Part 6

Quila

1

The spaceport was some way outside the capital. Because of the noise, Du’Fairosay opined, and the fumes from the shuttle engines. The days before the silent models were a distant memory everywhere that Quila knew, but she accepted the explanation without comment. If anyone would know about poor transport and outdated equipment, it would, she supposed, be Fairo. The Chi!me Ambassador, Par’Lennan, had not been there to greet her at the spaceport, though the glider had been laid on with a driver. He was unavoidably detained, the driver had explained, evading her eyes. Clearly it was not the first time.

The spaceport was set in a circle of low hills, like landing in a salad dish. The trees leaned across both sides of the road, the sun dappling the surface with green light, and flowers grew multi-colored on the verges beneath. She knew from her research that Drossa province was the most heavily populated, but she wouldn’t have guessed it from the spaceport road. There were no villages that she could see, only a few tumbles of broken stone walls and every so often a glider going the other way, as if it were a paradise, a sanctuary in soft green, untouched by working hands.

After about an hour they came out of the woods to see the edge of a wide plain, with Airdrossa sprawled across the horizon. It was low and black with a clump of towers at one side, hazy with distance, and the sky above it was tinged with dirty yellow. It was not an attractive sight, but it was clear that efforts had been made to make it so, from the pink-blossomed branches planted on either side of the road to the industrial areas carefully hidden away so that only a glimpse of flat corrugated roofs gave them away.

‘Airdrossa is supposed to be beautiful.’ Du’Fairosay was scornful. ‘I’d hate to see the rest of the place.’

Quila had been thinking the same thing, but his tone stung, as if the poor, grubby city was something to her.

‘Beauty is fitness, the right form for the right occasion,’ she said tartly. ‘Don’t be so quick to your aesthetic judgements, unless you want others to make them against you. Study what the city is and how it does it, then you may be in a position to make criticisms of its beauty, not before.’ She sounded in her own ears like her teachers, like his.

Airdrossa looked better from close quarters. When the famous towers were overhead and the suburbs and the smog lost to view, it was not without its charms. The glider pushed slowly through the crowded, narrow streets and Quila pressed her face to the window. This was the oldest quarter, a maze of narrow stone buildings. The shutters were all closed against the sun? and over them swung plaques of filigree metalwork, leaves, animals, the sky and the stars dancing on the painted wood. When the glider moved close in to let another past, she could see that the walls themselves were also carved with patterns of stylized leaves.

Even though it was the middle of the day, the streets were busy. There went a pair of young women, their hair teased into elaborate piles and set with feathers, pink and purple froth dancing round their knees as they walked. One of them had a small animal, crouching on her shoulder, that chattered and twined fingers in her hair. There were older women with black scarves over their heads, young men in grey shouting into communicators, other men with tattered layers and bundles in their arms.

There were old men chewing in doorways, watching the crowds go by, waiters wiping tables in the cafés with practiced hands, balancing laden trays on their hips, crowds and crowds of Terrans, of every age and type she could imagine. And, every so often, a face that was not Terran at all. A smaller face in greenish grey, a pointed chin and large, blank eyes, taking the trays in the café, pushing a food cart, following a high-heeled lady with a larger animal on a lead. Standing in groups at a busy junction, pushed by a dark, raddled man to wash the drivers’ windows while they stopped, for a price. Quila had studied Terrans, but she had never seen a Jeba before.

When the glider pulled up outside the hotel, the doormen were Terran but it was a Jeba who rushed out behind them to shepherd the suitcases up the magisterial steps. He (she supposed it was a he, although with the Jeba she didn’t know how you told) wore the same red uniform as the other staff, even though on him the gold epaulettes on each shoulder practically overlapped. He looked temporary in it, she thought, as if at any moment he might disappear, leaving only his coat behind.

He gathered the suitcases outside the door, corralled them aside so that the passengers could walk in first. His head was bowed, a perfect impression of servility. She pressed ten UP credits into his hand as she passed, but he didn’t say anything. He couldn’t have seen that much money for a very long time, if at all, but she couldn’t tell if his silence was reserve or really disinterest. For a moment she watched him as he turned back to the suitcases, wondering how he did it. Then Du’Fairosay called her and she dismissed him from her mind.

Par’Lennan had left a message at the front desk, to say that he would meet her the following evening. She spent her first day wandering through the streets, listening to the talk in the cafés, watching the old men gathered in the doorways, the young women in their sharp bright shoes, and the Jeba. They were everywhere once you started to look for them, but they were difficult to spot and to follow, as if the camouflage they had acquired for living in the deep forests worked equally well in the stony city. There were no statistics, as far as she knew, for the numbers of Jeba in Airdrossa or even on the planet. She tried an estimate, but had had to give up the count after only ten or so. She could not even be sure that her ten were ten, and not five or fifteen. They were so difficult to see and they did all look the same.

She returned to the hotel with the dusk, tripping lightly up the stone steps with a friendly nod to the doorman, making sure she got to the door before he did so that she could open it herself. The lights in the lobby were very bright after the dimness of the streets; Par’Lennan, waiting to greet her, was little more than a dark shape.

The first thing that she noticed about Par’Lennan was that he managed to look nonchalant and comfortable in even the most unpromising surroundings. The second thing, as her eyes adjusted, was that he was young, a bright star in his first real posting, who had been on the planet for less than six of their months.

‘But it’s a great place, I feel like I’ve been here forever. You must let me show you around.’

His hair was cut into a fluffy point in a style she had seen on the young civil academy men in Zargras, the ones who were good enough and lucky enough to be sent to work with IntPro. He had their suit, too, with the shiny collars pinched into points so long they reached half way down the front, and their way of pushing all his hair back from his forehead and holding it there on the top of his head when he wanted to look charming.

‘That would be nice. But I thought we could sit down, have something to eat perhaps, talk over developments?’

‘Well, we could, but…’

He waved a slender hand, pushed it through his hair. His skin was the seashell shade found on Chi!me itself, delicate as a flower.

‘I suppose we could go and sit down in there, but, uf.…’ Up went the hand to the hair, back went the dark fluff, ‘You won’t see anything of the real Ty in there. In there are only diplomats and has-beens. You don’t want to meet them. Come with me, I’ll take you to some place real.’

His grin was broad and friendly, two lines of white, regular teeth.

‘Alright,’ she said, wondering if she would regret it, ‘maybe for a little while.’

