by Alec Saracen
19
The Thumb on the Scales: Hello.
Convivial-sackcloth: not a good time
The Thumb on the Scales: I don't care. It's not a good time here either.
Convivial-sackcloth: how come
The Thumb on the Scales: Where to begin? Would you believe me if I said you were the closest thing I have to a friend left on this godforsaken planet?
Convivial-sackcloth: I mean
probably
The Thumb on the Scales: Great. Thanks for your confidence. Listen, I need a favour.
Convivial-sackcloth: odds are youre not getting it
fair warning
The Thumb on the Scales: I appreciate your honesty. I need to talk to Chrysia Salmi.
Convivial-sackcloth: the lightstream founder?
The Thumb on the Scales: The very same.
Convivial-sackcloth: well
no
anything else?
The Thumb on the Scales: We've hit wall after wall on this end. We know that Lightstream is behind FreeSpeak, we just can't prove it. It's obvious, apparently, according to my specialist, and Salmi's an interesting person. I'd like to talk to her. Today.
Convivial-sackcloth: sorry did my last not send
not happening
The Thumb on the Scales: Give me a code to get in touch with her. I know you have one. That's all I need – something she'll see.
Convivial-sackcloth: why do u think id give you that
The Thumb on the Scales: Because it will benefit both of us.
Convivial-sackcloth: not good enough
The Thumb on the Scales: Listen. It's this or an official approach, and if I do that, a lot of people are going to know I'm talking to her, Chang included. Either way, I'm talking to her. This way, we can keep it under control. The other way, who knows what would happen? Can you take that risk?
Convivial-sackcloth: can you? you're not that reckless
The Thumb on the Scales: On an ordinary day, I would agree. Today, I have very little to lose. Give me the code.
Convivial-sackcloth: you're bluffing
The Thumb on the Scales: I'm really not. Do you want to explain this to your mother when it goes public?
Convivial-sackcloth: I take it back
you're not bluffing, you're just an asshole
The Thumb on the Scales: Now you're getting it.
Convivial-sackcloth: what the hell happened to you since we last talked
The Thumb on the Scales: Let's call it clear-eyed self-appraisal. Code.
Convivial-sackcloth: …
*
The message Zhai sent to Chrysia Salmi was brief. He had no real expectation of a reply. Salmi was notoriously reclusive, unseen in public for six years and barely seen before that, and if she was really a Chang supporter, she'd most likely take her president's lead and stonewall Zhai. He'd kept his approach simple – and honest. If she told Chang he'd been secretly trying to contact her, so be it.
This is Ambassador Gumeigo Zhai of the Coalition. Would you be willing to talk privately to discuss the future of Tor?
There was something exhilarating about brazenly telling the truth like that, he found. Perhaps that was an indictment of his life of lies. He no longer cared. He'd lost his taste for subtlety.
Alone in his room, Zhai stared at the ceiling, where his unanswered message blinked on the smart material.
This is Ambassador Gumeigo Zhai of the Coalition.
Seeing it laid out like that, it struck him that his name was crammed into his title as if it didn't matter. 'Ambassador' mattered, as did 'Coalition'. They were the walls of his existence, the outward-facing reality that the world saw. 'Gumeigo Zhai'? Just another name. Just an irrelevant person, encased in the armour of the state.
Beyond the window, Macard glittered.
Idly, passing the time, he selected those two central words. He changed the text size with a pinch of his fingers, making 'Gumeigo Zhai' dwarf the rest of the phrase. Another pinch shrank the words to tiny scribbles of light, leaving just 'Ambassador of the Coalition'.
He scrolled back and forth for a while, watching the words wax and wane.
Some faint recollection stirred. A younger Zhai, wine sweet on his breath, in his quarters on Megereth Station the night after the award ceremony, the party still ringing in his ears and aching in his legs. He held the medal they'd given him, tilting it against the bedside light so that golden glimmers played across the ceiling.
An alcoholic fumble dropped the medal in his lap. Looking down, he saw his eyes reflected dimly in the gold, and the placid glow of pride that had wreathed him all evening finally faded.
