Ambassador 4: Coming Home (3 page)

Probably because they couldn’t get their mind around how someone who left over fifty thousand years ago could still be alive today. Or if they believed that it might be possible because the ship had travelled at near lightspeed and there had been serious time dilation, they might have trouble believing that someone could live for four hundred years. “They will, once they hear his stories.”

“I hope you’re right,” Thayu said.

Yes, I hoped so, too. If he got involved with the dig, that would alleviate my worries about what he might do when bored. “And we urgently have to notify security about this breach.”

“Yes.” And then she chuckled. “I can just about hear what Sheydu will say about it.”

Sheydu rarely had a good word to say about
gamra
security. “I also need to do something about the hub storage situation.”

She frowned at me.

“Apparently a lot of people have contacted me about the Aghyrian ship in preference to contacting Delegate Namion. Devlin came to tell me that the hub storage was full.”

“Ah.” A look of understanding came over her face. “I was wondering why I got these impatient messages about stuff that I never heard of before.”

It affected all of us. I rose from my desk. “We better get dressed.” I took my jacket from the cupboard.

“We’re going out now?” Thayu asked. “Into town, I mean?”

“If the captain wants to come.”

“All right.” She pointed at the cupboard. “Gun. Armour.”

I’d shut the cupboard door and now reopened it, heaving a sigh. I hated wearing the armour and preferred not to carry a gun; she knew that. I slipped my shirt off over my head and pulled on the armour. There was a mirror inside the cupboard to help me do up the clips at the sides. Thayu helped me with the back. Her hands were strong and warm and made short work of the clips.
Snap, snap, snap
. She squeezed my shoulder. I turned around and pulled her into a kiss. The armour had a rigid front plate that went down in a v-shape at the bottom to give maximum protection to my soft parts while still allowing me to walk. It was not designed for certain—um—bodily functions. Ow, it got really tight down there.

Thayu grinned.

“We need to give Menor a reply soon,” I said.

Her expression sobered. “Do we? It’s our decision whether we use him or not. I presume his seed remains well-preserved. He can give us some any time.”

“Yes, but we should make that decision. I don’t like keeping him hanging.”

Thayu closed her eyes.

“It’s all right by me, really.” I’d said this many times before. I wasn’t sure why she hesitated so much. Maybe because Coldi didn’t have a strong culture of adoption. Children who grew up in someone else’s household, say because both parents had died, were often deliberately made to feel inferior. Maybe it was that, and the fear that any child from Menor’s seed would have curly hair. I said I didn’t mind. After all, I had curly hair, but curly hair was a very serious matter for Coldi.

More and more I feared that we would not end up using Menor at all, and Thayu would either stay with me and grow increasingly unhappy or she would leave me for a man who could give her what she wanted. Maybe she felt even now that she had an obligation to me because I’d paid a huge sum of money to Taysha to sever his contract with her. Even if I got my money back.

Finding a donor had been my idea and my initiative. Sometimes I would catch her looking for pictures of her son, who no longer lived in the Inner Circle, because I’d shot his uncle and the family had been ousted in the reshuffle following the big shakeup of power at Asto’s top.

We could adopt him, I’d said.

We could use Menor, I’d said.

I did
not
mind that the child wouldn’t be mine, I’d said.

Her replies were always inconclusive.

But the issue would just not go away. She said she wanted
my
child, but if there was some sort of secret process that made it possible, no one had informed me.

The whole thing was starting to give me nightmares. Most of them had Thayu walking out on me, leaving me the compete and utter wreck I had been when Inanu left me.

Memories of that time were a very hairy place to be, one of drinking too much and standing on a rooftop overlooking Athens holding a bottle of zixas and thinking I might just skull the lot and be done with it.

Damn, my eyes clouded over just thinking about it.

And here we were once again just going about our daily business, ignoring the issue. Getting dressed and getting ready for all eventualities, as long as it didn’t involve making a decision.

I wanted this solved, decided one way or another, but just like all the previous times, there was no time for an argument.

