Jeff Kozzi

Chapter 1:  Sabrina Kabern

from The Memoirs of Sabrina Kabern, Volume One, The Kajerist Years, "Introduction"

The first and last assignment in the education of ambassadors and diplomats at the Shalhoon Akademi is the same, an essay, "Who Am I?" The comparative results are weighed heavily against each other by the Akadami and the diplomatic corps. The best ambassadors representing Shalhoon, and in this regard, at least, I think I was one of the best, never lose true sight of who se is despite the varied and changing roles and challenges. While the great ambassadors can always convey an affinity and likeness to the cultures they contact, they can never get so absorbed into the individual worlds and times as to lose sight of their own identity. The moment they do, their effectiveness and integrity in the representation of Shalhoon has been lost.

I like to think I’ve maintained that sense of who I am despite my belief that I performed my fifty-four years in Shalhoon’s service during the most tumultuous times in the Sivil Galaxi’s 62200-better year history. Historians may want to disagree, or cast off that accusation as arrogant bias, but my inner sense of self, as vivacious as those first and last days at the Akadami when I wrote those essays, meager years before Shalhoon’s greatest political upheavals, tells me that I’m right. As an ambassador, I’ve had to swallow my pride and ignore what was right for the greater goods of the people and times around me, or, in worse reason, to maintain the precious ego of a self-gratifying, self-centered and self-absorbed diplomatic contact. I did that when it was my role as ambassador. As I sit now in retirement and compose the following memoirs, I truly realize the importance of those essays. For all the compromise and adaptation necessary, the maintenance of self, the vanguard of inner feelings and morality and opinion that more often than not cannot be conveyed in political forums, must take absolute precedence. I was one of the best because I hid those inner senses successfully, but never from myself. I spent fifty-four years hiding them. Now, as a private citizen composing these sketches as much to unload the burden as to add a bit of truth to the political record, I will hide them no longer, even if they seem to over-indicate an arrogance congruent to the stereotyped Shalhoon. I lived in the most tumultuous times in Shalhoon’s history, and the Sivil Galaxi’s history. I saw, and helped catalyze, the end of the great worldly hierarchies among mammalian baseform-governed worlds.

I’ve outlived the hierarchy in power when I joined Shalhoon’s ambassadorial corps. I’ve outlived all the professional associates I ever called friends, those in office upon my beginning, and those who came much later. I’ve outlived my husband, our children, my sister and all her children. I’m entitled to some nostalgia, and the tears of bittersweet memories. I outlived Kethe Kajer, and his unwilling successor.... When I entered the ambassadorial corps, Shalhoon had never seen the smallest sense of warfare on hir majestic surface. In my time, I lived through not just the first attack, but those that followed, usually with a lasertron in my hand, to my shame. The times in which I lived weren’t just tumultuous in the sense of the Shalhoon hierarchy’s conversion to democracy. I dedicated myself to the embassies in 62175, one year before Alisia Kajer died so horribly, less than three years before Kethe Kajer gained the throne of Shalhoon and plunged our majestic world into, unarguably, the bloodiest and most destructive war in our galaxy’s history.

The times weren’t tumultuous, they were violent. I do not write these memoirs because it’s expected of retired ambassadors. I write them because I lived to tell my story, and that’s more of an opportunity than most people born in my era ever had the chance to do....