Apparently, Catherine Wells decided that she wanted to be a writer when she was ten years old, and that was that. A novelist and librarian, she has only recently begun writing short fiction. Her novels include Beyond the Gates and Mother Grimm, which was a finalist for the 1997 Philip K. Dick Award.
If  " 'Bassador" is any indication, she should definitely devote more of her time to the short stuff.

'Bassador
Catherine Wells

We could hear the rumble of their hovercycles echoing through the concrete canyons long before they arrived. My mother seized my hand, terror in her eyes, and dragged me out of the street. "Trabina! Hssht! Come!" I resisted, dragging my feet, craning my neck toward the throaty sound of power.
A morbid thrill shot through me, a curiosity/dread, as the time I had seen the Pigatzo beat up a ganga outside my window. Only Powers rode hovercycles, sweeping down through the projects from the north, flaunting their wealth and their strength with their beautiful machines. I had seen three different Powers in my project: the Tunnel Runners, the Pigatzo, the Fetts. But rumors had been circulating all week that a new Power was coming, one that brought more trouble than all the others combined. I was seven years old; I wanted to see it.
My mother yanked at my arm, jerked it nearly from its socket, and hauled me up the steps of our building so that I fell and scraped my bare knees on the eroded cement. "Trabina! Come!" she snapped. "They almost here!" She caught me round the waist with one arm and ran for the door.
Suddenly the street was filled with the thunder of half a dozen hover-cycles retroing to a stop in front of the building. My mother turned like a cornered animal, back braced against the door. From her protecting arms I saw them dismount, six helmeted figures in worn leather that winked with metal studs.
"Bookali," my mother whispered.
Four of them stood guard over the hovercycles, faced in four directions, rifles carried in the crooks of their arms. Another threw a disinterested glance toward my mother and me, then turned and nodded toward the empty building across the street. He and the sixth Bookali strode toward it, cleated boots ringing on the paving.
They tested the door, found it code locked. One produced a small box, long and flat, which he attached to the key panel. After a moment he removed it, touched the door handle, and the door sprang open. Powers, indeed, who could pick a code lock without triggering the building's defenses. Three ganga had tried to force that door once; two had died for their foolishness.
My mother keyed our own building now, quietly, carefully, not to attract any attention. The door gave a soft buzz and suddenly four rifles were trained on us. We froze, afraid even to breathe; then slowly, cautiously, Mother pushed the door open a crack and we melted inside. Even as the door shut off my view, the four rifles had not moved.
As soon as it was sealed, I wriggled from my mother's arms and ran for the landing, braced my arms on the windowsill and drew myself up to look out at the scene below. The four guards again faced four directions; their two comrades had gone inside. The hovercycles rested on their gravfoils, gleaming in the occasional ray of light that filtered through clouds and past concrete towers to play across the canyon floor. The bikes were black and silver, like their riders, and I thought they were the most beautiful things I had ever seen.
"Trabina!" my mother hissed. "Na! Come away!" But I would not, though I heard her clatter up behind me and knew my backside would pay the price for my disobedience. But I watched as the two Bookali came back out and sealed the building behind them. They were mounting their hovercycles as my mother seized me around my waist and hauled me away; but she, too, paused to look out as the six bikes coughed to life, hovering just off the ground. Then, almost as one, they engaged thrust and roared down the street, leaving only their echoes behind.
"Curse be," my mother muttered after them. "Stay away from my project." But it was not to be.

No one wanted the Bookali in their neighborhood, for it inevitably drew the attention of the other Powers. The Pigatzo were said to burn Bookali headquarters whenever they found them, and the Fetts to do worse. Anyone who associated with the Bookali could expect to come under scrutiny as well, and dire tales were told of innocent children who had been lured inside a Bookali headquarters somewhere.
My friend Shenka and I watched as the Bookali returned to our project with truckloads of boxes. Shenka was older than I by at least a year, and dark to my light. She was taller, as well, and stood on her tiptoes on the fifth-floor landing to see out the window and down to the street below. I, of course, braced my spindly arms on the sill to attain such height, strong from much practice of this particular exercise.
