New Title 2

by S J MacDonald

  ‘So,’ she said, gesturing invitingly to a table, ‘fancy a cup of tea?’

  Sixteen

  It was some minutes before Janil was introduced to Silvie’s companions, though he had already realised by then that the strikingly attractive black woman had to be Shionolethe. When they were introduced she offered her hand and told him to call her Shion. He shook hands with her shyly. Meeting her was a tremendous event in itself, of course – so little was known of the Veiled World that to him it was rather as if he was being introduced to a creature from mythology, an elf or faerie queen. Except that she didn’t look like a faerie queen. She looked like an ordinary person, with a stylish but practical haircut and a matter of fact manner. Tamus had been right, Janil realised. Shion could indeed go about in crowds without attracting attention. Silvie, on the other hand, sparkled as if beams of sunshine were focussed just on her. And there was something… something. It wasn’t just the strange metallic silver hair or the elfin quality of her looks. Perhaps it was in the brilliance of her sapphire eyes, the swift grace of her movements or some little quirk of posture, but even when she wasn’t speaking there was something different about her which would always draw attention. Put her in a wig and dark glasses and dress her as a tourist and she would still be the centre of attention as people sensed something odd about her they could not quite put into words.

  And the same, Janil realised, could be said about the boy who was with her. It took him a while to realise that, as he finally tore enough attention away from Silvie himself to take an interest in the child. He was introduced merely as ‘Davie’ and he too held out his hand, which Janil shook solemnly, as he would with a child mimicking adult manners. He couldn’t understand why there was a child with the quarian ambassador but the whole situation was so bizarre anyway that he was simply accepting it. Then, when he shook hands with Davie, it occurred to him that there was something quite odd about him, too. He might look like a child but his eyes were shrewdly amused. There was a sense of fizzing energy about him as well, as if he was poised on the verge of leaping up and sprinting off somewhere. No further explanations were given, though, and Janil hardly liked to ask. And in any case, Silvie was already grabbing his attention back by asking him a question.

  She wanted to know how he had worked out that she was on the planet and predicted where she would be swimming. It came as a shock to him when he realised that she had seen his analysis but had not understood it. He had always taken it for granted that aliens would be far more intelligent than humans and generally superior to them all round. He had never imagined meeting an alien who admitted frankly that she wasn’t very good at maths.

  ‘I can do adding up and taking away,’ she assured him, ‘but I don’t understand all that probability stuff. So just explain it to me in normal words, can you?’

  Janil did his best, finding that at times when he had to resort to mathematical concepts she picked them up very quickly.

  ‘It makes far more sense when people explain it than when it’s just written down,’ Silvie observed. ‘Thanks, Janil.’ She shot an amused glance at the boy Davie. ‘No you couldn’t,’ she said, ‘you never explain anything properly; your head is all over the place.’

  ‘Right back at you, Sis,’ said Davie, and grinned at the baffled Janil. ‘Silvie and I are cousins, genetically,’ he told him. ‘I am – technically – human, but I too was bioengineered by quarians.’ No further explanation than that was offered, as Davie looked enquiringly at Silvie. ‘So?’

  ‘Oh – yes, definitely,’ said Silvie, and beamed back at Janil. ‘I like you,’ she told him. ‘Would you like to stick around?’

  Janil had now reached what he felt to be a state of terminal bewilderment. It was just not possible to be any more confused and out of his depth. He was on his own here, too, as Tamus had melted away discreetly as soon as he’d made the introduction to Silvie.

  ‘I am currently,’ Davie explained, ‘recruiting people for my staff aboard the Stepeasy.’ That was true –he was still trying to find replacements so he could release the Fleet and Diplomatic personnel he’d been obliged to borrow at Chartsey. Selecting replacements wasn’t as simple as getting his executives to sort it out for him either, since he was determined not to allow anyone else to work aboard his yacht unless they’d got Silvie’s approval first. ‘If you’re interested, I’ll have you meet with one of my executives to discuss possibilities.’

