Part 4

Quila

1

After the ship, the bustle of the Thousand StarWay was almost overwhelming. Quila had been so proud of being untouched by it once, ambling through the crowds on her way from the Academy to her mother’s house, insouciant. She couldn’t do it now. Everything was just too bright, too noisy: sales pitches from every flickering shop front, entertainers dancing or playing in admiring circles, luggage carriers bleeping their proximity alarms, announcements of yet another boarding flight booming and clicking from the speaker system and voices, always voices. People arguing, people shouting, people dragging mountains of fraying luggage or striding confidently with none; every language of the galaxy merging, deafeningly, into din. The blue light bathing the walkway in front of her changed, abruptly, into green as she stepped into the grab of another shop, yellow searchlights dancing across it. Quila winced, rubbed her eyes.

‘I’ve been away too long.’

‘What was that?’ Du’Fairosay, beside her, bent his head. ‘I didn’t catch that, what did you say?’

‘Nothing much. Just that…’

He spread his hands apologetically.

‘I still can’t hear you.’

‘I should come back more often!’ she bawled. ‘I used to think this was fun!’

***

‘It is fun though, isn’t it?’

They had found a bar out of the worst of the hubbub, with tiny high tables and delicately sculpted metal stools. A small screen embedded in the table top told them the progress of their onward flight. Still a standard hour to go. Quila stared at it, warming her hands on her cup of hot finla juice. It never ceased to fascinate her, ever since she was small, how you could go to so many far-flung destinations from the same place. Most of the flights were to other Chi!me worlds, of course, but there was the morning planet hopper to Gargarin with a stop on Iristade, there was the high speed shuttle to Terra and the slow picket to Darien. So many places you could go, so many times you could get up, walk away, run onto that ship to Ursa 9 or Herantive or Qiva Maior and never come back, so far away… So far away she didn’t even hear Du’Fairosay start to speak.

‘I’m sorry, what was that?’

His face was a study in subordinate shame.

‘No, I’m sorry. You’re tired, I shouldn’t bother you. I’ll be quiet.’

‘It’s all right. I was thinking, but one shouldn’t think alone for too long.’ She smiled, she hoped encouragingly. She had never had a deputy before. ‘What was your thought? Tell me.’

‘Nothing really,’ he said, depreciative. ‘I was just remarking that you were right, what you said before. This place, it is intense, but it’s fun too. And we should come here more often. Every time I pass through here, just stepping off the ship and seeing all that color, it’s like coming home. Don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know; I haven’t really thought about it.’ She looked at his hand, curled round his cup on the table top, so much darker than hers that was bleached by the Chi!me sun. ‘Of course, I was born on Chi!me, so in a way I suppose it is, but, well, when you travel as much as I have, you don’t really think about a home in that way.’

Her mother’s house, so far away she could hardly remember what it looked like; the compound on Zargras, dim in its dome beneath the dust.

‘Home is people, trust, doing the work that has to be done. Don’t you think?’

He smiled at her, appreciative and dutiful rolled into one.

‘Oh, absolutely,’ he said. ‘May I get you another drink?’

***

The trip from Zargras to Thousand StarWay, the space port for Chi!me, was a quick one: with no stops and priority at both jumping on and off points, it took less than a day. It wasn’t the distance that took the time so much as status when it came to space travel. Civilian ships would often only stay in hyperspace for a couple of days; and the longest part of any journey was not the flight but the waiting for clearance to get back into normal space, the taxiing in to the space port, refueling, shopping and snacks for the passengers then loading up and waiting again in the queue for the station point back into the dark.

Military ships, if they were sophisticated, could transfer themselves into hyperspace on their own whenever they wanted, but no civilian ship could muster the power. Civilian ships did not jump, they were thrown, and when you were thrown and before whom depended largely on who you were. The Zargras to Chi!me shuttle was one of the most important routes in the galaxy: nothing took longer than it should. The rest of the journey would be different.

The Benan line was a new route, as star services went. Before the civil war the only transport had flown from Terra itself and after that all civilian traffic had had to route through Gargarin. It was less than a cycle since the regular service had started running from Chi!me but, judging from the number of people gathering at the gate, it was already a popular one. Mostly Chi!me, Quila noticed, though there were a few here and there who looked Terran. She didn’t know how to tell if they came from Benan or not.

She walked down the gangway to the ship, Du’Fairosay following behind her with the bags. They were supposed to follow you wherever you went, but every old travel hand knew that they tended to be wayward. Du’Fairosay had looped the handle of one of his bags around his wrist and was twitching it in the direction it was supposed to go with flicks of his hand. Quila glanced behind her and saw that he wasn’t even watching it, he was looking out of the window at a large transport creeping into dock. His assurance was a good IntPro trait, to be sure, but an uncomfortable thing to have in a deputy. She would just have to get used to it.

