The stewards reunited coats and small bags with their owners during the last half-hour of approach.
There was the usual advisement: “The dock will be cold, nadiin.”
Understatement. Bren went aft, accepted his knee-length formal coat, bullet-proof vest and all, and wrestled it on in that slow-motion effort which was the only successful tactic in free-fall. Floating fabric had to be maneuvered just so, and lace cuffs had to be extracted from the sleeves and allowed to float.
He also had to get back forward and belt himself back into his seat without wrinkling the coat-tails. Ginny Kroger, herself in that battered parka, gave a helpful tug on the coat-tail and smoothed it behind him as he drifted down.
“Not the most sensible dress for freefall,” Bren muttered. “Didn’t have time to change.” On principle, he never changed half-and-half, no mixing, for instance, of a more practical casual crew jacket with the formal court trousers; and no mixing of Mospheiran clothing with atevi, either. When he was in court dress he was nand’ Bren, paidhi-aiji. When he was in island mufti and speaking Mosphei’, as he did aboard station from time to time, guesting with Mospheiran station officials, then and only then he was Bren Cameron. Never the two should confuse his often-drifting brain.
On this flight, to and from, he had been stiffly, doggedly nand’ paidhi, and he dressed to exit that way, in the rib-hugging coat… apt to freeze half through on the dock, but socially very proper.
He searched his small carry-on for his gloves. In vain.
The stewards made their final pass, gathering up loose items and advising passengers to put away every item that could break free or drift free.
The forward screen meanwhile showed them the station— then Phoenix herself, a huge, dust-stained wall of white. Tenders moved like dustmotes about her: robots. Ginny’s robots: she watched them with proprietary interest, and pointed out to him one of the oldest models.
“A-4. We’re upgrading the memory, refitting the grappling arm for the newer version. The frame won’t go out of use.”
Far, far different scene in Bren’s memory, than the desolation at his first approach.
The stewards meanwhile addressed a novice worker who hadn’t a clue that loose item applied to a pen in an unzippered pocket.
The imminent-maneuvering warning sounded, routine approach toward the docking mast. The forward screen showed them one of the unused sectors of the station, now, an unlovely, impact-pocked stretch of metal. It was nevertheless a sound section, if it was 21, which Bren was convinced it was—he could just make out the 2 and maybe the 1—but it was a battered and long-neglected section of the station, all the same, due refurbishment in the next scheduled expansion of habitable space on the frame.
They fixed what they could as fast as they could, and before it broke, pressed ahead on program. The concentration of effort lately was to get residential and systems operations sections repaired, assuring residences where the influx of workers could find accommodation. Every area opened meant more workers could come up from the planet, and that increased the speed at which they could work, but it also exponentially increased the need for services—
And that need got more companies involved, with their help and their own concomitant problems. Like Sun and Harbor, one of which was going to win, and the other, not. Development had been a snowball rolling downhill ever since the first shuttle flew. Now they were at work on the construction cradle that orbited independently—well, cradle was premature, and orbited was a little optimistic. But it would be a shipyard cradle: orbiting in a linked mass, herded by robot tenders and occasionally by human intervention in their few runabouts, they had pieces… modules, whole prefab cabins of the starship they were going to build, all mixed with pieces of the shipyard that was going to build it.
There was a lot of that, everywhere. If they had room, and it was built, they lifted it to orbit. They wasted not an iota of cargo space. They had elements of the exotic engines up here. None of them had a frame in which to function yet, let alone a hull to which they could attach, and they were not yet stable where they rode, but there they were, herded by robots. It looked a lot like the atevi-Mospheiran-Phoenix cooperation itself.
But with all the problems, he had to say both it and the threeway cooperative worked. Atevi operators ran robots designed by Mospheiran robotics experts—by Ginny Kroger, among others—using atevi-designed computer systems newly linked to Phoenix sensors and remotely monitored by crew. The plans for supercomputers necessary to run the starship were already undergoing analysis in atevi labs—God only knew what atevi would do with the supercomputers, or what politics that would turn up. Atevi dreamed math and patterns, and hadn’t had human-designed computers and software in their hands for a week before someone was saying there were obvious advantages and obvious possibilities, and someone else was saying there was an obvious infelicity in this and that code.
Change, change, and change. But they built on a pre-tried design they’d drawn out of the newly-recovered archives. They’d had no need to invent their way to space. In fact some held that the act of invention shifted all-important numbers that had already proved fortunate, a scary, foolish and unnecessary modification—
That, they could have settled. But it wasn’t only atevi number theorists who threw monkey wrenches into what might have been a smoothly-running production line. The whole station refit and the shipyard assembly could have run a damned lot faster if Phoenix command hadn’t suddenly taken it in their heads that the ship refueling, which hadn’t been done since Phoenix had arrived back in the system, had to be a priority.
He’d raised objections to that with senior captain Ramirez, pitched his only fit of privilege, but in the labyrinthine ways of stationside politics, he’d lost. And fueling had proceeded, monopolizing robotics resources, taking up precious station construction budget when the mining operation, as one could anticipate, developed bugs.
But it was good to know sooner rather than later. They’d worked the bugs out of their plans and their equipment.
And now that was a refueled starship out there… which might be smart. Maybe it was. He supposed it let everyone sleep sounder at night. It made the crew happy, knowing that they weren’t sitting inert at dock while the station drew down power for no few of its systems. And could anyone blame them, when a Mospheiran union wanting a second annual vacation in the contract delayed critical components, or when an atevi launch manager delayed a shuttle five days to gain felicitous numbers for an engine?
Politics, politics, politics. Everyone won a little. Everyone made sacrifices and gained benefits from the collective effort. Mospheirans compromised their dearly-held comforts to come up here, and had the benefits of advanced human medicine, not to mention the whole library of human achievement—the fabled human archive that the ship had sent down to the island. Atevi meanwhile shoved the throttle wide on their economy and risked destabilizing the most stable government the world had ever known, but they drew down numbers from the heavens, too, mathematical certainties that could unify their number-loving culture in ways humans could only imagine, a delight that all but made toes curl.
So if Phoenix crew ate vat-cultures and endured the worst jobs and slept aboard the ship to afford better accommodations to their world-born labor force, then they wanted something tangible for that sacrifice, too. And what logically did they want? We deserve to have our priorities addressed, too, had been the general cry from the ship-folk. They wanted to know that their ship, their whole world—and the defense of the whole solar system if anything went disastrously wrong in their estimation of the situation—wasn’t sitting dead at dock.
In that sense, the shunting of resources to that operation was a reasonable act.
But, God, Phoenix had an appetite: they’d spent as much resource on Phoenix, which they sincerely hoped would stay motionless at dock, as they’d spent on the station with a population now in the tens of thousands. Three whole damned years of high-priority labor, fueling that ship, with just enough left over for the station, while certain things fell apart from sheer lack of exterior maintenance and manpower. Ginny’s new robots would help bring the station restoration back to speed, but they’d slowed the whole program to accommodate Ramirez’s insistence on refueling.
The aiji had accommodated Ramirez. So had the President of Mospheira. That was the plain fact. Mospheirans and atevi alike owed Stani Ramirez for his level-headedness against bad decisions in his own command structure—they owed him for his clear vision and his continual smoothing of the way ahead. And they wanted to strengthen his hand in the Captains’ Council, one supposed.
So, well, hell, if the ship-fueling kept Ramirez happy, Ramirez kept the ship-folk steady at their work.
And it was done, that was the best news. Done, as of this month. Complete. Finished. And now they got the robots they’d tried to get up here before last winter.
“Nadiin,” the shuttle co-pilot said on the intercom, “take hold. Prepare for contact.” He repeated it in Mosphei’, for their one Mospheiran passenger, though by now Gin knew that warning in her sleep.
They’d fixed the balky docking grapple, among the very first station repairs they’d ever made, and now the docking procedure was routine. First Phoenix, then the station became a white wall in the cameras. The image on the screen came down to the crossbars of the docking guide, and, sure enough, bless that grapple repair, they went in with a grace and smooth authority that brought cheers from the passengers.
Thump and massive click. Engaged. Safe.
Home again, strange as it was to say. Well and truly home.
“Prepare to disembark,” the co-pilot informed them. “Thank you, nadiin. Please follow the rope guides and don’t let go for any reason. We can retrieve you, but it’s a large, cold space, and very embarrassing to be searched after.”
Laughter, from the workers who were on their first trip.
“My best to the team,” Bren said to Ginny Kroger as he unbelted, knowing they would part ways at the lift—Ginny to the human quarter, himself to the atevi. He drifted. They continued null-G at dock: the mast had no rotation, and they simply loosed the restraints, gathered their small amount of hand-luggage and floated up out of their seats on the slightest of muscle movements.
“My best to yours,” Kroger said as the world turned topsyturvy. In that sideways orientation they met Banichi and Jago face to face: “Good day to you,” she said in passable Ragi—and had a courteous answer, at least as far as security spoke to outsiders while on duty.
“Nandi.” Banichi had taken the bulkier baggage from under the seats, and moved with the precision of practice in zero-G. Banichi took the lead while Jago glided hindmost, casually sweeping Kroger into their protective field for no other reason than that Kroger was in their way, harmless, and attached to their company. The workers squeezed aside, waiting to let an atevi lord go first, and only then drifted free of their seats, subdued and decorous in the presence of aijiin.