The real place was a bar of shadowed corners in a street just off the main square. What it was called Quila never knew; the lettering on the signboard was too weathered for her to read. Par’Lennan, who had walked a little ahead of her all the way from the hotel, stepped ahead to open the door, then stood back ceremoniously to let her through first.

She paused just inside the door, unsure in the sudden gloom of where to go. Par’Lennan let the door slam behind him.

‘Try that table there,’ he pointed. ‘Really we should stand at the bar, but I’m sure you’d prefer to sit down.’ He made it sound like a fault, as if she was irredeemably staid, and she was tempted to march up to the bar just to show him. But they did have to have some discussion about the planet, and she couldn’t imagine talking with the barman listening in. Keeping her sleeves away from the sticky patches on the table she settled herself into the seat he’d indicated and waited for him to return with the drinks.

‘I love this place, it’s so full of all the worst types of life,’ Par’Lennan announced as he set the glasses on the table. ‘Smugglers, gamblers, drunks…policemen, they’re all here. See that man over in the far corner, the one with the hat? Gangster, if you want anyone dead he’s the one to see, for a price. Mostly workers who make everyone else refuse to work, you know the Terran term? Union organizers? But anyone you like, really, your wife or your husband, your father or your business partner, as long as you can pay.

‘The scarred man at the games table, his businesses pay no taxes except the protection to the police. Last year his wife died with her lover in their glider and now his new wife is younger than his eldest daughter. The policeman’s by the bar, the one with the largest glass, and the man with him you don’t ask where the money for his drinks comes from, not if you want to leave by the door and not in pieces. There’s probably a CAS man in here as well, but I can’t see anyone I know tonight.

‘The man by the door, the one with his face in his terminal, is a writer for one of the news casts, he came here to investigate and clear up the seamy side of Airdrossa, but they’ve got him now and he only says what they want him to say. That’s what it’s like here, it takes you in and you never come out the same. Not just this bar, the whole planet. You think I’ve brought you somewhere unusual, but it’s not true. It’s all like this, all of it, all just dirty and chaotic and dangerous. It gets you and it never lets you go. It’s fantastic. Don’t you think?’

Quila took a sip of her drink. It was oddly sweet, with an oily aftertaste that sat on her tongue after she swallowed. She set it down and edged the glass away.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s not quite like anywhere I’ve been before. Sometimes it seems so familiar, I think I’ll have the hang of it within a day, then the next minute I’m up against something so strange I could live a thousand lifetimes and never get to understand this place. You don’t find that?’

Par’Lennan laughed. ‘But that’s the charm, that difference, that edge of strangeness that means you’re never quite sure. The difference between Airdrossa, which let’s face it could be anywhere in the Terran empire with no problem at all, and the villages that are just in another age. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were the indigenous people, that they’d never flown here from the stars. It’s amazing to think that we can be sitting here and two days’ ride away are people who are still obsessed with that ridiculous Terran sky god cult…’

‘Christianity?’ Her tone was dry, but he was unperturbed.

‘That’s it. I forgot you were the big Terran expert. And that’s just the Terrans, the Oneness only knows what the Jeba get up too. Now there’s a strange people, with all this Caduca stuff and all. It’s all over the place at the moment, you must have seen the signs?’

‘The signs?’

‘The little hollow men? You must have noticed them, they’re everywhere.’

The outline of a man painted on a wall, a twisted piece of metal hanging from a waiter’s belt…

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I just didn’t know that that was what they were. It’s not just the Jeba, then?’

‘It’s a Jeban idea, but the villages are in it too, somehow. It’s like a god figure. I don’t understand it, no one does. I don’t think they understand it themselves and isn’t that just the most amazing thing? It’s astounding.’ He pushed his fringe back with one hand, again, and smiled. ‘Isn’t this just the most fantastic planet?’

She said, conservatively, ‘I’ll have to see a little more of it before I make my mind up on that.’ She pushed her glass further across the table. ‘So, what should I know before I meet the President?’

Par’Lennan pulled a face. It was unlikely, he explained, that she would meet the President at all.

‘No one sees him; I mean no one. For days at a time.’

‘You mean he doesn’t do audiences?’

‘No, I mean no one sees him. Not his staff, not the house journalists, no one. Even his relatives are turned away. The last hot season, it went on for so long, people began saying he was dead.’

‘But he wasn’t.’

‘No, not that time. They rolled him out quickly enough once that rumor started going round. But then it was weeks before anyone saw him again.’

‘So what do people think is going on? Does he just not like seeing people? Is he being ousted?’

He shrugged. ‘They say he’s ill, he’s got that old multiplying cell disease that all these Terrans still seem to get.’

‘But we’ve taught them how to cure that, haven’t we? You said this has been going on since the last hot season?’

‘Longer, it was just before I was sent out that he had his first withdrawal. Yes, it’s usually curable for Terrans, but there’s still a few cases where nothing can be done, so maybe he’s one of those. Or maybe it’s something else he has. Either way, they say he’s dying and that makes things very interesting for us.’

‘Does it? Why?’

‘Because his successor will be the man who’s effectively his deputy now. Desailly.’

He shot her a significant look, waiting for her to confess her ignorance so that he could be worldly-wise.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve heard of him, I discussed him on Benan. They told me he was a dangerous man, but I don’t see why. Surely, if his ideas are so ridiculous, he won’t win the election and he won’t even become President.’

Par’Lennan laughed, shortly.

‘Oh, he’ll be President, you don’t need to worry about that. As for danger, well, I suppose that’s a matter of opinion, but he’s certainly a complication. You’ll see when you meet him, he’s no friend to Chi!me.’

‘I don’t expect him to be, or any of them, until we’ve proved ourselves their friends. The President has always been willing to talk to us. He’s not been an enemy to us.’

‘Well, that’s as maybe, but Desailly is different. You know the Terran saying, “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”? Here they have a different version, “keep your enemies in the grave.”’

His tone bordered on the portentous and Quila had to suppress a snort. She narrowed a skeptical eye.

‘Thanks for the advice.’

‘Fine. Well, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. You’ve been briefed, I’m sure.’ He looked away from her at the dimlylit room, his face suddenly as sulky as a child’s. ‘I’m just telling you. You should be careful.’