At the bottom of the ramp, two of the ship’s crew, a man and a younger woman resplendent in gold uniforms, were stationed to meet the passengers. Quila fumbled in her waist pouch for her terminal to confirm her identity, stifling the annoyance she always felt whenever she had to show it more than five times in quick succession. The woman took it one-handed, saying something over her shoulder to her colleague, then she looked at it and her demeanor changed.

‘Ambassador Ar’Quila, welcome aboard the Flower of Benan,’ she said. ‘The Captain has asked me to show you to your cabin personally, with your travelling companion, of course.’ Her tone was so respectful; she was almost bowing.

The cabin when they got there was on the upper deck, with a window in the ceiling so that she could look out on the stars. It was enormous, twice the size of anything Quila had ever travelled in before, and had, as the attendant pointed out, its own private bathing and meditation room attached.

‘We hope you’ll be very comfortable,’ she said anxiously. ‘We may not be as well-equipped as some of the larger lines, but we make every effort…’

‘It’s fine. Really, more than fine.’

She smiled in what she hoped was a reassuring manner and the attendant went on.

‘The Captain looks forward to seeing you at dinner at his table. I hope you will be able to attend?’

Quila composed her face.

‘Of course,’ she managed, ‘please tell the Captain I would be delighted,’ quite as if she did this every day.

Du’Fairosay, she gathered, had a cabin on the deck below: not as luxurious as hers, of course, but still a long way above what his IntPro salary would have brought him on his own. She unpacked and sat on her bed, feeling the engines starting up, reverberating through the floor as the ship moved slowly away from its bay out into the inner orbit. The station was some way out from the space port: the speeds at which some ships would come through it meant it had to be, but the queue of ships waiting to leave stretched back so far that they had to wait in the hangar for clearance even to move into the line.

There was a good view from the cabin window, better than she had ever had before. Leaning back on her bed, she watched the train of ships moving slowly towards the gate, green lights and blue lights, yellow and red and orange against the twinkling void. After a little while she fell into a doze. When she woke the lights in the cabin were lower to indicate evening and there were only three ships in front of them, two in the queue and one, a freighter from its bulk, in the station itself.

She had only rarely had the opportunity to watch this, the entrance to hyperspace that underpinned her life, so necessary and common it was never remarked. The freighter hung motionless, as if nothing was going to happen, then suddenly green lights ran in a delicate pattern down the length of each of the rails. The space between them seemed to crackle, the freighter gave a great shudder, the air blurred right across her sight like blinking, and when it cleared the freighter was no longer there. The green lights pattered again on the steel and the next ship moved gently into position.

Quila watched the last two ships go through, but as soon her own had finally leaped, she found the button to slip the opaque film over the windows. It was chaos, hyperspace, no place, and though she knew there was nothing out there but particles she couldn’t help the shiver of primitive dread it gave her, like when as a girl at the Academy she had lain awake at night and imagined voices calling her in the wailing of the wind. At least there was no sound in space. Quila changed into her smartest clothes, put on her smile, and went to find Du’Fairosay in the bar.

The Captain went back to the bridge after dinner, leaving Du’Fairosay and Quila to their drinks on the terrace. Not a real terrace, of course, but the appearance of a temperate evening was impressively convincing, almost like Iristade. It was strange, how differently everyone treated her since she had returned from her mission there. Before Iristade, she had been just another IntPro official, not worthy of anyone’s attention, but now…

Ambassador Ar’Quila, the Captain had called her, in every phrase he said. Sometimes it still took her a moment to realize that was her, but she was getting used to it. Getting to like it, too: after all, it was only her due. A night like this, with the silver wings of the insects fluttering amongst the flowers. Tables covered with the ruins of a feast, air thick with celebration, And so we drink to you, Ar’Quila of the Chi!me…

‘This is a nice garden, isn’t it?’ Du’Fairosay said. ‘They’re quite new on the smaller ships.’

Quila agreed. ‘It is nice. It reminds me a bit of Iristade, the place where I was last posted. And, I suppose, a lot of other places too. Is it anything like your home?’

‘My home?’ he looked surprised. ‘Teyro, you mean? No, not at all. It’s probably why I like it.’ He smiled, without bitterness. Bitterness would not have been approved.

‘What is it like, then?’

‘Watery, very watery. There’s lots of land, but there aren’t any large land masses, there’s just thousands and thousands of islands. The biggest of them is maybe two days’ walk from end to end, and most of them are exactly the same as they have been for thousands and thousands of cycles, too. It rains all the time, and everything is black, or grey, or dark blue, the sea, the sky, the leaves on the plants, all of it. I didn’t know what red was till I went to Chi!me.’

