by Patty Jansen
“Go and talk to the Barresh Exchange,” I said. “There was a flash in the high end of the spectrum. Get them to send out immediate scouts to the Aghyrian compound to see what’s going on.”
The men nodded, without question, and set about doing it.
Chapter 3
* * *
I INTENDED to go back to the living room but Thayu had followed me. I closed her in my arms. She nuzzled my cheek and stroked hair out of my face.
“What a damn thing to have happen on this day,” I said in the hollow of her neck.
“Don’t worry. It’s out of your influence.”
“No, it’s every bit in my influence. Ezhya has just asked me to go and talk to the zeyshi.”
She frowned deeply. “But they’re on Asto.”
“Yes. He wants me to come. He says it should be possible. I think it’s been possible for a while, but he’s just kept quiet about it. I don’t know what to think, Thayu. On the one hand, he says zeyshi are nothing, on the other hand, he wants me to risk my life talking to them.”
“Because he can’t do it.”
True. With his position, the difference in status was too big. “He told me he’d sent Risha to defuse a number of issues that zeyshi care about. That’s what I don’t understand. He has been working with them. Why hasn’t he been aware of these people and their issues?”
“Risha will have sent others. Risha is Coldi and adheres strictly to the sheya instinct code. He’s not going to get far with people who don’t have the instinct. If he’s really going to talk to zeyshi, he needs someone who doesn’t have the instinct either.”
I stared at her. “Are you saying that you think Risha lied to his superior?” And was she saying that Ezhya had made a mistake?
“I’m not sure, but no one can simply walk from the Inner Circle into the zeyshi settlements. Ezhya understands. He needs someone like you to talk to them. Risha would have used someone, or else he’s lying.”
“But what do they want and why would they get involved with an Aghyrian claim?”
“I don’t know. Because they’re zeyshi, they’re not logical anyway.” That was pretty much the standard Coldi response. Give up trying to understand these people because they can’t be understood, and also: it’s their own fault that they have to live out there in the desert. If only they behaved like us, we’d give them places in society.
“But Thayu, think of all the work we’ve put into trying to coordinate the parties in this potential conflict. We put out a call for opinions. The Aghyrians on Asto or the zeyshi never said anything. No one has ever come forward from the zeyshi and they’ve had every opportunity to do so. Ezhya thinks this claim is a front for something else.”
“Like what?”
“That’s a good question. Some internal politics in the Inner Circle?” I spread my hands. I had no idea how that would work.
“I don’t know. He already told you more than he would have told anyone else. If he asks you to do this job, perhaps you should stop wondering why. It will be revealed in due course.”
That was another infuriating thing: the Coldi’s blind trust in those who ran society. I guessed it came with the sheya instinct, but I didn’t have that instinct.
I let it rest and told her about the flash we’d seen.
She frowned. “Why now? They’ve been silent for so long. The Renkati complex was shut down and subjected to inspection. Their illegal exchange equipment was removed and taken apart. The whole organisation doesn’t exist anymore. The issue was dealt with.”
I shrugged and we looked at each other, knowing that whether or not this flash was artificial or a natural phenomenon, the deeper issues of that conflict had not been dealt with: the fact that gamra was split over the dominant role of Asto in dictating policies, and that Asto itself was a planet facing major upheaval of its climate, that had, by Ezhya’s admission, changed enough for the Aghyrians to make their claim. And processes to change gamra laws had been too slow to prevent that possibility. Which was probably why everyone had kept quiet over the declining daytime temperatures on Asto.
I wanted to say more, but there was an explosion of raised voices inside the communication room.
We went into its semi-darkness and found Thayu’s father’s military guards, the ones I wasn’t too happy about giving free reign to my equipment anyway, cursing about a power surge and loss of some log data, and I was reminded uncomfortably of how fragile communications were. Quite soon, they were all laughing and things were back to normal. All the lines had come back on.
I eyed Devlin, who had been forced to relinquish his position as controller of the hub and stood near the door.
“What was that about?” I asked, my voice low.
“Frequency mismatch,” he said. “It’s been going on for some time, some days more often than others. It doesn’t usually last very long.”
“Oh?” I vaguely remembered them talking about this, but now, after having seen that flash, that information suddenly became relevant. “Any reason?”
“The Exchange says they’re working on it.”
Which wasn’t really an answer.
We went back to the living room. The party was winding down, and people went to bed, either my guests Ezhya and Margarethe Ollund in my guest quarters, or in their own apartments elsewhere in the complex or the city.
Thayu’s father turned up from wherever he had been. Nicha spoke briefly with him, but it seemed he had been on an unrelated visit and didn’t have any more information. “These are matters for civilians,” he’d told Nicha, and Nicha had not questioned further. I was of the opinion that he had to know more, but I was a civilian of non-existent ranking in Coldi society and everything in his behaviour showed that he didn’t think I was worth his time.