The inner hatch meanwhile opened. A gust of cold air came in, biting cold. Gloves were definitely in order, but Bren hadn’t found his—and now he recalled where his were, not in the carry-on at all, but in his casual jacket. And that was deep in diplomatic baggage down in the hold. The onworld household staff had not been apprized of the fact he would go directly to the spaceport from the ceremony.
Station personnel, meanwhile, met them as they disembarked, cold-suited, masked, stationed there to be sure they used the lines and that no one went drifting out a hundred meters to the far recesses of the docking mast.
Cold—yes. It was cold, a cold so bitter it hit the roots of the teeth on the first breath. Bren used his coat-tail on the safety-line, having no wish to lose skin; and Jago, seeing his predicament, simply took hold of his arm and drew him along. It broke no few regulations—but he arrived at the end of the safety line without frostbitten fingers.
The personnel lift that faced them was nominally sheltered, but it had been waiting a few minutes—it was bitter cold as they entered it. Atevi workers would have certainly understood if the aijiin had taken the lift first and all to themselves, leaving them to wait it out in the cold, but on his standing order Banichi held the lift door open once they reached it, packing the workers in as they never would do in the security-conscious Bujavid—workers with their cumbersome luggage, to the confusion and embarrassment of the protocol-sensitive novices. On the planet, common folk had no wish to mingle too closely with aijiin, who sometimes drew bullets. Up here, there were no bullets to fear—but there was the consideration of frozen fingers and power-conservation.
“A different world up here, nadiin,” Bren said to all and sundry. “Here we do differently. Pack in. Pack in close. Customs will meet you downstairs.”
They all made it in, pressed body to body. Banichi pushed the button and the lift banged into motion, bringing the floor up under their feet.
Baggage settled. The air warmed with the body-heat of a packed elevator—the other reason for packing it close—and Bren, with his hands beneath his arms, drew breaths of air that no longer quite burned his lungs.
Atevi spring court dress was not adequate for this transit, even with the vest. Ginny was far more comfortable in the tatty parka, and had the hood up. Rime was on the metal as the car stopped at the station main deck and let them out into customs—a set of tables and low-level x-ray and sniffer apparatus easily rolled in to meet the flight—in what was otherwise an ordinary station corridor.
“Let the paidhiin out!” the cry was within the lift, and workers pressed back in an effort to give him and Ginny the scant courtesy they could manage. Those nearest the door had to get out first, all the same, and simply bowed as they walked out through customs—a privilege of rank they didn’t decline.
There they parted, having their own separate welcoming parties waiting. For him, Tano and Algini were both there, welcome sight—tall, black figures in black-and-silver uniform. Kate Shugart, from Ginny Kroger’s staff, had come to welcome her. The hellos were warm enough, and reciprocal between staffs, but: the cold above had set into travelers’ bones, and the desire for a warm drink and home overwhelmed any inclination to linger for social pleasantries.
Bren and Banichi and Jago walked along with Tano and Algini—rare that those two simultaneously left the security station, but it wasn’t likely to develop a crisis in half an unattended hour, if things were going as usual.
“And how are things?” he asked Tano. “Any calls?”
“Oh, very well here. No calls. Jase Graham will be your guest tonight at dinner, nadi-ji, unless you object. Bindanda is doing his utmost.”
Bindanda, that loan from Tatiseigi, was a very creditable chef, besides having done double duty as security and anything else that came to hand. Narani, his head of staff, would have made the judgement call accepting Jase as a guest tonight, but that was no problem. His staff had standing orders that Jase might be his guest whether he was absent, present, or en route.
Besides, Jase had so wanted to go down on this trip, having found a rare quiet moment that he could take leave of his regular duties. It hadn’t happened. Ramirez had called at the last moment, senior captain, and there it was: no trip.
“I trust there are no crises. Nothing behind this invitation.”
“Not that we know,” Tano said—which covered a very extensive information-gathering apparatus. “The priorities committee met on schedule. Lord Geigi sent word to our staff that there were no surprises on the agenda.”
“Very good. I have to see him, tomorrow if I can. There’s progress on the robots—they’re here, in fact.”
“Yes, paidhi-ji.” Not only Tano, but Banichi and Jago were listening, absorbing, putting pieces together, the most competent staff any man could ask for. They knew instantly what it all meant. They swept up every crumb of detail he gave them and would bend heaven and earth to make things work on schedule.
“One trusts the broadcast of the memorial made it up here.”
“Yes,” Algini said.
“Curious, was it not?”
“Indeed,” Tano said.
“Do we have any theory what it meant?”
“None, on the surface,” Banichi said.
“What it meant,” Jago said, “likely defines itself in meetings yet to come. Curious, indeed, nandi.”
But not their meetings. Not their risk. He’d been of use, perhaps, only as a symbol of the space effort. Tabini surely knew about the robots his shuttle was shipping up off his continent
… and that was something Tabini would announce, a triumph of persistence, if nothing else, a new phase in the construction.
C1early space would be a topic in the upcoming session, and Tabini showed his cards—so to speak.
Home again, home in every sense, where he had his own information-gathering apparatus. He had considerable power onworld. It was nothing to the resources he had here, in what had become his office, his residence, his steel-and-plastics world.
Home, and setting to work with a whole new set of parameters, given Ginny’s surprise. Home, where Geigi, who was nominally in charge of the atevi side of the station, was far less enigmatic, and where things ran more or less predictibly. He drew a deep breath, worked chilled fingers, walked a corridor he knew to a lift he knew and rode it in close company with his own staff.
There was a subtle anxious mindset that took over when he was on the planet, in the constant knowledge that at any moment, at any slight miscalculation, he could meet a bullet and end all the work he did or hoped to do—and with it, hope for lives that he had no right to risk. Visits down there, under any level of security at all, had gotten to be a calculated risk. Up here there was more and more to be done, and down there the pace of change pushed the planet’s less stable residents to greater and greater agitation. There was simply no replacement for him, and he had to admit he had no right, no personal right to take stupid chances with his life. That meant downhill skiing was right out, along with bad-weather flying or boating, and he hadn’t been on a mecheita’s tall back in four years. Not that he didn’t miss those things, dream of those things—but at least—at least, up here, things ran, and he could stop anticipating disasters.
The curving corridor apparently ended in a door like all the other doors, but Algini keyed open the security lock, let them through into a whole self-contained world. It was the door of the Little Bujavid, as atevi called it. Lord Geigi’s residence was at the start of this new corridor, the paidhi-aiji’s at the end, and two unoccupied apartments in the middle, ready for any atevi lord who found it necessary to be here on short notice: Ilisidi had been the first inspiration, and the Astronomer Emeritus had visited as recently as half a year ago.
It was atevi decor from the first moment they passed the door, a muted color here and there, a great deal of white or near-white. The hall-end had the baji-naji conspicuous, next Bren’s own doors.
Baji-naji. Chaos and overthrow: appropriate enough emblems not only for the space program but for the paidhi-aiji’s household and this whole section: they all found more than a little humor in the notion.
But the baji-naji had a table beneath it, a wooden table with a single river-rounded stone: chaos underlain with, comparatively speaking, the most stable thing in the universe, their own precious world, the place that sent them.
His major domo Narani had done that understated exterior arrangement for the hall. Atevi visitors had greatly admired it. A photograph of it had reached the news services, as a result, and Narani, his modest major domo, from a small rural estate, with a peasant-bred practicality to his designs, had accidentally created a widely copied fashion throughout atevi society, an entire artistic movement in Shejidan that found approval on both sides of the conservative-liberal battle. His back-to-basics traditionalism that harked back to country modes and primitive expressions—so the practitioners of kabiu’tera declared. Narani might have had a whole new career on the planet, a respected master—if he were willing to leave here, which Narani was not.
In point of fact, Bren thought, he simply liked Narani’s arrangement. In stabilizing the chaos around the place, it did satisfy the heart—God knew what wonderful things it did to atevi sensibilities—and to him, yes, both the baji-naji and the stone were very apt, very reassuring.
Home for certain. The door opened. There were bows, there were pleasant, familiar faces… Narani was, of course, foremost, an older gentleman, kindly and very much in charge. There was Bindanda, a roundish fellow of great creative talent—not only in the kitchen. A handful of staff who chanced to be near, men and women who came simply to fill out the number and make a good showing in the hall.
“Nand’ paidhi,” Narani said. “There will be dinner with nand’ Jase tonight. One hopes this is acceptable news.”
“Very acceptable, Rani-ji.” He shed the coat into Narani’s hands, and the bulletproof vest with it. The temperature was perfect, the place was perfect. Here his staff would steer him into the right clothes and the right place at the right time and he utterly could stop thinking about schedules and protocol crises. Once he would have called it lazy. With the pace of decisions his job had become, he called it necessary.
“When my baggage arrives, unpack it. Packets. All labeled. I’ve bought gifts for all the staff. —Danda-ji, your spices should arrive. And yes, the video games. I’ll deal with my messages tomorrow if there are none urgent. —Is there, however, anything pending from Lord Geigi?”
“Oh, indeed,” Narani said, and signaled a younger servant, who presented the message-bowl for visual inspection: it contained a good number of small scrolls, one of which was Geigi’s message-case: he knew that one very well. He picked that one out and read it on the spot.
“Geigi advises me he wants a meeting tomorrow. Noon would be excellent, if it suits him. Anything my staff arranges with his staff will do very well.”
There were a handful of less formal cases: atevi disputes or atevi advisements. The messages were from departments, two, by appearance, even from common workers: certain mediations with humans might properly come directly to the paidhi-aiji, a right guaranteed by centuries-old law.