‘It sounds interesting.’

He laughed.

‘Not really, take it from me. When I came to Chi!me I thought I had died and sailed to the bottom of the sea, as they say on Teyro. I was never so pleased to leave anywhere, believe me.’

‘So, you haven’t been back?’

‘I went to see my parents once after my first cycle of school on Chi!me and again when I got to the Academy. I can’t go more often than that: there isn’t a regular shuttle and the weather is so bad you can get stuck there, if you’re unlucky.’

Quila smiled. ‘Which you patently are not.’

‘No,’ he said, smiling back. ‘Of course not.’

***

Du’Fairosay’s father was a ship repairer and fisherman in a village called Senna, on Fingue. Fingue was the second largest island on the Heliostir archipelago, three clusters east of the capital. It was not the richest place on the planet, but neither was it the poorest: it was ordinary. Like his two older and three younger brothers, Du’Fairosay, whose name in those days had been simply Faro, had gone for basic religious tuition once a week with the priest of the small village temple.

The priest, Johasa, was neither wealthy nor especially well-educated, but he was the only person in the village to have studied in the capital and returned. From the first, he had recognized in young Faro something he had once seen in himself. The islands of Teyro had rich and largely oral poetry cultures, and Faro at two cycles could not only recite perfectly any one you cared to mention, but take the theme and begin to compose his own.

It was clear that Johasa had little to teach him by the time he was three, and, in another time, he would then have stopped attending the school and simply gone to sea with his brothers. But Teyro, poor as it was, was nominally part of the Chi!me dominion, and there were avenues open to Faro that there had never been before.

One day, visiting the temple in Kaiohiri, the largest town on their part of the island, Johasa met an old acquaintance from his own schooldays, who told him about the scholarship established with Chi!me funding for one child to attend the high school in the capital. Johasa put Faro’s name forward that day. Faro had spent a cycle at the school and then won a place in the Academy out-world program. A cycle-long intensive introduction to Chi!me education and culture, this was designed to bring the brightest young people of the outlying planets into the Chi!me system, to enter some form of government service or even IntPro itself. All of these were worthy ways to serve, they were taught, but it was IntPro which was the real prize.

Faro had fixed his eyes on IntPro from the moment he had stepped off the ship from Teyro. Hadn’t he always been told that if he worked hard enough he could win and make them all proud? He graduated top of his class and entered the Academy itself in the following cycle. He had been IntPro for two, now, and although there always seemed to be too many calls on his pay for him to be able to send home as much as he would like, he knew his family were proud of him. Even though he never went back.

‘Don’t you miss them, though, your parents?’ Quila asked. She hadn’t seen her mother for almost as long, of course, but she had been brought up to expect such separations. If you came from a more restrictive culture, it had to be hard to adjust.

He tried to look unconcerned. ‘It can’t be helped.’

***

He remembered the sun on the water, the heat on his head as he sat cowering under his hat on the jetty, watching them put out to sea. His brothers bent over the ropes, their backs smooth with muscle, shouting commands to each other in the local sailing argot he hardly understood any more. His brothers in his father’s boat, sailing out to fish with their father as their father had done with his, as they would do with their sons who were now only squalling bundles in their mothers’ arms.

‘Don’t you want to come, Faro?’

On the first day at the Academy training they had given them all Chi!me names. They had made him Du’Fairosay; they had explained that you could never hope to fit into a culture if your name marked you out. His brothers with the sun behind them ranged along the side of the boat, bare-chested in the loose short trousers they wore all over the islands.

‘Come on, Faro,’ they’d called again, and he’d waved his hand to them and said no.

She looked impressed, he thought, as if he had fitted in, though she would be careful not to say so. She wouldn’t want to sound patronizing, when all the time she was thinking, how well he’s done for an out-worlder. She was nice enough, but she wasn’t any different from the rest.

***

He was smiling at her again, but he didn’t say anything. Quila couldn’t think of any more conversation. Instead, she gulped down the rest of her drink.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m tired and I’m sure you are too. Perhaps tomorrow we could meet and go through our briefings on Benan Ty? We want to know what we’re dealing with.’

‘Of course. I’ll see you at breakfast, then?’

‘Alright. At breakfast.’ The expression on his face was perfectly pleasant, but she couldn’t help sensing a chill from him. Probably he was tired.

‘Good night,’ she said. She could feel his eyes on her all the way she went, watching her walk away.

***

After almost seven standard days’ journey, the Flower of Benan reached the hyperspace point that corresponded with the Benan station and settled down to wait for its clearance to land. This was not as lengthy a process as it would have been at one of the major centers. Thousand StarWay had recently expanded the numbers of its incoming berths to reduce hyperspace queuing, but at Gargarin, for example, waits of four or five days were not uncommon for civilian craft, even if your ship was Chi!me. Benan, however, had little space traffic, and after less than a day, the Flower of Benan took up position on the other side of the station, and was pulled through.