***

The Airdrossa night was stickily hot, and her room was muggy with it. Quila threw her wrap on the bed and flung open the window. The city stretched away beneath her, the orange street lighting and the dark roofs, the whine of the transports on the road outside and the distant clamor of a siren. The flashes and bangs cutting the sky over the city, pattering, fizzing sounds like blaster fire. On one of the shuttered houses below a door opened and music drifted tinnily out into the air. Voices called something that didn’t sound like the Terran she’d learned; footsteps rang on the pavement. Someone laughed, further off, glass smashed and someone screamed.

Away on the horizon was a darker line that could be hills, or cloud. She leant her arms on the sill. Even this, the best hotel, looked shabby from a distance, but now studying it closely she could see that what she had taken for pockmarks were actually carvings, whorls and waves cut into the stone all the way up the walls. It must have taken so many days of skilled labor, have cost so much in time and money and effort to execute and she thought suddenly how secretive it was, how strange in a place whose Terran poverty, hopelessness and violence were all too achingly familiar.

A breeze blew the window gently back against her arms. A flying insect blundered past her head, seeking the light. She winced as it crackled in the light killer, she always disliked those things. Perhaps she had better shut the window. It felt so immense suddenly, the knowledge that beyond that line were miles upon miles of fields and trees and people, all alien to her, and that was odd, because as planets went Benan Ty was absurdly small.

The settlers and the Jeba lived on only one of the three main continents, and the smaller islands were similarly uninhabited more than a day’s sail out from the mainland. The others were too barren, their topsoil too shallow, to grow enough to feed a population; even the mining operations were almost entirely automatic. There was no dark heart, no void at the center of the maze to be lost in. She knew that. She knew that. Determinedly, sensibly, Quila closed the window and went to bed.

2

Petrus Desailly yawned, suppressing the urge to put his head down on the desk and sleep. He had never really accustomed himself to going without a siesta after lunch, even after all these years. He had a reputation for it, like that irreverent little cartoon he’d seen on one of the news channels, himself tucked up in the parliament chamber with a large white nightcap drooping over his face. It had been a good drawing, remarkably like. He had thought of requesting a copy, but they would most likely prefer to offer him one, the next time the editor needed a favor. They said it was because he was provincial, he knew, the Airdrossa elite who had always been suspicious of him. He heard it in their voices when they thought he was out of earshot, in odd snatches of recorded conversation, ‘Of course, in Chaireddan,’ the downward intonation, as if it was the back of beyond. It bothered his wife.

Oddly enough, when he was in Chaireddan he had never wanted to sleep the afternoon away, not since he was a small child at school, fighting and kicking at the white-swathed nuns who glided, clucking, round his bed and tried to cage him. Yet here in Airdrossa, where it was not done, every afternoon, all he wanted was to lie down and shut his eyes. At least his meeting with the Chi!me woman had not been difficult. She was quite a good-looking woman in her way, if you could get used to the blue, and younger than he had expected. It had been interesting. Once, long ago, he might even have identified the slight pang he felt for her as pity.

***

Par’Lennan had set them up an office in the Chi!me embassy, a white, gracious house with an air of hard times. Du’Fairosay hung a blue crystal from the ceiling, the light clashing with the green-dappled sun that shone through the trees outside. After the first day he spent most of his time there, working on their ViaVera contacts while Par’Lennan liased with the government. There had been a UP team on Ty for months, Quila understood, though it was not clear if the government did. Du’Fairosay did not like to be asked about this work, the few enquiries she made were met with evasions and silence. It was best not to pry too closely. It was not unusual, she told herself, for the members of a team to have different orders, different information. Repetition was waste, after all.

Du’Fairosay and Par’Lennan reported to her, dutifully, every day. ‘We’re making good progress.’ ‘It’s going very well.’ Beyond that there was little she could do. She occupied herself walking the streets of Airdrossa, breathing their air; taking the place in through her skin. The cathedral, its spire towering above the flapping scaffolding and the pink-lit sign of the club against its walls. The crumbling elegance of the main streets, wide opulence of unrealized hopes. The swooping stone between peeling shutters, carven trees and hills of a Terra left far behind. A house in a turning off the shopping street had a great tree etched into the whole of its side wall, with advertising screens fitted to every fruit. They changed every minute or so if someone was passing; Quila liked to stand there and watch as Aztec trainers gave way to Peron shirts, to DeBeers gliders and back, the tree fruiting a confusion of berries. She wondered sometimes what they were, and if people bought them. She supposed they must.

She never tried to hide who she was when she went out walking. She could have covered her head and been more anonymous older, poorer women in Airdrossa did so, after all but she was never prepared to. She didn’t believe in concealment, felt that people had the right to know that the Ambassador, the special envoy, was passing by. Not that anyone seemed very interested.

They were not outwardly friendly, the Airdrossans. Like Terrans everywhere, they were reserved and inclined to be suspicious of new situations. The service in the shops was polite but expressionless. It was only sometimes, turning away, that she thought she caught a raised eyebrow, the ghost of a smile. Once there was a muttered comment, but her Terran was not quite like Ty Terran and she couldn’t make it out. There was only one time she was afraid, but after that she had bodyguards.

She had been sitting in one of her favorite cafés, near the hotel, making her midday meal last longer. She had her terminal and some links to study, but she wasn’t really paying attention to them. The café was on one of the busier streets and the temptation simply to watch people go by was too great. It took her a while to realize that the people had gradually become all men, mostly middle-aged, swarthy men in clothes even she could recognize as shabby, all going the same way. They walked with purpose, in silence, not like people going home. One of the Jeban staff was clearing the table next to hers.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, leaning over, ‘but do you know what’s happening? Where are all those men going?’

The Jeba stopped, a glass hung from each spindly finger, and looked at her. Under its scrutiny she could feel her cheeks purpling. ‘It iss demonstration.’ Its tone was measured, an air behind it she couldn’t catch.

‘A demonstration of what?’

It spread its glass-decked hands. ‘Yess.’ It turned back to the table.

‘Well,’ Quila addressed its back, ‘thank you anyway.’ She would have to go and see, after that.

She followed the last of the men to a plaza by one of the bridges. A platform was set up under the riverside trees as if for someone to speak, although no one was on it. In front of it, the men milled around, shouting. Some of them had placards, but the slogan was too idiomatic and the lettering too wayward for her to be able to make them out. Something about hitting, she thought, about work and hitting, but she could not be sure. It all seemed rather desultory, like a ritual no one was interested in performing. She was about to leave when the police arrived.

