“What can we do?” I asked myself as much as Thayu. “Everything we do is turning into a mess. I don’t even know why it’s our task to try to find Federza. We don’t have time for it.”
“Then don’t. He’s not our responsibility.”
No, he wasn’t. But I couldn’t forget how he’d been genuinely scared when he came to my apartment, before he was shot at.
I let out a deep breath. There was no time.
“I’m going to get Veyada to dig out every single law he can find that says that gamra has to make a decision about the captain and the ship. The only thing they do is bullshit around the margins. Meanwhile, we have the captain getting into the security accounts.”
“Security reported that they fixed that.”
“Not for long, I bet.”
“Until they find out what else he’s been getting into.”
It disturbed me deeply. I knew that on Earth a lot of modern technology contained chips that had little preprogrammed routines that Coldi had planted there, and that the Exchange could access, if necessary.
What if the Aghyrian technology—the very one Coldi had used as blueprint for their development—had similar hidden routines?
“I promised him that he could visit the historical sites. He needs to see some of these sites. How long is it going to be for the Pengali or Miran to grant me a permit?” Which, fuck it, I couldn’t receive if Delegate Namion was going to hang onto control of my message account.
“I think we should take him to look at Asto.”
“That might be the most logical solution, but I’m afraid that he will either do something stupid to himself or to us.”
“He hasn’t come here all this way to do stupid things. He won’t be in control of the craft in any way. You have the permit already. We should arrange it to keep him occupied.”
“All right then, let’s do it.”
Chapter 10
* * *
WITH THE EXCHANGE in operation, a trip to Asto wouldn’t be anywhere near as long and uncomfortable as my previous one. Not long after he became fascinated with me, when I was very new to this job, Ezhya had taken me to look at Asto from orbit a few times. Looking at stars or some other celestial phenomenon was his euphemism for a private talk, or some other private activity. In a way it galled me that I had to do this with a very unpleasant person. I had good memories of floating in orbit and seeing the planet’s surface pass under me while sipping some kind of liquor.
I spent much of the morning trying to organise a pilot, without a great deal of success. They were busy. They wanted exorbitant amounts, or they didn’t take tourists. I was left with two I didn’t particularly like but which I would use if there was no other option. Thayu remained conspicuously quiet in this matter, so I half-suspected that she was working on something else. My guess: her father.
After lunch I went downstairs to tell Kando Luczon about the trip. No need to notify Delegate Namion by sending the message through the account that he was spying on. Lilona opened the door this time. I told her about the trip and that we would contact her when it was organised.
She acknowledged my efforts with her usual empty smile.
When I came upstairs, Devlin notified me that some correspondence had come through in my account. I guessed Delegate Namion had figured that he couldn’t hold onto everything that arrived in the account without being asked to explain. Most of it was boring stuff, but one was a message from my father, presumably sent before he received my message not to send anything to that account anymore.
In any case, the message contained nothing important.
My father had bought a new boat. It was a classic catamaran with a kitchen and three double cabins. He lived with Erith—my Damarcian stepmother—and an ever-expanding herd of animals, to which he had recently added a camel—yes, seriously—so who was going to occupy all that space on the boat? Oh yes, I got the hint, Dad.
While I was reading, transported to salty sea breezes and dolphins gambolling at the bow—and that surfboard that sat in the storage room downstairs and that I’d promised Raanu I’d use to teach her to surf—someone came into the office.
Devlin. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but you have a visitor.”
Again, I thought Marin Federza and while following Devlin to the living room, formulated a response that would be neither unfriendly nor give any indication that I’d been waiting for him.
However, when I entered the living room, I found Asha Domiri standing at the balcony door overlooking the marshlands beyond. It was now late afternoon, and the room filled with golden sunlight.
“It’s a nice sunset,” I said, and it was, with a flock of little sheep-like clouds, pink-edged and bright in contrast to the dark purple sky directly above.
“For this place, yes, it’s a nice effort.” He nodded. He was aware that I didn’t like to do subordinate greetings and today didn’t seem to have a problem with that.
“Have you seen your grandson yet?”
“Not yet.”
I had been going to ask why he’d come to see me, but put the pieces together: Thayu had spoken to him yesterday and he was going to offer transport for us, Kando Luczon and his companions to look at Asto from orbit. He trusted Kando Luczon as little as I did.
“We’ll go and find Nicha.” After breakfast, I had seen him potter about the apartment with the baby.
He was just coming up the stairs, carrying his son in a sling that hung over one shoulder. The baby was awake, looking around with a slight frown on his little face. His skin was no longer wrinkled, but full and soft. His hair was a soft fuzz on top of his head, slightly blue-purple metallic-looking already, but still light in colour.
Asha nodded at his son. “Well done. What’s his name?”
“Ayshada.”
The name seemed to please Asha.
Nicha held the baby up to his father. Asha stroked the little boy’s head with a hand that looked massive in comparison with the baby’s head. He was so tiny, and looking around so peacefully, that it was hard to believe that he had kept everyone awake last night.
