Ambassador 4: Coming Home

by Jansen, Patty

  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.

  Asha might be staying in the guest quarters on the ground floor of my apartment, but his home ship probably sat in orbit, watching us, waiting for me to obtain the information they needed, to sign agreements of nonviolence with the Aghyrians and disclose whatever knowledge they had obtained in that other galaxy.

  And I doubted I’d be successful. Yes, there had been some progress made today, but it was a slow, two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back process.

  When I stepped off the walkway, Telaris detached from the shadow of a wall and joined me soundlessly.

  “Just buying dinner,” I said.

  He nodded, but continued to walk next to me.

  “Everything all right?” I asked him.

  “We’ve been talking to Reida,” he said. “He says he has important news and is on his way back to the apartment.”

  Dang it, and I wasn’t going to be there. “Can you tell Devlin to ask Nicha to deal with it on my behalf?”

  Telaris said he would. Then he said, “Any luck yet?”

  “We agreed not to commence the forceful questioning until we left the hospital.”

  He nodded, again in silence. I didn’t like it. I didn’t know what he expected me to do. Push Lilona with her back against the wall, point a gun at her face and start asking questions? Not my style. I doubted I’d even get the answers I wanted from that tactic. She’d probably just flip out and start blathering about her captain. For all I knew, she might even self-destruct.

  “Asha’s guards are here,” Telaris said a bit later. “They’ll be waiting on the town side of the bridge. How long do you expect to need?”

  “Not sure.” And then, “I don’t like the idea of putting pressure on her, Telaris. Who is to say that she doesn’t have some kind of system built in that warns the captain and all sorts of other people when she is threatened?”

  “We’ll have to risk it.”

  “I don’t know that she will answer our questions.”

  “We can only try. I think Asha has given us enough reason to do so.”

  In other words: leave it to security, dumb delegate, and stop meddling.

  Did Ezhya ever feel sorry about the pain and pressure his guards applied to people who disobeyed his rules or possessed information that he needed?

  I was about to ask where Evi was when the very man came walking down the street carrying a couple of parcels.

  Dinner.

  Evi gave them to me. The food he bought was green-coded—because that was what keihu people ate, and there were not many foreigners in this part of town. It had been intended for himself and Telaris, but he assured me that he could easily go and buy new food. I took the parcels and went back inside.

  While I had been away, Lilona had produced her own tree based on the files from Jacina.

  “The very tips of the branches represent all the people alive today.” She pointed to one solitary branch on the left of the tree. “This is you.” She looked at me. Next, she pointed to a line that went straight from the trunk into the air. “This is me.” Then she pointed to another branch to the right of the straight line. It lay close to a couple of branches that represented a relationship cluster that would contain the Mirani Endri and keihu. “This is her.” she nodded at Thayu.

  I stared at the distance between the lines. The further apart in the tree, the less relationship. My courage sank. Every bit of anecdotal experience said that we would never have children, but seeing it like this cemented the facts. I really wished I’d pushed harder for Thayu to agree to using Menor.

  Thayu was looking at it as well, blinking. It seemed that the truth had finally sunk in. I could see it on her face. And she did want another child, and did not want to use a surrogate.

  Damn, what would this mean for us?

  Chapter 15

  * * *

  LILONA WAS FINALLY in her element. She went on at length about each of the different races both past and present, oblivious to Thayu’s silence and morose expression.

  It seemed she had already forgotten the question I’d asked her and was getting carried away with all this data. I had no doubt that geneticists would find this extremely interesting, so I let her talk as much as she wanted. Also, because I felt extremely hesitant about what would happen the moment she stepped outside this building.

  Apparently, the Coldi had been created by stripping the unused, “junk” parts of the Aghyrian DNA, replacing it with altered code and turning it on. Underneath the added altered genetic code, Coldi and Aghyrians were identical, because all the original Aghyrian genes were still there.

  Which was why Aghyrian throwbacks happened.

  “They happened because there was contamination,” Lilona said. “Waller Herza thought that it was fun to contaminate the new people with his own code. He was always a selfish man with an interest in self-aggrandisement.”