She saw the heads turn first, a rolling movement on the edge of the crowd, swinging to watch the carriers push into the plaza. The placards hoisted higher; someone leaped onto the platform and started shouting something into the magnifier. The police climbed out of the carriers, formed up in lines in front of them. They each had a shield which they locked together to make an armored line, covering their fronts and their heads, their black uniforms a menacing blur behind. She realized that these had to be the paramilitaries, the CAS.

They shuffled forward, slowly, as the first missiles bounced on the top of the shields. The man on the platform screamed a slogan and the crowd picked it up, roaring. The CAS started beating on the insides of their shields, in time with the chanting so that for a moment it was as if both sides were making music together, coming together to dance. Another rock landed on the shields and, for no reason Quila could see, one of the CAS men pushed his blaster through the shield wall and fired.

In the front a man fell. There was a silence like an intake of breath, then the crowd broke and ran. Quila, on the edge of the group, found herself in the front as they sprinted for the side streets, rushing to put enough distance between them and the demonstration so that they could become ordinary citizens again. For her, it was easier; she told Du’Fairosay afterwards that she had never been in any danger. She did not tell him about the man they shot, about the dark patches on the earth when she went back that evening, but he still didn’t believe her.

The next morning when she came down from her room, she found the bodyguards waiting for her. They stood motionless on the floor of the lobby; if she hadn’t known they were Terran, she would have sworn that they didn’t even blink. Two of them, hulking mountains of Terran muscle, dressed in army fatigues so tight they might have been poured into them. She walked round them slowly.

‘Very nice,’ she said like a general on parade. ‘Very…military. Very good.’

Du’Fairosay was waiting behind them, a satisfied smile on his face. She hissed, so as not to offend them, ‘This is your doing? What in the stars are you thinking of? I don’t need, I won’t have, minders!’

‘You need protection. After yesterday you can’t deny that. I’m sorry if you don’t like it, but it is necessary.’

He didn’t sound very sorry, in fact, he didn’t sound sorry at all.

‘Necessary? Are you suggesting that I can’t judge what’s necessary?’ She was indignant. The cheek of it! ‘I think you forget yourself. You will send these…bruisers away and next time you feel it necessary to so exceed your orders, you will remember…’

‘My orders are to take all necessary measures to ensure the success of this mission and this is one of them.’

‘I fail to see …’

‘Of course you do!’ His tone was as exasperated as hers. ‘You want to walk among the people. I know. I know, believe me, Ar’Quila, I know exactly why you don’t want to take these measures. But this is not Zargras, nor Iristade; on these Terran worlds your worth is judged by how far away from the people you can afford to keep yourself. When you walk alone through the streets you harm your standing, not help it, and you put yourself in danger. I won’t let you do that.’

His expression was intent. She was touched, even in the midst of her rage, by his concern for her.

‘It’s something I have to work to change, something we all have to change, I know that. But we won’t do that hiding behind muscle. You must see that.’

‘All I see is that changing a culture is a long, slow process and now is not the time. There are people here, many people, who would like nothing better than to see you dead and the peace process extinguished. ViaVera, the government, every organization has their renegade factions, the people who think their leaders are wrong to compromise, wrong to talk and try to end the killing. There are always people who don’t want the peace. Don’t you know how much danger you are in? Don’t you know that there are people who want to kill you? You have to be careful, you have to be suspicious. If you have not been trained to be these things, then you have to learn.’

‘And take the bodyguards?’

Although he didn’t move, it seemed as though he stepped back. His expression was relieved.

‘And take the bodyguards,’ he agreed. ‘They’re here, after all. You might as well accept them as not. You know we have the budget for it.’

She realized she hadn’t even considered the money, only her visceral distaste for hierarchy and show. It was natural, she supposed. The Chi!me were not a material people.

‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘If we have the budget for it, I suppose I’d better make the best of it. I promise I will take them with me whenever I stir outside the hotel. Does that satisfy you?’ She smiled, to show she did not hold his concern against him.

‘It’s a start,’ he said.

She found she couldn’t enjoy her trips out with the bodyguards in place. She stayed in the hotel, waiting for Du’Fairosay and Par’Lennan to report to her on progress with the guerrillas. She decided that she would not call them terrorists, despite the appellation given to them by the Benan Ty press. It was judgmental, it was not respectful, and it was a fundamental of peace that all sides deserved respect.

‘I don’t know what to think of them, though,’ she said, ‘only that I can see them but I can’t imagine them at all.’

It was the afternoon of the second day after the demonstration and she was recording a message to send to Ceronodis. Ty was remote enough to make real-time communication more difficult than it was between, say, Zargras and Chi!me, and she found she liked the excuse to talk and not be interrupted. She was sure that whatever Ceronodis would say would be helpful, insightful, and she was, oddly, equally sure that she was disinclined to hear it.

‘I think we all have a fixed image of what a guerrilla would be like, sneaking through the ferns with the war marks on their cheeks and a knife in their teeth, a gloating shadow on a wall as a building blows. I know they do things like that, why else am I here, but I have to think them just as kusay as anyone in Airdrossa, or how could I do any good?’

Kusay was a Chi!me term, developed when they had first gone to the stars. It meant a person, Chi!me, human, Gargarin; someone who had lived up to the minimum standards for their species and was therefore allowed to be included in it. By claiming it for ViaVera, she felt enlightened.

‘They must eat, and sleep, and talk and laugh and receive communications from Chi!me peace envoys and talk about them, too… I know they do all these things, but I can’t imagine them doing them, and I don’t know what I do when I actually meet them. It’s quite a challenge, I hadn’t realized, and that’s all to the good, of course. It’s just that I’ve had a sheltered upbringing, I’ve never met a murderer before.’

It was odd when she thought of their work, her little message of peace going out at the same time to palace and forest, through the most and least official channels there could be, but she did not think of it much. It was for Par’Lennan and Du’Fairosay to do, not for her. It was her place to leave them to it.

The next day, Par’Lennan told her she finally had an audience with Desailly, and she was realist enough to recognize that if she was going to get to the President, it was only going to be through him.

‘I’ll go, because I have to go,’ she told Par’Lennan, sitting in his office, ‘but I do not like this system of government. Once we have peace again, this is another one of the things that will have to change.’

