The Coalition Man

by Alec Saracen

  Zhai paused, remembering the rough breezeblock wall that had saved his life against his cheek. The jumbled horror of screams and gunshots and the antique motor-car's engine had mingled roared in his ears.

  He recalled stepping dumbly into a street wet with blood and seeing Ahibo, face-down, motionless. Smiling no more.

  “Of course, it all went away,” he said bitterly. “They probably weren't invited to any parties for a few months, and they paid their fines. That was it. The price of a dozen lives.”

  “Awful,” Salmi whispered, as Zhai lapsed into silence. “Awful.”

  “So I do know how it feels when the world won't let you breathe,” Zhai said, after a while. He closed his eyes, breathed in, composed himself. Pushed Ahibo back to the past, where he belonged. “It's Chang's hands on Landing's throat, but his grip's weakening. He wants to join the Coalition to keep hold of power, and let me tell you – if Tor does join the Coalition, we'll be in no position to make domestic demands. Chang will do what he likes, backed by the military might of the Coalition. That's not what you want; that's not what I want. I'm working towards Torian independence, whether under Thier or some other party. There has never been a better time to turn against Chang, and there never will be again. So no matter what your arrangement with the government is now, I suggest you start looking for a new one.”

  Silence stretched out, long and heavy.

  “Why don't you want Tor to join the Coalition?” Salmi asked.

  Again, simple curiosity. The honesty of it made Zhai genuinely consider the question in a way he hadn’t before, and the answer he found surprised him.

  “I thought I wanted an independent Tor because overextending the Coalition would cause long-term problems,” he said. “Now I think I want it because it's the right thing for Tor. This world deserves better.”

  “It does,” Salmi said, the faraway tone returning. “I didn't expect this, Ambassador. I thought you were going to ask me to take FreeSpeak down to help shepherd Tor into the Coalition.”

  Zhai smiled thinly. “I'm full of surprises. What would you have said?”

  “I'd have told you privacy matters more. There's no freedom without privacy, and no privacy without FreeSpeak.”

  Zhai couldn't help but smile. Another true believer. Everyone on this planet had such strong convictions! Was it something in the air?

  “You could rule this planet if you wanted to,” he said, to make sure. “You know that, right? Now that the Alliance is out of the way, it's open season on the top job.”

  “I don't want to rule anything,” Salmi said. “I like creating. Ruling seems to be an exercise in destroying.”

  You would have such an interesting conversation with Their, Zhai didn’t say.

  “A little destruction may be what we need now,” he said instead. “Chang needs to come crashing down. Is there any way you can pass government information to ResTore?”

  “Oh, yes, I could do that.” Salmi's voice betrayed her eagerness. “I can do a lot more than that.”

  “How much of it would give make it obvious that it was you?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Then stick to what you can hide,” Zhai said decisively. “If you can act unseen, keep it that way.”

  And the same went for him.

  How quickly alliances could break, shift, and form again, he thought. How quickly the fate of a world could teeter from one extreme to the other.

  “You've given me a lot to think about, Ambassador,” Salmi said. “Thank you.”

  “And you–” Zhai began, but Salmi had already severed the connection. He sat there in the darkness, suppressing a chuckle. From anyone else, that would have been intolerably rude. From Tor's maddening, brilliant tech queen, it wasn't an insult. It wasn't anything at all. Simply the quickest solution.

  He settled back, and thought.

  Sleep eluded him for hours, and when it came, his dreams cast him into a claustrophobic chasm between Xanang and Naro, throwing him into the teeth of the nightmares of the past.

  20

  Sam and Harod returned the same day the first rains broke over Tor, presaging the coming monsoons. Zhai spent the afternoon sitting in the embassy's communal area, watching muted footage from Landing as rain pattered on the window. The weather hadn't helped to calm things down. If anything, the unrest had only intensified, spurred on by the uncomfortably humid heat. It was the kind of weather that got under the skin, spreading out into a web of elusive subcutaneous itches that drove Zhai mad even in the air-conditioned embassy.