Quila, making last use of her luxurious cabin, watched through her porthole. Much though she disliked hyperspace travel, the step back into normal space was always a wrench. In hyperspace you were suspended, literally out of time, in a place where no usual concerns could touch you. It was what made it frightening, but on a ship like this, with every comfort ready on command, it was also attractive. To float in nothingness while people brought her things, hung on her every word and called her Ambassador, with no doing, no action, no work, and no duty, nothing but nothing, the floating and the void…

‘It’s like being dead,’ she’d said on the last night to Du’Fairosay, as they leant with their after-dinner drinks on the balcony rail over the garden. ‘If you could watch while people praised your life, and all you had to do, all you could do, was listen. As if you were a dead god; you know, one of those primitive deities you find people still believing in, not having to do anything but sit back and be worshipped. It’s not good for the character, of course, but I do rather enjoy it.’

She’d been foolish, she supposed, the drinks and the scent of the false flowers making her lower her guard. Ceronodis would have known what she meant; she would have laughed, accepting the thought for what it was, and they would have talked of other things. But Du’Fairosay was not Ceronodis.

‘That would only be the case if it were something desirable,’ he’d said stiffly. She hadn’t noticed at the time that he hadn’t even brought himself to say the word ‘dead’. ‘I’m afraid I can’t agree.’

She hadn’t spoken to him since; she’d been too busy packing to venture out that day.

‘I must find him before we make landfall on Benan,’ she told herself, ‘I’ll need him to keep the Benans happy while I talk to our Ambassador. I’d better check the information for that as well, I can’t even remember his name.’

She leaned over the edge of the bed to rummage in one of the bags half-filled on the floor. Above, the sky in the porthole flashed white and green. For a brief moment it was as if the whole ship was being turned inside out, a pulling sensation in all directions at once, then it ended and the porthole showed blackness studded with stars.

‘Good morning,’ a voice said from high on the cabin wall above her head, ‘this is your Captain speaking. We have now crossed back into normal space outside the Benan system and will be docking in Benan spaceport in approximately two standard hours. Would all passengers for onward flights to the Terran system please make themselves known to the cabin crew to obtain their forward transfer clearances? Thank you.’

The speaker crackled and fell silent. Quila opened her terminal and flicked the screen to the information on Benan.

2

From Benan spaceport, Quila and Du’Fairosay transferred to a shuttle that would take them down onto the planet. It wasn’t necessary for their journey, as the onward connection to Benan Ty would also leave from the spaceport, but it would have been a snub for the Chi!me Ambassador to pass so close to Benan and not stop. They might bow over her hand again and call her ‘Ambassador’. They had to stop on Benan. It was only polite.

She met Du’Fairosay in the queue to disembark. Despite her worry that he would have held a grudge for her stupid remark the previous evening, he seemed his usual courteous self. If anything, he was even more deferential, as if he was sorry. He obviously was not going to mention it, however, and if he did not she was certainly not going to bring it up. Conciliation was silence, so she had always been taught. So she returned his greeting as if nothing had happened and they walked on to the shuttle in companionable quiet.

Benan hung red and heavy in the shuttle window, as if it were more solid than anything else. It had been settled by Terrans for mining, and it was still attached to Terra, was one of the few planets to cling to the trappings of the Empire even when the power enforcing it was gone. The settlements were almost all around the coasts of the two main continents, Quila had read, hardly anyone ventured into the interior. It was too hot there, too barren, although the indigenous people had lived all over the land and left their cities behind.

She had seen pictures of those, of spires of sculpted rock, wind-eroded inscriptions that no one living could read. An enigmatic place, she thought, guarding its primitive secrets. She shivered.

Du’Fairosay bent solicitously over her. ‘Are you cold?’

She was IntPro, she was Ambassador Ar’Quila, who was not afraid.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Would you ask them to turn the heating up?’

They landed just over an hour later at the main spaceport, just outside the capital San Fredo. As diplomats, Quila and Du’Fairosay did not have to wait to have their IDs checked or their bags examined. They were whisked through Greeting with hardly a pause, sweeping past lines of traveler’s grey with tiredness, too beaten down with waiting even to watch with resentment as they passed by. They stepped through the last silver gateway into the main body of the spaceport and there, leaning on the barrier as if he were not the most important person in the building, was the Chi!me Ambassador to Benan, Pen’Eriten, waiting for them.

He was much older than she had expected. Quila stepped towards him with her hands held out for the ceremony of meeting, and all the while she was thinking, I can’t believe he’s so old. Ai’Amadi had told her he was a senior man, ‘very experienced,’ he had said. She had thought he had meant he was someone who would help her, she had not realized it was a euphemism. Why, he was older than her own mother, he must have been here on Benan for ten cycles at least.