Par’Lennan leant back, tipping his chair so that the front legs left the floor. The headrest hit the wall in the center of the long black smudge of his habit. He smirked at her. ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘Just don’t tell that to Desailly.’ ‘Of course I wouldn’t.’

‘Although, come to think of it, I expect you already have.’

He gestured at the ceiling with a knowing finger and sauntered back upstairs to where he and Du’Fairosay were working. She wanted to be angry with him, but she could not. He had told her the embassy would be bugged, just as the hotel was. It was not his fault she had forgotten.

Waiting in the presidential anteroom for the attendant to usher her in, she realized she didn’t know at all what she expected Desailly to be like. In her head she ran through everything she had learnt about him; it didn’t help. He was from a humble background, a children’s report Du’Fairosay had found for her had been heartrending about his poor widowed mother, scrimping and saving so that her only son could get an education and better himself.

He had had three sisters and they had scrimped and saved so well he had made it all the way to the university, the top level of schooling available on Ty. After he had finished, he had come home to Chaireddan and joined the police force, in which his natural talent had been recognized so quickly that he swiftly moved up the ranks. Either that, or they were short of recruits; Quila wondered if most bright, ambitious young Chaireddan men didn’t stay as far away as possible once they had escaped. He had been chief of police before he was thirty, the youngest they had ever had, and his poor old mother had been proud of him. And then he had killed Mara Karne.

He had become a star overnight. Invited to Airdrossa to receive a medal from the President, he had not been able to move without all the broadcasting stations surrounding him, showing the watching parts of the world what their hero was doing every moment of his day. The only place they had not gone was the President’s private suite, and no one ever knew what had been said there.

They only knew that the President had come out onto the balcony with Desailly at his shoulder and had introduced to the people the new head of the CAS. He had held Desailly’s hand up in his own to acknowledge the cheers; Quila had seen the pictures. Many of Airdrossa’s political class had died over the next few years, but Desailly had survived and flourished with the CAS behind him, until now it seemed all his enemies were contained or dead.

He had a name as a private man: he was never one for parties and had remained with the Chaireddan wife he had married straight out of university and who was too shy to say a word when she appeared with him at functions. It was said about him as if it was a wondrous thing, a man still married, as if it showed something in him they would otherwise have thought was lacking. He had a name for ruthlessness, also.

The bench where they had told her to sit was a Terran antique, and uncomfortable. Quila wriggled, trying to spread her weight from one numb buttock to the other. She had met ruthless men before, men whose private lives were exemplary, men who tried to put their opponents at a disadvantage through judicious use of hard seats. She had dealt with them all, on Zargras, on Iristade, and it had never bothered her. She was IntPro, it was what she did.

He would be genial on the surface, polite and smooth, he would chat to her, try to make her like him, because that was how men like him always treated females like her, and she would smile and nod and keep her distance, as she had been taught. She knew all this, she had done so many times, yet the picture in her head was flimsy as insect wings, like ViaVera in their mountains or the people behind the closed shutters of Airdrossa, and behind it she could see nothing at all.

A door opened a little way down the corridor and a man stepped out. The light was shining in through the window beyond him, so that all she could see was his shape, silhouetted against it. She raised her head, trying not to screw up her eyes.

‘Ambassador Ar’Quila?’ the man said. ‘I’m Petrus Desailly. Won’t you come in?’

He was better dressed than she expected. Many of the men in Airdrossa were sporting copies of Chi!me dress, overjackets with round collars and fastenings down one side, made up in such cheap, dull materials it made her wince to think of wearing them. Desailly’s was higher quality than that, but cut in a strange, symmetrical style with diagonal lapels folding back on either side of his chest that she guessed would be Terran. The jacket was plain, but on each lapel he wore a small badge. On the left it was the lion of Benan in the traditional green and gold, on the right an arrangement of stars she didn’t recognize in the red, white and blue she knew to be Terran. As she walked past him into the office he saw her looking.

‘You’re wondering about my badges?’ He smiled. ‘I never take them off. The right, here, is for thinking, action, politics, if you will. The left, that’s for emotion. Where the heart is.’

He was a Benanist, of course. Everyone said so.

He was a small man, hardly taller than her, his face a white stain under the dark brown of his unruly hair. The overwhelming impression she had was of seriousness, a concentration in that unremarkable face and the watchful eyes. You wouldn’t notice him in a crowd and that would be, in the end, all the worse for you. She shook his hand when he offered it. It was cool, clean, not too firm, and with half her mind she thought, inappropriately, this is the hand that held the blaster, this is the finger that fired.

‘Please, sit down.’ He gestured to an armchair beside the window. She sat.

***

She talked like all her kind. He had met enough of them, over the last years, to recognize the type. She was pretty, he decided, half-listening, with her indigo hair all piled up on her head and her blue skin under her robe so delicate that a movement could shatter it. It was a time of great opportunities for Benan Ty, she was saying, they could go out there and take their place in the galaxy.

‘All those resources can be yours. We’ve learned to grow past the stage where any other race is seen as a rival. The galaxy is limitless. There is no space to defend, no borders, no protected trade. There is only us and all the other races, doing business and helping our people to grow, expand, be all they can be. Ty can be a part of that. We will help you, we will give you everything you need and a thousand other things you don’t even know yet that you want.

‘We can bring you the galaxy, we can open up the galaxy to you. Trade, growth, UP membership, even. I know Ty shares representation with Benan, but wouldn’t you like your own voice? Your own chance to participate in the democracy of planets? We can help you help your people, if you’ll let us and, in turn, you can help us, because I’m sure we have much that we can learn from you, trade with you, as well, once we get to know you better.’

She leaned forward as she spoke, belief shining out of her like a beacon. If he heard the spaces between her words, it was clear she didn’t.

‘Ty has been independent for longer than you’ve been alive. Why do you come to us now? What is so special now?’ It was a difficult question, designing to trip her. She smiled a little, not disturbed, and he liked her better for it.

‘You mean, is this about Terra? Of course in a way it’s about Terra. “When Terra sneezes, all the colonies catch a freeze”, isn’t that the saying? So of course, now that there’s a government again on Terra we’re trying to help rebuild in a way we just couldn’t before. We know you’ve been though instability in this part of the galaxy for many years and we want to help you get over that. And I do think this is a crucial time. You were a Terran colony once, and you can choose to remain one, in spirit if not in fact. Or you can choose to open yourselves up to other possibilities. It’s your choice.’

