Part 10

Quila

The Montcada gardens were famous. The hotel lobby was full of them, screens listing their attractions in the wet season and the dry, pictures cast onto the walls behind reception showing the flowers in full, lurid bloom. She found them very different from the night gardens of Iristade; from moth wings, silver against the memory of cheers. Even though it was nearly the end of the season it was still very hot in Airdrossa. She and Du’Fairosay strolled along the fountain path, the jets forming a watery arch over their heads. She could hear the faint hiss of the mechanism as they passed each one, and the cries of children playing on the distant lawns. The sun bounced, iridescent, off the droplets on her arms.

‘You must tell Par’Lennan how pleased I am with his work,’ she said after a while, ‘in case I don’t get a chance to. And yours of course, setting up this meeting. Everyone on this world said ViaVera would never agree, after all, and you’ve both proved them wrong. You should be proud of yourselves.’

She looked sideways at Du’Fairosay, but his face betrayed little emotion. If anything, he seemed slightly uncomfortable at the praise.

‘We only try to serve,’ he said.

‘Well, of course, but that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize when you serve well, and you have.’ She wanted to tell him he should not defray deserved congratulation out of bashfulness, but it occurred to her suddenly that she was always lecturing Du’Fairosay.

‘I expect Par’Lennan told you I’ve finally got an interview with the President arranged? I have to wait three weeks, if you can believe it, but I’m looking forward to seeing what he’s like. For all that Desailly has all the power, he’s still the President, after all. It will be interesting to find what’s actually in the hollow center. Do you want to come? I’m sure I can arrange it if you do.’ Du’Fairosay spread his hands no. ‘Ah well, I suppose you have enough to be getting on with.’

They reached the end of the fountains and started back the other way.

‘I wonder how much Terise did to get this agreement,’ Quila mused.

Du’Fairosay turned his head towards her. ‘Terise?’

‘You know, the ViaVera woman. She said she would try to get them to come to the meeting, and now they are. I just wonder if she had anything to do with it.’

‘If she was who she said she was, I’m sure she would have moved the sea and the stars to get you what you wanted,’ he said. ‘For what she was promised, anyone would.’

It sounded sour to her. She shot him a narrow look. In the month since her meeting with Terise, they had somehow not found the time to discuss it. At the depth of his rancor, she wondered suddenly if she had been avoiding it.

‘Do you think I shouldn’t have done it, then? I should have sent her away?’

He averted his gaze, pinch-lipped.

‘No. You were correct.’

‘Come on, Fairo. Be honest with me, at least. Clearly you don’t think I was correct, or you wouldn’t have spoken in the way that you did. Do you think I should have had nothing to do with her? But then who knows what the consequences would have been? She promised that she would help us get our meeting, and we have it. We don’t know how much that was her doing, but we can’t deny we’ve got what we want. I don’t think there are any guarantees that we would have done otherwise.’

‘No, I know.’

‘Then, what?’

He was silent for a moment.

‘I just think it’s a high price to pay, that’s all. I don’t think it’s one UP, or Chi!me, can afford.’

‘A price? You mean her man? The amnesty?’

‘I’ve read about that man Ladyani. Do you know what he’s done? He’s been the head of ViaVera operations for more than twenty years, he’s a mass murderer. If the Chi!me let him go, if we seem to condone those actions, we will never win. The Chi!me have to be seen to be just, we can’t seem not to know about the people he’s killed. We can’t turn a blind eye, not when the universe is watching us. We have to be seen to do justice. You remember the train to Santos? The way those people died? They say they stood round and laughed, have you heard that? That’s what they say of him.’

‘I didn’t know you knew so much about him. You should have said something.’

‘Would you have wanted to hear?’

The fountains pattered on the ground around them. She couldn’t think of a reply to that.

After a while, he added, stiffly, ‘I’m sorry if I have been disrespectful.’

‘No, Fairo, it’s alright.’ She sighed. Some things should not be said, some things should be simply understood; the gap between intention and action, possible and desirable, promise and result. She had not wanted to have to explain this, but she could see it was necessary if she was to keep his trust. Trust was so important between them; she owed him an explanation.