They walked through the terminal to the pick-up point, where it seemed there was a problem. As they stepped through the tinted glass doors of the building, a young Benan female ran up to Pen’Eriten and started whispering urgently in his ear. It was too quiet and too rapid for Quila to make out; despite her emergency language study, her Terran was still rather rusty in real life. It would pick up in a couple of days, she knew, that was one of the things this side trip was all about.

‘I’m sorry,’ Pen’Eriten said, ‘I don’t know if you heard any of that, but we have a slight hitch with the transport. You see, when we were told that an Ambassador would be coming, we were just told an Ambassador, on their own, no one ever mentioned to us that you would be bringing an assistant. They laid on the best transport they had for you,’ he gestured, ‘but, as you see, it’s a bit unfortunate.’

The car sat low and shining above the road, just large enough for two.

‘They are looking for another one now for your assistant and the luggage, but if you would rather take the shuttle to the other airport, or wait here for one big enough for the whole party, of course we would completely…’

Quila considered. Outside the terminal building the sun was very strong; uppermost in her mind was the need to find some shade. Du’Fairosay could wait, she was in no mood to begin her visit by being difficult.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said, ‘let’s go.’

Settled into the corner of the glide car, away from the bright Benan sun, she studied Pen’Eriten’s face, looking for signs of failure. He was plump for a Chi!me, his belly pushing at the smooth cloth of his tunic like a starving child in an ancient report, and his hair grew in a plume all down his neck in a way that no one on Zargras had worn it for three cycles. It was warm in the car the best design on Benan did not seem to include really efficient air cooling but there was only a slight flush on his cheeks to show it.

As he sat he drummed the fingers of one hand on the side of the door, dadum, dadum, dadumdumdadum, over and over as if it meant something, but his expression as he gazed out of the window was cheerful enough. Dadum, dadum, dadum-dumdadum…dadum, dadum…he caught her eye and stopped it with his other hand.

‘I’m sorry. My youngest daughter is learning the zither, and there are some tunes you just can’t get out of your head once you hear them.’

Daughter? No one in Pen’Eriten’s position was allowed to bring a child from her mother’s house and, in any case, his records showed he was uncoupled. She stared at him, unable to think of anything to say. He returned her gaze, abashed.

‘I haven’t been on…um…Zargras for…a while. Obviously.’

He looked away, out of the other window. They were out of sight of the airport now, passing through wide plains of clay-colored earth under an orange sky. Every so often, the roof of an agriculture dome flashed in the sunlight. The sides of the road were scattered with hoardings. ‘Old Coke, for a taste of home’; ‘London Fried Chicken’. They gave no clues to what they were.

To break the silence, she asked, ‘what’s a zither?’

It was the easier of the two obvious questions. She couldn’t even begin with the other.

He brightened up immediately.

‘Oh, it’s an old Terran instrument, with strings. Very ancient, and very difficult as well. There’s hardly any music written for it, and every time she breaks a string we have to send all the way to Terra for a new one, but it’s the fashion. You know children, they always have to have what everyone else does. Do you have…’ He caught her look in time. ‘No,’ he said, ‘of course, you wouldn’t have.’

She felt discomforted suddenly, as if there had been a transgression against the bonds between guest and host and she had been the one at fault. She wanted to make it right, to recapture his enthusiasm.

‘I was very impressed with the new direct shuttle,’ she offered. ‘It was very quick, very smooth and the crew on the ship couldn’t have been more welcoming. It must be a relief to you, after the journeys you used to have to make.’

‘Chi!me to Gargarin, Gargarin to Terra then a hopper here. It wasn’t so bad, really. I’ve always liked long journeys.’

‘But the new route must open up so many more opportunities, mustn’t it? It must be very exciting, thinking of how much closer it brings you, Benan, I mean, to Chi!me and the rest of the galaxy. You must be very proud.’

‘Oh yes.’ He stared out of the window. ‘Very proud.’

‘It was set up with UP money, is that right? For one cycle, then once it’s established the government can take it over? You must be working hard to make sure they see advantages.’

She tried hard to show the excitement in her voice. It was exciting, this opening up of a whole system to the rest of the galaxy, especially after its only outlet for so long had been poor, dangerous, riven Terra. She supposed he must have lived with the thought for longer than she had done, for he didn’t turn.

‘Oh, I think they see what it means for them,’ he said. ‘Look, we’re coming into the city.’

