Ambassador 10: Lost Forest Secrets

Chapter 2-1

Chapter Two

I INVITED EZHYA for a trip in my brand new aircraft, but he was busy and sadly had to leave.

After Ezhya collected his security and his craft had taken off from the rooftop landing place, Thayu strode out of the living room where she had hosted a meeting with some of her contacts, which had necessitated my taking Emi. She still wore her dark security outfit.

She found Emi next to the couch, still chewing the key ring, and picked her up. She had drool dribbling over her cheek.

“What did she put in her mouth?” Thayu asked.

“Nothing that was small enough to swallow.”

“Look at her hands. They’re disgusting.” They were. The little chubby palms were almost black. “What has she been doing?”

“Just being a baby.”

“You’re always so careless about what she gets up to.”

“What am I supposed to do? Hold her all the time? She wanted to go outside and I didn’t think that was a good idea, so I let her crawl inside. I gave her the chain because she would have started screaming otherwise.”

Thayu snorted, but said nothing because she knew I was right. She took the chain off Emi and put it on the table, collected a moist cloth from the receptacle near the door, and attempted to wipe Emi’s hands. Emi protested.

“How was the meeting?” I asked her.

“Useful.”

Which was probably as much as I’d ever know about this highly confidential meeting. She’d even been coy about exactly who was in attendance.

“Ezhya was here,” she said. Emi started wriggling again. She wanted to crawl. That and chewing were her favourite activities.

“He was.”

“What did he say?”

“He got some strange information about Simon Dekker.”

“Is that news?”

“You’re in a very sarcastic mood today.”

Clearly, her meeting had not gone as well as she’d hoped.

She bounced Emi on her knee, but Emi had spotted the key chain and gave a loud cry while reaching for it.

“Just let her have it,” I said.

“It’s disgusting. You don’t know where it’s been.”

“Probably nowhere she hasn’t chewed or licked already.”

Emi was wriggling so much that Thayu had to put her down. The moment her feet hit the ground, Emi pulled herself up on the edge of the table, grabbed the chain and ran off with it.

I laughed.

“Look at how cheeky she is getting! No, don’t laugh. She’s learning so many bad things. It’s not funny.”

“Thayu. Relax. She’s fine.”

I poured her some tea and held out the bowl of sweets that stood in the middle of the table, those bowls that seemed to be everywhere in the apartment. Although sweets was perhaps a misnomer, because the little soft cubes of jelly managed to be both sweet and incredibly sour. Like many things on Asto, they were made from some kind of fungus.

She took a couple and put them in her mouth, nostrils flaring. No, that meeting really hadn’t gone well.

While we drank, I told Thayu about Ezhya’s visit and the letter from Simon Dekker that he had intercepted. Her reaction was the same as mine. Why not send it to us? and Haven’t we been down this road before? and yes, we had, and no, Nations of Earth didn’t appear to have learned anything.

And then I told her of Ezhya’s suspicions that the main reason Dekker had not told us about these “attacks” was that the reports were fake and designed to create opposition against gamra.

Then she said, “Yeah.” And nodded with the entire top half of her body. “I don’t like that man.”

“Join the club.”

“Is there tea?” Veyada had come into the room.

“There is.”

He went to the table and poured himself some. Then he sat on the couch. “I’ve joined the club. But I guess it’s not the tea club you were talking about.”

“Simon Dekker,” Thayu said, in a close approximation of the proper pronunciation.

“Oh.”

Because that explained everything.

Then he said, “I don’t like that man.”

Thayu and I burst into laughter. From the corner, Emi cheered and waved her arms, rattling the chain.

“What?” Veyada looked from one to the other.

“That’s exactly what everyone has told me about him. I mentioned Dekker to Ezhya and now Thayu and the first thing they both said was: I don’t like that man.”

“And you don’t like him either.”

“Nope.”

“So what are you going to do about this document?” Thayu asked.

“First I’m going to study it very carefully. And I’m going to investigate these incidents to see if they really happened. Then, when we get back home, I should ask Melissa about it. And Amarru. And I should ask the Tamer Collective.”

“Is Minke Kluysters still in Barresh?” Thayu asked.

“I haven’t heard to the contrary. I will ask him.” Sadly, with Earth joining gamra, travel had become much more available. It was still very expensive, but that was no problem for Minke Kluysters.

Thayu snorted. “Like he’s just going to tell you, ‘We are working with the new president to make sure Earth never officially joins gamra.’ You’re better off putting some surveillance on him.”

“We’ll do that as well, but I will talk to him. It will be interesting.”

I was already formulating some questions. I just needed to work on not making them too pointy.

Talking to Melissa would be interesting, too. We hadn’t always been on great terms, and I was sure she thought I was a prick, but having been captured by Robert Davidson—who had also killed her partner—she had even less love for the Pretoria Cartel than she had for my arrogance. Likely she would be honest with me. Relatively. As honest as I needed her to be about Dekker.

Emi was now lying very quietly on her stomach in a spot where the sunlight hit the floor. She was still awake, her large dark eyes blinking, but she’d fallen asleep in that spot many times. I offered to take her to bed.