‘You’re not wrong, to say what you’ve said. You’re right, some crimes can’t be forgiven, can’t be wiped out however much we might want to. And no crimes can be wiped out because it is expedient to do so.’

Terise would be back at ViaVera now, with the man Ladyani. She couldn’t picture her there. It was very possible that she would never see her again, never know if she tried to help them, or have any chance to try to keep the promise she made. It still felt strange.

‘Sometimes you have to undertake one thing and mean another,’ she heard herself go on. ‘I had to agree to her request to help Ladyani, because if I hadn’t, she would not have helped us. And I did mean, I do mean to help him, in a way. If we take him, we will not terminate him out of hand, we will not torture him and put him on show in the way I am sure Desailly would love to do. I would see he got a fair trial and a fair ending. I think in the circumstances that is all she could reasonably expect from us, whatever was said. If it wasn’t made exactly clear, well, sometimes these things have to be done. It’s not ideal, it’s distasteful, even, but it’s what we have to do to bring peace to these people.’

She looked out through the scarves of water, over the park. Nearby a few young couples were scattered over the grass; beyond them, a group of children played a shrieking game with sticks and a brightly-colored ball.

‘I remember once when I was very young, maybe only two cycles, my class at school were taken on a trip to one of the outer worlds. You maybe came too old for them, but we always had trips when we were little, it’s how we learned. I don’t remember the name of the world. I think we only went to part of it, one continent, maybe. It was a mass of plants, I remember that, leaves so thick you had to hack your way through to follow paths that people had cleared only the day before, that was how fast they grew. It was an incredibly fertile place, but it wasn’t any use. No one could live there, it was so dense it might as well have been a desert. We camped there overnight, and on the second day we carried on slashing our way through the plants to the edge of the sea where we were being picked up.

‘It was about midday when we came to a sort of clearing, not really clear, but easier, somewhere where the plants didn’t press quite so close around you, where you could look about without the leaves getting in your face. I remember there were all these bumps, hummocks really, and I asked my teacher what they were. They were ruins of homes, he said. They were the houses of the people who had lived there off the land when it was farmland, not jungle, and prospered there for a long time. Then a war came, and bad men came, and they were being killed and couldn’t keep their farms any longer, and the jungle came creeping back and took it all so that no one could live there. A whole continent, lost, because the law was lost.’

One of the children fell over, screaming. The others picked it up.

‘That’s what we’re doing, you and I, that’s what we’re defending. All the people who need to know that they are safe in their homes and their fields, who need to know there is a system of justice, of law and order. A gardener that can keep the weeds from the beds and make it bloom in beautiful harmony as it should again. It’s not the most heroic calling, maybe, it’s not one for which we ever receive much thanks, but that’s not the point. As they used to say when I was first training at IntPro, if you’re here for the honor and glory, you shouldn’t be here. Gardeners are never the aristocrats, never the rich or the well-respected, but they are necessary, the most necessary sometimes of all. We are the gardeners. It’s all we are, and all we should hope to be.’

His face was unreadable. ‘Don’t you ever think you should leave them to their own gardens? Sav Serve yourself and leave them to find their own way? It would be easier.’

‘Well, of course it would, but we aren’t here because things are easy. We had the luck, the tremendous good luck to be Chi!me, and we have to use that luck to help other people who were born into much worse situations than we. If it means we have to be humble, then we have to remember whom we serve, and what it is we are set to achieve. And if it means that we have to dissemble to get where we need to be then so be it, because men like Ladyani are a blight that cannot be allowed to go free, no matter how useful their women may be to us.’ Her throat felt oddly thick. She swallowed. ‘However much we may like their women, however much we may sympathize.’

The sun beat down through the arcs of water, shining in her eyes. She stopped at the edge of the path and let the droplets run down her back.

‘It has to be about the law,’ she said. ‘In the end, there’s nothing else.’

The jets hissed in the air around her. Du’Fairosay looked at her with an expression she couldn’t interpret.

‘We’d better be getting back to the embassy,’ he said, neutrally. ‘We told Par’Lennan we wouldn’t be long; he’ll be wondering where we are.’