I went to the bedroom to put another shirt on, because the one I’d been wearing was too tight to be worn over body armour. The bracket with the gun went on my arm before putting the jacket over the top. This was not my
gamra
issue jacket but a security-style design with a lot of room in the upper sleeves so that one could retrieve the gun without taking off the jacket. Thayu had ordered it made recently, in
gamra
blue and all.

“Do you think Nich’ should come?” I asked while inspecting myself in the mirror. I would normally ask Eirani to do my hair, but I didn’t want to subject her once again to Xinanu’s ire by making her walk past the room where Xinanu stayed.

“You still ask that question?”

“I guess that’s a no?”

“Of course he should come. We’re a complete association.”

That balance between caring for one’s family and extreme callousness towards them was one I’d probably never get right. I was sure that on Earth, any young man who left his highly pregnant partner in pre-birth distress over some routine job would get clobbered over the ears by her. I didn’t comment further. I’d probably exhausted today’s supply of get-out-of-jail cards for failing to understand.

We went into the hallway, where it had gone relatively silent. The door to Nicha’s room was shut. Xinanu’s voice drifted from within. She was crying.

I cringed and knocked. “Nich’?”

The door opened a moment later and Nicha appeared in the door opening, looking harassed and tired.

“We’re going into town to take Captain Luczon to the dig site. I’m sorry if you don’t want to—”

“Give me a moment to get ready.”

He disappeared, leaving the door to the room open.

Xinanu sat on the couch by the window, her feet on a footstool. She wore a long dress of stretch fabric that sat snugly around her distended stomach.

She gave me a hard look. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

Like the stupid human I was, I felt like I had to say something. “I can ask the medico to come if you want.”

“What would I need her for? What do you think I am?”

“That is not how you speak to your host,” Thayu said, in a very snippy tone. “Even if he asks a question you don’t like.”

“Leave it, Thay’,” Nicha said from somewhere inside the room.

“No, I will not leave it,” Xinanu said. “He asks me a rude question. Am I supposed to simper just because he is in charge of paying the rent on this place?”

At the same time Nicha shouted, “Stop it, please,” and Thayu said, “Yes, you should. Because you don’t rule the world.”

Before it could get any worse, Nicha scurried out of the room with his shirt half done up and carrying his armour and gun bracket. He slammed the door behind him.

Xinanu yelled through the door. “That’s right! Leave me alone!”

Thayu pulled a face. “What a drama queen.”

“Let’s go,” Nicha said. In all the time Xinanu had been in his room, I’d not heard him say one bad word about her. He surprised me sometimes.

While he put on his gear, I ducked into the hub, where Devlin greeted me with a lopsided smile, a small oasis of mirth of someone who understood how I felt.

“Can you tell our captain that we’re coming to pick him up?” I asked. “And let the council know that we’re coming to the dig site.”

“I’m onto it.”

“Also, Devlin, I’ve had a look at all the messages and shifted the ones that are of immediate importance to my personal work area. Of the rest, you can ask the office downstairs to sort it in rough categories. Anything to do with the assembly goes straight to Delegate Namion. I don’t want to see it anymore. Everything else gets sorted into broad subjects. If it’s easy to deal with, deal with it. Use my stamp file. Try to sort everything else into stuff with some kind of time limit and non-urgent messages. Send all the non-urgent stuff to Delegate Namion, too. Sort the urgent and semi-urgent messages and put in my work area the stuff that you think I should absolutely deal with soon.”

He nodded. “Can I take time off from covering the negotiation?”

“The Aghyrian claim is dead, not that anyone has noticed yet, but I don’t expect there to be a lot of work associated with it in the near future. Do whatever you need to keep yourself out of trouble until the bureaucracy catches up with the truth on the front.”

“All right.”

I returned to Thayu and Nicha, now both fully dressed and ready to go. Telaris at the door asked if he should come, but Thayu said it wouldn’t be necessary.

We walked over the gallery to the part that went underneath the artificial waterfall to the other side of the atrium, where a set of stairs led down on the outside of the building.