She was very quiet, her little body warm and heavy, when I carried her through the high-ceilinged corridor to our bedroom.

The building was new and was a typical Athyl design, with perfect symmetry, large square spaces with lots of empty space.

Our apartment in Barresh was not particularly cluttered, but it had come with some beautifully made antique furniture. In that apartment, none of the walls were straight, the ceilings in the rooms were low and windows and passageways supported by arches. The floor was covered in mosaic, and there were all the bookcases and the plants and the tiyuk pelt rugs.

I was sure that the apartment would feel small and claustrophobic after living in this open and airy space.

Coming into our bedroom, the house’s AI darkened the windows at my command. Emi’s crib stood in the corner.

I put her on the bed, changed her and then I wormed her out of her shirt and put the loose sleeping gown on her.

She was almost asleep when she hit the mattress, and only protested a little bit when I unclenched her little fist and took the chain with the keys from her. “Sorry, but Daddy needs those.”

I watched her fall asleep, her little hands twitching. My heart ached. How was it possible to feel so much love for someone that small?

I snuck out of the room, quietly closed the door, and joined the others in the dining-room/kitchen area at the back of the apartment. The entire wall on the far side was made of glass. From here, the view stretched in the direction of the desert. I could see the hill of Pakkatish, where Reida’s mother lived, in the distance.

Reida himself had just finished a teaching session with a couple of local youths. Most of them lived on the lower floors of the building. The group was packing away circuit boards and bits of surveillance equipment that Reida had taught the youngsters how to install and subject to basic repairs and configurations.

They were now getting up from the table and saying their goodbyes, while Deyu had taken it upon herself to walk along the outside windows with a rag on a really long stick, to wipe the dust off the window. Yesterday’s sharp shower had not done much for the distribution of dust over the glass.

“So what is the plan?” Reida asked me.

Of course, he knew that Ezhya had visited and that I’d been waiting for that visit to determine when we could return home. “We are going to return home as planned,” I said.

He nodded, seemingly happy.

“Any reason you like to go back?” I asked him. He did seem to enjoy teaching and revelled in his elevated status when we were here.

“Probably some rich keihu family chick,” Sheydu said.

“Why do you always think that’s all I want? Besides, they’re all dumb, only interested in your money, which I don’t have, or your rich family, which I also don’t have.”

“That takes you off the list, then.” Sheydu snorted.

“They’re also chubby in places where I don’t like chubby.”

“Ugly chicks, then.”

“Tell me, how did we get to this level of conversation?” Deyu said, coming into the door.

Reida said, “When I’m involved, apparently people feel the need to descend to gutter speech.” But he grinned at Sheydu, because now that Reida was a fully qualified and highly capable spyware engineer, the two frequently resorted to what looked like needling and bickering to uninitiated outsiders.

But the fact was that Reida relied on Sheydu for advice and his wellbeing, and that Sheydu was intensely proud of how her pupil had grown from a morose, angry adolescent to a dependable and loyal young man.

Most large residences that housed multiple families in Athyl came with domestic staff. This was because when you bought a house, you didn’t actually buy the house, but just the right to live in it. The house itself remained the property of the city, and one of the city’s tasks was to make sure that the trains ran, the streets were clean, facilities worked and citizens had useful things to do. So for every residence, they decreed the number of staff employed to maintain it. And if you bought the residence, you paid the city for their wages.

This apartment had a cook and two domestic general workers. We’d had no say in appointing them. They were, as they say, part of the furniture.

The staff would stay here and manage the apartment while I was away. Several people had already let me know that they would like to use the apartment’s meeting rooms so we could hire them out. There was a lot of business going on in Eighth Circle.

Nicha had been in town. He was just coming back, holding Ayshada by the hand, who was yelling loudly, “Train, train!” He pointed at the train that zoomed over the rails that hung between our building and the next. He ran to the window, his little hands making fingerprints all over the glass that Deyu had just so meticulously cleaned.

Typical Asto households had a light meal at the end of the afternoon, when people returned home, and then another after dark. The cook brought out a huge tray full of plates with snacks: lots of fried mushrooms, fried worms—a favourite of mine—spicy balls made from a bulb, and of course manazhu, the dark green “coffee” that was popular in Athyl.

The smell of food brought out everyone. Of course, only the Coldi members of my team had come on this trip, but everyone was there: Thayu; Veyada, Mereeni and Ileyu; Reida and Deyu; and Sheydu with her entire association: Isharu, Naru, our pilot Leisha, Zyana, Anyu and Sevayu.

All of them had been attending to their own business in town. I’d found that these trips to Athyl—during which my security caught up with their secret channels in the city—had been greatly beneficial to their overall connectedness with wider events in Coldi and gamra communities.

Nicha came to sit next to me. He left Ayshada with Ileyu. Ayshada treated her like his little sister. It was very cute.

He had brought a puzzle toy to show her, which he put on the table, scrunching up his face as he tried to fit the required number of beads into the slots.