by Patty Jansen
“Why is Margarethe Ollund so keen to have Robert back?”
“Is she?” He gave me a sharp look.
“She contacted me about this. She wants him brought back as soon as possible.” I was gasping for air.
“She probably fears for his safety,” Jasper said. “The debate about whether Nations of Earth should join gamra is flaring up again. She may be under pressure from people who don’t want Earth to join and are using Robert’s case as a reason. Barresh never ceases to supply the gamra opposition on Earth with material to make their case.”
I was probably supposed to chuckle here, but I couldn’t muster the strength.
“As for the president being keen to have him returned: Robert Davidson is a high-profile mining magnate. People make a lot of noise when he disappears. That’s inevitable.”
“Well, I’ve sent out a team. So all we need to do is wait until we hear from them.”
“Understood.”
He said nothing for a while.
“What is your function in Barresh, Mr Carlson? Are you a spy?”
He laughed. “No. I’m just a businessman.”
“Do you know Robert Davidson in that capacity?”
“No, that would be too handy. I have never met Mr Davidson and I have no idea why he would be more important than for the reasons I just said. Because he’s a rich man with powerful friends. When governments make decisions, those decisions are not always made for the reason the public thinks they are.”
“I’m . . . well aware of that.”
“Good.” Another silence. “Because there may be some things that I could tell you that could be of interest to you.”
“Does it have anything to do with this case?”
He laughed. “Always practical, aren’t you?”
No, but I’m fucking dying in this airless tin can. “Please, if you’ve said all the things that you’ve come to tell me . . . turn everything back on. I can’t do anything about any of this, and I need a clear head to think about it . . . I am really not very well.”
“All right.” He rose. “I’ll go now, so your woman can turn everything back on, so you stay alive.” He walked to the door. “Oh, before I forget. As a gesture of possible future collaboration, an assistant of mine is waiting outside. There is no need to beg these crooks for donations of their smuggled artificial blood. They won’t give it to you anyway. My assistant is a perfect donor.”
He opened the door and went out.
A moment later, the light came back on and the vent blew out a hiss of oxygen-laden air. For a while, I lay on my back just concentrating on breathing.
A businessman indeed. He sounded more like a skilled lobbyist. Given his status with the Trader Guild, that was probably a fair assessment of his capabilities.
The door opened again.
“Thay’?”
“He’s gone. I turned everything back on. Sheydu would have something to say about the warning system in this place. No one even came to check the outage.”
“That shows us . . . really how much they care . . . about us.” I was still gasping.
“They care about things that get them into trouble.”
“What about this assistant of his? Is he there?”
“He is.” The expression on her face showed that she felt very ambivalent about it. “He’s Tamerian.”
I met her eyes and her expression was one of shock, but in a way it made perfect sense. One philosophy about creating an artificial race would be that they were as compatible with everyone else as possible to enhance their chance of survival.
Did that mean . . . I felt cold. Did that mean they could cross-breed with all other races, too, and that they would spread their silent, obedient, non-communicative stain across humanity?
Thayu said, “He’s gone to the lab for testing. They expect to have the results later today.”
She sighed. She didn’t like it. I didn’t like it much either, but there might not be another option. Even if none of the medicos had explicitly told me, I understood very well that my low blood count hampered my ability to fight the rampant infections, and that letting my body fight them on its own might well lead to a much longer recovery than normal, or worse.
Thayu sat on the edge of the bed.
I told her what Jasper had told me, and she nodded. It appeared to be a repeat of what he had said to her.
“Do you know who he works for?” I was starting to feel a little better. “Nations of Earth?”
“He reports to a small intelligence company in Athens. They probably work for Nations of Earth in some way, but I don’t know that they work for any person in particular.”
It was amazing all the things Thayu knew. Although to be honest, she probably had help from Amarru on this one. “Do you trust him?”
“You should never trust anyone who is not in your associations.” And if I was Coldi, that would be all I needed to know.
No, I didn’t trust him, either. He was too forthcoming with information, trying to impress me with his stealth ways, commanding that equipment be turned off as if his words were top secret.
But what was his game? No idea, besides trying to butter me up.
Later, when Thayu had left and I lay alone staring at the extremely boring ceiling in this extremely boring cubicle, I thought of some of the questions I should have asked him. About Margarethe Ollund, for example.
I wondered how much she was using Robert’s case as a political vehicle from her own platform. I didn’t see a need for her to become involved in this case, unless she wanted to use it to prove that yes, Earth should get on with gamra membership or this sort of thing was going to happen over and over. And that the current situation did not prevent criminals from doing what they wanted. It just made it harder to persecute them.
I had heard it all before. I’d been a political football once, and wasn’t keen to repeat the experience, especially since I no longer had a horse in this race.
CHAPTER 12
* * *
NOT MUCH LATER, the door opened again and the medico came in. She shut it carefully and set a tray on the table next to the bed. On it stood a bottle with syrupy, dark red fluid.