And a handful of human language printouts. His staff had rolled them into the traditional form—and he feared one of those might be a letter from his relatives, who any hour now might hear via the news services he had been in Shejidan and hadn’t called—he’d catch hell for that, when his mother knew.
And at the bottom, an accident of shape, not priority, rested a couple of flat, sealed disks that were with equal certainty from various station departments—data he’d requested.
Besides those, still more letters would come flowing into the mail system from the planet, following the memorial service. He could forecast that as he could forecast a storm from the smell in the air. From down there, adding to the mail he’d brought up with him, would come letters ranging from the thoughtful, well-dispositioned observations of lords he did deal with on legitimate business, to less useful suggestions from the amateur but well-meaning, and so on down to the truly unbalanced, be they harmless or otherwise—rather more of those than the real proportion, actually. He had a very large staff on the planet whose job was to filter the mail—but they did pass through the choicest crackpot letters. Such missives, however amusing, gave him a useful sense of the fringe element—and the things sane atevi might actually feel, but would not express or admit. The fears of shuttles puncturing the atmosphere and letting all the air out had diminished significantly, for instance: those were easy. The alien threat was not, and now second-class machimi had a whole new subject matter: alien invasions which came down on sails of flame, destroying cities, frightening children into nightmares. There was an ongoing machimi involving an atevi starship crew fighting off aliens that remarkably looked like other atevi dressed like humans.
He truly didn’t approve of those, but that failed to stop them.
Well, but he was glad to have matters underway with Geigi… and could scarcely wait to inform Geigi about the robots, which really was Ginny’s triumph to reveal first, to Ramirez and the ship council… but Geigi was more his territory, and discreet with the other two camps.
So he could be sure Geigi’s business wasn’t the robots. The urgency was more likely Geigi’s precious fish tanks—not the decorative ones in Geigi’s office, rather the big ones that were meant to feed the space-based population. That was the project Geigi was determined to build as soon as they could spare the labor and machinery from the refueling effort. After three years, priorities were being reset, and he just bet that Geigi was intent on getting his own project to the top of the heap— especially hoping he’d come back from the planet with some new sense of the aiji’s next priorities.
He wasn’t averse to Geigi’s program. In fact he was in favor of it. But he wondered, on his way to the bedroom, whether he could get a reciprocal concession out of Geigi. They were close associates, but that never meant one couldn’t look for advantage in a situation. It was simply the way negotiations happened in court.
A younger manservant appeared in the hallway to inform him, a formality, that his bath was waiting… never mind the shower was always available: it was the form, the welcome home. He went in, shed the clothes into the manservant’s waiting hands, stepped into the shower and vigorously scrubbed away the residue of candle-smoke and incense that had come with him from the memorial.
Simply shutting his eyes reconstructed that vault, and the world, and the mourners all eyeing one another up and down the rows like predator and prey.
Poor Cajeiri. His first public ceremonial, and he’d embarrassed the house, and his present and past guardians.
But the diplomatic relations of the aiji with the East weren’t his problem. The East-West problem all belonged to Tabini and Ilisidi now, and there was no one in the world—literally— better at handling those stresses and strains on the social fabric. The aishidi’tat stood firm. Tabini ran it; he intended it to survive, and its welfare, however habituated the thought, was just not the paidhi’s problem any longer.
Neither was the heir to the aishidi’tat the paidhi’s concern.
He needed to sift through the mail. He needed to solve the pressing problems up here in the heavens.
Not least among them the matter of a fish tank and the prioritization of Ginny’s new robots.
He let the water course over him and laid his strategy for a visit to Geigi.
And for a phone call down to the planet, to give a hello to Toby, who’d want a reasonable answer as to why his brother hadn’t phoned when he was in easy range of a visit. That had to be a very, very carefully given excuse.
He felt guilty about that choice. He really did. But the schedule had been rushed. He was tired from the trip as it was. Sandwiching a flying trip to the island into his other business…
Honestly, no, that wasn’t it. Toby’s letters were full of troubles he couldn’t solve and his phone calls were harder still. No, I can’t grew thinner and thinner as the years passed, particularly when he was in range, and please was so implicit in every conversation he had with Toby. Please come down here, please don’t be out of touch, please tell me what to do with Mother.
Hell if he knew. There wasn’t a good answer, not outside of their mother deciding to do something different than she’d done for the last forty years. Mospheirans didn’t change easily. Their mother didn’t change, period.
Most of all, hardest for him to deal with Toby’s queries on his marital crises: What do I do about Jill? How do I keep her?
Say no to Mother was the only answer he knew. Don’t try to stand in where I know damn well neither of us should be. Get out of there. Don’t go when Mother calls.
You think after all these years I’m going to have a better answer? Me, the unmarried one?
He scrubbed his face and his hair, hard, not even wanting to think about that next communication with Toby. He couldn’t play part-time marriage counselor, or psychologist, not atop everything else. He had—
God, he had Sandra Johnson’s plants in his baggage. And uninvited as they were, she’d gone to a great deal of trouble to give him that gift. He didn’t want to account for their accidental demise in the letter he was bound to get.
He put his head out of the shower and spied Bindanda.
“Danda-ji, there are some plant slips with my carry-on baggage. Would you kindly find out how to pot them?”
In an orbiting apartment with no pots, no soil and no fertilizer. But his staff necessarily specialized in miracles, and he could do Bindanda the greatest possible favor not to drip on the floor when he made the request.
“Yes, nadi-ji.”
Toby, on the other hand… Toby’s problem… wasn’t something Bindanda could make go away.
Well, he had to call Toby. He had to. He’d probably better call his mother.
He’d do it tomorrow.
The shower beeped: even the paidhi had a water-limit… one he’d insisted on having, and there it was, a one-minute warning, just time enough to get the soap off in decent order.
He rinsed, cut the water off and stepped out. The junior servant was right at hand to help him into his warmed, soft robe and equally warmed slippers.
After that, he sat on a bench, had his hair dried and braided in formal order, and afterward got up and dressed for dinner, not in the full court attire, this time, but atevi-style, all the same, for a dinner at home, among intimates: the lace-cuffed shirt, close-fitting trousers, a white ribbon for his braid. When he asked himself, he didn’t know why he didn’t call for human-style clothing for a dinner with Jase: certainly it would have been appropriate, maybe more appropriate, and in most regards more comfortable. But somewhere in the hindbrain he was still on the world.
“Nandi.” Bindanda brought him a small envelope—no question it was human, no question it was Mospheiran, at first sight. It had a little residue of dirt. From the plants, it seemed.
A letter from Sandra Johnson. With photos of Sandra and smiling near-teens. Good God, he thought. Who are these kids?
Dear Bren, I was repotting today and thought of you. I checked and these plant slips aren’t contraband where you are.
The picture? This is my oldest, Brent, and this is Jay.
Was she married? Had she told him she was married?
I’m working in Brentano now, for a law firm, well, you probably know, Meacham, Brown & Wilson. John and I are happy here. But when I thought about you up there in all that plain plastic, I couldn’t just toss the cuttings. I hope they’re no trouble and if they are, throw them out. I told Brent and Jay I once visited the aiji in Shejidan and that I know you, and I’m not sure they believe me, but I don’t forget those days. I think of you fondly and thank you for all you’ve done up there.
Sincerely,
Sandra Johnson
John who, for God’s sake?
But she was certainly due a letter, and he opened the computer that had magically arrived in his room, and wrote an answer.
Dear Sandra, absolutely I’ll treasure them. Growing things are pretty scarce aboard.
I’m so glad for you. Fine-looking kids. Congratulations.
Bren.
Due two letters, in fact:
Dear Brent and Jay, believe your mother. She saved the whole world, once, and the aiji himself still owes her a personal favor.
Sincerely,
Bren Cameron
Paidhi-aiji
Just occasionally there were entirely delicious satisfactions to the job. And he did treasure… what were the plants’ names? Hell, he couldn’t remember. Seymor and Fredricka, he decided—granted they lived.
Tough specimens. Survivors. Coming home to the realm of their ancestors.
That letter, however, had led him to think about his mail queue, and he connected.
A letter from the tax authority on Mospheira. He needed to file a paper, the same paper he filed every year. No, they couldn’t possibly accept his secretary’s signature. It regarded the immense amount of pay he’d accumulated and not spent, and which he used to pay his mother’s bills and buy birthday presents for Toby’s kids.
A letter from a charity wanted an endorsement, Society for Beachside Preservation, something of the sort. He wasn’t sure how that had gotten through Mogari-nai and C1. He wasn’t out of sympathy for the cause. It sounded like something Toby might favor. But he doubted Toby had sent it.
The letter from the State Department turned out to regard his personal identification card, which had expired. He could bring the requisite cash and his expired card to any courthouse he could reach.
Well, that was a fair hike.
And a letter—God, a short note from Barb.
He hadn’t heard from Barb at all for two years, not since her divorce. She’d said then she was getting her life together— adjusting to life as it was—life, as, dammit, she’d chosen it to be. She’d said she didn’t expect an answer, and gratefully enough he hadn’t sent one—
But he heard about Barb often enough. Barb and his mother got along, consoled each other—they had a frightening lot in common and every time he thought of it, he told himself his instincts had been right. Run like hell. The Bren Cameron that Barb and his mother both hoped would exist didn’t exist, couldn’t exist, not since he’d taken on the job—and thank God he hadn’t run back after Barb’s accident, hadn’t gotten involved in her life again. He’d only have provided the chance to let Barb lock on and mess up the rest of her life.
