Ambassador 7: The Last Frontier

Chapter 1-2

Thayu asked, “Anything about him that makes you uncomfortable?”

“Just the face. I don’t think I’ve seen him before. But he doesn’t seem the tourist type.”

She chuckled. “How long ago was it that you told me off for being paranoid about people?”

I smiled at her, and she slapped me on the shoulder.

They would look at it, she said, in all the magical ways that my association looked at these things, with equipment that I didn’t realise they’d brought and didn’t want to know was here. Seriously, at times I thought my association was in the possession of a magical expanding suitcase. We hadn’t brought all that much luggage, had we?

Fred, now without sand, followed us inside the house.

The air in the kitchen was warm and smelled like bacon and eggs and coffee. Just that smell brought memories back to me of when my grandmother used to stand at the same stove that still graced the kitchen.

Today, that position was taken by my housekeeper Eirani from Barresh, and she had a set of two burners going underneath the hot plate on which lay five eggs and a mountain of oysters, tomatoes, onions, mushrooms—those fancy yellow ones—and a bunch of sausages.

“It’s almost ready, Muri,” she said, wiping hair out of her face.

“Thank you, Eirani.”

Every morning when we walked Fred, she would venture into the chicken coop to get the eggs. Eirani was very unsure about the chickens, but was fine as long as they didn’t come too close and they didn’t fly. But she understood eggs. Eggs in Barresh were of the soft-shelled lizard or fish variety, and you went to find them, or in her case, buy them.

The kitchen was full of chatter and laughter, all in Coldi, and that definitely did not fit with my memories of this place.

My father sat at his favourite spot at the kitchen table, on the bench with the cushions, leaning against the wall. Erith, my Damarcian stepmother, had completed a batch of blackberry jam yesterday and was writing out the labels, watched by Reida, who was both intrigued by the process of writing with ink and the lettering. He was a very practical young man who had never received much in the way of formal education, but he was smart and was fast catching up.

Erith put the jars in a neat row, with her long-fingered Damarcian hands, in which the thumb and index finger were much longer than the other fingers.

“Are you going to deliver these somewhere today?” Karana asked. She was attempting to feed Ayshada, who sat on her knees, but he was much more interested in a cup of tea.

It was alarming to see a child stick his hands in the scalding tea, but he was Coldi and it didn’t harm him. In fact, he was now trying to put his face into the tea, but Karana put a stop to that.

“Three of these are for the neighbours,” Erith said, indicating the jars. “But the others we can keep.”

Much in this little community was traded between families, and she would give these jars to other families in return for hay for the animals or a dog-grooming session for Fred or a slab of eggs.

Eirani brought a plate of sizzling food to the table. She had added fried sliced eggplant to the mix. In the past few weeks, she and Karana had learned about growing vegetables. I’d been informed that the small yard at my apartment in Barresh would now be transformed into a vegetable garden. And that jam was a really good thing.

It seemed like taking Eirani on this trip had been one of my better decisions.

“Cold out there?” my father asked as I sat down.

“A bit.”

We had this conversation every morning, and like every morning, Fred drank noisily from his bowl and went to the quiet of the living room.

I took a cup of tea from Eirani and sat, and it wasn’t until then that I registered that the rest of my team were engrossed in something on a screen.

Veyada and Sheydu were watching something on a reader propped up against a fruit basket so that everyone could see it. Nicha was watching, too, but he had taken over Ayshada who was getting just a little bit too dangerous with the hot drinks, so he had to watch from a distance.

I got up, walked around the table and looked over Veyada’s shoulder. “What are you all looking at?”

“We finally got this.” He showed me the screen.

The screen displayed a written document. The header showed that it came from the Athens Exchange and the sender was a Coldi person. A doctor, to be precise.

Ah, yes. The report on Jemiro.

At one time I would have said “poor Jemiro”; but, after speaking with the doctor at the Exchange when we were there, I’d wondered if Jemiro was even human and if he qualified for sympathy. I wanted to feel sorry for him, but wasn’t sure if there had been anything for me to feel sorry for. Had been, yes, because the reconstructed body that looked like the person we knew as Jemiro had died two days after we brought him to the hospital at the Exchange, when his brain pretty much stopped performing all the body’s vital functions.

More than anything, thinking about him filled me with a deep sense of disgust and betrayal. Disgust because these people who had made him and passed him to us had no respect for a family, even one as dysfunctional as Barresh’s Pakiru family. Betrayal because someone had sent this not-person with our group while pretending that he was a normal human being, while acquiring our sympathy. I’d known that Jasper Carlson, who had recommended Jemiro to us, was up to some tricks, but this deeply disturbed me.

