by Patty Jansen
“It’s all about the pretty girl with the pretty smile.” Thayu grinned.
She could joke, but I knew the signs. One: he kept quiet and never volunteered information. Two: he spoke to Thayu, not to me. Three: he offered help only when Margarethe had gotten upset.
I would hazard a guess that he worked in intelligence, possibly for Nations of Earth. Possibly, too, he was reporting back on me and the other people from Earth on the orders of men in grey suits at the top of the various departments, men like the despicable Simon Dekker who I’d dealt with briefly and who had fortunately been sacked. Men who collated huge files on people of interest that were still stored on paper, and digital versions destroyed unless they were safe and verified. I knew this data-gathering on top employees was common practice, but the thought made me uncomfortable. I didn’t work for Nations of Earth anymore but, obviously, that hadn’t stopped me being a person of interest.
I wasn’t sure what to feel about that, although in my current state, “nothing” would be correct. I felt confused, alarmed that he wanted to see me. “If Jasper Carlson wants to visit me, tell him I won’t be going home for a while yet.”
“I have some different news about that, too,” she said. “I ran into Lilona in the foyer, and she asked why we hadn’t been back.”
Oh, crap, did I have to deal with all of this at once? “Did you tell her that we’d come after the election?”
“I did. We need to make an appointment.” Her eyes were intense. Yes, I would do it, but I still didn’t know what to think about having my entire genes changed, and I was in no state to discuss that, either.
Thayu continued, “Anyway, we got talking about why you’re in here. She said there is a kind of plasma she can give you that is a—what did she call it again?—primer, that’s it, for the gene treatment. It doesn’t actually change anything inside you, but makes you more receptive to all types of medicine, including hers. She had names for all this but seriously, don’t ask me about them. I don’t know how any of it works. But she said she’d contact the medico to see if she can give you this stuff.”
“That would help me?”
“She thought it might, but she needs to investigate first.”
“When would we know this?”
“As soon as possible.”
I nodded. I was bored. I wanted to go home. I didn’t want to stay in this claustrophobic cubicle for seven weeks. Hell, the election would be on by then.
“Anyway, about what Margarethe told me: We need to get Robert.”
“I spoke to Melissa about that. She agreed to go out. Apparently she also got a message from Margarethe. She’s leaving this afternoon.”
Shit. “I hope she taking a good team, because otherwise, we’ll have to go and rescue her as well.”
“That won’t be necessary, and you’re going nowhere for quite a while. Melissa took a few people with her, including a Pengali guide. They will be fine.”
“I hope the guide was from the right tribe.”
“I have no idea.”
Oh, damn it. I was guessing probably not. Probably Melissa had taken one of those Pengali people who advertised themselves as guides, but who only took visitors to historical sites near the escarpment, an area they were familiar with in the hands of their own tribe. I felt cold inside.
The door hissed open and Veyada came in, carrying a basket. He set this on the table and unpacked a variety of containers. Lunch. “What would you like? Nut bread, fruit?”
It was customary in the hospital, I had learned, that the family provided food, unless the patient required a special diet.
Eirani’s bread smelled wonderful, and I asked for a piece.
Veyada smiled. “You must be getting a bit better. You’re very chatty.”
“I just had my ear bitten off by Margarethe.” I told him about the brief conversation I’d had with her, and he was equally puzzled about the urgency.
Thayu spread her hands. “I understand they’d want him back, but since the fact that he got lost out there was his own fault, and he’s in a dangerous place, I don’t understand why they don’t accept that getting him back is not so easy.”
“The longer we wait, the less likely he will be to survive, especially since he’s on an island that has no fresh water.”
“Yes, but she doesn’t know that.”
No. She only spoke of the fallout and Robert’s wife. I wondered if this wife was perhaps an employee of Nations of Earth, but even if that was the case, Margarethe wouldn’t have told me through the Exchange link, where everyone could listen in.
CHAPTER 11
* * *
LILONA SHRAKAR came to my room not long after Veyada and Thayu had left. I hadn’t seen her for a while.
She looked a lot healthier than she had when I had first seen her. Her hair, then, had been dull and grey; and her skin, lifeless and pale. Now her skin had acquired a healthy glow and her hair was darker. She still had some grey hair, but it possessed a lustre it previously lacked. I could see that even from the wisps that protruded from underneath the purple cap.
Wow. That showed how stressed the crew of the Aghyrian ship were, and how much they needed to find a place to settle and replenish their resources.
She carried a clear container with medical equipment, syringes, boxes, tweezers and other metal implements, which she set on the bed. Then she took the reader that held my medical data from the shelf. She read, nodding.
“Interesting medical file,” she said. “The list of diseases found in your system is quite impressive. How did you collect all these?”
“I went for a swim in the channel and got set upon by a bottom-munching machine. And then I got beseeched by blood suckers.”
She pulled a face. I remembered the time we walked through the drainage pipes and she got upset about getting dirty, after having lived in the clean ship all her life. We hadn’t even encountered nasty creatures back then.
“They tell me it’s going to take a long time to recover unless I get a blood donation from someone. We can’t find a suitable donor. I don’t have a long time.”