  Strategy had bloomed like algae on Landing's chaotic cauldron of violence. The government had remembered that restraint was an option, but the damage had been done. Mistakes were still made. A government sniper killed four looters. Two riot police beat a pregnant woman into a coma and refused to let her be taken to hospital for half an hour. One squad barged into an unofficial triage centre near the square where Thier had spoken and arrested the doctors as anti-government agitators. Whether they were individual moments of madness or deliberate acts of sabotage, they were ensuring Roshi Comet and TruthTeller always had some new outrage to report.

  The protesters, too, had adapted. They had realised there was relative safety in numbers, and ResTore were marshalling their supporters into ever larger marches and rallies. Thier appeared in person only for a few minutes at a time, just long enough to maintain momentum without exposing him long enough for government retaliation. If anything, it heightened his power over Landing still further, his long absences and brief appearances deepening his air of quasi-religious mystique. With every appearance, he grew visibly wearier, though the earthy conviction in his voice never wavered.

  Thier was married to a fellow professor, Zhai had discovered from his public records, though his wife never appeared in public and he wore no ring. He tried to imagine Thier's home life. Could anyone really live with a man like him?

  The familiar self-flagellating part of his mind had whispered, how about with a man like you?

  When Harod returned, he stepped into the embassy, took one look at the fractured relationships between Zhai and his staff, and with the practised air of a man who'd spent most of his life setting things straight, threw himself into the salvage job. Within two hours of his return, he had convinced Lho to cook Zhai's favourite meal and had half-cajoled, half-browbeaten Ceq into attending a conciliatory dinner alongside himself, Zhai, and Sam.

  “I was gone for four fucking days,” he muttered into Zhai's ear as they made their way to the makeshift dining room that evening. “How did you do it? That must have taken effort.”

  “Plus the planet's on the edge of civil war,” Zhai said. “Don't forget that.”

  Harod shook his head. “Twins. How could I? I was on Megereth Station, telling Sekkanen to her face that we had everything under control, give or take an assassination attempt or two, and now there's all this–” He windmilled his arms around vaguely, as if any gesture could encapsulate the events in Landing. “Madness,” he settled for. “Absolute balls-out madness.”

  “If the world's going mad, let's go mad with it,” Zhai said cheerfully, and clapped Harod on the back.

  Harod raised an eyebrow. “Certainly an answer.”

  Zhai really did feel like he was going mad. An odd feeling of disorientation had been stealing over him for days, accelerating in the wake of that awful moment Ceq and Grey Hawk had dredged up the sunken memories of Naro. Between them, Thier and Salmi had turned him round a few more times, heightening that sense of ontological dizziness. It felt as if he'd spent hours confidently striding down a long, branching path only to gradually grow uncertain of his course, as if he'd finally stopped in his tracks, realising that he had forgotten his destination and had been walking the wrong way anyway, as if he stood stationary at an unmapped crossroads, a cold wind raking across his skin, as the sun sank into the night. Thrumming deep in his bones was the sick conviction that he was not where he was supposed to be, that somewhere far behind him,
on the edge of memory, was a boundary he should never have crossed.

  Harod shot him a last glance of half-disguised worry, then opened the dining room door.

  Sam, true to his word, had brought Lho a flash-frozen block of enormous prawns in saltwater, imported all the way from Elennios. They went some way towards appeasing her. She served them up in a sizzling sweet-and-sour sauce so spicy that even Ceq, who could usually go toe to toe with Zhai when it came to heat, was sweating before she was halfway done. Sam and Harod shared an entire tub of yoghurt to combat the heat. Only Zhai and Lho, ancient veterans of Xoma cuisine, could stand it.

  “Your employees are weak,” Lho said to Zhai, watching with obvious amusement as Harod mopped his brow with a sodden napkin.

  “Well, they didn't have you to toughen up their palates,” Zhai replied. “When I was young, there were more than a few of your dishes that made me cry.”

  Lho scoffed. “You still ate it.”

  “Through floods of tears. Good food is good food, even if it burns.”

  Lho accepted the compliment with a curt nod. Zhai set down his chopsticks and drained the last few drops of his wine, a vintage white from Echaude.