The security station was in the space under the bottom of the staircase. Today, it was occupied by a single officer who sat yawning at his tiny workstation. The man was Damarcian and listened to my story with an expression of disinterest. He copied Kando Luczon’s message to me with all the relevant details and assured me that he would raise it with his boss. When, he didn’t say.

Oh well, at least if this all blew up, security couldn’t use the argument that they knew nothing and no one had told them.

“You want to check on Xinanu?” I asked Nicha when we’d left the office and were underway to Kando Luczon’s apartment.

“Not really.” He sounded quite flippant.

“But what if she has the baby while we’re gone?”

He and Thayu both frowned at me.

“Yes. What if?” Nicha said.

Thayu said, “Most Coldi children are born in the living rooms of their homes. Often the mother’s friends are there, but there is not always time for them to come.” Which, by the look on her face, there hadn’t been for her.

“What if something goes wrong?”

“If it takes a long time, then the family gets a medico.”

Nicha said, “You know how most Coldi are touchy when people remind them that they are ‘only artefacts made by the Aghyrians’?”

Yes, they were frequently more than a little bit touchy about this. I’d never even heard Nicha says those words. Coldi found them deeply offensive.

“Well, in this case we’re glad that we are just the way we are. Coldi women don’t gamble their lives when they fall pregnant. Birth is nowhere near as hard as it is for your people or for Aghyrians.”

So, I understood that they’d be happy for Xinanu to have the child by herself in Nicha’s room while we were gone.

All right. Whatever. Who was I to argue with them anyway?

I was just a stupid human and I was not really feeling the vibe at the moment.

I
N THE SHORT TIME
that I’d dealt with him, I’d learned that Kando Luczon loved to keep people waiting. One day, when the many issues between us had been settled, I’d turn up really late and let him wait. I would put up some bugs so that I could see him looking out the window, opening the door and checking if I was there yet, doing everything to make sure that
he
was not the one standing out here waiting, but sitting in the apartment and waiting nevertheless.

I doubted he’d learn anything or get the hint. It was immature and I’d probably never do it, but even thinking about it was fun.

I was lucky to be working with people who were least likely to play the coming late tactic. Coldi were always early because they had curious natures and hated the thought that they might miss out on something.

For now, the waiting was our job.

We did so on the ground floor of the atrium, leaning against the wall that surrounded the water basin at the bottom of the waterfall. The air here was cool, laden with droplets of water. The apartment that had been allocated to Kando Luczon and his two companions was on the ground floor, next to the ground floor of mine. It was a guest apartment and could be use by whoever needed it in our building. I wondered if he got hungry with the smell from our kitchen.

The covered courtyard with its trickling waterfall consisted of a central area with paving surrounded by a lush garden bed. We could see the front door of the apartment through a riot of bushes and vines and other potted greenery. It was still firmly shut.

Thayu rolled her eyes. “I’m thinking about how well this guy is going to get on with Ezhya, when they finally meet.”

“Yeah,” I said, and thought of the tense standoff around the Aghyrian ship that I’d helped resolve. “On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to know.” Patience was not the Coldi’s strong suit.

Nicha yawned. “Why are we going to this place in town? Do you actually have any new data on this dig?”

I said, “There was some news on the Barresh channel that the engineers managed to enclose the site by driving metal plates into the ground and sealing them, and have the pumps running full time to get the water out, so they can finally see the bottom and start digging. They found it easily enough. The captain saw the news coverage and now he wants to go there.”

Nicha shrugged. “It’s his right. You know I still can’t quite comprehend that this guy saw that ship that they’re digging up. Most of it will be so far decayed that it won’t be more than a thin metal-rich layer in the soil. Imagine that. Going on a trip and coming back when all of this—” He gestured at the lush atrium. “—is buried under layers of mud, and some boorish folk have built ugly houses over the top. Imagine that.”

“No thank you. Losing three weeks was bad enough.” Losing fifty thousand years . . . I couldn’t even begin to comprehend.