  “I think it went differently,” Thayu said, and she sounded snippy. “
Our origin stories tell us that there were thirty-five couples. There were meant to be thirty-six, but a stasis pod failed and one of the men died. The woman who was meant to be his partner was woken up before the meteorite strike and had a baby the natural way. She survived in the chamber when the meteorite hit and after the dust had cleared, years later, went on to open the cubicles so that your ‘all-purpose colonising race’ could actually get out of their boxes, because if she hadn’t done that, they’d all have died from eventual power failure.”

  Thayu was not a person of a lot of words, and for her to say this would have taken a good dose of anger. The significance of her outburst went straight past Lilona, who had magnified an area of the tree on the screen and sat squinting at the data. “This group is very varied.”

  Thayu spread her hands and rolled her eyes, but Lilona didn’t see or didn’t understand the gesture.

  I checked the names in the group she was studying. They included Marin Federza, Feylin Herza and Sadet Arwan. “Those are the Barresh Aghyrians. The genome was pieced together from your throwbacks, surviving Aghyrian strains and a single direct survivor.”

  Now she gave me a startled look. “Survivors?”

  “There were two kinds of survivors. The Mirani Endri are virtually pureblood Aghyrians descended from a ship that landed on the Mirani highlands. They never interbred with any other races other than Coldi. There was also a single direct survivor, a woman called Anmi, found in a stasis chamber as baby. You will find her genes in the Herza and Federza families.” I didn’t know why I felt so fierce about defending them. After all, no one particularly liked the Aghyrians, but they were part of Barresh and most of them were half-decent, even if they were often rich, entitled arseholes.

  “There were survivors from the meteorite strike?” Her voice was soft.

  “None that are still alive today, although their grandchildren are.”

  “How did that happen?” She sounded shocked.

  I told her what I knew about the babies that had survived in buried chambers, that most of them had been found during building activities in Athyl about three hundred years ago, and that the last one found was Anmi, the mother of the Aghyrian compound in Barresh. Lilona asked what section those babies belonged to and I had no idea what she was talking about.

  Then she wanted to know what Anmi looked like.

  “Like many Aghyrians, pale-skinned with deep black hair and eyes. They’re all very tall.”

  “Pakshar,” Lilona said, and by her tone, I gathered that was not a good thing.

  She went on to explain that there had been two rival nations on Asto, those of Aghyr and Pakshar. Both had built magnificent capitals that lay across the river from each other. “You could see from the top of Aghyr into Pakshar. Aghyr had buildings of knowledge and study. Pakshar had temples where people with outspoken personalities were worshipped.”

  We knew that Athyl was built on the ruins of Aghyr, and that the desert valley that ran across it was likely to have contained a river. Pakshar was likely to have included the flat country that today took up some of Athyl’s outer circles. The zeyshi-controlled desert was probably all that remained of the Pakshari plains.

  Lilona said that the people in Aghyr were “rational”, the people in Pakshar were not. They were—and here she used a strange word that I deduced from her next description to mean something like “spiritual”. She kept pointing at her head. Maybe she thought they were mad.

  “Our scientists were rational, but Waller Herza, he was half-Pakshar, and he betrayed us. Through him, all of the science in Aghyr became contaminated.”

  What with, I couldn’t understand but I didn’t think it was a contamination of the biological kind. With religion? With opposing thoughts?

  “The contamination happened through him, with help from his scientist friend Perling Dinzo.”

  Something clicked. “Dinzo, that was Anmi’s clan name. The survivor woman who started the Barresh Aghyrian settlement.”

  “Perling Dinzo’s daughter survived?” She seemed horrified.

  “I don’t know who she was, except that the local Aghyrians regard her as their mother. Did you also meet her father?”

  “Oh no, the captain taught us all this.”

  And here we had the captain again, a fallback answer in case of doubt.

  I was starting to feel distinctly uneasy about this transfer of information. These people had memories longer than an elephant’s, and held more massive grudges than the Sicilian mafia. Whatever these “contaminated” or “irrational” scientists were supposed to have done, apart from the very sensible thing to save as many people as they could, apparently it was ground for a very strong reaction from the “rational” crowd, whatever they thought was rational about coming across a vast swathe of space to trade grudges with a culture that died fifty thousand years ago. What had they come back here to find? An empty planet waiting for them? Were they here to get rid of the Coldi, the local Aghyrians or both of them?