“He’ll be a handful of trouble,” Asha said in a rare personal comment. “Take good care of him.” Then he nodded, signalling that the time for chat was over. He met my eyes. “I need to talk to you.”
“That would be a good idea. I think Eirani is about to serve dinner. Why don’t you stay and we can have our discussion afterwards?”
“It’s . . . sensitive. I’d like to go somewhere else. Just the two of us.”
That was interesting. “I guess we could go to one of the eating houses.” Eirani would not be impressed, but it wouldn’t be the first time that I didn’t attend dinner at short notice.
“I’d like to go to a place where we can disappear in a crowd, not be recognised and pointed at.”
“We could go into town.” He would definitely be recognised on the island.
“All right.” This was getting ever more curious.
I had to make some preparations. One simply did not catch the train into town with a guest of this calibre. I asked if I should bring guards, but Asha said his guards were shadowing us all the way. They were bringing Evi and Telaris along, and anyone else would be notified if we weren’t returning at the agreed time.
Devlin called a water taxi, which we caught from the jetty at the back entrance to the building. It was one of those flat-bottomed marsh boats with a jet engine at the back. It had three benches for passengers. In past trips I had learned that the back row was where you wanted to be if you didn’t intend to get wet. Asha and I sat down next to each other on this bench. The driver, a young Pengali man, asked if we were ready, and when I said we were, gunned the engine. As we pulled away from the quay, I couldn’t see any guards, but they would be there, even if I had no idea where they hid.
The trip was fast, windy and noisy and left no opportunity for talking. As the outline of the gamra island receded in the distance, I had a strange feeling that Asha might be tr
ying to get me alone on some kind of journey. The resemblance with the manner we’d been whisked away to go to the Aghyrian ship was eerie. Maybe there was trouble at the siege area, where a fleet of Asto’s military ships surrounded the sleeping giant that was the Aghyrian ship. I might not come back here tonight.
But in that case . . . wouldn’t Asha have insisted that Thayu and Nicha or Veyada and Sheydu come as well? And last time he had told me to pack a bag.
Asha’s face looked no different from the way it usually did: stern but otherwise unemotional, while the warm wind and occasional spray of water battered our faces and strands of hair blew in our eyes.
I had asked the driver to drop us at the airport jetty which was next to the station.
From there, it was a short walk up a slight incline, past the fence where you could see the craft on the tarmac. Asha’s familiar unmarked craft sat at the far end. A plainly dressed guard stood next to it. I didn’t miss the bulges of guns in the sleeves of the jacket. I didn’t miss the broad shape of the shoulders and judged the soldier to be female. Did Natanu have a sister?
A train had stopped at the station soon after our arrival and we walked up the hill, mingling in the crowd. We chatted about innocent things. The weather, the building activities in town, whether or not I was going to get that pilot’s licence that I’d promised Ezhya to get. Every time the subject changed, I expected him to mention any of the serious issues we faced, but he did not. Maybe it was because it was quite busy on this path, maybe because of something else. I didn’t know. I wished those Inner Circle people would stop doing this. Maybe he only wanted to talk about his family and the Azimi problem, but if so, why did he need to make me so nervous over going out to a private dinner?
It was almost dark by the time we came out onto the main square. The place was busy with people milling about and choosing which place to eat at, people sitting at eateries, people lining up at the popular places. The air was full of chatter and cooking smells. Of course one could not make a fire in Barresh, but electrically-fired oil burners were a way that stall-holders had found around that, and deep-frying just about anything was very much in fashion. Much of the food smelled heavenly and contributed a lot towards expanding waistlines. Mine, too, I was afraid.
We walked past all that activity and chose a small Pengali-run eating-house in the quiet end of Market Street. It seemed a casual decision, but I had no doubt that Asha had planned to go here and already had his guards stationed at strategic positions where they would have been scouting out the surroundings for most of the afternoon.
We sat at a little table under the giant trees that lined this part of the street. He commented on the trees, and I told him how the entire street used to be lined with these trees down to the square, but that the ones closer to the airport had been blown over in a terrible storm.
A tiny little light in a jar of pink glass stood on the table. Not glass, of course, but real Pengali-cut diamond. There were whole cliffs of this stuff at the escarpment, waterfalls running over cliff faces made of pure diamond. Most windows in Barresh were made of it, as were drinking glasses and bowls. There was the regular clear variety, there was pink, there was yellow and amber and a kind of purple-blue that was the most expensive variety. The Pengali had developed ancient, time-consuming processes to cut it.
This eating-house was a Pengali place, proudly run by an all-Pengali staff with uniforms that allowed for their tails, singlets that showed off the patterned skin on their shoulders and a variety of exquisite artwork on the walls. Whenever I came here, I resolved to learn more about these ancient people, and somehow, that wish got lost in the bureaucracy and other “more important” things that crept on my to-do list.
All around, people were talking to each other in keihu or Pengali. Locals mostly, some of whom gave us curious glances. At one point, I spotted Telaris in a corner, in the company of a Coldi woman in dark clothing. Just letting me know he was there, I thought.
