Ambassador 5: Blue Diamond Sky

1 THE GUN WAS a thing of beauty, a marvel of engineering. It was the latest Deysha model, produced on Asto, the most heavy-duty weapon I was allowed to have on a regular civil permit. Thayu had selected it for me, had ordered it and had personally travelled into town to take delivery of it at the Exchange. She had come back to the apartment carrying a big box that drew envious glances from young Deyu and Reida. She had set the box on the table in the living room and opened the lid. She had unpacked the box—with a foam mould and packaging material inside—and everyone in my association had come into the room and watched, drooling, as she took the shimmering, virgin weapon out of its packaging. Everyone, that was, except me. I’d been out at some meeting and only heard about the drooling bit when she brought me the weapon, in a dedicated arm bracket, while we sat at the table at dinner. Eirani looked askance at it while unloading her tray onto the table—her opinion about guns was pretty much in line with mine—but didn’t dare ask a top-level spy, two former members of the Chief Coordinator’s guards and the other trained members of my association to remove it from the table. She knew enough by now that she would be booed out of the room. So we ate with this shimmering, smooth, high-tech, deadly thing next to my plate. I barely dared touch it. The feel of it in my hands was sort of comfortable, but the comfort was overruled by the overwhelming fear that I’d accidentally hit a wrong button and kill someone. I needed to learn to use it, Thayu had assured me. So after dinner I went with Veyada to the shooting range. He taught me all the tricks and technological whizzbangery that made it almost impossible to miss—at least so he said—and we kept visiting the range every day until I learned how to use the technology to actually hit the target, at least most of the time. Clearly, the natural talent I had displayed in the past for hitting stuff—like murderous opponents—evaporated quickly when I was not under threat of being killed and the world was not about to explode. The problem was, Veyada said, that I was enjoying myself too much. Trying to hit a shooting target was strangely stress-relieving, and there had been plenty of stress in my life recently. It was as if my brain was telling me to take it easy and treat this as a game. Which, Veyada kept telling me, it was not. Guns kill people, blah, blah, blah. I’d heard him repeat his spiel so many times before, to Reida, to Deyu, to anyone who wanted to hear it, and even some people who didn’t. Veyada took guns seriously. There were severe consequences to guns being used. People died. One got into legal situations. All reasons why I’d preferred not to carry one. Dog, meet tail. But eventually, I mastered enough skill that Veyada judged it safe to take my skills into the wild. We were going on a trip. A hunting trip. In the marshlands where the Barresh delta opened into the sea lived colonies of flying fish that were good eating. Local Pengali fishermen would catch them by throwing a stone in the water to scare the fish and scoop up the ones that broke the surface with a large butterfly net. One could also shoot them. They were extremely good target practice, Veyada said, because it required one to be fast and accurate. Besides, he had developed a taste for fish. We were to go for a few days, just myself, Thayu and Veyada. Nicha had his son to look after, Sheydu was running a course about explosives for the benefit of the Barresh guards, and Deyu and Reida were training with her. We weren’t going anywhere that required security, so even Evi and Telaris could stay behind. I’d given both of them permission to take time off, hoping they would use it to visit their family on Indrahui even though I was unsure how many of their family were still alive. That subject was fraught with painful history, so the brothers preferred to keep silent about it. We packed all the camping gear, including the tent, because the wet season was on the verge of breaking. Thayu rented a boat. No, we didn’t need a driver. She knew how to operate a boat. I took my surfboard out of the storage room downstairs and hauled it to the jetty, under the curious gazes of many. Eirani was most disturbed when she saw that our gear didn’t include food. I told her that the concept of a “hunting trip” was that you caught your own. But what about you don’t catch any, was her concern. For her, food was something you bought at the markets. Veyada added, “If he misses too many times, we’ll be eating lily bulbs. Serves him right.” We set out from the gamra island on a bright sunny morning. Already, big billowing banks of clouds were building on the top of the escarpment. They were still white, but soon they would turn dark and be big enough to roll off the escarpment and sweep over the delta with lightning, thunder and sheets of driving rain. We’d already had a bad pre-season storm a few days ago, which toppled trees and lifted one of my beach chairs off the balcony, depositing it in the garden downstairs. Such storms would become more frequent. It was probably one of the last stretch of days in the year that this trip would be nice, or even possible. Thayu steered the boat in a southwesterly direction. The powerful jet engine propelled us away from the island at high speed, skimming over the water, wind in our hair. I had forgotten just how nice it was be out here, and remembered with a pang that I had promised to take