  Janil gaped at him as several items of information fell into place.

  ‘You’re Mr N?’ he gasped.

  Davie grinned amicably.

  ‘Is that what they’re calling me?’ He considered briefly. ‘Well, it could be worse. And yes, Janil, I am – Davie North Delaney, Exo-Ambassador by extraordinary appointment. I am, by the way, sixteen, a year older than Silvie.’

  Janil could hardly take it in.

  ‘But they said you’d been working for the Diplomats for years,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Davie confirmed, patient as he had learned to be with slower human minds. ‘I started young,’ he said, and grinned. ‘This is what I was engineered to do, to be – an ambassador for humanity, just as Silvie was engineered to be an ambassador for her people.’

  Janil had strong beliefs about the morality of bio-engineering human beings. He opposed it on principle, and would have said even a few hours ago that it was always and totally wrong.

  Now, though, he looked at Silvie and Davie. He had felt without question that it was perfectly acceptable for the quarians, themselves a bioengineered species, to create a representative designed to help them improve their relationship with humans. How, then, could he argue that it was wrong for humans to have done the same? And that it had been done with the help of the quarians made it even more of an ethical conundrum. Strangely, though, that hardly seemed to matter. It was just thrilling and fascinating to see the two of them together. Then what Davie had said actually sank in.

  ‘And you… you’re offering me a job?’

  ‘As a forensic data analyst, yes,’ Davie confirmed. ‘I’m involved with a project I believe you might be able to assist with, and in any case I can always use a clever analyst. You don’t have to decide now, of course, no pressure, but we are of course talking about executive level employment with excellent salary and benefits, as well as the opportunity to travel on the Stepeasy and be part of whatever projects we are working on.’

  Janil wanted very much to shout yes, oh, yes, yes please, take me with you, take me now! He had, however, just enough grasp of reality left to recognise that there were practical difficulties.

  ‘But…’ he floundered. ‘Uni…?’

  ‘We can make arrangements with your university,’ said Davie, with total conviction. ‘You won’t have to quit your degree.’

  ‘Oh – I want to say yes, so much!’ Janil said, with heartfelt yearning. ‘But what about my family? I can’t just disappear, that’d be awful!’

  ‘No, of course you can’t disappear,’ Davie said, with a little note of reproof, at that. ‘I am the last person to suggest that you should do anything to upset your family. You can’t tell them the whole truth, of course, but you could tell them a partial truth – that the owner of the Stepeasy saw an analysis you’d published in a journal and was so impressed by it that I offered you a job. You can tell them that you’ll be analysing corporate productivity data, which you can certainly do if you have nothing better to work on. But you really don’t have to decide right now – we won’t be leaving till next week.’

  Janil gazed at him earnestly.

  ‘You know where we’re going, of course?’ Davie said, and saw the answer in the way that Janil was about to shake his head. ‘Really?’ Davie had taken it for granted that the Diplomatic Corps would have given him a full briefing before this meeting. ‘Oh. Well, we’re going out to investigate the Phenomenon which appears occasionally out in Sector Seventeen. We believe it may be a ship belonging to an undiscovered world.’

  Janil blu
shed. He had no words. To him, it was as if Davie had announced his intention of leading an expedition to the bottom of the garden in order to hunt for fairies. Even Alien Truth had some limits to their readiness to believe, and the Space Monster of Sector Seventeen was well beyond them. People who believed in the Space Monster were the ones the members of Alien Truth called nutters. And as for believing in any lost world out there in the wilds of space, that, for Telethorans, was pure fairy tale. Janil himself had never attempted to calculate the probabilities on that. To do so would have been as silly as attempting to work out the probable location of the gingerbread house.

  ‘Yes, he is serious,’ Silvie assured him. ‘And yes, it is real.’

