Burning Bright

He took the short road to the Ghetto where Chauvelin lived with most of the rest of Burning Bright’s noncitizen residents, skirting the cliff edge above the delivery basins of Junction Pool, then cutting straight through the industrial zone past the spaceport at Newfields. A column of smoke and steam hung in the distance, the winds slowly bending and fraying it to nothing: someone was saving money on launch costs, flying chemical rockets. The pilots who ran the orbital shuttle would be cursing, Ransome thought, and smiled.

The ambassadorial residence stood on one of the highest points in the Ghetto—on all of the Landing Isle, the largest piece of the original landmass: the hsai liked heights, and most of Burning Bright’s inhabitants didn’t care. The household staff had been told to expect him. Ransome paused at the gate only long enough to identify himself—most of Chauvelin’s household knew him by sight, after nearly fifteen years in the ambassador’s service—and then a pair of hsai servants came out of the main house to meet him. The male took the denki-bike, and the hsaii—Chauvelin’s steward Iameis je-Sou’tsian, Ransome realized with some surprise—bowed politely.

“Sia Chauvelin has asked me to bring you directly to the garden,” she said, in tradetalk, and Ransome answered in low mian-hsai.

“I’m honored by the courtesy.” And very surprised by it, he added silently. What the hells is going on, to make me rate this treatment? He followed without question, however—he knew better than to ask that question—and je-Sou’tsian brought him through the sudden cool of a service passageway, bypassing the main house, and led him out as suddenly onto a path that ran between tall walls of flowering hedge. Ransome blinked, momentarily confused, then oriented himself. This was the maze, a part of the garden derived from hsai tradition, and one that Chauvelin rarely used. Je-Sou’tsian followed the turns without hesitation, however— maybe it is true, Ransome thought, that there really is only one pattern in use on all the worlds of HsaioiAn—and let them out through a red-lacquered gate onto the carefully landscaped lawn of the upper terrace. Chauvelin was waiting a few meters away, seated comfortably in the shade of a bellflower tree, a luncheon tray beside him and a data manager resting in his lap.

“Na Ransome is here,” je-Sou’tsian said, and the ambassador looked up with an abstracted smile.

“Ransome. Join me, why don’t you?” To je-Sou’tsian, he added, “Thank you. That’ll be all.”

“Yes, sia,” the steward answered, bowing, and backed away.

Ransome made his way down the terraced slope, stepping carefully around the elaborately casual plantings. He was very aware of the ambassador’s residence looming behind him, the sunlight polishing the white-stone walls and glinting off the long windows. It felt unpleasantly as though someone were watching him, and he seated himself deliberately on the wall that overlooked the lower terrace. Chauvelin glanced up at him, gave a quick smile, and Ransome smiled rather wryly in return. If it had been the cliff wall, overlooking the hundred-meter drop to the Old City, he would never in a thousand years have settled himself there, especially with Chauvelin sitting less than two meters from him, and they both knew it.

“So good of you to come,” Chauvelin said, with only the lightest note of irony.

Ransome let his smile widen. “I was working,” he said. “What is this about Cella, and the Game?”

“That’s the very question I’d like you to answer,” Chauvelin said.

Ransome spread his hands—a human gesture, not hsai, and deliberately so. “I don’t know. I’ve been out of the Game for three years, I barely pay attention to the Game nets except when I’m trolling for images. I don’t know what Cella wants—except that if she wants it, Damian Chrestil probably wants it, too.”

Chauvelin nodded slightly, though Ransome could not be sure if the movement was a response to his words or to something on his screen. “I need to know why. Ji-Imbaoa came in this morning—”

“Sober?” Ransome murmured, with just the right note of shock, and allowed himself a brief smile when the word surprised a laugh from Chauvelin.

“Mostly so. At any rate, he came to me complaining that Damian Chrestil is interested in you, via Cella—he knows you as my agent, so don’t ask—and demanding to know why. When I checked him out, I found the same thing: lots of agitation to get you back into the Game, and usually Cella’s at the back of it. I want to know what’s going on.”

“I told you,” Ransome began, and Chauvelin nodded.

“I know you’ve been working. A commission for Syndic Leonerdes, and that big installation for the governor. But I need to know what’s going on, I-Jay. Ji-Imbaoa—well, I won’t bore you with hsai politics.”

“Bore me,” Ransome said.