Neither Jasper nor any of his cronies had shown any interest when Jemiro’s brain malfunctioned and he died or, should I say, stopped working, two days after we delivered him to the hospital.

The doctors had thought him an interesting case and had requested his body for investigation. I asked that they do it quickly and send the body to the Pakiru family so they could rebury the son they’d buried a month earlier—paid for by my account—and to send me a copy of the report. I’d almost forgotten that it was coming, preferring not to think of the whole sorry episode while we were on leave.

The document contained pages and pages of medical data, including scanned images of his head and other body parts. There were a lot of medical notes superimposed over the images, indicating how the body was cobbled together from various parts, probably because by the time they acquired the corpse—“acquired”? How about “stole”?—some of the organs were beyond repair.

His body included numerous bio-implants, designed to work with living tissue and take over the function of body parts. The report stated that, after the death of the original person, the intestines had decayed too far to function. This was why his stomach cavity contained a couple of larger implants. But the connection between them and the tissue had not been made properly, or rather, not enough of the dead intestine had been cut away to prevent the rot from spreading.

The report suggested that if he’d been properly conscious, as he certainly was when speaking to us, he would have been in insufferable pain. He’d never said anything. Had he been told not to?

That feeling of disgust about the whole episode crept up on me again. I was on leave. I didn’t want to deal with this right now. I’d ask my team to go through it when we were back in Barresh, when I could brace myself for the utterly cruel and disgusting details that came too late for us to change the outcome. I skipped to the summary at the end.

The report said that by the time Jemiro came into the hospital his brain had already begun to shut down, and they could do nothing to reverse the process. In the back of my mind, I asked the question whether they even wanted to.

And then I wondered how many other not-people like Jemiro were walking around deceiving people into thinking that they were genuine employees.

Jasper Carlson’s company had advertised that they could find a person for every job. Was this how they fulfilled all those contracts? In that case, there must be other people in Barresh who had run into the same issues with their “employees”.

Was Jemiro a Tamerian or was he something else?

We hadn’t yet found out how Tamerians were made, and whether they were made at all, or if, like the Coldi, they had been made once and left to their own devices and their own reproduction. I didn’t think so, but no one could communicate much with Tamerians. They did the jobs people asked them to do. They were strong. They were formidable fighters, shooters and runners, but they had no social skills. Jemiro hadn’t had those either. But he had been made out of a keihu body, not . . . whatever it was that Tamerians were made from, if they were made and not born.

While we were at the court, Lenka Trnkova had told us about the faceless assassins who had killed presidents and dissident leaders in Africa. Most of those had been African, but there had been others belonging to other races. Earth races. What were these people and did they all come from the same source?

I leafed through the rest of the report, unrest gnawing at me, knowing that when this holiday was over, I should contact someone to investigate what was going on at Tamer and how this related to Jasper Carlson’s activities and why he’d tried to pass this person onto us.

The report concluded that the hospital had been powerless to stop Jemiro’s death and that if the family consented, the report should be sent to all major medical facilities in gamra worlds. The report also said that neither I nor anyone else had a hand in his death and no criminal investigation was necessary.

Well, phew. That issue hadn’t even crossed my mind.

Then at the very bottom, the Coldi doctor had scribbled a handwritten note that said, Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions, although I understand that, in the current situation, your mind will be elsewhere.

I looked at Thayu and she frowned back at me.

Your mind will be elsewhere . . . in the current situation. What situation?

I showed it to Nicha and then to Veyada and he showed it to Sheydu. They all sat up straight, showing mildly alarmed expressions.

What situation?

Thayu picked up her reader and scoured through the news.

“Something has happened, clearly,” Nicha said.

But we couldn’t see anything in the news feeds. In fact, the news had been really quiet. We had joked about that a few times this week. And my messages had not been half as numerous as before. I’d thought it was because people respected my time off, but come to think of it, when had they ever done that before?

A deep chill went over me.

I went to our bedroom, at the back of the house, that looked out over the mountains and the horse paddock.

I dug up my reader. I had made a point of switching it on at least once a day during this holiday and, even so, it was amazing how buried it would get under clothes and other things that we used throughout the day.

I switched it on while walking back to the kitchen, but nothing unusual showed in my messages. Certainly, if something had happened that justified the doctor making an offhand comment about the current situation, my messages should have exploded with questions. Because they always did.

Thayu gave me a strange look. I pushed the reader across the table to her. Her eyes moved as she looked at the screen.

She nodded. Said nothing, but her brow furrowed.

Nicha leaned over and she showed the screen to him, too. And then Sheydu and Veyada.

Quiet nods. Lips pressed together. No words were necessary. Somebody was partially blocking our communication and probably had been for the past three weeks.

The holiday was over.