Last he’d heard, she was all right. She’d come out of the accident alive and whole. A rough few years, one hell of a mistake, but she was doing all right these days.
Being on a space station without a convenient way down seemed a safe distance.
Bren,
Your mother’s not doing well. The new medications aren’t what we hoped. I hope you’ll find time to come down as soon as you can.
The bottom dropped out of his stomach… not hard, just a little twinge of guilt. His mother’s health hadn’t been good, but the majority of the crises had involved some scheme to get him to visit. What was the date on the letter?
The day he’d left for the planet, dammit.
And if he had visited—if he had, every damned time his mother would revert to the ordinary list of complaints and the tally of his failures to care enough, visit enough, do enough… no, no, no, he didn’t feel guilty.
But he went for the message-bowl, then, opened the messages, and found, dammit, one from his brother, not with the usual header that would have tipped off the staff as to its origin and sent it straight to him no matter where he was: no, this one was from Community General, from the hospital nearest their mother’s neighborhood. Toby hadn’t known there was a reason to put an official stamp on it. Toby couldn’t have known he was actually on the planet and in reach, if he’d only put an official stamp on, to alert his staff.
Dammit.
Bren, Toby said,
Mother’s in hospital, her blood pressure again. The apartment manager found her on the stairs and called the ambulance. The doctors aren’t certain…
It went on. Toby’d gone to the capital immediately. There was a second letter with the same origin. Their mother was in the hospital. The medications had taken a toll of her other organs. The doctors were working on the problem.
Toby had dropped everything, ignored all his advice, left Jill to go to the capital to be available.
Well, when hadn’t he felt guilty… for leaving his mother on the island, for leaving Toby to deal with her, when what she wanted was him, the one of her two sons who didn’t come running?
When hadn’t he felt like a scoundrel, ducking possible visits?
Yes, his coming onto the island was a danger to his mother and to Toby and Toby’s family; but they just weren’t damned pleasant visits, either, and if he was honest, that was the real reason… and the source of enough guilt to turn his stomach. Toby, granted, had at least had the good sense early on to go live up on the coast, out of range—but when things had shifted and Toby had turned out to be the only one of them who could be there, Toby would come back—at the worst moments Toby would get on a plane at whatever hour, leave his promises to his wife and his kids hanging while he ran down there to deal with the fact some lunatic had phoned their mother’s apartment and set off her heart condition. They were real troubles, always real troubles, but they had a knack for happening on birthdays and holidays and other times brother Bren couldn’t show up to visit, and the coincidence was more than suspicious.
Did other sons board a plane every time a parent had a medical incident? No. But did they? Toby did, because Bren couldn’t. He told Toby not to go… but Toby went; and once Toby got there, Toby got all the complaints—no thanks for his being there, just the complaints. Where was Bren? When would Bren come? Why couldn’t Bren come? Tell your brother this, tell your brother that…
And ask why. Ask why Toby ran off to try to be a better son to their mother than he could be, and oh, there was a dark spot in that answer. He and Toby weren’t rivals, never had wanted to be, but their mother could look right past Toby without a blip on her radar, and say her sons never cared for her— meaning him, Bren, the one of the two their mother couldn’t possibly have with her.
Was that what was going on again?
Or was this finally the real thing, a real life-and-death crisis?
And even if they’d discussed it, he and Toby, and unmasked what was going on and shone light on the cold facts… the reality of that tactic hurt so much Toby went and did it again, trying for some better outcome, some moment when their mother would just once look at him and say to his face, “Thank you. You’re a good son.”
He picked small details out of the second letter, something about Jill off on business.
The hell. Separate vacations for the last three years, one separation, a new courtship. Now Jill was off on business at the moment and Toby wouldn’t admit to her he’d flown down to the capital. Toby was, in fact, actively concealing where he was, though Jill was due home tomorrow—to an empty house up on the coast. Surprise her with it—God, Toby… what are you thinking?
The kids, at least—hardly kids now—were in school—likely staying with friends at the moment. While Jill—Jill had had all the crises she was willing to take. It wasn’t what happened. It wasn’t the bouts of illness, which were a real illness. None of those things were the issue. What was the issue was a battle between two women over a son and husband. Jill knew she was always going to lose, and that Toby couldn’t win.
know there are good reasons,
Toby finished his second letter.
If I have to handle things here I will. But I think you’ll feel better if you can get down here.
And who knows? She’s tougher than either of us. She’s beaten the odds before.
You may get a letter from Barb. I know you don’t want to, but read it all the same. I think it’s time to make peace on all fronts.
Time to make peace. That was certainly the truth.
Would he have gone to the island, if he’d gotten that letter before he left the ground?
Would he have thrown all his good reasons to the wind, missed his shuttle flight and caught the next air cargo hop to the island?
He didn’t know. He honestly didn’t know that answer and it was too late now to know the truth.
Turn around and catch the next shuttle flight down, next week?
Maybe. He didn’t want to think about that answer. Not until the shock had settled.
And it would settle, before the chance came.
Meanwhile he owed his brother a letter. But he couldn’t write that until he honestly knew what he was going to do.
Going down there when Tabini was in the midst of maneuvers as critical as any in his reign… risk all that that entailed? It wasn’t a good time for the paidhi-aiji to intrude his human presence into a rush trip onto the continent and on to Mospheira. Even going in at the other spaceport wouldn’t conceal the fact that he had landed—again. A furtive visit was even more apt to attract attention from the news than going down officially at Shejidan.
The more dogged of the conspiracy theorists, atevi and human, wouldn’t believe for a moment that the family emergency existed.
God, he just didn’t see how he was going to get there. He didn’t know if he wanted to get there.
But leave Toby to deal with things solo, one more time… not to be there the one time their mother, who was the world’s best at crying wolf, really was on the brink…
What he most needed to do was to grab Toby by the ears once and for all and say, Go home, brother, you have a right to your own life. But he’d done that and Toby didn’t listen. Toby was so damned smart, but in matters involving their mother, Toby didn’t listen, because somewhere in the tangled depths of family politics, Toby didn’t ever like the answers he got.
A small commotion had reached the foyer. Narani came to the office door.
“Your luggage has arrived, nandi. Crates have been set in the kitchen. Those without labels are in the foyer.”
“Very fine, Rani-ji.” He rose from his desk and let the messages lie—decided against the coat, after all, and walked to the the foyer, where, amid dinner preparations, the smaller luggage sat, large, travel-worn lumps of diplomatic bags about which the servants gathered in shy anticipation.
He personally opened the sealed tie and passed out the bundles and packages. He needed distraction. He enjoyed the gift-giving, like holiday.
Letters. Abundant letters from happy, sensible, long-bonded families, whatever the baroque nature of atevi parentage and fosterage. He gave those into Narani’s care, and Narani ceremoniously handed them to junior servants to sort and distribute, all with fair despatch. There were special treat packets from various homes, small, brightly wrapped presents from relatives… those were the bulk of the bags—besides the requested video games, which regulations did not permit in the general uploads from Mogari-nai, and which therefore had to be freighted up. For Narani, a great-grandfather for the third time, there was a basket about which he had been curious: it was very light. It proved to be simply curls of fragrant bark, and that gift passed from one to the next, with appreciative sighs and second sniffs: smells of the world of their birth.
Then his gifts: he had provided, gathered from the Bujavid gardens, a middle-sized box containing bits of natural wood and a few curious rocks and sprigs, which the servants prized for their own common quarters, for kabiu. That was his gift to them, which he had personally asked of the gardeners.
For his senior staff, he had another box—a very fine two hundred-year-old bowl of southern work, for Narani and an antique book for Bindanda.
They were far, far more than servants to him.
For Tano and Algini, books. Tano had, besides, gotten a letter from his father. The two had begun to correspond, and did so quite frequently, now that Tano was out of reach.
Banichi and Jago turned up, at the distribution of gifts, both fresh from showers and ready for dinner—they came to present Algini their own gift, a very, very florid shirt, to laughter and applause from the servants, because Algini had a penchant for his old black uniform tees, in his rare moments off-duty. Algini accepted it in good grace, shed his uniform jacket and put on the shirt over the black tee to general laughter.
The door beeped. Algini shed the gift quickly.
“What?” Banichi said. “Not wear it for Jase-ji?”
Algini said not a word, only put on his jacket and looked quite proper before junior staff could open the door.
Jase turned up in station casuals, never, these days, his atevi finery. Bren was sure it was a political decision that led a Phoenix captain, however unwelcome the captaincy, not to dress as a foreigner to the ship. Jase kept his hair cut, too, and at his least formal, still wore ship-issue, plain blue that had as well be a uniform. He’d been given his captaincy for political reasons, after the juniormost captain Pratap Tamun—there were four captains running Phoenix, by ship’s custom—had led a failed mutiny. The ship had badly needed a reconciling symbol in the wake of that disturbance, and Jase had become that symbol—a captain not tainted by the divisive politics that had led to the mutiny. But beyond the immediate need for a figurehead and over Jase’s protests, circumstances and the senior captain’s insistence had kept him in the post. In self-defense, Jase had thrown himself into the requisite studies, and the requisite manners, and uniform—hell, he probably even knew the set of orders that could activate the ship engines. Please God they could put off that order for decades.
“Hello there,” Bren said as Jase shed his jacket into the servants’ keeping.
“Good trip?” Jase asked him.