  “I'm sorry, Lho,” he said, after a moment. “Forgive me.”

  “I can't.” Before Zhai's stomach could drop far, Lho raised her own glass, which was half-full of sour rice wine. “Pairing grape wine with my food is truly unforgivable,” she said.

  Zhai burst out laughing, and Lho smiled with him as the non-Qienchuan speakers looked at them bemusedly.

  “You know what I mean,” Zhai said, pouring himself another glass. “And you were right. I was angry because you were right. I'm not myself at the moment.”

  Shrewd eyes raked over him. “Then who are you?”

  “I'm damned if I know.”

  Lho shrugged. “You do know. Everyone knows who they are. We lie to ourselves to hide it, but the truth is down there somewhere, beneath all the lies. Just look.”

  “What if it's lies all the way down?” Zhai said. “What if you take all those away, and there's nothing left?”

  “Nonsense,” Lho snapped. “Stop whining and look. You're not special. Maybe you have to look harder than the rest of us, but that's your own fault for burying yourself in lies. You're better than you think.”

  “I've done awful things in my life, Lho.”

  “Then I know you had good reasons for doing them.”

  Zhai shook his head. “Only more lies.”

  Lho set down her chopsticks and fixed him with a steely glare. Zhai had a sudden urge to do his homework. “Listen to me, Gumeigo,” she said. “You were not born for this. Your mother, now – she was born to live the life she did and to die the death she did. We all saw that. That was why we couldn't stand in her way, even if it cost her everything. She believed, even as they shot her for it. Not everyone has a cause like that. There's no shame in not having one. Just don't lie to yourself that you do.”

  As Zhai watched her in silence, she took up her chopsticks again, plucked an entire discarded prawn head from Zhai's plate, and ate it. Harod and Sam were carefully avoiding Zhai's gaze, uncomprehending of the spoken words but very aware of the tone. Ceq was looking right at him with her new-found air of judgement.

  “Sam,” Zhai said, hoping to regain the initiative, “what did Sekkanen want you there for?”

  Sam's head jerked up at the sound of his name. “I'm not sure,” he said hesitantly.

  “Did she meet with you privately?”

  “Yes.”

  Zhai made an impolite 'go on' gesture with his chopsticks, which drew a glare of disapproval from Lho.

  “She mostly wanted to know about you,” Sam said, clearly picking his words carefully. “Like, how you were acting.”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  Sam paused, looking nervous. “Well, not much, really. I said you weren't doing anything unusual.”

  Well, you're wrong on that count, kid, Zhai thought, secretly grateful for Sam's vote of confidence.

  “That was it?” he asked.

  Sam gave two quick nods. “Yeah, pretty much.”

  He was holding something back, Zhai knew, but he suspected it was innocent. He didn't want to torture the poor boy. Zhai's own reports back to Megereth Station always tended to be brief and somewhat opaque. If Sekkanen had ordered Sam to keep closer tabs on his activities, Zhai could hardly blame either of them. He could forgive Sam a little intrusion.

  “I see,” he said.

  “You know, I was actually glad to get on the ship back here,” Harod said, changing the topic with surgical precision. “The Devvies are insufferable at the moment, and they're not exactly fun at the best of times. There's a thick layer of smug in the air wherever you go. I can fucking smell Lockley Satterkale's self-satisfaction from the other side of the station.” He paused to wipe his brow again. His entire hairless scalp gleamed with sweat. “Then again, at least there's no civil war back home.”

  “There isn't one here either,” Zhai said, “yet.”

  “Matter of time, matter of time. Picked your side yet?”

  Zhai sipped his wine thoughtfully. Salmi would remain his personal secret, for now. Fleischer wouldn't believe how easily her security had been compromised, for one thing. “Well, Thier won't have me.”

  “Yes, from your description he sounds... singular.”

  “You ever see the Otchwill film about the Twins? The Lives and Deaths of Risi and Gali, or whatever it was called?”

  Harod nodded and hummed the first couple of bars of the famous overture. “Obviously. Watched it in Monochromatic Motion Pictures IV at Alleker.”

  “You remember that?”