I looked at the featureless building below, its dull gray face blending with all the others in this concrete canyon. Awnings were long gone, painted signs obliterated, everything covered with the universal grime of the projects. I had seen that building every day of my life and thought nothing of it; now suddenly it was mysterious.
My mother passed by on her way to the laundry. "Outlaws," she muttered, pausing to peer over my shoulder. "Now be trouble." She yanked my twisting braid for no reason and continued on her way.
Outlaws. It was a strange condemnation. There was not much of law in the projects; Powers kept the law where Powers lived, and only came to the projects to visit retribution on those who dared to venture outside them. So what was this new Power doing here?
"What are Bookali?" I asked my friend as the dark-clad figures loaded the heavy boxes onto sleds. Sweat gleamed on their foreheads, and occasionally one would strip out of his leather jacket. Some of the Bookali were women, but most were men, and clearly accustomed to this hard labor.
"Trouble," Shenka replied, but I thought it was her mother's opinion. Shenka herself had little imagination.
"But Pigatzo make war on ganga, and Fetts chase Tunnel Runners- what Bookali do?" I persisted in the clipped speech of the projects. "Keep secrets," Shenka replied with authority. "That what my uncle say."
The answer seemed silly to me. I did not know Shenka's uncle, and I was not prone to trust any man. When a boy turned ten, he went to the ganga; he was not given an option. Then he died, or became a Tunnel Runner, or simply disappeared. Few men stayed in the projects, and those who did tended to sleep by day and forage by night, so I did not see much of them. I had no reason for trust.
Below us, the power sleds loaded with boxes glided smoothly over the pocked paving and into the building across the street. Other things were carried in as well: gridwork, planking, unidentifiable jumbles of metal and plastic collapsed together. There was some furniture, all of it spartan; but mostly there were the boxes.
And through it all the four guards stayed at their posts, alert for any movement, any sign of trouble. They got none from us; the people of the project-even the ganga-stayed away. But I would not help but notice that the Bookali made no trouble, either: they searched no buildings, yelled no abuse to people inside, fired no weapons through open windows.
"Why Pigatzo hate them?" I wondered aloud, for they did none of the things the ganga did, that I could see.
" 'Cause they tell secrets to people," Shenka replied. "My uncle say. Say they tell people things they shouldn't know, and it make them sick."
"But why Pigatzo hate them for that?" I asked, puzzled. "Pigatzo na care if people sick; then people na make trouble for Pigatzo."
Shenka shrugged. "Maybe they tell secrets about Pigatzo," she suggested. "Or maybe-" She strained with the effort of speculation. "Maybe the secrets make people crazy, as well as sick. Pigatzo na like people be crazy."
That was true. Tunnel Runners were all crazy, and Pigatzo would shoot them on sight. I wondered if the Bookali told secrets that turned people into Tunnel Runners. The thought made me shudder.
"Trabina, come from window," my mother admonished, on her way back upstairs again. Reluctantly we both turned away.
"Let's go my parmen," Shenka suggested. "Rikka's home."
Rikka was Shenka's older sister who had run with the ganga for a while. But when her ganga boyfriend went to the Tunnel Runners, Rikka had had enough; she came back home. Still, Rikka had seen and done things the rest of us could hardly imagine, so we liked to listen to her talk, even if she had the sharp edge of a ganga.
"Bookali, pah!" Rikka spat when we asked her about them. "Not so tough. See those big rifle they carry? Pff! Stun rifle only. Ganga is better armed, not to say Pigatzo. They na so tough, these Bookali."
"Then you go down there," Shenka challenged, unwilling to have this new terror diminished.
"Me? Na, I don't go. Who needs? Like a smashed head, I need Bookali. What they got?"
It was a question that still bothered me. "What do they got, Rikka?" I asked.