“Interesting,” Bren said. “Good, I suppose.” He decided, on the whole, it had been a good trip, no matter what he learned once he got home. No matter what he’d not been able to do while he was there. “The whole business seemed to be a funeral.”
“Funeral.”
“Well, of sorts. Belated. A memorial service for Valasi. Tabini’s putting on a show, called in all the television people. Don’t ask me why. Days there and I still don’t know. I think we got the feed up here. I haven’t asked yet.”
Jase gave him a look as they walked into the dining room. Jase had lived on the planet, knew Tabini, and well knew the rumors Tabini had assassinated his father.
“Curious.”
“Baji-naji,” Bren said. “Everyone who’s anyone was there, and for some reason, I was, and it was important that I be there. I’m still trying to figure it out.”
But that was the last word of politics, dinner being the matter at hand, and he would not insult his staff by violating that very basic rule of a noble house. Banichi and Jago joined him and Jase on some more convivial nights, but this being a homecoming, and his security staff having, it seemed, given Narani their regrets, dinner had been construed a shade more formally this evening—it was clear in the careful arrangement of the table, in the number of forks laid out, seven, to be precise.
Jase settled, and paid courteous attention as Narani supervised their juniormost servant setting out the appetizer, a pate of pickle, seafood and nuts that was improbably one of Jase’s favorites. The accompanying crackers were a Mospheiran brand, but kabiu, and plentiful in the station outlets.
“And was Ilisidi there?” Jase asked. It was not quite a political question.
“Oh, yes. I had supper with her. She sends her regards, nadi, most specifically. I gave her yours.” They spoke Ragi. Jase liked to keep up his skills and Bren thought in Ragi, dreamed in Ragi these days—refused to slip into Mospheiran or ship-accent unless he had to: it fuzzed his thought patterns in the work he had to do. “Ah. There is some additional news. The Astronomer Emeritus is coming up two months from now. He should keep Geigi entertained.”
“There’s a treat,” Jase said cheerfully. Grigiji was a favorite and intermittent guest—a delightful and curious old man whose greatest joy was the observation station that was supposed to report to them if there was any signal out of the deep… and that incidentally gave Grigiji information on the wide universe. “I’ll arrange something for him.”
From Grigiji and the mathematicians they went on to discuss the weather in Shejidan, the quality of the fishing—but at each new course, offered great appreciation for the dishes. Bindanda had provided his favorites and Jase’s: the effort deserved applause, and one always showed particular reverence for the meat course, under any decent circumstances.
It was another of Jase’s favorites, among items they could import, a meat that Bindanda’s artistry turned from station staple to a very fine presentation.
It was a slow finish, then, a delicate cream dessert—atevi had only a dim compunction about animals kept for milk, though they would not tolerate animals kept for slaughter. But they had gotten the notion of cream cheese from Mospheira, and this was seasonal fresh fruit, one of Bindanda’s specialties, with a nut topping.
How Bindanda had gotten the fruit up here, on the other hand, must involve high crimes and bribery.
“Very fine,” Jase said. “Where did Danda-ji get this?”
“I don’t think we want to know,” Bren said, and called out the chef to compliment him—both of them praised the dessert, which pleased Bindanda exceedingly. But they had not a word from Bindanda on his sources, so they were assuredly not official.
After that they adjourned for conversation on more weighty matters, in the library-cum-study. Bren assumed his favorite chair, propped his feet up, slightly feeling the effects of pressure-change and long travel, and took a brandy. Jase took one, being off-duty.
“Funeral for Valasi,” Jase reprised. “Didn’t he have one already?”
“One isn’t quite sure what the ceremony meant,” Bren said. He suffered a little dislocation, a flashback to the vault, the shadows, the live fire of torches… and tried to think by what handle to grapple with all the questions at once. “I attended and I still don’t know why Tabini wanted me there. The meetings beforehand were all social. I wish you could have come. But I’m afraid there wouldn’t have been any fishing—except for information—and there was precious little catch in that commodity, either.”
“What’s your best guess?”
“A patch-up with the conservatives. An overdue patch-up. I don’t know whether Ilisidi’s on the inside or the outside of the plan… but Tabini’s spent a lot of political credit getting what he’s gotten.”
“The economy’s running well.”
“Oh, it is. But prosperity and electric toasters only means the far lunatic fringe loses power… and the legitimate sane conservatives lose power. And the very fact he is succeeding only makes it worse, to the other side’s view. They want him to fail. They want something to go wrong. And he’s just gotten stronger.”
“So he offers them a favor anyway?”
“So maybe he knows they’re getting desperate. He certainly made the transfer of Cajeiri into Ilisidi’s care quite public… that may have been the statement he was making. Which was and wasn’t a towering success at the ceremony. Which is one reason I honestly can’t figure it: the boy wasn’t exactly the centerpiece of the event—wasn’t really involved. My meeting with Tabini—well, fine, and social, but I expected more. I bounced from cabinet meeting to cabinet meeting, all courtesy matters and briefings, all the department heads wanting to get up to speed on what’s going on up here. I answered a handful of southern concerns about siting a plant down on the coast—I happen to agree with the ones protesting. They can put the thing inland. They don’t need coastline. It’s a damned eyesore where they want to put it.”
Jase sighed. “I did look forward to the fishing trip.”
“If you’d been there you’d only have gotten caught in this affair. But hang on. You’ll get your ocean. Next spring.”
“Promises.”
“Promises. We’ll try, this time. We’ll try damned hard. I’ll do some extravagant favor for Tabini and see if we can’t get a couple of weeks.”
“Weeks.” Jase looked glum. “I could use a month or two.”
“Something wrong?”
“I broke it off with Yolanda. Again.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.” That relationship had been on-again, off-again. Partners, mostly successfully, on-planet. On-station, decidedly not the case.
“Stupid personal stuff. I swear, I think she’s asking herself how can she tell she’s got authority if she doesn’t wield it? She’s taken up with a computer tech, now, a damned bad choice, but it’s her choice, and sitting where I do—I don’t care.”
What did a friend say? That that wasn’t quite the truth?
“Quarrel?”
“Sulks and silences. I’m on the captains’ list and she’s not, and I think that’s the crux of it.”
“She doesn’t want the job. You don’t want it. Yet you fight over it.”
“Doesn’t matter what we want. Doesn’t matter what I want. I have the office. Suddenly my advice is a captain’s advice. Whatever I say to her is criticism. If I have an opinion, it just blows up: unfair, pulling rank. So what do I do? We don’t talk any more. We tried being lovers. Didn’t work. Tried being sibs. That doesn’t work. I don’t know what we are, but we can’t live with or without each other. She’s going back on main schedule. She’s seeing her tech. What do I care? But some things you ought to know.”
Jase and Yolanda had been lovers, in the same job, stuck on a planet they couldn’t, at the time, get off of. They were shipmates, never sibs—in the biological sense. But they were, if being planned by the same man could make a kinship, if being born at the same time, for the same purpose could make one.
They were both Taylor’s Children. Conceived out of the genetic material of the heroes from before the Landing. Conceived to be heroes. Conceived to be above politics, if it was possible.
Thus far it hadn’t been possible, even between the two of them.
“I should know,” he echoed Jase. “What should I know?”
“She’d been talking with Paulson, and I asked about what. It’s my job, to ask.”
Paulson. Head of Mospheiran operations.
“And she called Mospheira,” Jase added, “and said it was personal.”
She’d served there. But in the last number of years she hadn’t called Mospheira. Didn’t know anybody on Mospheira, that he knew of, not in the personal sense. And now he knew.
“Who did she call?”
“Don’t know. I thought I ought to have asked. Maybe it was an old friend. But Paulson isn’t. And all of a sudden I’m the villain. I don’t figure her.”
Yolanda Mercheson, the third paidhi, the one originally destined between the ship and Mospheira—as Jase was the ship-paidhi, translator between the ship and Tabini… and him.
Well, a fractured romance was one thing. But having Yolanda start making phone calls between Paulson and Mospheira, on her own?
He left for a few days and things did go to hell.
“Can you trace who she called?”
“I might. It’s not my job, now.”
“Does Ramirez know?”
A heavy sigh. “I told him. What he said to her, I don’t know. But she was in a mood. Called me a few names. Hell of it is, I don’t know if it’s a personal matter, and I can’t find out—and if I ask, it’s personal and she’s not talking.” Jase gave a short, unhappy laugh. “You said, never let the job get into my personal life, and vice versa. You were right. It did. It shouldn’t have. Now that I’ve blown the alarm on her, I’m wrong. She’s broken regs for a personal call, she’s in deep trouble and of course now it’s all my fault.”
Yolanda Mercheson was as glum and methodical a young woman as Jase was high-voltage. Small wonder that relationship hadn’t worked, logical as it might have seemed at the time between two people effectively shipwrecked.
“A pickle.”
“As in dinner menu?”
“As in a hashed-up mess.”
“I don’t want this job, Bren. Hell, Ramirez doesn’t even need my vote in council. No one dissents. No one argues. I suggested he move Yolanda into the seat in my place. I guess my report this week didn’t encourage that, did it?”
“And Ramirez said, then?”
“Didn’t even look up. Said I was doing just fine: that I understood the atevi. Never mind I don’t have any other qualification and I couldn’t handle ops if the instructions were printed on the console… which they’re not. ‘That’s fine,’ the old man said. ‘You’re doing just fine. Yolanda couldn’t do what you do. Stay put.’ Not damned fair, I say, when the most I want out of life is to get on the ocean down there on a boat and just get out of this.”