She nodded. “That’s what the files tell me. They tell me that you’re impatient as well. It says ‘At risk of abandoning treatment without authorisation.’ ”
“It doesn’t!”
“It does say so.” She showed me the screen. She was right.
Well . . . I spread my hands. The assessment was not wrong, but who the hell had time to be sick anyway? “Thayu tells me you might have a solution.”
“I don’t know. Seeing this long list of infections on your file, I’m not sure. My potential solution comes with disadvantages.”
“Doesn’t it always?”
Her face remained very serious. These were clearly not disadvantages to be taken lightly.
“All right, what’s the option?”
“I was wondering if it would be possible to give you the primer that lets your immune system cope with the extra genetic material I would be adding when you receive the Coldi genes, should it be your wish to go ahead with that.”
Her eyes were intense.
I was in no state to make that decision now, but I also knew that given the choice, I would make it anyway.
Lilona went on, “But I would have to give you drugs to suppress your immune system to begin with, and you’ve got almost every infection known in Barresh, so I can’t, or you’ll die. The primer would take about two weeks to work, during which time you’d be kept in a coma—but first, the infections need to be cleared up.”
“That doesn’t sound like it saves a lot of time either.” That was the understatement of the century. Changing my genes was not about time.
“I agree. This is not something you’d do to get out of here quickly. It would be something you might do to save your life. I also didn’t get the feeling that you were totally committed to it yet. If I give you the primer, it would set changes in motion that are . . . not entirely irreversible, but hard to undo.”
I nodded and sighed.
Seven weeks in this tin can, it was.
* * *
I fell asleep before dinner and slept for a long time, until Nicha came with breakfast, and Veyada brought some stuff from the office. Then I had to tell Thayu that Lilona’s option would be too risky in my state. I couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or not.
“I want to get out of here,” I told her. “This place drives me nuts.”
“The medico tells me that first you’ll need to be well enough to spend time on a normal ward, outside this room.”
I sighed. “Has anyone else come forward?”
“No one compatible.”
“Didn’t they tell you that some stored their own blood? Is there a way we could check? They might have a universal blood product. Even if it is illegal to import it.”
“I can go and see what I can find out.”
I sighed again, and she sighed, too, and put her warm-skinned hand on mine. “It was really very stupid of you to go into that channel.”
“Yes, but he threw something in the water. He came back from his house in the dark especially to do that. Wouldn’t you have tried to fish it out?”
“Oh, I would, but only after I’d established a safe perimeter. It was stupid of you not to check. It was stupid not to wear armour.”
And so the conversation went around and around in circles.
Then I asked her, “Has anyone heard from Melissa?”
“No. But she’s out of range of just about every piece of communication equipment, so that doesn’t surprise me.”
She didn’t sound worried, but I was. I shouldn’t have let her go.
“By the way, Evi and Telaris are on their way home.”
“Already?”
“They heard what happened and decided to come straight back.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“Yes, it is,” Thayu said. “Their main job is here, especially when there’s trouble.”
“But they’re allowed some time off, and I’m not going anywhere.”
“If they didn’t have this job, they would have no time off, they wouldn’t even be alive.”
There seemed no arguing it, and to be honest, I was glad. Any extra hands were welcome.
Thayu stayed with me for the morning, wearing the funny purple anti-friction gown. She made sure I ate my breakfast and drank enough water. She helped me turn around and helped me with various bodily functions. She even stayed in the room when the nurse came to rebandage my leg, and didn’t pull a face when the bandage came off.
I asked, “Does it look a bit better?”
The nurse went, “Hmmm.”
I guessed at least it meant it didn’t look worse.
I hoped.
After she was gone, I slept t some more.
Thayu was sitting on the other bed, doing some work, when the power went off. The lights went off and the machines started beeping. A moment later even that stopped.
Without the humming and clicking and hissing air, it was very quiet in the cabin.
“What’s going on?”
Thayu got up and opened the door.
Someone came in, wearing a purple gown.
He was a thin man with a narrow face and intense dark eyes. He wore his black hair in a ponytail at the back of his head. His chin had a distinct five-o’clock shadow.
Jasper Carlson.
He sat down on the other bed, silhouetted by the light that came in from the window. Thayu had gone outside, presumably to deal with hospital people coming to investigate the source of the power outage and the lack of alarms. I really hoped Thayu hadn’t turned off anything that kept me alive along with the equipment that recorded voice and visuals in the little cabin.
Jasper folded his hands. “I would have preferred to come to a place where the walls don’t have ears, but I’m told you need to spend some time in here.” His voice was quite dark.
“Seven weeks.” I was beginning to feel tired again. This was not a social visit, and I really didn’t feel like discussing any kind of sensitive information or politics.
“Unless you find a donor.”
I sighed and nodded.
“You’re not going to find one in the places you’re looking. You’re B negative and you can accept donations from people with the same blood group or O negative. There are none of those in Barresh.”
I wanted to ask, How do you know that? but didn’t have the energy.
“Some of us store our own, but those who are smart have a supply of artificial blood.”
