by Patty Jansen
She rose, too, collected her security at the door and left. I caught one of the Barresh councillors frowning at her back.
She seemed to be angry, but I had already learned that with her, appearance and reality weren’t always the same thing. Likewise, she said she didn’t know anything about this group or their claim, but . . . Damn, I wished I could trust her.
One thing I knew was that whenever there was some instability at Asto, the zeyshi outlaws who lived on the fringes of the large cities tried to capitalise on it. They weren’t part of the vast networks or associations of the mainstream Coldi, and made a point of being different and at times loud and obnoxious. But I hadn’t been aware of such an instability on Asto.
I rose from the table. Melissa asked me if Thayu and I would mind posing for some more pictures. She didn’t seem to have picked up on the fact that something was going on. I told her to find Thayu—whom I’d seen leaving the room after Delegate Akhtari and who, I hazarded a guess, was at the security station trying to squeeze the last bit of functionality out of my listening bugs to see if she could pick up anything that Delegate Akhtari might say to her staff while walking along the gallery.
I felt sorry to send Melissa on a wild goose chase, because she wasn’t going to find Thayu if Thayu didn’t want to be found.
I wandered through the room looking for Ezhya.
I couldn’t see Margarethe, and that was probably a good thing with all this going on. She had a room in the apartment and might have retired. I knew her adaptation hadn’t quite settled and she’d be feeling hot and tired, possibly a bit feverish.
The Barresh councillors were at the dining table getting stuck in the food, which was mostly local fare. They were laughing at jokes told by Yaris, for whom I’d have to instate a most useful employee award. Their daughters still sat on the couch, under their fathers’ watchful eyes, looking very bored. Good. No scandals would come from that quarter tonight. Neither did they seem to have picked up on the fact that something was afoot, although Yaris met my eyes in a questioning way as I passed. I gestured later. I’d brief them tomorrow morning, when I had a better idea of what was going on.
Then I spotted Ezhya Palayi on the balcony, leaning on the railing. I could see his back from inside the room.
I went out, but the moment I stepped onto the balcony, I realised he wasn’t alone.
“. . . It was a good move,” he was saying, goddamn it, in Isla, albeit thickly accented. Then he turned and met my eyes, shamelessly. “Good day, Delegate.” In Isla, too.
I reminded myself to never, ever underestimate this man.
There were only two people he could have been talking to. He’d already spoken to Melissa—under duress probably, because Coldi in high positions did not waste much time speaking to people far down their pyramids of power.
The other person was Margarethe Ollund. She sat on our lover’s bench, where Thayu and I often spent our evenings sipping a cool drink and looking out over the marshlands that surrounded the artificial gamra island.
“Nice evening, Cory.” She smiled, probably unaware of any of what had just passed. “He was just showing me the impending eclipse.”
I leaned against the railing, my mind wanting to scream out you know he’s just been listening in on us for the past few months and there is a crisis going on?
But none of that affected her, and I tried to force my rattled mind back to chatter.
Ezhya looked at me, and the expression in his gold-flecked eyes told me that no, he’d probably taken up learning Isla on a whim a few days ago, being faced with the prospect of seeing me again, with some of my kinsfolk, and unable to understand our language. It was the sort of thing he’d do, the sort of thing he’d have the intelligence to do, and leaders on Asto were selected for their intelligence. It was, I figured belatedly, also not something he would do if he was under a lot of stress at home.
Well, that was something at least.
Calm down, Delegate.
I focused on the telescope. Yes, the eclipse. Astronomers in Barresh had talked about little else for the last few days. Eclipses occurred every twenty days, when the smaller sun Yaza went behind the bigger sun Beniz or the other way around, and the two suns merged into one big star, and then a smaller star. The entire period lasted most of a day, and the light grew dim, and, depending on which sun was blocked out, either yellow or bluish. If the eclipse happened to coincide with monsoonal cloud cover, it seemed like day never came. Temperatures dropped dramatically and some people always panicked.
It was rare, however, for a complete eclipse of Beniz, the stronger sun, to coincide with an alignment of the planets, so that Asto would be passing between us and the suns at the time of the eclipse, and there would be a very strong eclipse on Asto as well, one that would last longer than ours.
The screen of the telescope showed it all, the vivid pink spot that was Asto nearing the suns, both of which were very close together and about to vanish behind the horizon.
I sat down at the telescope, fiddling with the settings on the display and was about to say something, although I can’t remember what, when the screen flashed.
“Did you see that?” Ezhya said.
“I did.” I stopped the live feed, returned the cache and replayed. Just the stars, then a burst of light in the corner of the screen.
“Strange.”
“I didn’t see anything,” Margarethe said.
Oh, right. I stuck my finger in my eye and removed one of the protective lenses I wore. Dang. Her dress wasn’t ochre. It was reddish bronze. I replayed the segment, with the eye that still contained a lens closed. Saw nothing.
Right.