The fields on either side of the road gave way to lines of buildings. Solid and plainly built in brick the same color as the earth, unlike the other cities she knew, they were all in the style of the host culture, with no leavening of Chi!me or even Gargarin construction that she could see. Just lines and lines of clay houses, with only the different colors of their shutters to distinguish them from each other, except that every so often one would have a flag pole sticking horizontally out over of the street and from it would be flying the Terran flag.

‘Very colonial,’ said Quila.

She meant it as a joke, but Pen’Eriten didn’t smile. ‘They are very attached to Terra, particularly since the Terran government hasn’t collected taxes from them for the last fifty or so Terran years. As they say, patriotism is easy when it’s free.’

‘Patriotism?’ Despite her study, sometimes the language could flaw her.

‘Literally, attachment to or love of your planet, love beyond reason, belief that it is right whatever it does, simply because you come from where you come from. It’s a Terran word. I don’t think there’s a Chi!me equivalent.’

‘I should think not,’ Quila laughed. ‘It doesn’t sound a very useful concept.’

He gave her a look she couldn’t interpret. ‘No. Well. It’s the poorer classes, the working people who fly the flags, of course.’

‘Are the others less unreasonable, then?’

‘It’s a good outlet for the mob’s enthusiasms, but flag-flying is thought over-demonstrative for anybody else. The middle class has other ways of celebrating Terra, but mostly they’re no less attached. There are small groups of what they call internationalists, in the larger cities, but they don’t amount to much. I’m afraid you won’t find much support here for your…our side.’ He’d covered the slip but she still noticed it. She said, slightly huffily, ‘every reasonable person is on the side of peace, surely?’

He glanced at her as if surprised.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Well, people like peace in theory, but they’re always suspicious of alien powers intervening, whatever their motives. You must have seen that?’

‘Oh yes, I’ve seen that. The propaganda war is going to be just as important as any other part of my mission, I’m sure; it’s not just getting the agreement, it’s winning the hearts and minds over to our point of view. There won’t ever be peace without it, and peace, let us remember, will be as good for Benan as it will be for Benan Ty in the extra investment it will bring to this system.’

‘Oh, of course.’

Pen’Eriten peered out of the window. ‘Actually, I think we are nearly at your hotel. We’ve arranged for you to have a brief audience with the President at six this evening, which should give you a few hours to rest from your journey before you need to leave for the palace.’

On cue, the transport juddered to a halt outside a four-story building topped with an extravagantly carved pediment. Best Outwards, the sign proclaimed, enigmatically.

‘Here we are,’ said Pen’Eriten, clambering hastily out. ‘You’re all set for Benan standard time, I assume?’

‘Of course. They told us on the shuttle.’

‘Good, good. Well, here’s your assistant now, so I’ll leave you to get settled in and come back to collect you at five.’

The glide car was so low on the ground when it was stopped that any sort of maneuver was difficult. Quila slid out as gracefully as she could and, as soon as she was clear, Pen’Eriten took hold of the door flap and started to climb back in.

‘I’ll see you later, then?’ she asked.

‘Yes, see you later.’ He got one leg over the seat then stopped as an afterthought hit him. ‘Oh, by the way, welcome to Benan.’ He climbed into the transport and shut the door. The engine whirred back into life. It lifted to its cruising height and purred away.

3

It was very late by the time Quila returned from her audience with the President, but Du’Fairosay was waiting for her in the lobby. She had invited him to come with her, of course, she would never countenance any suggestion that her assistant was not good enough to meet any alien dignitary, but he had said he had things to do. It had been on the tip of her tongue to ask what things? but at the last moment she had thought better of it. She liked Du’Fairosay, she thought in time they could even be friends, but something told her that prying was not the way to win him. He was a private person. She could respect that.

So when she slipped round the front door of the hotel in her best IntPro wrap and leaned against it, there was a movement from among the chairs, and Du’Fairosay’s voice in the shadowed lobby, asking ‘How did it go?’ She wasn’t sure if it was welcoming or not.

‘What, my interview with Mr President Robbio Gonsales, you mean? It was all of ten minutes and he didn’t say a word either of us couldn’t have heard on a broadcast. All that “our two peoples have a unique commitment to peace” rubbish when he knows I know Benan has just as bad a record as anywhere in the Terran empire. They’re hardly an open society, after all, and just because they have this election show every ten years doesn’t mean he speaks for his people. But he pretended and I pretended, and a lovely evening was had by all. Stars above,’ she exclaimed, ‘you wouldn’t think sitting and waiting would be so tiring, would you?’

He watched her as she threw herself into a chair.

‘It’s not the waiting, it’s the acting you don’t like. You’d like to be honest.’

‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘I want to get down to business, dispense with the diplomacy. Funny thing for a diplomat, isn’t it?’

‘But you don’t give into it. You act if you have to, and you do what you must, because in the end you know what’s right.’