‘But if we don’t ‘open ourselves up’, we’d have to deal with ViaVera on our own, isn’t that so?’

Touchingly, she was outraged.

‘Not at all!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m here on behalf of my government to offer you a continuing dialogue, if you want it, about how the Chi!me can help you, but that’s completely up to you. On behalf of UP and my government, I’m also here to help you make peace with ViaVera and that doesn’t depend on anything else you choose. I don’t expect you to make a choice now, it’s not like one sweet or another, I know! I throw it out as a possibility, a dialogue for the future, if you like. For now, what we need to consider is the peace.’

‘Ah yes,’ he said. He stretched his legs out in front of him, pushed his fringe out of his eyes. ‘The peace.’

‘And for that, I will need to speak to the President.’

‘The President is unavailable.’ It was his stock answer, so well-used it was automatic. ‘I am his representative; I can speak for him.’

‘I know that. Nevertheless, my instructions are that I must speak with the President himself concerning whatever we might agree here, and I cannot bring anything to a conclusion until I have done so. When will he be available? I can come back any time that would suit.’

She had put it so firmly there was no refusal short of rudeness, and it probably wasn’t worth that. He said, conservatively, ‘I’ll see what I can arrange.’

‘Good,’ she replied. ‘Now, what we need to do is open up a dialogue with ViaVera, see if you can negotiate a settlement with them. So the best way to do that is to set up a meeting. I’ve got my people working on contacting them, and if you can have your people talk to mine about arrangements, I think we may be able to move forward to talks pretty soon. I think…’

He cut in. ‘They won’t talk.’

‘You don’t think so? I disagree, our preliminary contacts have been most hopeful. I think they will.’

She looked so smug, sitting there, so foolish and so sure. It made him angry.

‘They won’t talk,’ he repeated. His voice was thick in his own ears, rough like a day of shouting at his troops. ‘They won’t talk because they have nothing to talk about. You think they can negotiate, that they have something they want? They don’t know what they want, they kill and they kill and that’s all they are. It’s all they ever were.’

Her eyes had widened. He swallowed, moderating his tone. ‘They’ve never shown any interest in coming to talks before and you won’t get them to come now. They won’t talk.’ He leaned back in his chair, deliberating lightening his tone even while the irritation throbbed inside. ‘I’d bet on it, if my wife let me gamble.’

She smiled at that. ‘Even if you don’t gamble, will you let me prove you wrong?’

‘You can try.’

‘And if I do, will you come?’

‘And if I come, what then? What guarantee do I have that when you’ve gone back to the stars they won’t just turn their backs and start killing again? How do I know they’ll abide by anything they agree? I need surety if I’m to sell anything like this to my people, and I don’t see it.’

‘I can give you surety, UP power is your surety.’

He suppressed the urge to snort, allowed himself to look politely skeptical instead. ‘Ambassador, I don’t think ViaVera care very much for UP power.’

‘They will if it’s armed and pointed at them. UP isn’t just an abstraction, you know. We make sure it has teeth. They’ll know that, because we’ll make sure they know that. You’ll find they respect that more than you think.’

Her expression, as far as he could tell on a Chi!me face, was quizzical. He knew what she wasn’t asking him, what the whole purpose of her visit was to establish. Are you with us, or not? Do you support us, will you make trouble for us, do we have to deal with you? Are you with us? The same question, every time.

With every previous envoy, with that idiot of an Ambassador he had avoided an answer, but she was the figurehead, the one sent with the official question he had pretended had not been asked until now. He had always known that someday he would have to decide which way he would jump.

He nodded as if considering, giving himself time. He didn’t like the Chi!me. He didn’t trust the Chi!me, he wished they were a galaxy away. They had been once, and that had been better, but now they were here, and it might be the work of his days to keep them at arm’s length. But since they were here, and since they wanted to appear helpful, did he have to rebuff it? He had been circling the question for months, and still he came back to the same reply. Could it do so much harm, to take their bait and deal with the hook when he found it?

Back in Chaireddan when he was a little boy, some of his ever-changing uncles had taken him fishing. Sometimes the fish avoided the bait and went hungry. Sometimes it took the bait and died. And sometimes, just sometimes, it took the bait and got hauled out and at the last moment twisted from the hook and leaped back into the water, with food and freedom and all. It depended, really, on what the fish were prepared to risk, on the quality of the bait and the ruthlessness of the fisherman reeling them in. On what effort, ultimately, the fishermen were prepared to expend to catch them.

She was looking at him with her head on one side, in that birdlike way all the Chi!me had. He had an odd sense of lightness below him, like the highest rock above the diving pool, himself perched on one leg while all around was sky.

‘But if you’re wrong,’ he said, ‘if they won’t make peace, if we can’t come to an agreement that they will keep and end their violence, what will you do then? Will you leave us to it, will you abandon us? Or will you do what my people really need, and help us wipe them out?’

He watched her narrowly as she struggled with it. She wanted the peaceful solution, both sides dancing cheek to cheek. The sun was shining all around him and if he looked down he would fall. But he would not look down. He could hear the words in his head, stretching out before him like a bridge. If he just held himself still enough, if he didn’t hesitate.

‘Will you?’ he repeated.

She swallowed. ‘I think we can talk our way to a solution, you know that, and I won’t give up on that while there is still any way we can make it work. But if they really won’t talk, if they really won’t see that their only way forward from here is to accept a compromise that suits everybody…if they really are so blind…’ Her gaze slipped over his shoulder, as if watching an image on the wall that only she could see. She took a deep breath. ‘Then, yes. Ultimately, all legitimate governments have the right to deal with criminals and violence by any means necessary and the Chi!me will never fail to support law and justice. So, I suppose, yes.’

‘So…?’

Her tone was bleak.

‘If there are truly no other options to stop the killing, UP will kill them for you. You have my word on that.’

He had reached the other side, the ground was under his feet, and in another moment the image was gone as if it had never been. After a few pleasantries, she was almost ready to leave. ‘I’ll be in touch about a Presidential audience,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘I really do need to see him, even if it’s not for long.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. And if there’s anything else I can do, anything I can tell you…?’

She started to shake her head, then held up her hand.

‘Actually, there is something. It’s just curiosity, but I’ve been hearing about it since Benan and no one seems to be able to give me any details. You can tell me about the Caduca.’