This was something high in the spectrum, a narrow frequency that Margarethe couldn’t see, but Ezhya could, and I could with the aid of my lenses that shifted the spectrum of ultra-violet light into the visible.
Ezhya and I met each other’s eyes. This smelled of Aghyrian technology.
All right. So, Federza had arrived back at the compound, and they were using their—illegal—Exchange bypass to warn his fellows elsewhere in the settled worlds? I had visions of people balling fists and whooping at screens.
I said nothing, but glanced at Margarethe, because it was precisely this sort of technology that had killed her predecessor, when the group called Amoro Renkati had used a one-way illegal Exchange device to move a piece of glass to kill President Sirkonen. That technology produced a red flash, which the Coldi had been unable to see.
“It’s probably a flare in the receiver,” I said. I didn’t want to alarm Margarethe.
Ezhya nodded, but his gaze was far off. He put his hands together and squeezed until his knuckles were white.
With a sigh, Margarethe pushed herself off the seat. “I could sit here forever, but I’m quite tired. I might go to bed if you don’t mind. It was a lovely occasion.”
“I understand. Good night,” I said.
Ezhya turned to her. “Don’t forget what I said.”
She smiled. “I won’t.”
And then she was gone.
Excuse me, but what I said?
Silence lingered.
I strolled across the balcony and leaned on the railing next to him.
Side-lit by the light that flooded from the living room, his face carried lines I hadn’t noticed before.
He appeared flustered, with his nostrils flaring and having undone the neck fastening of his suit. I dearly wanted to ask if he had any problems at home, but leadership or political problems were not things we freely discussed, unless he raised the issues. At times he allowed me to forget that he was what people on Earth would call an absolute dictator with the power over billions, but there were subjects where I didn’t go with him.
Eventually, he said, “Unfortunately, it seems that the thing we feared has come to pass.”
I nodded and again we said nothing for a while. Frustration clawed at my inside. He usually spent very little time talking to anyone. Likely he’d leave very soon.
But then he said, “I might take you up on your offer for a room.”
What? He had never stayed overnight at my apartment. Never. “You’re most welcome. I’ll let the staff know.”
There would not just be Ezhya, but all seven of his guards as well.
“I’m sorry to impose myself on you, but my apartment is in use by the Asto delegation while their apartment is being renovated.” After a short silence, he added, “I need to sort out a few people.”
“I understand.”
When he remained silent, I said, semi-casually, “So, a claim, huh? Delegate Akhtari insists that she has nothing to do with it.”
“That’s what Federza told me as well.” He snorted. “I don’t understand him and I don’t believe him or like him.”
I nodded. That made two. Slippery snake. I was still seething with how he’d been trying to rope me into joining his anti-Asto club.
Ezhya blew out a breath. “If the Aghyrians have any sense, they wouldn’t upset the status quo. There is a lot of money involved in Aghyrian interests, and when they behave like this, they’ll lose their supply contracts. We have other places to buy our construction materials than the Hedron Mines.”
“They just about own the Trader Ledger on the island.” Gamra ’s main financial institution—Federza had a lot of involvement with them.
“Many threads are going where the blood cannot.” Coldi loved their proverbs.
I said, “Misha Palayi, Chief Coordinator of Asto.” If one person cited a proverb, the other was meant to reply with the person to which the proverb was credited.
I’d heard this proverb many times and still struggled to understand it. It seemed to say that loyalty network threads were stronger than blood ties.
I took a deep breath and asked, “Do you believe the claim might come from the zeyshi?”
“Ridiculous.” He snorted. “The zeyshi are illiterate scum who couldn’t put together any kind of basic correspondence to save themselves. One of them might have signed it, but this claim is a front for someone else. Remember, we’re dealing with the cowards who gave Amoro Renkati technology, and then watched, without interference, how they killed your president and were punished for it. They managed to walk away from the mess without taking any of the blame. This has been the Aghyrian game in the grand scheme of things. Find someone to blame if things go wrong. Find the most obscure Aghyrians you can and get them to put their names on a document like this. Make it look authentic.”
“You think it’s bogus?”
“No, the ID on the document scans as belonging to a woman called Vanu Ezhidi, who is also known as Evala Sadet Arwan. Troublemaker, zeyshi. She has a good list of notations against her name.”
“That second name you mentioned is an Aghyrian name.” They always had a three-part name. The first name would only be used amongst close family and friends, like Delegate Akhtari’s name was Pahini Joyelin Akhtari, but even people at the same level of authority, like Ezhya, called her Joyelin.
“Yes, but that’s not her legal name.”
“Is she Aghyrian?”
“Of course she is. What you people need to stop doing is treating them with more awe than they deserve. They’re people. They make mistakes. There are smart ones and dumb ones. They aren’t any more special than the rest of us.”
He’d said this many times before, but I disagreed with him. Telepathy and mindreading were not skills I associated with normal people, nor was a life span of a hundred and fifty years. It was true that the push for expansion had diluted the telepathy skills, but that didn’t make the average Aghyrian any less manipulative.