“I have really good news. You won’t believe this, but they’ve found a donor.”
“I heard something about that. Who is he?”
“I don’t know his name. He’s Tamerian. We’d never tested one before at the lab, and they’re perfect donors for just about anyone.”
Perfect so as to be completely interchangeable with any other individual. One could keep a bunch of Tamerians purely for backup organs. The thought made me ill.
She took one of my drips off, undid a connector and clipped on another.
“He hasn’t left yet, has he?”
“Excuse me?”
“The Tamerian. Has he left the hospital?”
“No, he’s having some food in the observation room. We took as much as we could.” She hung the bottle up on the stand, attached another lead—I had no idea what that was for—and attached that to one of the machines.
“Can I see him?”
She switched the machine on, frowning at me. “If you want. They’re not exactly very talkative.”
“He’s saving my life. I can at least say thank you.”
“I guess.”
She checked the machine, seemed satisfied, and gathered all her things into her box and went to the door. “I’ll ask if he would like to come in here. I’ll send a nurse to check your leg. The nurse will also take off the drip when it’s finished, and will give you your antibiotics.”
More poking and prodding with needles. Whoop-de-doo.
She left and I lay back on the bed, staring at the dark fluid in the bottle on the stand. The machine was making little puffing noises. It probably did something to increase the pressure in the bottle so that the blood would flow into my arm more quickly.
I knew it was impossible, but I felt better already.
After a while, there
was a soft noise at the door, followed by someone coming in. The Tamerian. He wore a protective gown and came in looking like a purple ghost.
“Sit down,” I said.
He did. Like most Tamerians, he had dark hair and olive skin. His deep-set eyes were grey.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Puck.” Or maybe he said Buck.
“Thank you, Puck.”
He looked at me and then at the stand that contained his blood, only his eyes moving.
“Do you work for Jasper Carlson?”
“He is my boss.”
“What sort of work do you do for him?”
“I do what he tell me to. Move boxes, unpack, clean.”
“How long have you been here?”
“A year and fifty-two days.” The way he said it sounded like a jail sentence.
“Do you want to go back to Tamer?”
He gave me a blank look.
“Do you like being in Barresh?”
Again, no reaction. The expression on his face remained neutral.
“I don’t know much about Tamer. Tell me about the world.”
“Tamer is a medium-sized world, the second planet in the system on a class 5 star. The orbital period is ninety-six days and a day is two point zero five times the gamra standard day. Gravity is one point one seven times the gravity of Ceren. The planet has a cool temperature and the surface is fifty percent covered in permanent ice. The dominant life form is a symbiont migrating plant. The top life form in the ecosystem is a warm-blooded predator. The human population of Tamer measures five thousand.”
“Well . . . thank you. You must like snow a lot.”
Another blank look. I cringed. This was more awkward than speaking to a teenage boy.
“Can you ski?”
“Yes. We ski.”
Another thought. “Can you surf?”
“Surf?” He frowned, the first sign of emotion on his face.
“It’s a bit like skiing, but on water.”
His from deepened. “How? You sink in water.”
“No, you stand on a board that floats, and you slide along the side of a wave. Like this.” I had a picture of Thayu attempting to catch a wave and I brought it up on my reader.
He frowned at the screen, his expression deeply intrigued. “Surf.” And then again, “Surf.”
“I like it better than skiing. It’s not cold.”
“But if you fall, you get wet.”
“Yes, you do. But that’s all right, because it’s warm. I could teach you if you want.”
He shook his head, still looking at the screen. “Surf.”
And then he said nothing for a while. The screen switched itself off. Some people were talking outside the cabin. I thought I heard Thayu’s voice.
“Anyway, thank you for saving my life.”
No reaction. He still stared at the dark screen.
“You can go now.”
“All right.” He almost jumped up and went to the door.
“Puck?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
“Yes . . . Surf.” He opened the door and he was gone.
The door shut again, but didn’t remain open for very long. Thayu came in gasping with laughter.
“You’re priceless. You want to teach a Tamerian to surf?”
“I don’t know what that conversation was about. But he seems to respond only to descriptive language. He doesn’t understand or know how to use abstract concepts at all.”
“Those Tamerians are not really the superpeople they are supposed to be.”
“I think the Aghyrians didn’t like the fact that their creation, the Coldi, had a mind of their own, so they overdosed on the toning down of personality and social intelligence.”
“The two go hand in hand.”
“Yes, but the Aghyrians themselves aren’t particularly socially adept.”
“Lilona is doing a lot better.”
“True. I wonder how much is learned.” Maybe I should try to teach Puck to surf. It would be an interesting experiment.
At some point someone was going to have to investigate the situation on Tamer, what the mysterious anti-establishment group of people was still doing there despite the fact that the Aghyrian ship was gone, who those people were and what the point of Tamerians was, other than that they made excellent bodyguards or soldiers who didn’t have opinions of their own.