"Liiiieees," Rikka snarled, drawing the word out with her best ganga sneer. "They tell you they got something, something good, but they got nothing. Nothing but lies."
"They got secrets," Shenka piped up, and I looked for Rikka's reaction.
"Better they keep they secrets," Rikka retorted, but she did not deny the idea. "They secrets na good to me. Fill my belly? Na. Make me rich, ride a hovercycle like them? Na. Bring Pigatzo down on us? Yes, that they do. Let them keep they secrets, I had plenty Pigatzo beatings already my life."
"She's scared," I whispered, sure there was more to the Bookali than secrets.
But Shenka took this as an attack on Rikka and came suddenly to her sister's defense. "Rikka na scared!" she objected. "You scared, Trabina."
"You call me scared?" Rikka demanded, turning on me suddenly with a large wooden spoon in her hand. "You call me scared, little girl?" She was an imposing sight, taller than I would ever be, braids jutting out in all directions, and with a jagged scar under one eye.
"You scared," Shenka repeated, trying in time-honored fashion to refute the charge by reversing it.
"Am na!" I objected, being very much so.
"When you run with ganga, you na scared nothing," Rikka boasted, advancing on me with the wooden spoon. "I na scared some Bookali with stun gun. Pah! You little rat-rot scared."
"Am na!" I said again, edging my way toward the door.
"Are so!" Shenka taunted, trailing behind her sister.
"Na!" I insisted, wondering if I could bolt and run before that spoon whacked across my skull.
"So, so, so!"
"Na, na, na!"
Suddenly Rikka stopped and the sneer twisted back onto her lips. "You na scared, little rat-rot? Show us."
My heart stopped.
"Yeah, show us," Shenka echoed.
Rikka's sneer stretched her painted lips across her teeth and left traces of color there. "You go down to Bookali, little rat-rot, if you na scared."
"Yeah, you go down," Shenka chimed; then, "I dare you."
I hated Shenka for that. I could have run from Rikka, could have run back to my mother and avoided that spoon and that sneer, but not from Shenka. If I ran from Shenka, I might just as well keep running. There is no worse sin in the projects than to be scared in front of your friend. You can refuse a dare from your enemies, but you can never refuse one from your friend.
"All right," I blustered, fear twisting my insides. "All right. I show you then. I show you. I dare." Late, far too late, I turned and ran from the room.
Down the stairs I raced, toward my own destruction, for so I knew it was. Powers-Powers would beat or kill at the slightest provocation. Only at the front door did I stop, stop to catch my breath, stop to let reason strive with madness. Which did I fear more, the Bookali, or my friend's disdain?
There was no question; it has ever been so. I opened the door and slid out.
The near guard turned at the sound and zeroed her rifle in on my heart. I waited, eyes clenched shut, for the sound of the shot that would end my life; but I heard only a soft, "Huh," and the scrape of a cleated boot. I opened one eye to see the guard standing in her place, feet wide apart, rifle resting once more in the crook of her arm. "Jess," she called to one of her fellows. "We have a curious one."
The rhythm of her speech was of a kind I had never heard before. Another guard turned and looked me up and down, and a smile twisted up one half of his face. He was dark, like Shenka, and thick-limbed. 
"Curiouser and curiouser," he said obliquely.
"What you think, child?" the first one said to me, shifting to the lilt of the projects. Her skin was as pale as any I had ever seen, and in the shadow of her helmet shrewd eyes glittered.
My heart pounded, wondering if they were just toying with me the way Tunnel Runners would toy with children before they carried them off. At any rate, I knew I had to answer, for not to answer was to admit weakness, and to admit weakness in the projects was death. "Heavy boxes," was all I could think to say.
The woman laughed. "Heavy, yes. Reason for that. You think?"
"If you say," I replied cautiously. Two Bookali loading a sled had paused just briefly to glance in our direction. Their shirts were soaked with sweat and they were smiling, too, as though it were some great joke that the boxes were heavy. "What in them box?" I asked finally.