  ‘At least, we think it is,’ Davie said, more cautiously. ‘Which is why we’re heading out there to investigate. I know,’ he said, with a sympathetic grin, ‘hard for you to take in. It is part of your planet’s mythology and that gives it low credibility for you. It is also on your doorstep, of course, and it is always easier to believe in such things when they are far away. And the authorities, it has to be said, particularly the Diplomatic Corps, have worked quite hard to keep the credibility of the Phenomenon low, since it is a situation they do not understand themselves, as yet. Anyway, the Fourth has been tasked to investigate it and we’re going along to support. It isn’t without risk of course and there are no guarantees about finding anything at all, but there’s a place on the Stepeasy for you, if you’re interested.’

  ‘Hey!’ said Silvie, with a movement as if he’d screamed so loudly it had startled her, though in fact he’d made only a small whimpering noise – outwardly at least. Then she grinned from him to Davie, giving an emphatic nod. ‘He’s interested!’

  ‘Yup,’ said Davie, and grinned with happy satisfaction. ‘Doughnuts for tea.’

  Seventeen

  He had to argue to get the doughnuts. The security agencies that’d been competing to bring Janil in for an interview were highly indignant at their quarry being snatched by someone who wasn’t even in the game. Besides, they said, he’d cheated, deploying Ambassador Silver as his hook, which was, or ought to be, unfair use of incentive.

  Davie, however, won his case. He might have been bioengineered to be an ambassador but he had also been brought up to be a businessman. There was nothing he enjoyed more in either capacity than a hard fought negotiation against a worthy opponent. So the Stepeasy took delivery of a crate of doughnuts and Davie North was accepted as a player.

  Alex paid up the Fourth’s share of the doughnuts without any argument, anyway. He was actually relieved that it had worked out so well for Janil Caldova. The reason he had been following the events of that day, in fact, was that he felt in some measure responsible for what happened to the student. The feeding frenzy which had erupted around him had, after all, been generated by Harry Alington. Harry, displaying that he had been paying close attention to Alex’s own unorthodox problem-solving methods, had set up that competition as one of his strategies to defuse and distract inter-agency recriminations over the attack on Alex. Alex had no issue with that as a problem solving strategy; he was actually rather impressed. But he was concerned about the potential consequences to an innocent civilian and had kept a watchful eye just to ensure that things were kept within reasonable bounds. That Davie had swept in and snared the prize had been an excellent outcome for all concerned. Davie, in fact, was enjoying the visit to Telathor very much and would not have minded staying longer.

  Alex, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to get away.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, talking to Davie in a rare moment they could sit and chat together, late at night aboard the Heron. ‘It is a lovely world – the environment is spectacular, the climate is superb and I’ve never met friendlier or more welcoming people anywhere.’

  ‘But.?’ Davie queried, giving him an amused look.

  ‘I’ve never eaten so much anywhere, either!’ Alex told him feelingly. ‘I’ve put on five kilos in four weeks. I’m spending fourteen or fifteen hours a day at social events which is my idea of hell. But that’s nothing, really, it’s just personal. The thing that’s really getting to me is the time that we’re losing.’ He gestured helplessly. ‘We weren’t supposed to come here at all at this stage,’ he reminded Davie. ‘And then it was supposed to be two weeks, max. And now here we are at four weeks, three days and counting. I’d say we’re losing focus but we’re way beyond that – people are starting to forget what we’re actually here for.’

  ‘So if I told you,’ Davie spoke with a hint of apology in his tone, ‘that Silvie has said she’d like to stay another month…’

  He was watching closely for Alex’s reaction, and seeing the flicker of dismay hastily concealed by a dutiful manner, Davie cracked up laughing.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t resist. Silvie’s perfectly happy to leave whenever you’re ready. Which will be on the nineteenth, yes?’

  Alex looked doubtful. ‘Theoretically, yes,’ he said. ‘But do you think they’ll actually let us go?’