‘Of course. I couldn’t do this at all if I didn’t have that, something, to hold onto. Could you?’

She meant it as a rhetorical question, but he seemed to take it seriously, considering with his head on one side. It was strange the way his people looked sometimes, how he could look so much younger and yet at the same time so much older than her.

‘No,’ he said at last, ‘You have to have something. But…’ He stopped, shrugging off whatever he had been going to say. ‘I’d better be getting to bed. I only stayed up to see how it went.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow? You are coming, to the ruined city?’

‘Yes, of course. I wouldn’t miss it. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Sleep well, then.’ Her voice in her own ears still sounded unsure.

He disappeared into the dark of the stairs.

***

‘This is the most ancient part of the city,’ Pen’Eriten said, ‘from that spire there all the way to that column in the distance. It’s difficult to tell, of course, but some people think it’s almost a thousand cycles old.’

Quila, squinting into the haze, drew in her breath politely. Her first school, at home on Chi!me, had celebrated its two-thousandth cycle while she was a pupil.

‘Goodness,’ she said, ‘That is impressive.’

The native city was half a morning’s journey into the interior from San Fredo. The car picked them up early from the hotel, Quila, Du’Fairosay, Pen’Eriten, and a Presidential aide called Carlos Morales. From the coast, the route took them into the surrounding range of low hills, climbing up the beds of long-dead streams until the sea was far behind. Gradually, the ground leveled, the tangled scrub which leaned over both sides of the paths died away, and they emerged onto the plateau, the high table that was the major feature of the main Benan continent.

Only ferns grew here, battered by winds, crouching under the open expanse of sky. Even inside the car it was oppressive, a vista so wide you could fall into it and be lost. Quila would have liked to pull down the blinds, so that she did not have to look at it, but that would not have been good behavior when Pen’Eriten had gone to so much trouble to take her sightseeing. After a while, another range of higher mountains began to appear to the left and right of their course, signaling the end of the plateau. They came down into the valley at almost midday and there, spread on the valley floor between the plateau and the mountains, was the city.

They called it Tass, or Tassiren, from a carving of what looked like those letters in some Terran tongue. What its people had called it, no one would ever know. In its heyday it would have looked like a forest, a forest of slender, stone spires, carved and designed by the wind and by hands into twisted shapes so delicate the mind could not comprehend how they could hold their own weight. Many of them did not, the scattered stones over the ground bore witness to that, and it was not safe to go inside any of the spires any more. Sensible hosts would not even take their guests in amongst them, particularly on days like that day when the wind was blowing, and Pen’Eriten prudently kept Quila to the lookout points on the outskirts.

Like all old Benan cities it copied its environment, and distorted it. The shapes of the spires took their forms from the edges of the cliffs surrounding its valley, but echoed it back in such an exaggerated form that the juxtaposition of the natural and the made was alien in its strangeness. It had no center, the city, no place for people to meet, no differentiation of different areas for government and residence. No shape to it, no form, no society, just those pillars in tortured red rock, crying their ancient complaint to the sky.

‘They must have been a strange people, the Benans,’ Quila said.

She and Pen’Eriten were walking slowly around some of the perimeter, carefully keeping in the shade of the cliff face now the sun was at its worst. Far behind them, Du’Fairosay and Morales huddled in the lee of the car, out of the wind. It was almost always windy at Tassiren. Quila would have wondered how they had stood it, but the guide Pen’Eriten had played on the way had explained that the climate had changed since the city was built, and that once all this land would have been green and lush. Quila pushed her hair out of her face. It was difficult to imagine gentleness, here.

‘Don’t you think?’

‘It’s a strange place,’ Pen’Eriten agreed. ‘Nothing ever has only one meaning. Nothing is ever quite what it seems.’

Quila assented, sagely. Her feet in her open shoes were scuffed with red dust, like a supplicant’s. ‘Like Ty.’

‘Exactly. What?’

‘Like Ty, the word, Ty. Doesn’t it mean both “slave” and “God”, or something?’

‘Oh, yes, sorry, for a moment I thought you meant something else. Yes, like Ty. Or like the Caduca, in fact.’

‘You mean the Jeban god? I thought the Jeba weren’t related to the old Benans?’

‘They weren’t, as far we know. They weren’t space-faring.’

‘Their cultures don’t seem very similar.’

‘No. No, you’re right, they don’t seem so.’ He looked around, assessing their position with one hand over his eyes. ‘We’ve come nearly halfway round now; shall we turn back?’

On the way back, the wind was in their faces. Sand swirled into their noses and mouths, whipping around as if it wanted to make columns of them, too. It was difficult to breathe, impossible to talk, hard enough to see when to raise your eyes was to lose them in a watering cloud of dust. After a while, they came to a place where a section of the cliff face jutted out into the valley, making a sheltered hollow out of the wind. They stopped in it gratefully, Quila leaning against the cliff wall while Pen’Eriten settled himself heavily on a rock facing her.