The woman looked furtively to left and right, then took half a step toward me. "Secrets," she said, and nodded knowingly.
Secrets, after all! Shenka's uncle was right. I remembered then that he also said these secrets made people sick. But the Bookali didn't look sick; they looked very fit and healthy, indeed, with biceps bulging as they stacked the heavy boxes one atop another. What kind of secrets could be held in boxes, anyway? And why should they be heavy?
Seeing that they were not going to blast me for being in the street, I edged down the steps, my back ever to the rail. I peered at the boxes from this distance, hoping for one that was torn or open so I could see what was inside. But they were well sealed, with numbers on the outside. I knew numbers because code locks had numbers, and one had to remember them to get back into the safety of a building. "Those secrets coded?" I asked in a flash of insight. The Bookali guard nodded wisely. "All coded. You know codes?"
"Just my codes," I answered, with visions of those boxes exploding if someone tried to use the wrong code to open them.
"You know numbers?" she asked.
"I know my numbers," I repeated.
"You know numbers, you can learn these codes," the guard said confidentially.
I stopped breathing. Was the Bookali offering me a chance to learn the codes for their secrets? I started to edge back up the steps. Maybe they were like the Tunnel Runners, who grabbed children that got too close and dragged them down into their lairs, there to do unspeakable things to them and make them crazy. Maybe these Bookali wanted to grab me and make me one of them.
Suddenly a shrill whistle pierced the air. "Fetts!" someone barked. In a flash the Bookali workers inside the truck slammed its gate shut. Another worker powered the half-loaded sled inside their headquarters, and the door sealed behind it. The truck roared off down the street. The guards covered this retreat, heading the while for their hovercycles, twitching nervously this way and that at any sound. When all the other Bookali had disappeared, the guards mounted their shining machines, keyed them to life, and flashed away around a corner. In less than a minute the street was deserted as if no Bookali had ever been there.
In the distance was the whine of other machines, of Fetts on hover-cycles or in hovercars. My curiosity did not extend so far as to wait for their arrival, so I pelted back up the steps and into the building. Inside, eight steps passed in four bounds as I hurled myself to the landing and leaped up to brace my arms on the windowsill.
The hovercycles came first, streaking along the broken pavement, banking around corners, darting up and down streets and alleys. They found nothing, and soon were gone in their driving pursuit of a quarry too alert, too quick for capture.
Behind them came the cars, moving slowly, hovering near (but not too near) windows; stopping now and again as a uniformed Fett jumped out and tried a lock here, a lock there. Some buildings were open, their codes broken, but the Fetts didn't bother to check those. Who would stay in a building that could not be locked? For others, they slapped a small box over the key panel, waited a moment, then toed the door open cautiously.
Across the street several Bookali waited within their new headquarters. In my mind I saw them: rifles trained on the door, muscles taut, fingers sweating on triggers, afraid to breathe. But when the Fetts came to that building, they passed it by. I felt a sudden release of tension, a relief as though I  had been inside, waiting in dread to be discovered. This puzzled me. Why should I care if the Bookali were found?
Suddenly I realized that I wanted to know what those secrets were. I wanted to go inside that building across the street and see what it was that made the Fetts and Pigatzo hate these Bookali so. Trembling at my own audacity, I crept up the rest of the steps to my apartment and crawled into my bed, hiding far beneath the covers.
The Bookali did not come back the next day, or the next. The Fetts came through again, and the Pigatzo; the Pigatzo beat up two or three ganga that were hanging around and took them away in a slow-moving cart that rumbled along the broken street on wheels. They promised to be back again soon; we believed them.
Other ganga slinked around the project, muttering about making an alliance with the Tunnel Runners, which we knew was only talk. Ganga sometimes became Tunnel Runners, like Rikka's boyfriend; and the Tunnel Runners would sometimes return a tormented victim; but no one just talked to them and came back all right. They came back dead, or crazy. So mostly the ganga melted away, waiting for things to cool down.