“That’s not what you want.”
“I don’t know what I want, to tell the truth. I know I never want to handle ops. I don’t want to handle command. I could live off a diet of fish.”
“If we’re really lucky, you won’t ever have to do anything about ops.”
“Or Yolanda.”
“You’re doing fine. Geigi favors you. You give him great confidence, just knowing you’re in office.”
“I’m glad he’s confident. I don’t like what’s going on.”
“Tabini isn’t at all unhappy to have one of the paidhiin sitting as captain up here: that’s an understatement. It gives him confidence. The whole aishidi’tat is pleased to have you right where you are. We don’t need Yolanda making independent judgements.”
“Damned right we don’t.”
“I’ll talk to her. I’ll keep your name out of it.”
“She’ll know. But at this point, hell if I care. Maybe you can get yea or nay out of the Old Man.”
“I can. Trust me.” He hadn’t mentioned the thing Jase would most want to know. “Ginny’s back. We’ve got robots.”
Hopeful quirk of an eyebrow. “Movement on the robots?”
“No. Freed. Liberated. Strike’s settled. The initial load’s just come up.”
“Damn!” It was an entirely cheerful damn.
“In the station’s receiving area, by now. I imagine she’s notifying Ramirez even as we sit here.”
“When did that clear?”
“Evidently very fast. Didn’t have any idea, either, until I met Gin on the flight. I think she’s escaping from the planet before one of the company execs can ask a return favor.”
“Oh, this is good news.”
“Looks as if everything’s going to move. We’re going to open the next section, first we can. I’ve got the figures, labor and support. Geigi will get his fish tanks.”
“And the Old Man’s going to be in a far better mood all around.”
He’d certainly made Jase’s evening. The unlovely little autobots were the backbone of the fueling and refit operation, and Ramirez had requisitioned a crippling number of them into his refueling and mining the last three years. They were finished with that—and now that they were finished, able to divert the robots back to other priorities, finally, the labor dam broke, and they had the autobots’ next generation.
But it wasn’t too late. It meant they could accelerate station operations, and accelerate ship-building: everything was going to break loose.
And damned if Yolanda Mercheson was going to conduct some personal business on official channels in the middle of it. Yolanda wasn’t going to be happy with him, either, before all was said and done, not if she’d been carrying on some personal business on Mospheira without going through channels—or if she’d been running some deal for Paulson without telling her fellow paidhiin. There was no legal sanction for the latter, and she wasn’t paidhi to the island any longer. He didn’t know whether to go and talk to her on what was clearly a sore spot. Between them, these days, there almost wasn’t a friendship, but he could at least make his displeasure known. He could talk to Paulson and make Paulson less anxious to go that route, if Paulson was making trouble—and a sad state of affairs if he was, and if he’d gotten Yolanda to do something that proved the final split from Jase.
“I’ll be talking to Geigi after breakfast tomorrow, if I can arrange it,” Bren told Jase. “I’ll promise him his tanks… I assume he gets his tanks. Any reason against it, before I set that promise in motion?”
“You aren’t talking to the decision-making wing of the Captain’s Council. Remember?”
You’re still one of the captains, Bren thought, but there it was: Jase flatly refused to wield the power. At times it was more than inconvenient, but it was Jase’s notion of honor, and there was no getting by it.
They had a second brandy, all the same, and talked about Geigi, Geigi’s boat—the object of Jase’s daydreams of ocean sailing—quiet talk at the end of a long, long week of hurry-up and changed plans, homecoming, and, thank God, arrival of the robots, that solved so many problems.
Bren found his eyelids at half mast, apologized, and Jase excused himself: “You’d better get to bed,” Jase said. The rigors of travel were, curiously, another matter ship-folk had to learn about, and most didn’t quite understand: the notion of packing one’s belongings in a suitcase and rushing breakneck from point to point was something Jase had only experienced on a planet.
“Good of you to come,” Bren said, saw Jase to the door himself, and added, because he meant it, “Very good of you to come. Do it again soon.”
Fact was, he missed Jase. Didn’t know how he would manage if Jase ever moved back in, since the affair with Jago had gone beyond affair, and gotten to be the next thing to married routine. But there were times a human argument, a human conversation massaged areas of his brain that felt far too little exercised… that was what it was, he thought: too little stimulation of the human that was left in him. Not good. Not at all good, for the human organism. He didn’t know, before Ginny on the shuttle today, how long it had been since he’d had a lengthy social conversation with another human being.
Immediately after that, the brandy hit him with full force, persuading him that bed was just about the last objective he could reasonably achieve. Sensibly, he wanted to talk to Banichi and Jago tonight about a number of things, and dutifully, he should have advised his staff and settled down for an all-night debrief. Jago waited for him in the security post, still official and still in uniform, well, down to the tee-shirt, at least—but debriefing wasn’t what she’d been led to expect tonight. Sleep was reasonably what she thought she had coming, and she, who’d been on outside duty for hours, took precedence over Tano and Algini who’d had only on-site duty, off and on.
He wasn’t in condition to confer with anyone, as it was. The Jase conversation had been the last. Even without the brandy he suspected he would have opted for bed, being just too dog-tired.
But there was more than that business afoot, more than Jase, more than Ramirez, more than Tabini’s dealings with the provinces.
“Is there any word from my brother?”
“No, nadi-ji. Go to bed.”
“Good idea.” Tonight he just wanted to fall over and be unconscious for a few hours. “I’m going to sleep, Jago-ji. Are you coming to bed?”
“Soon,” Jago said, and added, because she knew how curiosity consumed him, drove him, made him crazy: “Banichi likewise says get some sleep.”
At least they didn’t need him. Some things, if they rested in safe hands, he didn’t have to ask. He simply directed himself back to the bedroom, shed his clothes into a servant’s care, all but fell onto the mattress and pulled up the covers. His body temperature was sinking fast.
But he didn’t sleep. He shut his eyes, wondering where Toby was, in what situation, whether there would be a phone call before morning.
After half an hour he got up, went to the computer and keyed in a message. Toby, I got your letter. I’m concerned. Call.
He sent it. It had to pass through the security station out there. His staff would know, and probably be distressed about it. But he didn’t explain. He went back to bed, no easier in his mind.
Jago eventually came to bed, a considerable weight on the other side of the mattress, interrupting an exhausted haze that was not quite restful sleep. He knew she was there, and dropped back off, safe.
Safe. Companioned. All things local in their places.
He couldn’t oversee the others.
No phone call in the morning. Perhaps, Bren said to himself, amid breakfast, the health crisis was over and Toby was on a flight back to the coast. If Toby could possibly reach a phone, he’d likely call, and if he couldn’t reach a phone, it likely meant he was traveling— which was as good news as a phone call.
In the meantime, morning courtesies included a hike all the way to the Construction Operations office to meet officially with their nextdoor neighbor, Lord Geigi—electric runabouts were available for the trip, but undignified, in Bren’s island-born view of the universe—besides heartily cursed by walkers in the halls. Bren, for his part, preferred walking, for the exercise, if nothing else: he’d watched certain officebound sorts put on the pounds, and fought the tendency.
Besides, in long stretches of hall where Jase swore on his life there were no bugs, he could talk at leisure with his staff, much as he and Banichi would talk in the open country down on the planet.
“So how has the world taken the aiji’s address, by now?”
“In curiosity,” Banichi said. “In great interest. Great interest and an expression of discontent in the East.”
Hardly suprising.
“Any clues why he wanted me?”
Tabini, and the ringing of that bell that held every imagination entranced, entrapped.
“One is not satisfied,” Banichi said. “We’ve reviewed the tape. But we haven’t discovered the absolute answer, Bren-ji. We have not, not in the configuration, the seating, or in anything said during the ceremony. Legislative proceedings are under seal, down in Shejidan. And that is troubling.”
“Something is very peculiar, nadi-ji.”
They were coming into a more trafficked area now, beyond the limits of any secure conversation. Remarkable sight, atevi and humans in about equal numbers, coming and going on business, atevi and humans in office clothes and workman’s clothes—regulations-wise unable to say more than a handful of words to one another—notably please go, please come, please stop… please call the supervisor immediately, in the most meticulously memorized and numerically neutral courtesy. But by that means the common folk of two species did talk, if only in those approved, memorized phrases for known situations.
They tried to be careful. But at certain points they had to cooperate.
And sometimes it came down to things ludicrous on the surface—at least to one side of the question—but fraught with the most serious emotional reactions.
Fish, for instance, and the urgent reason he had to talk to Geigi about robots and a fish tank.
They reached the construction office, a reception area inside of course tastefully arranged: small scroll-paintings and a reception table, with a bowl for correspondence—and an inexpensive soft drink dispenser for human visitors. Geigi was nothing if not even-handed, though the split in decor made an atevi visitor look twice.
They were expected. The attendant rose and bowed, and immediately opened the door with a key push.
“Nandi.” Security on duty just inside was as easy, as cordial: Tano had called ahead.
And in this easy place, Bren left Banichi at the security station to take his ease with Geigi’s staff, there to have a soft drink, likely, and exchange information.
Meanwhile he went on into the inner chamber, where Geigi, in informal clothing this morning, presided over a desk well-littered with papers, beside a tank humming and bubbling and populated with color and darting movement.