  Thayu met my eyes. I didn’t need the feeder to know that she shared my apprehension.

  Time to put an end to it, she said.

  Yes, time to go home. Time to get ourselves “accidentally” ambushed by “strangers” in the form of Evi and Telaris and Asha’s guards, time for the interrogation, whatever that might bring.

  It had gone completely dark outside and the rest of the research lab was quiet.

  I rose, feeling sweaty. “I think this lab is about to close. Maybe we should go home and come back later.”

  Lilona said, “You can come to our apartment to discuss further. I have what I need.”

  “All right then.” I nodded to Jacina, who appeared slightly bewildered by the events.

  “I do have one more question,” Thayu said as she got up. “You still haven’t told us whether there is any chance at all that we might have a child.”

  I cringed. Thay’, please. I thought she would have understood, but science was never her thing.

  Lilona pursed her lips and looked at the screen. She sniffed. “Not without a lot of effort.”

  “But not impossible?”

  “Well. No. But there would be some very heavy treatment involved, and I would be hesitant about giving that to adults—”

  “I’ll do it,” Thayu said.

  “No. It wouldn’t work for you. You already have two sets of genes. We can’t strip genes in adults, we can only add. It would have to be for him. But we would need a lot of work to find out if it’s even possible. I couldn’t do that by myself. I need the team and the lab at the home ship.”

  Thayu looked at me, and I looked back at her. She smiled. My heart was hammering. That was just not what I’d expected to hear, at all.

  Holy fuck.

  “You said ‘a lot of work’?” I asked, hesitant.

  “Many, many tests to see if we could get the extra genes to stick, or if we could turn them on. It is probably still impossible.”

  “Could you try?” Thayu asked. Her eyes shone.

  “Not now. I need the lab on the ship.”

  “But later?”

  “Later, maybe.”

  That was assuming that she would return to the big ship. Which, at this point in time, we were trying to avoid.

  I couldn’t bear to meet Thayu’s eyes.

  We made our way out of the building through corridors shrouded in semidarkness. I felt sick and sweaty at the same time. Altogether not happy about what I’d found out.

  So. They could change my genetic makeup by adding an extra gene set to my junk DNA. But they’d been to worlds outside the galaxy and had discovered nothing new there? Did I have to believe that?

  The more I learned of these people, the less I liked them.

  As we left the hospital’s entrance, I thought I spotted movement on the artificial island. That would be Evi and Telaris, and Asha’s people would be nearby. I couldn’t see them. I was afraid to look in case I gave them away, knowing that they were closing in on us as we crossed
the bridge from the hospital to the artificial island.

  Thayu, in front of us, reached the end of the bridge and turned left in the direction of the tram station.

  Lilona and I stepped off the bridge. I braced myself for the attack, but it didn’t happen. We turned left, following Thayu.

  I held my breath, waiting for someone to pounce from behind.

  It didn’t happen.

  Surely Asha’s people would be waiting at that dark section of the street ahead? My heart was thudding, sweat running over my back underneath the armour. Thayu was still in front of us, and I couldn’t see her face.

  We made it past the dark section of street unhindered.

  Thay’? What’s going on? Where are they?

  I don’t know. I didn’t miss the disturbed feeling that came with the statement.

  Can you contact Devlin?

  We kept walking, now almost at the station. It was clear to me that the attack wasn’t going to happen, because there would be people on the platform and other passengers in the tram.

  Except the platform was deserted, and the tram, when it arrived, empty.

  I glanced at Thayu while the tram slowed down, unsure what to do. Evi and Telaris were meant to be with us at this point, and they were yet to arrive.

  Get on, she said. Above all, we can’t let her know that this was meant to be a trap.

  True, but something must have happened.

  Could be anything. It’s unfortunate, but they’re my father’s guards. They will have used their judgement and will intercept us somewhere else.

  All right then. I couldn’t say that I liked it, but I saw no alternative. I would make sure that they were notified of my displeasure.

  The tram groaned to a halt. The doors opened—