But the Bookali came back. Not in trucks this time, but on hover-cycles, roaring up to their headquarters across the street. They hovered there a moment, engines throbbing; then the door opened and one by one, the hovercycles glided inside. They left one guard standing outside, rifle in hand.
I had to wait till my mother went out. She and Shenka's mother took bread crumbs and a big cloth bag and went to hunt pigeons on the roof. I was supposed to stay in the stairwell playing, but I glided quietly to the front door and slipped out.
The street was empty. Children had found another place to play. I crept down the steps, casting about for watching eyes. Then with a deep breath I screwed up my courage and crossed the street.
The Bookali guard saw me coming. He watched me calmly, never twitching a muscle, just letting me come closer and closer. I stopped square in front of him and looked up into his face.
How handsome he looked to me! His leathers were scarred and his helmet scratched, but his lean face was smooth and blue-shadowed from a beard that would be jet black if it grew. There was no smile on his lips, just a somber look in his clear blue eyes. We regarded each other wordlessly; then he reached back and keyed the door. With a gentle push he opened it for me. "Lee," he called softly to someone inside. "The ambassador is here."
His voice was so sober, so calm, that no dreadful visions came into my head of what might be done to me in this place. Instead I walked slowly through that open door, mouth gaping in wonder at the sights inside.
Books. I had heard of books on the vid, seen pictures of them with their strange markings, but there were none in the projects. Never had I imagined there were so many in the world. They were arranged on shelves throughout the room, in a riot of colors and sizes, row after row after row. I scarcely saw the young Bookali woman who approached me. "Hello, Ambassador," she greeted. "I thought it might be you."
I looked closely at her then and thought I detected in her pale face, her shrewd eyes, the Bookali who had spoken to me on the street days before. She had shed her leather jacket, so that a plain white T-shirt encased her upper torso, and without a helmet she sported a shock of curly yellow hair. But her voice had that same wise gravity as she spoke again. "Come to see those heavy secrets?" she asked.
"Na secret na more," I informed her haughtily. "Books."
She nodded. "Books."
But I could not keep my attention on her. Books towered to the ceiling: books on shelves, books on tables, books on carousels. There were a few chairs and some vid screens, no doubt, but all I saw were the books.
"So this Bookali headquarters," I said, trying to sound worldly and unimpressed when I was neither.
The woman Lee smiled. "So you call. We call it something else."
I approached the closest shelf, drawn as if by a magnet to those mysterious volumes. Dull blue, faded red, and a whole row with identical gold and black spines. I eyed them carefully, never thinking to reach out and touch one. Lee followed me at a respectful distance, waiting until I turned to her.
"What these book for?" I asked.
"Full of secrets," she replied.
"What secrets?"
"What book?"
Turning around, I pointed to a tall one, mustard yellow with faded green markings. "This one. What secret?"
She reached out, and with a practiced index finger extracted it from the shelf. "Ah, this one." She opened it and looked at the inside. "Stars," she replied. "This one has secrets about stars."
"Like what?"
She turned pages slowly. I kept waiting for an explosion because I hadn't seen her key the book, and she had told me before that they were coded. But page after page slid past her fingers and she remained whole. "It says," she said finally, "that the sun is really a star."
"Go na!" I scoffed. "Sun too big to be star."
"Stars are big," she replied. "Just far away. Sun is small star, just close-like building that's close look big, but far look small." 
"You lie," I challenged, forgetting to whom I spoke. 
"Na," she said gravely. "Book say." And she held the book so I could see the markings that were concealed inside. Her finger traced along a line of them: " 'The sun is a relatively small star.' " 
"I na hear it say," I said suspiciously. 
"In code," she replied. "Have to know code."
With sudden insight I realized that the markings in the books were somehow like numbers: when you grouped them together in the right sequence, they made things happen, like opening doors or firing defenses or spitting out food. But unlike number codes, these codes made words happen-words that you couldn't hear as on a vid, but heard inside your head like imagination. I jumped, startled at the revelation. "You all right, Ambassador?" Lee asked.