“Anyway, the zeyshi haven’t been much of a problem since I told Risha to sort them out.” That would be Risha Palayi, one of his seconds. “I told Risha I didn’t care whether or not they moved to Eighth Circle, as long as they sent their young people to get an education in anything other than fighting and blowing stuff up—and skim racing. A lot of them took it up and there have been very few raids. The ones remaining in the desert are not going to raid areas where family members live, right? That is their weakness, their families. If there were significant Aghyrian interest in that group, we’d know about it. This claim exists for the sole purpose of tying up resources in gamra with the discussion of irrelevant details with a group that is by itself irrelevant.”
“Representing not-so-irrelevant interests.”
“It’s a stupid thing, some scheme by a big-headed small-time leader. Not worth the cost of transmission. If there was any issue within the zeyshi, Risha would have told me. Federza says he doesn’t know about it. He fancies himself a lot, but I think he’s high enough in the Aghyrian network to have access to these kinds of plans, if there were any, so for a change, I believe him.”
Funny how being dangled by the front of your shirt by someone much stronger than you tended to bring out the truth. I agreed with his assessment. Federza had seemed most upset and wrong-footed by the news.
“What are we going to do about this claim?”
“Nothing. Now that it has gone out into the world I can’t do anything or it will be seen as interfering.”
True.
“Let the assembly discuss it,” he said. “We’ll sit back and observe. These people who have made the claim will have to send representatives. We’ll poke the zeyshi about their record with Aghyrians, which isn’t particularly good. We’ll watch everyone’s reactions to them. We’ll bug the hell out of their accommodation. We’ll learn a lot.”
“I wish I could be so relaxed about this.” As a very worst-case scenario, the Coldi might lose their right to live on Asto, and that would be a disaster of immense proportions. No one wanted that, right?
“A claim was going to be brought anyway. It’s better that some fringe element claims, because their legal pockets are shallow and the case shoddy and their claim won’t pass. When it’s defeated, we’re free of the fear of claims for at least twenty years. Let’s deal with it. Talk to Federza. Make him nervous. Let me know if you need any lawyers. I’ll send you however many you can handle. Investigators, too. Find out who is making this claim and take them seriously enough to gain some of their trust. In that light . . .” A slight hesitation. “I think we are getting to the stage where we could consider a visit.”
“A visit?”
“To Asto.”
“Who?” I frowned at him. “Me?”
“You. As special envoy to talk to these claimants. They’re certainly not going to talk to me.”
But. Asto. I stared at him. “Has the climate changed that much recently?”
“It’s changing rapidly.”
But certainly not that rapidly. If there was anything I had learned from talking to climate scientists over the past year, it was that twenty years was a blip in time. I heard something else in his words: with current average temperatures—which Asto didn’t share freely—visits by non-Coldi had probably been possible for a number of years. Of course the administrators and quarantine officers had been keen to keep Asto isolated as long as they could. They liked their isolation.
He explained further, “With some help of technology and some planning, and my personal approval, it should be possible.” His eyes met mine. The characteristic gold flecking of the black irises was especially strong in him.
Was he really saying, We lied about this to everyone for years, but please come now because I need you to talk these people under the table for me?
I didn’t dare say anything for fear of
saying something out of place. Ezhya and I might be quite friendly, but there were areas where you didn’t go with him. Such as internal politics.
“I will . . . consider it, after the wedding.”
“I invite you.”
His eyes were pools of mystery. Often I thought I understood him, but at times like this, he was as alien to me as he could possibly be. Just what did he want me to do? Find these Aghyrians hiding with the zeyshi rebels in the hottest part of the desert plain and tell them to roll over and do tricks? From what I knew, zeyshi were possibly the toughest people in the universe, living in unbelievably harsh conditions. They hadn’t been swayed by anyone for thousands of years. What made him think that I could make any difference?
And that was as much as I got out of him. He diverted the discussion to more enjoyable subjects and I couldn’t figure out if that was because he was genuinely unconcerned or because something else was going on beneath the surface.
Damn. Well, I thought this was a serious matter, and I wanted to know what was going on, especially the origin of that flash, which he didn’t seem to be overly concerned about. He hadn’t seen that Aghyrian technology in use last year, but the thought that someone could pick up a ship, a person or a weapon from one world and unilaterally move it elsewhere still gave me the shivers. They could make an entire army vanish or send an influential person they disliked to a part of space from where he’d never be able to return.
When Ezhya said he was going to bed, I excused myself, went inside, crossed the party room as fast as I could without running, and went into the communication room. Evi and Telaris still sat there, now in discussion with Devlin and a couple of the contracted guards.
I gestured, and both of them came to the door.
“I need to ask you to do something, mashara.”
They gave me solemn nods. Likely they would have anticipated my demand for their services. They certainly looked the part, having shed their relaxed party dress in favour of their security gear.
We walked a little down the corridor, towards the sleeping quarters, away from the talk of the party.