“But you can’t—”
“You can’t take that through the Exchange? I know, that’s the bullshit they sell you when you ask about it. The problem is not with the processes of the Exchange. It’s with their bureaucracy. Artificial blood falls under medicines, and as such, it needs to be dealt with by the Trader Guild, who need a Quarantine Approval number to be able to complete the formalities. Of course it doesn’t have that number, and no one is interested in completing all the formalities, so it can’t be imported legally. But there are lots of things that make their way in and out of Barresh illegally.”
That seemed a remark designed to make me curious. I was supposed to ask something but couldn’t remember what. I wished he’d get on with it. I was fading fast, and why was it so cold in here all of a sudden?
“I’m going to tell you a secret.” He inserted his hand in his pocket and held it out to me. On the palm of his hand lay a glittering stone about as wide as my thumb, clear but with a bright turquoise hue.
“This is what it’s all about,” he said.
I frowned. I had seen this before, but where? My head was swimming.
“It’s a blue diamond,” he said, probably expecting a reaction that I wasn’t giving him. I don’t know that he appreciated just how unwell I was. “They have become quite the thing to have on Earth. Someone waged a very clever advertising campaign. Blue diamond rings are the thing to have when you’re getting married. A lot of people are paying a lot of money for these babies.”
“Don’t they . . . make artificial diamonds in all kinds of colours?”
“Yes, but if you really love a girl, you can’t give her a fake stone, right?”
True.
“All the stones are sold by one single company, Fleming Diamonds. They’ve spent a fortune in advertising. It was very smartly done. They’re the sole suppliers of these diamonds, so they can ask whatever they want. And they’re getting the stones here, where they are quite common. Illegally, of course.”
Ow. This made my head hurt. “Who are ‘they’? Do we know who is involved?”
“Pretty much everyone, but especially Clovis.”
“. . . Everyone?”
“Clovis Keneally, Juanita, Huang Le and his wife. I’m not too sure about Benton Leck, but he certainly never tried to stop them, either.”
“Wait. These people are smuggling diamonds?”
“Taking them in their luggage and bringing them to Earth.”
“But they don’t travel. I’ve checked.”
“Oh, no, they pay people to deliver the stock on their behalf. And they are cleverly disguised as travellers. Not that a little handful of stones would be easy to detect, especially since they have no value here and no one cares.”
“Does Robert Davidson have anything to do with this?” My teeth chattered. I was getting really cold. I was tempted to ask him a get to the point or get out question.
“Clovis has run a few of these adventure surfing tours for rich men. He uses them to carry packages.”
“Wait, there could be more people involved than just Robert?”
“I don’t know about this trip. It might have been just him. Clovis has done it a number of times before, and those tours were with small groups. On one, I remember, he had three people, another other time he had four.”
Damn. I felt sick. “But wait, Clovis is here. Why is Robert out there?”
“I don’t know what happened,
but I can make some guesses. At some point Clovis might have found out what industry Robert works in and put the two together: that Robert wanted to start his own diamond-importing business. Robert is well-positioned to do this. Execo owns most southern African diamond mines. He would be in an excellent position to do so, in fact.”
“But is he actually thinking of doing this?”
Jasper spread his hands. “He may, he may not. Probably not, because the money involved would be small fry for him. But men like Clovis have small minds. They probably had a fight and Clovis might have thought it safe to abandon him out there, knowing that he would be unlikely to survive. He would not be terribly keen on knowing that Robert is still alive.”
Oh shit. And I’d gone around advertising the fact that I’d found the note in the bottle. And . . . “I sent Melissa out there to get him.”
“Melissa Heyworth,” Jasper said, his voice flat.
“I don’t know of any other Melissas.”
“Shit.” He stared at me.
My heart jumped. It probably wasn’t a good idea to get agitated in my state, and I paid for it by feeling terrible. “Any trouble in particular?”
“Well,” he said, fingering his upper lip. “She’s a woman, alone.”
“She hasn’t gone alone.”
“Then I hope she’s taken enough people. If Clovis has really left Robert out there to die, he’s not going to want anyone finding out what he did. It won’t be pretty if something happens to her, being the gamra delegate.”
“No. Please can you make sure she comes back safely?”
“If they’re in Thousand Islands tribe territory, it’s out of my hands. I don’t know anything about his business, or about boats. Clovis is the only one who has any contact with those people. All the Pengali he employs are from the Thousand Islands tribe.”
Something clicked in my mind. “The ones with the giraffe patterns.”
“Yes. That type of patterning is much more common with the Thousand Islands tribe. The skin spots get bigger the further from the equator you go.”
“Is that why the other Pengali are sabotaging his boats?”
“Are they? As I said, I’m thoroughly unfamiliar with that business. He’s a bit of an unsavoury character, as I’ve already told you. I know that when he goes out there, he buys the tribe’s stones that young guys go out to collect for him. It’s a bit dicey, because some Thousand Islands elders believe that they shouldn’t be sold, because it’s not a hugely common colour, but yeah, otherwise he’s friendly enough with most of the tribe.”