Damn, why had he even approved of my buying out his daughter’s contract? I was under the impression that it had been arranged as part of his obligation to the family of Taysha Palayi, who had wanted Thayu as mother for his child. Next thing, I blunder in, going into the sordid mess of horse-trading over a woman with a cunning man of Asto’s Inner Circle—Ezhya’s second, to boot—and he says not a peep.
Bah, this subject was giving me indigestion that spoiled what should have been a relaxed day.
I was in the hall, showing the local councillors out when Evi came up behind me.
“Mashara has had contact with local security,” he said in a low voice. “They went to check the complex. It’s locked up and empty. They performed heat scans on the building. There is no one inside, and no working equipment has been used. The Exchange logged the flash, but doesn’t know its origin. They say it may have been a wayward satellite.”
Miran, across the border, had put a fair number of those in orbit in the past. Many of them were no longer functional and one by one met their doom in the atmosphere.
That sounded a likely explanation—except for that frequency thing.
“Thank you, mashara.”
He left, having allayed only one half of my unease. Knowing that Renkati had somehow reformed and re-started their experiments with illegal Exchange equipment would have given us something to focus on. Knowing they weren’t likely to be responsible only left the question: who was?
I still didn’t think that the flash had been harmless, but in my high-vaulted bedroom, with its large white-covered bed and with Thayu sitting on it and waiting for me as my official wife, I had other things to do. I did mumble an order to Eirani to wake everybody up at a decent time because I had planned some trips for Margarethe, and then I shut the door and turned to Thayu’s arms.
* * *
I had no idea what time it was when I woke up to a frantic banging on the door.
“Muri!�
�
That was Eirani’s voice.
It was pitch dark in the room, with only the merest glow of reflected moonlight coming in from the window.
I sat up and flicked the lever to the light.
Thayu lay on her stomach, her black hair mussed up. She mumbled something but didn’t stir. Sometimes I was jealous of her ability to sleep like a log. I looked at her, filled with such love that it almost made me cry. That was my earring that lay against her skin in the hollow under her ear. I still couldn’t believe it. I’d become convinced that my living on the edge between two worlds had permanently bumped me off the marriage market.
“Muri,” the voice came again.
I jumped out of bed, across carelessly discarded clothes on the floor and opened the door a crack.
Eirani stood in the hallway, in a loose gown I assumed to be her nightgown. Behind her stood my trusted guards, Evi and Telaris, taller than her, with obsidian skin and bronze-coloured ringlets glistening from the rain. They regarded me with their moss-green eyes. Dead serious looks.
I added the facts, liking this less and less.
That they were wet meant they’d been outside. They wouldn’t go outside at this time of the day unless necessary. They wouldn’t come and wake me before dawn unless . . . something had happened.
“What is—” I asked at the same time Telaris began.
“Where is the lady?”
In Indrahui. That was significant.
I was going to ask which lady, but I realised. “Margarethe?”
“She is not in her room.”
“Has she gone for a walk?” I knew what the twenty-eight hour days did to your system. It was her first time here, too.
“She would have worn a tracker.”
That was true.
I ran into the communication room, where Devlin, the lone staffer on duty, sat staring at a projection. I’d been too busy to keep up with my staff duty roster, but he looked alert, so he must have slept.
He was studying communication, I saw to my satisfaction. I’d commended him to the civil authority for a placement. He’d get paid more if he had qualifications for Exchange work.
Now he looked up, wiped the projection and stared at me. “Muri?”
“Who left the house after the party finished?”
He checked the log. “No one who wasn’t authorised to be here.”
“Anyone who was authorised to stay here? Like Margarethe Ollund?”
A quick glance at the screen. “Yes, she did, indeed.”
Ok, phew, calm down Delegate. She’d be time-lagged and have her sleep patterns all jumbled-up. She might have fancied a walk in the tropical night . . . and gotten lost, or accosted by undesirables, or . . .
Visions of last year were fast crowding my head. Shit. Calm down. Security at the island was pretty strict. Nothing would have happened if she just went for a walk.
“Wait, let me get changed.”
They waited at the door while I went back into the bedroom and rummaged around between shamelessly-discarded clothing on the floor. I found my pants but where the hell was my shirt?
“What about her comm unit?”
“Not responding,” said Evi from the corridor.
“Her guard?”
Yes, what about those four guards who were supposed to be watching her?
“Downstairs.”
“All four of them?”
“Yes. About to be severely reprimanded.”
“Never mind the reprimanding. Did anyone ask them when they lost sight of her?”
I was hopping on one leg trying to pull on my trousers. I found a shirt, yanked it on and went into the corridor, letting the door roll shut behind me. If Thayu still hadn’t woken up, the rattle of the slats would do the job.
“Mashara hasn’t spoken to them yet. There is a . . . situation.”