‘So,’ said Quila, ‘is there anything you think I should particularly watch out for on Benan Ty? Anything you think I should know?’ She was only asking for form’s sake, but it was important that he should not feel it. The wind hurled itself, howling, at the cliff. She raised her voice. ‘I’d really value your thoughts.’

If he could read her insincerity, he did not show it.

‘Well, I don’t know very much about the terrorists, but I’m sure anyone would tell you that the most important person on Ty at the moment is Desailly.’

‘The head of the intelligence service? I’ve heard of him.’

‘The CAS are more than just intelligence, they’re the force that props up the government. Desailly is an ambitious man, many people think a dangerous man, and for a Terran politician he has honesty, of a sort. You won’t get anywhere offering him private advantages. If you want him on your side, you’ll have to give him something real.’

‘Of course.’ Quila was stung. ‘I’m not here to bribe anyone. I have the authority to make whatever political settlement is necessary and that’s what I intend to do. I’m a little surprised that you would think I would do otherwise.’

‘I didn’t mean any offence. I’m only telling you what other people will think you’re about.’

‘Of course, I’m sorry.’ Her tone was still huffy. ‘I’ll just have to make sure I convince them. I know Desailly will be difficult, but I will get him on side in the end. I have to, this mission will have been for nothing if I can only come to agreement with one side. I have the authority to make him an offer he can’t refuse and I will, if I need to. I’ll do whatever I have to do.’

‘And what would it be, that offer? Just out of curiosity.’

Quila shrugged. ‘That I won’t know until I meet him. But this is where you and I have such an advantage, isn’t it? We’re Chi!me.’ Smiling. ‘There’s always something we have that everyone else wants.’

She peered around the side of the cliff face, into the wind.

‘Well, I suppose we’d better be getting back. It would be tempting to make Fairo mount a search party for me, but I don’t think he’d ever forgive me if he found I wasn’t really in trouble. I just wish I’d thought to bring a sand mask.’

‘I’m sorry, I forgot. People don’t really use them out here, I think Benans are used to sand.’

She smiled, to show she didn’t mind.

‘I’m sure it’s good for me to feel the pain of other cultures,’ she said. She took a deep breath.

‘Come on then.’

‘Ar’Quila.’

She stopped, one hand on the rock. Pen’Eriten regarded her solemnly.

‘Yes?’

‘Why did they choose you for this mission?’

‘I suppose because I have a background in Terran Studies. I’ve worked in other cultures, of course, but it always helps to have a deep understanding of the culture you’re helping. That and Iristade, of course.’ A brief smirk, quickly suppressed. ‘Why?’

‘I was a Terran specialist too, once. I thought I knew it all, there was nothing about Terran cultures that could surprise me…’

‘I don’t think that…’

‘And now I’ve been here longer than I lived on Chi!me and I have a Benan wife and Benan daughters and I’m still a stranger. They aren’t my daughters, of course, not really, but I like to think they are. They think I’ve gone over, on Chi!me, I know. If you ask anyone, they’ll tell you, I’ve forsaken my people. Some day, when they get around to it, I’ll be recalled and this will all have meant nothing but a little disgrace. I thought I could have both, I could be both Chi!me and Benan, but it seems actually that I’m neither. It’s a strange place to get to know. You make them your people but you still never really understand it, never really know when the ground beneath your feet is hollow.’

‘I think…,’ she began, although she didn’t know what she thought at all, except that it was a sad illustration of why they were told not to get too attached to one posting, and she could hardly say that. His expression was earnest, as if he was trying to warn her of something, but she couldn’t imagine what. She was hardly going to go native, after all. Even though he was so much older, she felt very much wiser than him.

He went on, ‘And Benan Ty isn’t Benan. There’s more than one history, and unless you know them all you’ll be lost. This is a great system for getting lost in, Ambassador.’

She didn’t understand what he meant, not really. She smiled because the image was suddenly funny, because in this strange place he had reminded her that she was Ambassador Ar’Quila, the victor of Iristade, and it made her happy. ‘It’s alright,’ she said, ‘you don’t need to be concerned. I know the way.’

Du’Fairosay was already in the car when they finally staggered back, peering at the pictures on a screen foggy with afternoon light.

‘Hello, Quila, had a nice walk?’ he said. ‘I just found something really interesting, listen to this. You know what they think Benan means, in the old tongue? It’s one of those dual things, they think, those concepts that mean two different things, both opposite? Well, Benan, they think, is the dead end and the way through, as well, and it can mean both of them together, as well, like the maze. Isn’t that interesting?’