‘The Caduca?’ He relaxed, chatting. ‘I don’t know much; I don’t think anybody does. It’s some Jeba idea originally, I think, some mystic leader who comes once a generation if you really deserve them, or something like that. The name “Caduca” is old Terran, though, something to do with a snake symbol, an old, dead snake, something like that.’

‘It sounds pretty harmless?’ she ventured.

‘Maybe it sounds it, but it’s got the peasants going round the villages with snakeskins round their shoulders, singing nonsense they don’t even know the meaning of and blathering on about the leader, the one who will save them all at the end of the world, or some such rubbish. ViaVera say that they have it, do you know that? Whatever that means, the peasants believe them. You didn’t believe me, when I said they wouldn’t talk, but there’s your answer for you. In their eyes, they’re not just murderers; it’s religion, and you can’t argue with that. You can’t have dialogue with the divinely-inspired; you can’t reason with someone who thinks they’re sent to blow up buildings by the nearest thing they’ve ever seen to God.’

He took a breath.

‘So that’s all I know about the Caduca, and if you ever meet the snakeskin God out in the forest, I’d be grateful if you’d introduce me, as I’d like a few words with it.’ He smiled. ‘Dialogue, you see? I’m learning your ways already.’

‘It’s always good to learn new things, but they don’t always supersede the old ones. Thank you for telling me about the Caduca. I always try to hear as many sides of a thing as possible, and it was very interesting.’ She was half-smiling now, her face shining with surety. ‘But I still think you’re wrong,’ she said.

She went soon after that, with many polite promises to return. He asked her, as he had planned, to save a dance with him at the formal ball that evening and she had agreed politely enough. He couldn’t tell if she relished the prospect or not.

He watched her go across the courtyard with her bodyguards. She had covered her blue skin with a cloak like the local women wore, but she was still instantly recognizable. She stepped through the gate past the guard post and out into the street. She should have come in a transport, he would have to mention it, it wasn’t safe for her to walk the streets as she did.

If she was a daughter of his…but she was too old to be anyone’s daughter, too old to be his, and some time he would have to work out what it was about the Chi!me that allowed them to do so much and see so little that they remained like children; powerful, sophisticated children but still children, inside. The guards closed the gate behind her. He shrugged, he would think about it another time, when he had leisure. He tapped his terminal screen, sending the messages that had come in during the meeting to his secretary to deal with. Then he opened another door and went to see the President.

3

Quila strolled away from the Presidential palace, her bodyguards obediently at her heels. She knew the moment she had stepped outside the room that it had gone well. She would not allow the creeping disquiet the aftermath of any occasion brought to obscure it. It had gone well; she had done well. She had talked Desailly into agreeing to talk to ViaVera if she could get them to the table, and that was all she had had to do. Admittedly, he did not think ViaVera would ever agree to talks, but that was her problem, not his. She would see the President and confirm it, and then when the meeting was arranged, Desailly would not be able to withdraw.

She would have done it, when even Du’Fairosay who was supposed to be her assistant might have doubted that it could be done. She saw it in his eyes sometimes when he looked at her, she thought, a kind of condescending sadness like an adult watching a child that does not know it’s sick. She would have showed him; she would have showed all of them. She would have to get her message off to Ceronodis tonight; she would be so proud.

It was too hot for walking. She realized that, deep in thought, she had slowed her pace to barely a crawl. The road from the palace was usually a busy one, particularly here where it turned into the main shopping street, but although most of the shops were open there were hardly any Ty people about. They must be staying inside, away from the heat. Sensible of them. Her hood was sticking to the back of her head, she could feel her hair, heavy with sweat, clinging in runnels all down her neck.

Where the sun caught the material it was so warm it felt like it was melting, and although there was nothing in front of her face she could hardly breathe. There was a limit to anyone’s endurance and she didn’t care if she did get stared at.

‘Bother Fairo and his rules,’ she exclaimed, and pulled the cloak off.

It was easier going without it, but the heat was still so intense she found herself disinclined to walk much faster. It didn’t matter, she wasn’t in a hurry. The other times she had been down this street, there had been so many people she had barely been able to see anything. It was pleasant to stroll down the center and survey the shop windows; the things on display were some of the most valuable clues to the culture, after all. It was mostly local produce, she thought, though she did see some heavy-duty clothes with a Gargarin cut. There were fewer Chi!me clothes, which did not surprise her. That would change. One of her bodyguards, Beres? Peres?, turned to survey the street behind her, tripping slightly on the uneven roadway as he did so. It was the third time in as many minutes, and she couldn’t help noticing that his finger was curled on the trigger of his blaster.

‘Is anything the matter?’ she asked.

‘No. Keep walking.’ His tone was brusque, stressed. He turned round again, rather obvious, she thought, if there was anyone behind them. He was supposed to be a professional.

‘Is there someone following us?’

‘There’s no problem. Just keep going.’ The other one, Micail, glanced back now as well, but only for a second. ‘Can you walk any faster?’ he asked.

Quila turned to the window of the nearest shop, on the corner with a narrow side street, and stopped dead. It was a jeweler, the display a collection of bright green stones set in silver. She couldn’t tell how it was supposed to be worn, she hadn’t seen enough ladies with jewelry in Airdrossa.

She kept her voice low, but as steely as possible.

‘If there is someone following me, I would be obliged if you would tell me,’ she said. ‘Now, let’s try again. Is there anyone behind us?’

Micail nodded.

‘Following us?’

Another nod, both of them this time.

‘Where are they now?’

‘Back at the window of the vegetable shop, Ambassador.’

‘Waiting for us?’

‘Yes, Ambassador.’

‘Good. So, this is what we’ll do…’

‘Um…Ambassador?’ That was Beres, braver than his colleague. ‘If we could keep moving, we should soon be back into the hotel district and once we’re there…’

‘We’ll be in a place with wider streets, more vegetation and even fewer people. An ideal spot, in fact, for them to jump us. So we won’t be going that way.’ Her soles were light on the pavement, muscles tense and ready. She smiled at their worried faces. ‘In fact, all you have to do is follow me.’

Without another word, she plunged down the side street, and ran.

For the first few steps it was a mistake. Her feet ached from the hard road, her breath pounded in her ears. Her cloak, folded over her arm, began stickily to slip and her legs ached from the unaccustomed exercise. It was foolish, ridiculous; she would be caught, shamed. Then, and she did not know how, she felt her stride lengthen, her feet trip airily over the stones. She let the cloak drop.