Raanu surfing. I hadn’t heard from Raanu for a while. When I asked, Ezhya had told me that his daughter was busy with tutoring. I thought it was more likely that his security had disabled the account that she had used to contact me. I had a vision of her lying on her stomach on her bed, with her chin propped up in her hands, contemplating ways to circumvent her father’s security and write political letters to important leaders. Tutoring, my arse. Raanu was becoming a stubborn and smart young lady. Maybe I should send her a message to check that she was all right, and let her know I hadn’t forgotten her and that the trip was still on. Soon, Barresh and the gamra island had disappeared in the haze that hung low over the water, and we were surrounded by nothing but reeds and channels and copses of megon trees, their trunks rising, ghostlike, from the water. We had a small break at a couple of small islands on which stood the ancient ruins of one of the early settlements in the area. Apparently the building had been a type of school, a few hundred years ago, but the roof had long since fallen in, and the walls had crumbled and were overgrown with moss, creepers and other weeds. The ruins housed a large colony of meili, bat-like creatures that also lived in the city in great quantities. They built nests out of a mixture of mud and tree gum that hardened like concrete. The nest itself looked like a little shelf and was set against a vertical surface, like a tree trunk, a rock face or a wall, in a place that was always in shadow. We walked into an open space that once must have been a hall, where these nests encrusted an entire wall, each of the little shelves with a furry, wide-eyed and slightly alarmed, squawking, bickering occupant. It was a living wall that reminded me of the walls covered in moving plants in the aquifers around Athyl. In the late afternoon, we arrived at the long sand spit that separated the brackish water delta from the ocean. The sand was white, the ocean brilliant turquoise, the waves perfect and glassy. A few offshore islands protruded from the ocean like giant humpbacked whales. The breeze carried the tang of ocean water, laden with humidity. The spit was narrow in some places, but in others it was wider and sometimes even housed copses of rainforest. We chose a beach next to such a patch of forest, because where there was forest, there was always a fresh water upwelling. We did carry a solar water distiller, but it was easier to just scoop the water for cooking and drinking out of a well. We set up camp on the edge of the forest in the shade of the trees. We gathered up shells and tubers. The big storm a few days ago had dislodged a lot of lily bulbs which had washed up on the inner shore of the sand spit. We didn’t even need to go out to collect them. Since it was almost dusk, the tide was out, and we ventured onto the exposed sand to dig up sand worms. Veyada turned out to be quite deft at camp cooking, and the meal, shared on the warm sand in the cooling night with the sound of waves crashing on the shore in the background, was one of the more memorable I’d recently shared. The hunting started the next day. Our main quarry lived where the current in the mouth of the delta was strong. We went out there in the boat. Thayu operated the engine—and it was going full blast. An hour or two after sunrise, the tide was going out like blazes, and with the added current of storm water still finding its way to the ocean, the outlet was a churning mass of water. Veyada threw scraps from last night’s meal in the water to attract the fish, and then threw rocks and bits of wood in the places where the fish came to feed. With each projectile hitting the water, at least two or three silvery glittering winged fish would take to the air. I stood in the bow with my gun, hitting most of them at their highest point before they fell back into the water. Thayu would then steer the boat so that Veyada could use the net to scoop the fish out when it floated past. We had collected half a bucket full of fish when a big maw opened up under the surface and sucked in a fish before Veyada got it. “Uh-oh. I think we’ve got an eel,” Thayu said. Veyada squinted at the water. “Looks like it. Might be time to head back.” “Yup. The engine probably needs a recharge, too.” We had no intention of becoming fodder for a twenty-metre-long marsh serpent; and killing it, even if we wanted to, was generally frowned upon by local Pengali and keihu people, so we let the boat drift back to the sand spit, where Thayu went about setting up the solar recharge for the boat’s engine, and Veyada and I cleaned and gutted the fish. We set up the solar water cooker—since one could not make fires in Barresh—and went to collect water from a pristine spring in the middle of the patch of forest, where a bunch of eared lizards squealed their alarm and took off into the greenery. In the afternoon, I paddled my surfboard out into the ocean and caught glassy waves in the turquoise sea. Thayu watched me from the beach. She later had a try of it, too. Since visiting New Zealand with me, she had been determined to learn how to swim. Surfing, however, was a completely different skill that involved understanding waves. We cooked our fish and ate so much of it that I thought I’d burst. The next day went pretty much like the previous, with an added bit of hanky-panky in the clear pool in the forest that Veyada pretended not to notice. On the last morning before packing up, I went for a last