A waiter came to bring our orders in clear bowls with little metal tongs. It was Pengali fare: fish, noodles, mushrooms, all grown and harvested locally. Asha thanked the waiter in a gesture unusually friendly for him. Then he fixed me with a serious gaze, and I knew that we had arrived at the important part of what had so far been a strangely relaxing outing.
“We must discuss the Azimi case. That woman has to be one of the most terrible drama queens I have ever had the displeasure of coming across. I gather she complained a lot when she was in your household?”
“She was not very nice to the staff even if they tried their best to please her.”
“She has also been complaining since she got home. The clan elders have told her that she’s wrong.”
“Delegate Ayanu is still in Barresh.” Even if she lost much of Ezhya’s favour and the race to become Chief Delegate. “She hasn’t spoken to me about it.” In fact, she hadn’t spoken to me since we had rescued Reida from being locked up in her office. “Is she still the clan leader?”
“She is. I don’t know how much she agrees with Xinanu, but there will be a complaint.”
“What is there to complain for them? Xinanu is the one who didn’t stick to the contract.”
“She says she had reasons not to. Frankly, I think it’s best not to wait for their complaint and lodge one of your own. That’s what I’d like you to do.”
“Do I have to? To be honest, I’m glad that she’s gone. I don’t want her to come back to fulfil the rest of the contract. We can manage between the three of us.”
“I understand that, but the point is, she offended us when she broke her contract. You must ask for compensation on behalf of the Domiri clan. This is important because the Azimi clan must not think that they can get away with this. They know it’s coming and they are already formulating their response.”
I sighed. Veyada had told me as much. It seemed the matter was unavoidable. “What if the Azimi clan has a valid counter-claim?”
His eyebrows rose. “Do they?”
“I took Reida from them. He was captured in Delegate Ayanu’s office because of a claim they had against him. I intervened and freed him. More recently, I used their network bugs.”
He shook his head. “Disputes of property are not clan matters. They won’t try to offset your relationship contract claim against theirs. They can’t. Different parts of the law.”
“Can this wait a while? No one seems to be in any great discomfort, and there are a lot of other things going on that require my attention.”
“Preferably not. With clan situations, the longer you let a thing fester, the worse it gets.” He went on to tell me how to compose and lay out a claim document. He had me type it up on the awkward keyboard projector of my reader, which projected the keys over the surface of the table, my glass and part of my bowl. The table just wasn’t big enough.
To my human mind, making the claim was an extraordinarily petty thing to do in the light of the situation. Xinanu was home, we were happy, we didn’t want her back and there was so much more important stuff to do.
But he insisted.
I had to redo the whole thing three times before he was satisfied with it. “Send it.”
“Now?” It seemed a strange thing to do while at a relaxed dinner.
“Why not?”
So I did. While watching the message disappear off my screen with a kind of trepidation, I asked, “What do I do with the response when one comes in?”
“It should be pretty straightforward. Veyada should be able to help you with most of it, although he is better versed in gamra law than clan law. If you run into trouble, ask me.”
I registered that he had not asked me why I had used my personal account instead of my gamra one.
We were silent for a bit, watching the other diners. Then he insisted on paying for the meal.
In all, I thought the evening had been quite amicable and for once, I was happy with the way I had remained in control of events. I needed help with this clan claim, and he had gi
ven it. I could handle it now. That certainly had to be a step forward from being dragged out of my house on some goose chase where I was only informed at the last minute what it was all about. I was sure that he knew many things that would be of benefit for me to know; but for once, he didn’t appear to want to talk to me in order to use me as vehicle for his aims.
Maybe I was getting the hang of this father-in-law thing after all.
We left the eating-house and walked back in the direction of the airport, but we hadn’t gone far when he stopped in the shade of one of the big trees.
I stopped too. “Is anything wrong?”
For a while, nothing moved except his eyes, studying the street where, as fas as I could see, nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Just the usual evening crowd going about their leisurely business.
“Not yet,” he said. “But I might have to ask you for a fairly large favour. I’m hesitant about this and haven’t mentioned it yet tonight, because I think I finally understand what you’re about, and what I’d be asking would be contrary to your philosophy. I’m hesitant because I respect you.”
“Well,” I said, and my voice sounded high. Did I say anything about the evening having gone well? “If you don’t ask I can’t say yes or no. So why don’t we have a drink and you tell me about it?”
“A drink is good. But understand: there is no saying no.”
I looked into his eyes a knew that the entire night had been a smokescreen, even the bit about the Azimi claim.
When dealing with Asto’s military, you were never, ever, on safe ground.
I hesitated.
At some point in my life, I was going to turn a corner where I knew so many secrets that I would become a representative of Asto. Maybe that point had already been reached. I’d been let into military secrets that no one knew. But so far, knowing those secrets had helped establish peace for gamra as a whole. I suspected that he was now asking me to assist in an act of war, which would turn a corner for me.
On the other hand, a strong Asto presence preserved the peace. I’d hate to think what would happen if Asto’s hold on gamra diminished. We’d have Barresh Aghyrians, zeyshi Aghyrians, Damarcians all fighting for control and a largely ineffective bureaucracy that never decided anything in time.
Ambassador 4: Coming Home Page 10