Zhai hadn't thought about it for years. He wished he hadn't recalled it now. Ceq's contempt prickled at him.
You're actually proud of what you did.
Not just me, he wanted to tell her, I was just part of it. But that made it worse somehow, because if it had been all him, he could at least have disavowed his actions, claimed some kind of moral growth in the decades since. Instead, the stain of guilt polluted not just him but the Coalition at large, and the Coalition was the one thing he could never disavow.
This is Ambassador Gumeigo Zhai of the Coalition.
Of. Possession. Ownership. A subset of a totality. There was a Coalition beyond Zhai, but no Zhai beyond the Coalition.
Zhai squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was uncomfortably straddling exhaustion and insomnia. Thier and Ceq had really done a number on him, leaving him drained yet unable to sleep.
When he opened his eyes, Salmi had replied.
Hello, Ambassador. Let's talk.
For a moment, Zhai thought he was hallucinating. He gazed stupidly at the words on his ceiling, his mind at a standstill.
Before he could reply, another message appeared.
Opening a connection now.
“Opening-” he muttered to himself, then yelped in surprise as a quiet female voice spoke aloud.
“What do you want?”
Zhai clasped a hand to his chest, willing his heart to slow down. The voice had come from his watch, which was impossible. Or, at least, it should have been.
Fleischer had a lot to answer for.
Zhai forced himself to speak just as calmly as Salmi had.
“How did you do that?”
“Do what?” Salmi sounded perplexed. She mumbled slightly, Zhai noticed, now that he was composed enough to analyse the disembodied voice.
Zhai looked uncomfortably round his shadowy room, as if Salmi could be hiding under his desk or in his wardrobe. “We've got security,” he said, thinking of all the meaningless words Fleischer spewed at him whenever she wanted funding for another system overhaul. He wished he could remember some of them. “Digital protection. Multiple layers of cyber defence. And a tech genius, she runs it all. Says it's impenetrable.”
Cyber defence? That had sounded ridiculous even to him.
“Oh. It – it was pretty easy,” Salmi said hesitantly. “Are you sure she's a genius?”
Zhai stared into the empty darkness, trying to visualise Salmi. Fleischer and Tetaine had put together a dossier on the woman. Raised in Landing, obvious tech prodigy, multimillionaire by sixteen, majority shareholder of Lightstream, Tor's dominant technology giant – the usual kind of story. She was barely thirty now, and hadn't appeared in public for six years. The last public images depicted a chubby, pale woman, her high forehead framed by curtains of brown hair, her hesitant eyes crouching beneath heavy brows. Her resting expression was somewhere between confusion and contempt.
Salmi was the creator of FreeSpeak, unless they were badly mistaken, yet Lightstream, her company, was clearly trusted by the government. Salmi herself was the only path to understanding the nature of that tension. He hadn't expected to reach her even if he resorted to official channels, but here she was, not quite in the flesh but the next best thing.
Why had she responded to him? Bar Violet, the rest of the government treated Zhai
like a jumped-up bacterium in a suit. What was Salmi's game?
Did she have one?
“She's – good,” Zhai said. “Maybe not quite at your level.”
“Oh. Well, probably not. I mean, I am a genius, I guess.”
If Zhai had read those words on his ceiling, he'd have thought Salmi conceited, or at least arrogant. In Salmi's quiet voice, they became a bashful statement of fact.
So, flattery was out. Honesty was in.
“What else can you do from there?” he asked, somewhat dreading the answer. “What can you see?”
A pause. Then: “Well, I – I could see anything on your primary network if I wanted to. Anything your watch can access, I could access. If I wanted to,” Salmi added hurriedly, as if to reassure him, “and I don't. Not really.”
Zhai hesitated, baffled. He had been certain that Salmi casually swatting aside the formidable electronic security of the embassy had been a power move, an unmistakable display of superiority – but now he wasn't so sure. It dawned on him that perhaps Salmi had simply followed the most expedient path to talking to Zhai without thinking about appearances or power games at all.