Maybe the Aghyrians were unhappy with Coldi because they hadn’t followed their blueprints of what society should look like. At least the Coldi had been able to grow into a well-rounded people. If these Tamerians never had opinions and never argued, then they would never be any good for anything except menial work.
I hoped none of these characteristics carried in the blood.
Although I was feeling better. It wasn’t my imagination.
By the time Nicha came with lunch, I was sitting up in the chair in front of the little window, dragged there by Thayu and the nurse, who needed to change my bed. The sheets were disgusting from fluids leaked from both my legs. Apparently the barnacle-like leeches injected an anti-coagulant in the blood that kept the bites weeping. But they had finally scabbed over.
“Wow,” Nicha said, setting down the basket on the clean bed. “How does it feel to have a bit of Tamerian in you?”
“I’m in no danger of blindly agreeing with everyone, if that’s what you want to know.”
He laughed. “You sound better. You certainly look much better.”
“I feel much better, too.” For one, the awful throbbing in my leg had almost gone, and I’d been able to put some weight on it while hobbling from the bed to the chair. I was even hungry.
Nicha had brought a selection of Eirani’s breads, noodles, chunky mushroom sauce with bits of fish and a crispy salad.
“So, have you heard from Melissa?” I asked while we were eating.
“Not yet. We’ve been extremely busy, Reida and Deyu especially.”
“Did the security breach give you that much grief?”
“No, they finished doing all that. It’s probably going to be a bit of a hack job, but it will do for now. One of Reida’s Pengali friends brought in a huge soggy, stinking pile of notebooks and documents.”
“Whatever is that for?”
“For whatever reason someone decided to dive in a drainage channel and get attacked by a bottom muncher.”
“Wait—are you saying that they found the stuff that Clovis tried to dump? Wouldn’t it be all munched up?”
“People dump all sorts of stuff in those channels, and the cleaner is there for a reason: to pick it up and remove it. That’s its function: to keep the channel clean of large items of rubbish. It can’t be too fussy about how to remove the rubbish. It just gobbles the whole thing up and dumps it at the outlet in the marshlands.”
“But what about . . .” I looked at my leg.
“Those were just the metal bristles that it uses to pick up things.”
“There is nothing ‘just’ about them.”
“Sorry.”
He chuckled, and I laughed, too. It was ridiculous, really. I was here because I’d been run over by a fucking pool cleaner.
“So, Reida got that box he dumped?”
“Yes, and the two youngsters have spent most of yesterday drying out the pages and piecing them back together on the floor of the hall, ‘helped’ by Ayshada.”
I laughed. I could just imagine that, and his frustration if he wasn’t allowed to ‘help’. “And? Did they find anything interesting?”
“Very much so. It looks like our friend has been paying bribes to just about everyone. Look.” He pulled out his reader and showed me a picture on the screen: on the achingly familiar tiles in the hall—and oh, how I wanted to see them again—lay a collection of scraps of paper. Painstakingly pieced together, they formed a page out of a notebook such as merchants in Barresh would use at the markets, or at least those who still wrote everything down on paper.
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There was a tally of a number of widely known councillors, with in the left column the amount of money given, by Clovis, I assumed, and in the right hand column the type of favour bought.
Of the well-known councillor Remiru, it said, Waive application process for new shed, and of the head of the Barresh guards, it said, Careful.
It was good to know that at least someone had some integrity left in this cesspool of a town.
I said, “Very interesting indeed. Did you find anything to do with Robert?”
“A printed copy of the advertisement that Amarru showed you.”
“So that mystery contact address that Amarru couldn’t reach would bring interested parties to Clovis?”
“Eventually. But there is more, because Huang Le is involved as well.”
Exactly as Jasper had said. Which meant that Clovis and the others would indeed not be too keen on being unmasked, by Robert, Robert’s wife or one of us.
“Nich’, I want to warn Melissa to get out of there quickly. If Clovis used Tamerian guards to protect his property and to kill any trespassers, I don’t like to think what he would order Tamerians to do to people who would try to uncover his tracks.” I did have trouble imagining the old man ordering people to be killed. Corruption, yes, that I could believe, especially in Barresh, where corruption was often the only way of getting ahead. But he didn’t seem the killing type.
“Melissa is out of reach.”
“Shouldn’t we have heard from her by now? I mean—how long does it take to get out there and back? No more than two days.”
“That’s only if he’s sitting on the beach waiting for her. If she has to do any looking around because he’s scared witless, it will be longer.”
True. Yet it seemed to me that she had been away forever, and I wouldn’t feel happy until she came back safely.
“I’m worried. I know it’s early days, but I’m worried that I sent her out there. If these people have this level of organisation, they won’t think twice about knocking Robert off, as well as anyone who comes to look for him.”