine … imagine.” He had to sort it out in his own head. “Once upon a time—”
She murmured, “Oh goodie, story time,” and he ignored it.
“—there was a girl named Kella. And she traveled to the stars to become a SEA Guard. She had many adventures. She met a boy named Hasan and helped him do a very stupid thing, which once upon a time, there was a girl named Kella and she became a world-class chef.”
“You’re repeating yourself. Sort of.”
“I know,” he said. “And it doesn’t make very much sense when I do it like that, does it?”
“Not really, but I figured that’s because you’re so glucose-starved, your brain tissue’s started consuming itself. Drink some more of the water.”
Obediently he did. “I think that’s what Xcanda did to the Tellers. And then I did. All accidentally.”
“Ah,” Kella said, after a long pause. “War through confusion. That’s my favorite.”
“It won’t be, if I’m right.” Finally, he pried his eyes open, squinting into the night-dimmed lights of the transport. He didn’t recognize Kella’s face at first; she still wore her helmet. “Do I smell that bad?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “And I don’t intend to find out.”
After drinking the entire raw glucose supply in the galley and taking an actual water shower that lasted so long the recycler cut him off, Hasan was able to explain his understanding more thoroughly: Everything the Tellers spoke was a story, if strange in its construction. Each conversation was a narrative, the individuals involved becoming characters that they mutually built through communication. The characters acted, then the individuals behind them followed suit.
The probes had started a narrative of peaceful greeting, all well and good. The problem had been that Xcanda, and then Hasan, had effectively tried to declare themselves the same character as the one represented by the probe—while placing themselves back at the very start of
the story. The narrative became a repetitive, strange snarl, and it had sounded like a mocking lie. There needed to be a logical conclusion to the story—or a new one.
So on the fifth day after his moment of stupid brilliance, his mouth still sour and his abused muscles shaking, Hasan asked Overcommander Xcanda to accompany him and Kella to the surface. The xurit had complied, though Hasan was aware that xin had no choice in the matter. But Xcanda was more a part of this than him, and he never should have treated xen the way Xcanda had treated him—like an obstacle. That had been another mistake, one he would correct now.
The field for a thirdfourthfifthhundredth time was a dizzying overlay of recalled data. Hasan walked forward toward the crowd of Tellers, Kella ready to catch him if he fell at his right shoulder and Xcanda at his left. He bowed, and his thoughts clicked over into the new language, the new understanding, effortlessly.
“We are here to mourn the death of our predecessor with you,” Hasan said as one of the Tellers, its skin vivid with pale lines, drifted forward. “And take up the great work they left unfinished.”
The Teller gestured, a graceful sweep of acceptance. “We mourn together and begin anew.”
Hasan smiled, echoing the expression with his hands. “We shall find a brighter path.”
“I have signed off on your report, Overcommander,” the ambassador said. “It’s in your records now.”
After a week of negotiations, the ambassador had left a volume of notes for the next mission, and established the means of continuing relations. Or as they had said, created a narrative you can safely build on. It meant little to Xcanda’s understanding of the situation, other than its meaning as a failure transformed into resounding success within protocol.
“Your efforts are acknowledged,” Xcanda said.
The ambassador bowed. “With your permission, SEA Guard Kella and I will now depart.”
It would be a relief to resume a mission so long delayed. “Granted.” The ambassador turned to go, and Xcanda considered: This seemed to be one of those rare occasions where the annoyance caused by a being was actually proportional to its achievements. “May all Ro’s light shine on you, Ambassador Al-Amir.”
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