As a lifelong politician, the concept felt odd and alien to Zhai. At least he had the experiential reservoir of years dealing with Ceq to fall back on, though Salmi seemed to exist on a different level to either of them. Ceq simply didn't care; Salmi didn't seem to understand.
Thinking of Ceq made something in Zhai ache. He turned his mind back to the enigma of Salmi, Lightstream, and FreeSpeak.
“I only contacted you through FreeSpeak,” Zhai said slowly. “Is that how you got into our network?”
There was a brief pause, and for some reason Zhai was convinced that, far away, Salmi was nodding.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “That's right.”
“So you can do that to anyone who's using FreeSpeak?”
“No, not anybody.” Again, Salmi sounded confused. “You contacted me on an open code, Ambassador. I mean, that's why I answered.”
“An open code?”
“You don't know what that is?”
“No,” Zhai said carefully.
“Oh no,” Salmi said, suddenly sounding distraught. “I – I'm sorry, Ambassador, I thought – I didn't mean to violate your privacy–”
Zhai had no idea what was happening, but magnanimity was never a bad option. “It's all right. It's my fault, I didn't know what I was doing. A friend gave me the code, and I didn't realise what it signified.” Now that he thought about it, the code Violet had given him had looked unusual, starting with a letter rather than a number.
“I'm sorry,” Salmi whispered again. Zhai recognised real mortification in her voice. He sensed that both parties to the conversation felt equally disarmed.
“It's all right. Really. What does an open code do?”
“It – tells FreeSpeak to take down all the privacy guards. Any time you use an open code when you contact someone, you're opening yourself up. The idea is that it's a – sort of gesture of trust. I only answer open codes, because I know whoever's on the other end has nothing to hide. I – I could go through your whole network, Ambassador, if I wanted, but I don't do that kind of thing.”
“You just can do it.”
“Right!” Salmi sounded cheerier now. “That's the point of FreeSpeak! Even I can't access anything that's not on an open code, but if you contact me on an open code, you're inviting me in, to make sure nothing's being recorded or spied on. That's – I'm sorry. I thought everyone who had my personal code knew.”
“I wasn't told,” Zhai said, imagining the smug look on Violet's face. “Obviously I'm very ignorant about a lot of this. But you created FreeSpeak, yes?”
“Of course.” Again, something in her tone suggested to Zhai that he'd missed a step somewhere, and that contacting Chrysia Salmi without knowing for sure that she was behind FreeSpeak was like demanding a meeting with Chang without knowing he was the president.
“Could you tell me why?”
Another pause, as if Salmi could barely make sense of him. “For privacy. Every planet should have something like FreeSpeak, but Tor didn't. So I made it myself.”
“But not publicly? Neither your name nor Lightstream's is associated with FreeSpeak.”
“Because it's against the law,” Salmi said. “That's the arrangement. The government can't get rid of FreeSpeak, so it accepts it – as long as Lightstream's name stays out of it. I can't get rid of the government, so I accept it – as long as FreeSpeak stays up.”
“And the government contracts Lightstream operates?”
“Just business. If I didn't do it, someone else would.”
Zhai tried to wrap his head around the situation. The truth wasn't far from their speculation after all, but it seemed insane to him that the government would keep handing Lightstream more and more wealth and power if it knew Salmi was behind FreeSpeak.
Unless she was doing something more personal for Chang.
Chang was on top of an ever-shifting pile, constantly fighting to keep his footing. What if Chang had recruited Salmi to keep tabs on his internal political opponents, rewarding her with the contracts and an eye turned firmly the other way? It made perfect sense. In fact, considering Chang's justified paranoia, it would be surprising if he hadn't recruited Salmi, or at least tried to.
Zhai's thoughts flickered like lightning down the trail of political possibility. That would place Salmi as a powerful, powerful figure, and set her in opposition to Thier, the Hactaurs, Cadmer – anyone who might be plotting to take power from Chang.
Wouldn't it?