Ah, I was getting through to the problem. Something else was happening that made the men reluctant to interfere.
I did up my waist band. “Let’s go and see these guards then.” Because that seemed to be what they wanted. I had an inkling about what that might be. How about, mashara, just for once, you give it to me straight. But that was not in their nature.
We plunged into the darkness of the hall, and down the staircase at the end.
Downstairs, in the staff quarters, was a spare room whose function I had never figured out. It had only a door into the corridor, and not to adjoining rooms, as most rooms did. It also had only one window, high up near the ceiling. Frankly, the place looked like a prison cell, and failing to discern a purpose, I had used it to store items of the previous owner’s furniture I had no use for, but I’d sold that furniture some time back. Currently, the room was empty except for some plain chairs and a few boxes of tools that belonged to the technicians who had been busy pulling all listening equipment from the walls and installing my own listening equipment, which I could be sure was not siphoned off to somewhere else.
There were voices coming from inside this store room. Light blazed through the slats of the door.
Before we entered, I could hear Melissa’s voice ranting, in Coldi.
“How could you leave her? How could you not know where she is? You were being paid to look after her.”
She stopped ranting when we entered, and turned to the door. Her face was red. Margarethe’s four gamra appointed guards stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by various other people in uniforms, including three of the kitchen staff, the two translators and four of Asha Domiri’s guards.
The four, all of them Coldi, glanced at me. Two of them looked down, subservient, which they didn’t have to do for me. The other two continued to meet my eyes, intense.
Melissa was pleading to me in Isla. “Thank God, there you are. Cory, get these idiots to talk.” She gestured at Margarethe’s guards, and went on in Coldi. “Why won’t you just tell me what you’ve seen and what happened? What sort of security is this?” And back to Isla, “They’re hopeless, Cory. All they said was that the matter was off-limits. As if we’re talking about state secrets here. Someone very important has gone missing—”
Something clicked in my mind. “Wait. Did they say that? Off-limits? Did they use the word zharu?” The literal translation of zharu might mean off-limits, but what it really meant was that somebody of higher rank had put a gag order on the matter, and that, when you came to think about it, meant something different altogether.
“What does it matter what word they used? This sort of information should not be withheld—”
“It does matter.” I already saw the answer in the guards’ defiant eyes. This is not a good time to push the boundaries of habits that have existed for hundreds of years. “If they said zharu, it means that security has everything under control.”
“But they won’t tell me where she is.”
“No, they won’t. They are sworn to the person they’re protecting, and whomever she, in this case, says they should obey.”
“We’re talking about our president—”
“Who is clearly doing something that she means to be off the record, private—”
“We don’t know that. Hell, she doesn’t even know about any of these customs. This is exactly what I meant the other day, Cory. How can they expect us to trust them, when they’re exclusive, and secretive? We have a right to know what’s going on. Otherwise the Nations of Earth will never trust gamra. Never, Cory, never.”
We faced each other. Her chest heaved with deep breaths. Her eyes blazed from under her fringe. I hated fighting with anyone at the best of times, and the middle of the night was definitely not a good time.
“Melissa, things are under control.”
Why the hell had Margarethe brought her, of all the journalists she could have chosen?
“Prove it.”
“OK.” I turned to the guards and continued in Coldi. “Mashara? Tell the lady what the situation is with our president.”
The men hesitated.
“They’ve been instructed not to say any more,” Evi said behind me. “Mashara assures that the lady will return by morning.”
Yes, it was as I thought. This smelled very much like—
The door opened and there stood one of the people I had expected to be here already: the formidable head of Ezhya’s guard. She made a few movements with her hands, and her six colleagues slipped into the room from the corridor, and crowded around Melissa, a solid wall of silver and red.
Melissa’s eyes widened. “Hey, what’s going on? Cory, what are they doing?”
“Mashara asks you to leave.” I understood that much of the guards’ sign language. “You’re making an undue disturbance.”
“Heck disturbance, Cory. You can’t just send me away. I have a right to know what is going on.”
One of Ezhya’s guards gently gripped her shoulder. Melissa tried to push his hand off. “Who says you can touch me?”
“Melissa—” I said, more insistent.
“No, Cory, don’t ‘Melissa’ me. They have no right to touch me—”
“They do and they will. Listen to me, please, and listen carefully. You will never, ever be safer than with a pair of gamra guards. They will never reveal either your secrets or your whereabouts to anyone unless instructed by you. This is the mechanism we’re watching here. They know where Margarethe is. They are telling us it is nothing to worry about.”
“No, Cory, you’re weak, letting everyone walk over you—hey, didn’t you hear me? Let me go!”
The guards hustled Melissa out of the room. I cringed. There would be a lot of patching up about this later.
The door shut but I could still hear her voice. I breathed out deeply. “My apologies, mashara.”