surf. Veyada had said he’s spotted some beisili offshore when walking to the forest to get water at sunrise. As soon as I’d paddled past the surf, I could see that they were still there: there were at least four giant looming light-grey blobs in the water. Occasionally they would lift a flipper into the air, or poke their head on a swanlike neck up to have a curious glance at me with a sharp blue eye. I approached carefully. Beisili could be a bit stroppy, particularly at this time of the year, but the younger ones were often curious and would sometimes come right up to the beach. It was a family group: two adults, probably sisters since they were light grey, with young that measured about the length of the surfboard excluding their long neck. The word “plesiosaur” best described them. One of them even came so close that I could almost touch it—although we were always warned not to do this. Their skin was really rough and could cause cuts. They were also full of sea growths that stung and caused skin irritation. This particular one was young enough not to have developed the rough, sea-growth-encrusted ridges on its back or the top of its head. The eye, too, had not yet assumed the adult cobalt-blue hue. It was still dark grey. The group eventually moved on and it was time for me to go, too. Go back home and face all kinds of boring problems. There was a bit of current so I let myself drift to the beach that was closest and rode the board all the way to the sand. I stepped into the surf with a feeling of melancholy. I loved coming here, and should really do so more often, but there never seemed to be any time. I picked up the board, and then— Something had washed up on the high-tide line: an empty clear jar sat on the sand that was otherwise unmarked even by footsteps. Why was it that every beach anywhere in the universe where people lived always seemed to be fouled by rubbish? It should be put in the bin where it belonged. I picked up the jar, tucked it in between my board and my side and walked back to the camp where Veyada had breakfast ready and Thayu had made a start on packing away the camping gear. “What have you got there?” Thayu asked. “I get so annoyed when people throw out rubbish.” I dumped my board at the high tide line. The jar fell, too, bounced and rolled over the sand back towards the water. While I ran after it I noticed that there was something inside. I stopped it rolling into the water with my foot, picked it up and turned it over. Inside was a sheet of paper. I unscrewed the lid. It came off easily, meaning that the jar hadn’t been in the water for long. Seawater on Ceren was even more corrosive than on Earth, laced with more salts, which tended to gum up every surface. The paper inside was a bit moist but otherwise clean. Not overgrown with black mould either, and in the warm weather that would happen within days. Printed on the front of the waxed paper was some sort of schedule. I’d seen these sheets distributed in town for those few Pengali who didn’t have or refused to buy readers. Schedules like this were available for channel ferry and train timetables, and were usually kept in a holder mounted on the wall at a station entrance or ferry stop. The paper was only printed on one side. On the back someone had scrawled, HELP in big capital letters. In Isla. What the hell. . . ? The letters were awkward and ugly, written with what looked like a piece of brightly coloured, sulphur-encrusted rock like one could find near the hot springs. Underneath the text, there was a clumsy drawing: a curved line meeting another curved line, and an arrow pointing towards a half circle. “What is it?” Thayu asked. I showed her the back of the wrapper. She frowned. “What is the point of that?” “It’s a message in a bottle. A long time ago on Earth when people first started to navigate the oceans, a ship would sometimes run aground or storms would smash it against the rocks. The story goes that people who survived these ship wrecks used to throw a bottle in the water so that other people could come and rescue them.” She frowned. “But the current might take the bottle to a place where there are no people.” “Yes.” “And even if it does float in the right direction, it might take a very long time.” “Yes. This was before any form of long-distance communication existed.” Her frown deepened, as if she couldn’t imagine such a thing. “But the people could be long dead by the time anyone found them.” “Yes. But sending a physical message by land was the only way to contact another person.” Now she looked at the jar. “So, is this such a thing? Why would anyone use it while we have so much better communication? Is this real or a joke?” “That is the question, isn’t it?” “What does it mean? That is writing, isn’t it?” “It says ‘Help’. I don’t know what any of those other scrawls mean. There’s an arrow here, but I have no idea what the other things are.” Thayu squinted at the paper. She shook her head. “What do they mean, help?” I spread my hands. “That’s the big question.” Veyada said, “My big question would be: why is it written in Isla?” Well, yes, that, too. Thayu said, “Someone trying to pull a prank? Trying to see how far a jar will float? This could have been lying here for years.” Veyada shook his head. “The paper would be covered in mould and the lid would have been gummed shut with salt and growths. It’s recent.” “I agree,” I said. “And I still don’t see why it should be in Isla.” No, he was right. But I had no idea either. It was very, very strange.