If it did, it meant Zhai was in big trouble already. If it didn't, it opened up surprising new opportunities. Pushing on offered greater rewards than it did risks.
Besides that, though, some part of him yearned to cut past the political bullshit and speak the truth for once in his life.
“Tell me about Chang,” he heard himself asking. “How do you feel about him?”
“Well–”
But Zhai's thoughts had already moved on. Chang wanted to join the Coalition, ergo he couldn't act against Zhai without risking fatal damage to Torian-Coalition diplomatic relations. Even though they hated him, the Devvies would never let acting against an ambassador go unpunished for precedence's sake. Despite the fact that they were trying to kill him themselves through Peck. That was politics for you.
He drew a mental straight line from that: even if Salmi was somehow Chang's closest ally, Zhai was probably safe no matter what he said, especially since Harod was off-world.
Except it didn't add up. Chang was a paranoid autocrat. Salmi had created a network specifically designed for anti-government privacy. As alliances went, it was the unholiest of unholies. It made sense in a world where the grip of the Alliance was inescapable. Did it make sense on an independent Tor?
The same wild bravado that had bound him to the Hactaurs flared up again.
Fuck it, he thought. He didn’t care any more.
“Scratch that,” he said, as Salmi started to reply. “Let's not talk around this. I think you're propping up Chang. I also think that you signed up to prop up Alliance Governor Chang, not President of Tor Chang, and that the ground is shifting. I think your commitment to privacy means you'd prefer a free, independent, democratic Tor, which is also what I want. I wonder if maybe you're thinking: is Chang weak enough that you can move against him without risking a backlash? And let me tell you, the answer to that is yes. Have you seen what's happening in Landing?”
“I grew up in Landing, Ambassador,” Salmi said, in an odd faraway voice. “I guess you probably know that already.”
“I did.”
“Sometimes, it felt like the whole city drowned in the shadow of the towers. We were still living in the ruins of a dead world, and it seemed like nothing would ever grow again. There was nothing new in Landing, Ambassador. Not ever. Things just wore down and finally broke, and nobody replaced them. We had food, but the city was being starved.
They never wanted us. They were just waiting until there was nothing left of Landing, because it was too much effort to fix it. If they can't turn it into another Macard, they're not interested.”
Bitterness had crept into Salmi's voice.
“Fifty percent unemployment. Only the most basic welfare. Failing power lines. Failing water supply. Agro output declining every year since 140. When you grow up in that city, you're choking all your life. Do you know how that feels?”
“I do.”
A pause. Zhai suspected Salmi was looking into his past, and her next words confirmed it. “You grew up on Xanang.”
“I did.”
“What was it like?”
“Worse than Landing,” Zhai said after a moment.
“How much worse? What did you see?”
The question was asked in innocent curiosity, almost childish. That made it no less painful. Zhai's childhood memories of Xanang were fogged by age and distance, with most of the few flashes of clarity reserved for sounds, smells, throwaway family moments. Wind chimes. The grumble of the antique black motor-cars that prowled the sizzling streets. An abiding memory of heat pressing down from turquoise skies, a sweltering echo of gravity. The myriad scents of Lho's cooking.
Ahibo.
He blinked at the sudden rush of memory. He hadn't thought about that for years.
“I had a friend,” he said slowly. “When I was very young. Ahibo.” The boy's face returned to him in an instant: gap-toothed, broad-nosed, always smiling. “Low-caste, like me. Legally, we were nothing. Little more than slaves. If they killed us – the fohu zho, the silk-wearers in the upper castes – it wasn't murder. It was – I suppose the word translates as 'misuse of power'. The punishment was a fine, one year's income to the victim's family. Not their income. Ours. Murder for pennies. It was almost a sport to the worst of the rich heirs in the top castes, and the rest of them saw it as youthful foolishness. Regrettable, but hardly the end of the world.
“Sometimes, they took it too far. When I was – about five, I suppose – a couple of fohu zho came driving through our district in one of their old petroleum cars, drugged out of their minds. They had guns – only the upper castes were allowed guns, you see. And they just started shooting. And laughing.”