“Bren-ji.” Geigi rose—great courtesy, for a lord in his own territory. He was a jovial man whose whole attitude toward life was experimental—and, for an atevi lord, very spur-of-the-moment. He swept business aside, knocking two storage disks onto the carpet in the process, and personally dragged a chair up to the side of his desk. “Tea—tea, will you, Bren-ji? I swear I could do with a cup. We have this most amazing infuser—” Geigi himself went to a domed creation on the bookcase counter, put a plastic cup beneath, and created a cup of tea.
“Thank you.”
Geigi hastily created another, stirred it with a plastic rod. “Not so fine as that, but hot.”
“Very welcome.” One was appalled. A tea-maker. A Mospheiran tea-maker. In an atevi lord’s office.
“Back from the world and all, and a puzzling trip, I take it.”
“I have no idea why I was called, nandi, I truly don’t.”
“What, pray, is the aiji doing down there?”
“Mystifying us all. I wish I knew. So does everyone.”
“A requiem for Valasi-aiji, and not a whisper of ill intent to the living or the dead.”
“Not a one. And I can’t answer.”
“Can’t.”
“Truly can’t, Geigi-ji. I was down there. I came back none the wiser. But!” It was rude to change subjects on a gentleman, but Geigi was an intimate of long-standing, so intimate he risked his reputation with truly marginal tea. “I had a seatmate on the flight up, nandi. Gin Kroger.”
“Gin-nadi. With news?”
“Oh, with more than news, nand’ director! The robots are with us, and more certainly on their way.”
“A wonder!”
“I talked with Jase last night, filed intent to have some of our windfall diverted to your fish tanks, my closest of associates, and we, you and I, nandi-ji, need to put our heads together, so to speak, and set priorities and requirements and a timetable before someone else gets a bid in.”
“This is marvelous!”
“If the tanks can do as they need, Geigi-ji. If they can provide the needful food.”
“I have every detail.” Geigi leapt up and went to a central cabinet, among the other high, clear-doored shelves and cabinets that graced this very modern office. From it he extracted a stack of much-abused paper, brought it to the desk and spread it out, sketches of a circle containing many little circles.
It was an actual engineering plan, an exploded diagram of what he had last seen as a series of sketches on scrap paper: an aquiculture tank, with triple walls and heaters and solar panels and details he hadn’t seen.
Another trip to the cabinet and Geigi laid something new atop it all: it might be another tank, or a tricky sort of valve— the paidhi had gotten fairly proficient at engineering over the last decade, but this one eluded him.
“This is my own invention,” Geigi informed him. “And mathematically, baji-naji, I can say there are potentially sufficient variables to make the solutions for escape exceed the number of fish. This is an escapable trap.”
“An escapable trap, nandi.”
“It admits fish to an area where they may be caught. It revolves, see?” Geigi went back to a second cabinet and brought a plastic model, a somewhat taped-up and revised plastic model.
One began to get the notion.
Fairness. Mathematics that would prove to have harmonious numbers.
Atevi hunted. And fished. They did not raise animals for slaughter. The ship-folk’s cultural divorcement from the concept of eating living things ran head-on into Mospheira’s love affair with food and meat. The mainland’s code of kabiu, fitness, meant eating no meat outside its appropriate season, and eating with ceremony—respect, even reverence: ship-folk began to take to that concept, though queasily.
But for atevi, reverence didn’t mean processed meat, and it didn’t mean domesticated herds. And that had been a major stumbling block in trying to supply food to the station.
Fairness meant going out to fish for wild fish, not scooping up everything that lived in one whole tank and processing it without individuality.
But this revolving trap, this remote-fisher, offered a statistical chance to the fish to escape.
“Ingenious,” Bren said.
“Fry hatch along the bottom, where this grid—” Geigi pulled a sheet of plans from the middle of the stack, which showed a mesh smaller, one presumed, than the adults. “And a rapid current sweeps the young into the hatchling tanks, to what passes for shallow water. There are three outlets and one inflow. Of outlets, one offers this choice.”
Absolutely ingenious. Roulette, for fish.
Geigi was self-pleased. “Phoenix engineers, who understand this floating in space, these no-gravity pumps, they do this sort of thing very well. But we can satisfy the objections of the most fastidious. Fish may become resident in this facility, we don’t breed them. They breed themselves. And even from the fishing tank there is an escape back into the breeding tanks.”
Bren examined the plastic model, asked himself why a fish would want to dive through those holes—a question the paidhi had never asked himself in his life.
Some fish, like the species they planned to have in orbit, were kabiu in all seasons, having no migration or well-defined breeding behavior that made them appropriate or inappropriate.
It was not like the introduction of high fructose sugars, which had addicted the crew and made SunDrink a wild success. To the bewilderment of the Mospheiran companies who had hoped for Phoenix to argue on their side and accept meat products, the human ship-crew did not take readily to meat… but did take to the atevi view of fairness and fitness and season. Fairness made a sort of sense to the ship-folk, while it vaguely disgusted Mospheirans, who preferred not to think of the fish on one’s dinner plate as a personality.
“We can offer the fishing tanks for recreation,” Geigi said. Bren had wondered how long it would take before Geigi offered that notion.
“At first, however, nandi, I fear we’ll do well to have the fish reproduce.”
“We need a game biologist.”
“And the engineers.” It all was, to Mospheiran sensibilities, an insanely grandiose plan. But insane things had been engineered before now, since humans falling in from space had landed in a steam-age culture. One had only to look at the Shejidan spaceport to know what could be done to accommodate atevi sensibilities. Fresh water fish, however, not salt. A sea turned out to be a very fussy, very complex environment to maintain.
And once there were the robots, they had the means to automate operations and increase the supportable station population at the same time. With an unlimited food source, they could envision full-scale operation, a station population adequate to any operation… any operation, and a food-source that wouldn’t exclude atevi from orbit: that was the center of their plan.
“If we achieve this, nandi,” Bren said, “and quit spending so much of our launch weight on food, we’ll have the labor up here. No question.” In the most logical sense of how to proceed, he supposed he should push for a Mospheiran style fish-farm to start into operation first, to feed enough Mospheirans to make the harder project easy—but getting more Mospheirans than atevi up here was the very last thing they wanted to do. “This keeps everyone happy. I’m quite convinced.”
“Very good,” Geigi said delightedly. “Excellent!”
It was concluded. It was only twice and three times the scale they had intended, but now two thirds of the population were in accordance with the other third, and kabiu could be satisfied for good and all, now that there was a positive abundance of worker robots.
“We have at least a materials estimate,” Geigi said—and stopped, as the door opened and Geigi’s chief of security slipped in with a quietly blank look. Security never intervened in business except on life or death.
“Nandiin,” the man said. “An urgent message for the paidhi.”
For him? And two lords’ security agreed to interrupt a meeting? It was nothing good.
Might it be his call from Mospheira? Some message from Toby?
“Excuse me, nandi.” Bren rose. “I’ll deal with it quickly.”
“Whatever you must do,” Geigi said, rising, the soul of courtesy.
Geigi’s man led the way outside. Banichi was there, to be sure, and Bren’s immediate expectation was that Banichi had received a message, something relayed from Tano.
But Geigi’s man opened the door to the general reception area, where an unlikely individual, in blue fatigues and with a blinking lot of electronics, waited for him.
Kaplan. One of Jase’s aides, considerably out of formal uniform such as he mostly wore nowadays.
“Excuse me,” Kaplan lisped in Ragi, and lapsed into ship-language. “Captain Graham’s sending, sir, Captain Ramirez— he’s had a seizure. They’ve taken him to infirmary.”
“To station infirmary.” Ramirez would ordinarily go to sick bay on Phoenix. The station infirmary was closer—for minor things or, conversely, for absolutely urgent care.
“Orders said find you wherever you were, sir. Captain Graham thinks you should come, right now.”
“Absolutely.” He changed to Ragi. “Ramirez has been taken to station hospital, a health crisis, I take it. I’m going at once to pay respects. Tell nand’ Geigi.”
“Yes,” Geigi’s man said, and went to do that immediately.
Which left him with Banichi and Kaplan.
“Kaplan. We’re with you.”
“Yes, sir.” Kaplan led off, out the door.
Ramirez. He’d been subconsciously primed for grievous news to come from the planet, not from here.
But Ramirez… Ramirez had been in dubious health—and he was one of the three keys to the whole atevi-human partnership. The paidhi-aiji could suffer a personal loss and go on doing his job the same day. The paidhi could lose everyone he loved in the world, and the future of three nations would go unshaken.
But Ramirez stumbled, in the midst of all the agreements and programs that relied on that one man… and three worlds shook.
Lord Geigi, no less, overtook them at the lift. That was Ramirez’ importance. Bren acknowledged the presence with a glance as the car arrived, and all of them got in together, bound toward a very small installation on third deck, which had only one virtue—its proximity to Ramirez’ on-station office.
They didn’t speculate aloud, he and Geigi. But it took no telepathy to know they shared the same thought, the same apprehension of disaster.
Phoenix security was evident in the infirmary corridor, two in fatigues; and armed guards occupied the infirmary foyer as if the place were under siege. It was anxious security, worried security—security whose highest authority was behind those doors, incapable of command.
“Mr. Cameron, you can’t bring them in here.”
Kaplan was absolutely speechless. Bren swung a stark, forbidding look at the human officer, Jenrette. Ramirez’ man, for God’s sake, delivered a prohibition to an atevi lord and his retinue as if they were random tourists.
“Mr. Jenrette, this is lord Geigi and his security.” Bren spotted the personal guard of Captain Sabin and Captain Ogun present further in; and Polano, who was another of Jase’s message-runners. “Captain Graham sent for us.”
