The ambassador asked for a reply before the afternoon changed color.
Tobin translated that as before sunset. He entered the request in the diplomatic schedule and offered refreshments, which the visitor politely declined.
Her name was Sev. The membranes along her arms had been green when she arrived. By lunchtime they were turning gold.
Tobin assumed this was a mood.
The briefing packet contained six hundred pages of trade priorities and twelve pages of biology. He'd been given the job that morning because the regular liaison was ill. Nobody asked whether he'd finished reading.
Sev sat beside the window. Through her translation device, she asked whether the proposed agreement still required her people to surrender exclusive access to their navigation network.
"The minister is considering your amendments," Tobin said.
"How long?"
"An hour, perhaps."
The gold membranes folded against her body.
"That is a large part of what remains."
Tobin opened the biology section.
An individual of Sev's species lived approximately nineteen human hours after emergence. Their young inherited extensive sensory and practical memory through structures carried inside the parent body. Their civilization accumulated knowledge across generations that rarely overlapped for long.
The ship in orbit had crossed interstellar space under automatic control, carrying a succession of thousands of short lives. Sev had emerged aboard it the previous evening. She was already older than Tobin had understood a person could become while sitting in a chair.
He called the minister's office.
"The ambassador's lifespan is in the briefing," the secretary said.
"She needs an answer now."
"We're aware of the time pressure."
The secretary's tone made Tobin look at the negotiation schedule again. Long consultations followed every refusal. Requests for clarification occupied hours. The visitors' last two delegates had signed provisional concessions near the end of their lives.
The schedule had worked as intended.
Tobin went to the minister's private corridor. An aide stopped him before the door.
"We can transmit an answer in seconds," Tobin said. "They're making her wait."
"Both sides use their advantages."
"She'll die."
"She will die today regardless. The question is whether she leaves her people an agreement."
Sev was standing when Tobin returned. Her translation device rested against her chest, pulsing softly. She had requested transport back to her ship.
The security office estimated forty minutes to clear her departure. It was the same security process the next delegation would have to complete on arrival.
Tobin asked whether she could rest or slow her metabolism. He heard how desperately human the question was.
"Can you?" she asked.
He sat beside her.
Outside the window, maintenance workers were cutting the lawn. The sound entered the room in short bursts whenever someone opened the courtyard door.
"I thought the color was how you felt," Tobin said.
Sev looked at the fading gold along her arms.
"It is how much time my body has kept."
He told her what he'd found in the negotiation schedule. She listened without surprise.
"We believed it might be an accident of scale," she said. "My predecessor asked me to establish whether it was deliberate."
"It is."
"Then I have an answer to take home."
Her ship could receive transmissions without the departure clearance. Tobin helped connect her device to the room's communication port. She spoke in brief, rapid sequences. The human translation couldn't keep up. Text accumulated across the screen faster than he could read it.
She transmitted the proposed contract, his explanation and the waiting times. Then she disconnected the public channel and began a message for the young she carried.
Tobin looked away to give her privacy.
"Stay," she said. "Someone should witness this part too."
The membranes opened. Inside a transparent fold near her chest were three small shapes, already moving. She touched each one and spoke to it. Their bodies brightened in response, receiving something the translation device did not attempt to render.
Departure clearance arrived while she was doing this.
Tobin called for the transport crew and told them to bring the small environmental carrier from her arrival luggage. Sev could no longer walk to it. He and a crew member lifted her, taking care not to fold the membranes beneath her body.
The gold had become almost white.
"Will they be able to leave?" she asked.
"Yes."
He checked the clearance again before saying it a second time.
Sev died before the carrier reached the courtyard. Her young remained alive in its controlled atmosphere, pressed against the folds that had sheltered them. The crew took them to the shuttle with her body.
Tobin kept copies of the schedule and the calls he'd made. That evening he sent them to the parliamentary inquiry office under his own name. He didn't know whether anyone there would read the biology section either.
The minister's secretary called as he was packing his desk.
"We're ready for the ambassador now."
"She's dead."
A pause. Then the secretary asked when the next representative would be available.
On the departure screen, the shuttle was rising toward the ship. Tobin watched until it became too small to distinguish from the daylight.
"They have her answer," he said, and ended the call.