She remembered this. At school on Chi!me Two, she and Ceronodis sprinting together from the pursuing team, ducking through the alleyways as fast as they could go, hiding behind bushes with their hands over each other’s mouths to stop the giggles. Later, on Zargras as a young trainee, when the boy supposed to ambush her had let the muzzle of his dummy blaster stick out a little beyond his cover, she had grabbed and seized it without breaking stride, whirled it round and tapped him on the head before racing away. She remembered she was good at this.

She supposed she was in some danger, but she couldn’t really feel concerned. Not when she could run so fleet and true, not when she had two bodyguards puffing stentorously behind her. She wasn’t sure there was really anything to be running from, but that didn’t really matter. She remembered how this had always made her happy. Arms pumping, hair flying free, Quila sailed round the next corner into another alley and slowed. At the end, nearer than she had expected, the blank wall of a building blocked the way, but she thought there was probably a passage out around the rear, to the left. It was as good a place as any to pause. She dropped her pace to a walk.

‘Are they still behind us?’ she puffed. ‘Did you see?’

No reply. She realized suddenly that she couldn’t hear anything. No rustle of protective clothing, no breathing but her own. She swung round to the empty street and, as she did so, something whined past her ear. She felt a small, sharp cut like fire on the side of her head and when she put her hand up to it, it was wet. She brought her hand back so she could see what the wetness was, stared at the indigo stickiness webbing her fingers.

Everything seemed to be happening very slowly. She had been standing there, staring at her hand, forever, yet she could feel herself still gasping at the first pain. She heard the words ‘I’ve been shot,’ and she didn’t know if she had said them. Shot. It was so strange; she could hardly understand it. Shot. It was so strange.

There was a sound behind her, and without knowing she meant to, she dropped forward and down and dived for the only cover, a stack of metal crates halfway along the right-hand wall. Something whirred down the alley and crashed into the wall of the house opposite the other end in a shower of splinters. Blaster bolts, part of Quila’s mind registered. Good ones. She raised her head gingerly so that she could peer over the top of the crate. Another bolt whistled past her, too high to be any danger.

They were on the roof at the end of the alley. It was a good position for covering the entrance, just as if they had known she was coming. But maybe not so good for covering her escape. She slipped down again into the shelter of the crates. It was a stroke of luck, their being here, and she was suitably grateful to them. There must be a café or a bar nearby that dumped them there. Some of them had been there a long time, their metallic surface scratched and pitted as if with messages; a rough sketch that almost looked like a human, outlined in white, strokes and angles in lines like a doodler’s impression of writing. It seemed a little futile, whatever they meant, for who was going to see it there?

She pulled her attention back to the problem at hand, and considered. There was a passage off to the left at the end of the alley, she was sure, leading around the back of the building and away. The shooters were on top of that building, so their view of the end of the alley would be limited at best. If she crept very fast along the wall to the end, they would not be able to aim at her, and she could be away round the corner before they had been able to get into place. It was all about knowing the angles; she remembered saying that to By’Remse, the class champion, one day after she’d beaten him at chase, and he was so angry she had thought for a moment he wanted to hit her. The situation then had almost been similar; the blocked alley, the field of fire. She had won then and she would win now, however bad the situation might seem; she knew it. She was Ar’Quila and she could do it.

She was sure they would be watching, so there wasn’t much point in peeking out.

‘Oh, stars protect me,’ she muttered. Her hands clenched once on the side of the nearest crate. She shut her eyes and launched herself blind down the wall to the end of the alley. The whirr of the bolts started almost at once. She kept her eyes closed, wincing at every explosion as if she did not know yet whether she had been hit. She could almost feel it ripping through her breastbone, severing her head, running her limbs with fire in her imagination as she ran. Ears ringing, she cannoned into the wall and quickly felt along it to the passage out. Mercifully, this was covered.

She sprinted along it for a short way, ever conscious that the assassins would know exactly where she was going, that they would be waiting for her when the roof ran out. She panted round the corners. Maybe she could get out before they made it there? She knew she was fooling herself, could not quite believe that there would be an escape at the end of it, when she saw the door. The broken door leading into an overgrown garden, hung around with trees so that no one looking down into it could see anything but green. Bounded by a low wall, with the gardens of other houses stretching away beyond it.

‘Thank the Oneness,’ Quila breathed with a devotion she only felt in crises, and dived through.

***

Du’Fairosay pulled the hotel door open just as she was reaching for the handle. He stopped so abruptly she thought he would fall over and stared at her.

‘Quila.’ It was hardly more than a breath. His eyes closed.

‘Fairo…’ she began.

His lids snapped back. After the first shock of seeing her, he had remembered to be furious. Her words died on her tongue. He held the door open for her and, meekly, she went in.

She wasn’t used to rebukes, but in a way she couldn’t blame him. Du’Fairosay must have had almost as great a shock as she did, when the bodyguards had returned without her.

‘You ran away from your bodyguards! Someone was chasing you, and you ran away from them! That was…that was…’

‘Irresponsible.’ He didn’t dare to say it, but she could. ‘I know. I know, I’m sorry. I thought they were right behind me, then they weren’t. I’m sorry.’

All the way back to the hotel through the gardens, she had been storing up rage against the bodyguards who had deserted her and Du’Fairosay who had made her rely on them in the first place. But somehow on the doorstep of the hotel, after that one brief moment of gladness, he had made it all her fault, and she was suddenly so tired she had let him. It was the best way to get through it, anyway. Take responsibility and be better, wasn’t that the idea?

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.

Du’Fairosay smiled thinly. ‘You don’t have to apologize to me.’

His anger was concern for her, of course, and she appreciated that he cared. If it seemed extreme, strained, she shouldn’t wonder at it. She supposed he would be censured if she died. Off-worlders were always particularly sensitive about that. She realized suddenly how tired she was, how much she longed to lie down and rest before she had to dress for the dance.

‘It’s alright, Fairo,’ she said. ‘It was only a little danger and I’m trained to handle that. Anyway, didn’t you warn me to take the bodyguards with me? You did your job. After all, if I escaped, I owe it all to you.’

He stared at her with a strange look, as if she had spoken the words in some forbidden language she didn’t understand. His lips were pursed so tight he could hardly get the words out.

‘I have things to do,’ he said, then turned on his heel and strode away.