"Trabina," I told her. "I na 'bassador. What that book say?" I pointed to a blue one.
Lee laid the first book aside and extracted the blue one. "This one is about gravity," she said. "That's what keeps us on the ground, instead of floating up into the air."
My brow creased and a tight little knot started in my stomach. Why didn't we float? It had never before occurred to me to wonder. What would it be like to float in the air? To fly up to the roof of my building, instead of climbing the stairs? "It say how bird fly?" I wanted to know.
"Not this book, I don't think," Lee said as she flipped through the pages. "But some book will. Shall I find you one?" 
"You know all these book?" I demanded. She laughed. "Not what in. Just how to find."
The little knot in my stomach had grown wriggly fingers, but I ignored it. "How you learn code all these book?"
"I was taught," she told me. "When I was your age." Then she squatted down and looked right into my eyes. "I can teach you, Ambassador." 
"Trabina!" I said sharply, not liking the way my stomach was twisting. "I Trabina!"
"Ambassador Trabina," she agreed.
I thought of Crazy Rashalla and Ratface Tony, and I wondered what I was being called. "What a 'bassador?" I asked warily.
"Ambassador is first," Lee replied. "First to cross the street. First to come in. First to learn Bookali secrets."
"Learn secrets?" My stomach cramped sharply and I realized at last what I had done. "Na secrets. Na want to be sick. Na want to be crazy." I spun around and headed for the door.
"Na crazy," Lee called after me. "Only little secrets make crazy. Only half secrets. Books have 'most all secrets. Books tell you everything."
"Na, na!" I shouted, tugging at the door handle, terrified by a Power that knew everything. "Na want Bookali secrets! Na want to be crazy!"
But it was too late. Even the few secrets I had learned made me sick, left me cowering under the blankets in my room. I slept fitfully, seeing stars as big as suns, seeing a world gone black because the sun was only as big as a star. In my dreams I floated off the ground, up over the projects, leaving everything I knew behind. When I wouldn't get up for lunch, my mother fretted over me, asked what I ate, was I rat-bit. I couldn't tell her I ate a secret, and was bitten by a book.
And then the craziness came, the craziness Shenka had guessed at: I had to go back. It was the same kind of craziness that people got who tried to escape from the Tunnel Runners: they got sick, and then they had to go back, had to have what it was the Tunnel Runners gave them that made them sick in the first place.
Finally, late in the afternoon, I slipped out of my apartment and stole down the stairs.
Shenka was playing on the landing two floors down, the one from which we had watched the Bookali trucks. It seemed long ago. "Trabina, you still sick?" she asked as I approached.
"Na," I lied. The questions were eating at my insides; I could feel them. "Na sick na more." I started to go past her.
"Where you go?"
The idea and the act were one. I looked furtively to left and right, as Lee had done, then took half a step toward her. "Secret," I whispered confidentially.
Shenka's eyes got wide and her mouth dropped open. "Tell me?" she pleaded.
But I shook my head. "Na, can't. Secret." I went a few steps farther, then stopped, slyly. "But you can come."
I hated myself for saying it, hated myself for doing to Shenka what the Bookali had done to me. But that was how life was in the projects: getting your friend into the same trouble you were in, so you didn't have to be there alone. And Shenka, poor, unwitting Shenka, followed me out the door and across the street.
I heard her gasp when she saw where I was headed, but I grabbed her hand and held on tight, dragging her along. Committed now, I marched right up to the Bookali guard, bold as brass, and looked him square in the eye.
It was a different guard from before. "I 'Bassador Trabina," I told him with authority. "This my friend Shenka." He nodded courteously, and I could feel Shenka trembling at my side. Indeed, my own fear was not gone; but I was ruled now by a desire stronger than the desire to flee. I squeezed Shenka's hand and spoke again.
"We come to learn secrets."