  ‘No, of course not!’ Davie laughed again. ‘They’ll hang on to you for as long as you’re prepared to stay, obviously. But you’ll just have to be firm. The nineteenth has been agreed, so come the day you just have to say thank you and goodbye, and go.’

  Alex had a feeling that it was not going to be that simple. And he was right. Though events the following day gave him even more of an incentive to get off the planet as soon as he could. By lunchtime, headlines were breaking all over the planet, most stations going with variations on He Fibbed!

  These headlines accompanied footage and stills of him holding hands with Yula Cavell. It did not look good. Quite apart from the fact that he’d been caught on camera in a private moment, that moment had been captured in a romantic arbour and both of them had drinks in their free hands.

  The images weren’t fair, of course. They had been taken during a fifteen minute break they had managed to snatch between events, just a few minutes to sit down quietly and catch up on their fluid intake. They were constantly being given drinks at events, but almost always had to set them aside almost immediately as the blitz of introductions began. So they’d both taken a fruit juice and sparkling water spritzer to rehydrate before they headed off again.

  It was just unfortunate that the spritzers did look very like elaborate cocktails, with the tropical blooms all around them a luxuriant setting. It was perhaps even more unfortunate that the chairs in the arbour were of the semi-reclined type with support for the feet. So they did look as if they might be lounging in some tropical leisure resort. Alex did not need to be told how bad that looked, or could be made to look, when he was in uniform.

  All the same, Froggy Croker felt obliged to point it out to him.

  ‘It’s an absolute gift to the media back home,’ he told the captain. ‘They’ll already be saying that you’re milking this courtesy visit for all you can get, and images of you drinking and romancing in a garden when you’re in uniform are just an absolute gift. Yes, yes, I know, you were on a comfort break and not doing anything you shouldn’t, but it just looks so bad. Even the Telethorans are upset, because they think you lied.’

  Alex knew that. He had been told that already by his diplomatic staff. Jun Desmoulin had come close to displaying agitation, he was that concerned.

  President Arthas, in fact, called him about it in person.

  ‘We need to do another press call,’ she told him, and it was not a suggestion.

  So Alex went back to the Arbour, the official presidential residence, and soon found himself back in the media room. The journalists were notably more hostile this time, even the Telethorans raising something of a clamour at his appearance. In a culture as open and honest as theirs, lying to the public was contemptible.

  They followed the same format as before, with Alex restricted to yes and no answers, though on this occasion at least he felt that he would rather like to try to explain it in his own words. Joy knew better. No matter
how well Alex put his explanation, his manner would remain so stiff and formal that it would be difficult for many to believe him. He had told them that there was no relationship between himself and Yula Cavell. Now there was holographic evidence that there was. Pictures trumped statements any day of the week.

  Joy, though, knew exactly how to handle this. Reminding Alex that he was to respond as if on oath, she put it to him that he had fibbed about his relationship with Yula.

  ‘Were you in a relationship with her when I asked you that question?’

  ‘No,’ said Alex, definitely.

  ‘So – it was true when you said it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But then – something changed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ms Cavell, I understand, stepped down from being your bodyguard after the shooting incident?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you were no longer in a working relationship?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The Fleet forbids officers in a working relationship to become romantically involved, is that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But now you weren’t in a working relationship with Ms Cavell. And that changed things?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So – she saved your life, you were free to get together and there was, let’s say… a moment?’

  Alex’s expression did not change, but he became a little pink around the ears and the little moment of hesitation before he answered made it clear enough how embarrassing he found that question.

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  Joy Arthas laughed, putting an arm around his shoulders and gesturing broadly to the journalists.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she said, ‘that’s romance.’

  Some of the Telethorans actually said ahhh, though admittedly some of the offworlders did give rather more cynical snorts. That, though, did settle the question of whether Alex had lied at his media call. It wouldn’t stop the offworld media running with the story of his and the rest of the Fourth living in idle luxury here when they were supposed to be out chasing pirates, but there was little Alex could do about that.