  Harod looked defensive. “It's a good movie. What about it?”

  “I was thinking about it yesterday. Thier reminds me of Iscur Denovic's Gali.”

  “Devilishly handsome?”

  “Fanatically confident in his own intellect. He doesn't believe he can possibly be wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “Anything.”

  Harod whistled through his teeth. “Dangerous. Glad he's not planning on taking over if ResTore win out – though one has to wonder, who will?”

  “Indeed,” Zhai said. “The Hactaurs, on the other hand, have the stink of government on them. If they end up on top of the pile, that pile's going to start agitating. Elections are the only thing that'll calm the planet down at this rate, and military governments and elections are just such a wonderful combination.”

  “To democracy,” Harod said drily, raising his glass.

  Days ticked by. Landing simmered. Thier made speeches, ResTore organised rallies, the government broke them up, and the cycle repeated, edging ever closer to one disastrous catalyst that would pitch a world into war. The government's official channels had been forced to acknowledge the unrest, though they were still trying to spin it as isolated outbreaks of looting. They were condemning ResTore as a criminal organisation infiltrated by foreign terrorists. The mayor of Landing, a thin woman whose fury at the riots was obvious, appeared every now and again to assure the attractive news anchors that everything was fine, which didn't seem particularly newsworthy to Zhai.

  Macard was still quiet, for the most part. Coalition intelligence filtered through to Zhai of underground meetings broken up, their participants secretly imprisoned, but nothing larger had erupted. For now, Chang's shining citadel stood unblemished.

  Chang himself was making speech after speech in public, trying to shift attention away from Landing and towards his grand independence celebrations. A worldwide holiday was planned, complete with parades, specially composed music, festivals in every park and square in the capital, ceremonial air force flybys, and – of course – the grand party. Zhai, starved of contact by the government's refusal to talk to him, the Hactaurs' cautious way of keeping their distance from him, and Grey Hawk's disappearance – Tetaine was certain that all the Liberators were now operating in Landing – was eagerly
anticipating it. Dozens of worlds were parachuting in ambassadors just in time for independence, and he expected to meet a few old friends there.

  The rain showers grew more frequent. They never lasted longer than a couple of hours, but they were always heavy, spewing fat drops that rattled on the windows. Zhai hated being cooped up inside, but he had no excuses to leave any more. Peck was out there somewhere, plotting her next move, and whatever it was probably involved unpleasant things happening to him.

  One day, stalking the now-carpeted corridors of the embassy, Zhai passed the gym to see Ceq and Umbiba side by side on treadmills, barely short of a flat-out sprint. He stood in the doorway and watched, listening to their panting and the pounding of their feet, wrinkling his nose at the smell of sweat. Ceq broke first, though Umbiba only lasted a few seconds longer. Both of them were drenched.

  “Not bad, soldier boy,” Ceq managed, between gasps. Umbiba was too exhausted to reply.

  “I could do better,” Zhai said. Both their heads turned his way, and Zhai slapped his belly to underline the joke. Umbiba let out a wheeze that was meant to be a laugh, but the smile had faded from Ceq's face.

  “Can I help you, Ambassador?” she asked.

  “No, not yet,” Zhai said. “I'll let you know when my life's in danger, shall I?”

  He left before she could reply. Twins, but he missed her calling him 'boss'. The four syllables of 'Ambassador' practically dripped with distaste as they left Ceq's lips, and that was all she would call him now. In moments of weakness he blamed Grey Hawk for forcing him to tell Ceq about Naro and blamed Ceq for letting Grey Hawk influence her, but in truth he knew he could only blame himself. He had always wondered why Ceq could stomach working for him when she clearly had so little love for politicians. Now he knew: she hadn't truly known him, and now that she did, she despised him. And it was far from unjustified.

  Naro returned to his thoughts time and again, bobbing up to the surface like a corpse in a river no matter how many times he tried to push it back under. It was never going away. Naro was his professional foundation, the incident that had proved his ability to the Consolidationists, the event that had propelled him out of the jostling pack of mid-level functionaries to the highest echelons of Coalition politics. He'd have an easier time escaping his own skin.