Jenrette took a deep breath and made that slight nod of the head that ship personnel had learned to use with atevi authority. “Apologies. Mr. Cameron, the captain… the captain’s in a bad way. The other captains are with him and I can’t let anybody in right now.”
“We’re here officially, sir, from the aiji’s side. I hope you’ll convey that to appropriate channels. We’re here to help if we can, nothing else.”
“Yes, sir.” Jenrette’s nerves were wound tight, but he let go a pent breath and looked grateful.
“I’m sorry,” Bren said. Jenrette’s whole life was wound up in Ramirez, and Bren sensed in the man’s manner that Jenrette knew they were very near to losing the captain. After all the close calls, this might be the last one, and Jenrette was struggling. “I’m personally sorry, Mr. Jenrette.”
“Thank you, sir.” The last was a breath, heart-felt in expression.
Banichi and Jago, further removed, meanwhile, were in near-silent communication—likely with Tano and Algini, back in their residence. So was Geigi’s security in touch with someone elsewhere.
As for Geigi, his solid, ordinarily cheerful face showed he well understood the heightened tensions… not in human terms, but certainly in practical ones. Love might not translate, but man’chi covered the situation. An association about to shatter translated into Ragi understanding very well, and Geigi’s security was understandably on edge, considering their charge here in the midst of humans at a moment of transition. Geigi’s men reasonably thought they were here to shore up order against impending chaos.
“One fears the worst,” Bren translated quietly for Geigi. “Ramirez is alive at the moment, though the outcome seems very much in doubt. I don’t think we have to fear a coup as Tamun tried to effect, not even a dispute of succession. Ramirez-aiji’s chief of security is distressed, and only wishes to prevent intrusion.” This above all else was not only understandable but commendable in a man in Jenrette’s position. “These men all answer to the ship-aijiin. Doctors are with Ramirez. We may expect some sort of initial report on his condition.”
“Understandable in all senses,” Geigi said. “We will attend a decent time, and wait for the report.”
Geigi’s bodyguards meanwhile still looked uneasy. Their senior spoke to Banichi in low, worried tones. Banichi answered something, and there seemed to be some agreement, likewise some quiet communication to separate staff offices.
So they stood. They waited. There was little room in the place. The infirmary staff remained at the desk, looking anxious. A lone human worker came into the infirmary with a badly cut hand, and hesitated in dismay, but one of Ogun’s security directed the man to the desk, and security escorted the worker quickly back into the patient care area. For the rest, quiet prevailed.
“One should set an extra watch on the survivors of Tamun’s men,” Banichi suggested quietly, in the wake of the worker, and it certainly was a worthwhile consideration. Tamun might be dead in the coup of several years past, but there were still a handful of crew under close watch, minor adherents of the Tamun affair who had had amnesty.
Bren hesitated; but critical as the situation might be, he went to Jenrette. “Mr. Jenrette,” he said in a low voice, “my security expresses a concern regarding Tamun’s people. I trust we know where they all are.”
“At every moment,” Jenrette said, and drew a breath and seemed relieved to find something within his capacity to say, yes, that was under control.
So they stood, over a period of minutes after the worker’s passage, and the activity in the infirmary’s central corridor increased in ways that seemed, from Bren’s vantage, to center further up the corridor than the injured worker. Doors opened and closed somewhere in the depths of the place.
Then came a period of ominous quiet, no one speculating, no one saying a word. Jenrette, who had spent years of his life with Ramirez, stood barred from whatever proceeded with his captain, and Bren deeply pitied the man, who struggled valiantly to maintain his calm against evidence that something was wrong.
Then one of the doctors came out into the hall. Two and three others walked behind him, aides, all looking grim and defeated. The doctor spoke to them, then saw the gathering, and came up the hall with a glum expression.
“I’m very sorry. Captain Ramirez is dead.”
There were no expressions, no outburst from the men. “Mr. Franklin is in charge,” Jenrette said calmly, passing command to Ogun’s chief officer. “I’ll be reporting to Captain Graham, now.”
Jase had wanted to resign his office. Instead—Ogun commanded first-shift; Sabin, second: Jase became third, a heartbeat closer to command, in a ship that had just lost a wealth of its experience and knowledge of very critical decisions.
“Ramirez-aiji has just died,” Bren translated for lord Geigi and for his staff, who kept a solemn silence like the rest. “Command has just passed to Ogun-aiji.”
Now the captains emerged from the room down the hall— Ogun, Sabin and Jase Graham. Jules Ogun was a black man, white-haired, square-faced and solid as a basalt pillar; Sabin, a slight woman of grays and dour expression on the best of days, was no different in expression today: they were Ramirez’ two contemporaries, both taking matters in grim-faced calm.
But Jase… Jase, who’d regarded Ramirez as a father, at least as much contemporary father as he had—looked shaken.
Jase… and Yolanda. No one had notified Yolanda Mercheson to be here. And she had lost every bit as much as Jase.
Ogun shook Jenrette’s hand, first, then looked at Bren, and at Geigi.
“Captain Ramirez is dead,” Ogun said. “Seniority rests on me. Captain Ramirez’ policies and orders stand until specifically revised, Mr. Cameron, will you relay that to the alllies? We’re on our way to Phoenix, to make the official announcement in about ten minutes. We ask you keep it off the com until then, even for your personal security.”
“Our condolences and respects,” Bren said solemnly. “We understand. —Banichi, the ship-aiji asks no communication until the official announcement.”
“One hears,” Banichi said. It wasn’t to say word hadn’t already passed to his own staff and to Geigi’s, before Ogun had requested otherwise, but transmission had been in Ragi, and not apt to slip those channels. Now Bren ordered silence, a respect to the ship that hosted them, as the captains left, Jase left with them, and the aides attended them out.
The foyer of the infirmary was suddenly only atevi and the paidhi, and the language became wholly Ragi, impenetrable to the infirmary staff.
“They’re going to Phoenix,” Bren explained, “to make the official announcement. We should go back to our own offices now, to answer questions as they come to us, Geigi-ji. Ogun holds Ramirez’ policies and orders in place, at least for the while. I’ll send a courier to Paulson.”
Paulson was acting head of the Mospheiran section, Mospheirans having been utterly without representation and without information in this turn of events.
“A good idea,” Geigi said. “I’ll send, as well, to my domestic staff.”
By courier, that was, which didn’t breach their agreement. They left the premises and took quiet leave of each other.
“Call Jago out to meet us at the lift,” he said. He didn’t construe that as violating the silence. “She’ll see me home. You go to Paulson. I’ll write a note.” He searched his pockets for a notepad, found it, wrote as they waited at the lift, a notification for Paulson. A gentler notification for Yolanda Mercheson. He wasn’t sure Jase would find the moment, caught up as he was in the captains’ council, whisked back to the ship under bewildering circumstances.
By the time you get this you must surely know the sad news, that Captain Ramirez has died. Jase is caught up in official proceedings and incommunicado, as far as I can determine. He was called there, and took it hard. I know he’s still in shock, as I know this message must come as a great shock to you; but I am free to write as I fear he is not, under official order, and express, as I know he would, concern for you.
My staff will welcome you at any time and convey messages or provide a quiet rest as you need. Please accept my sincere condolences.
—Bren
Jago arrived before he was done. He gave her the messages, and their destinations. “No danger,” he said to her. “But requirements of propriety.”
“Yes,” Jago said, and went, quickly.
The messages might or might not beat the official announcement, but they would salve feelings. Especially Yolanda’s. That Jase was under official order might at least take the sting out of the likelihood that Yolanda had not been advised, not even in Jase’s mind—he feared so, at least. The look on Jase’s face had said that not much at all was in Jase’s mind at the moment—nothing logical at any rate. And Yolanda wasn’t as close to Ramirez as Jase was. Not that he’d ever observed.
The pace of everything had stopped when Ramirez’ heart beat its last. Now the rate of decision accelerated again, a set of movements that had immediately to be performed and a set of facts that had to be confirmed, abraded feelings patched, nervous allies reassured even if logic and common sense said there would be no immediate changes in policy.
The announcement came over the general address in the corridors as they reached their own apartment foyer, as Narani was accepting his coat. The intercom light near the door began to flash, in case they might not have heard.
“It’s reported,” Bren said to the staff in Ragi. Tano and Algini had come out of the security station. “A call to Tabini-aiji. Use my personal codes. I’ll speak to the aiji himself if I can reach him.”
“Yes, nandi.” Tano and Algini would have heard every breath and whisper in their vicinity for the last hour: they were rarely out of touch with their own internal security, and the same, he knew for a fact, for lord Geigi. And likely two messages were going down to Tabini, and Paulson would immediately call the State Department on Mospheira, at very least.
Then, very quickly, the facts would hit the public news services—no overwhelming shock, because Ramirez was no young man, and his heath had been a serious question for a long time.
But the loss of Ramirez was going to shake everything from the legislatures in Shejidan to the markets in Jackson. Every lunatic who’d been halfway quiet would become agitated and full of speculations. Every paid publicity-seeker who wanted five minutes in front of the cameras was going to jump up waving his arms.
Crisis… under control, but yes. They had to get Tabini and Shawn Tyers fully informed, fast, and get a news release organized ahead of the fact.
He went into the security office to write one, and Tano hastened to open up the board and send as he was directed. Algini was monitoring, listening intently, likely to Jago. Banichi was talking to Narani, outside, likewise passing other details, and count Bindanda into that briefing, too. His security was operating on edge, not alarmed, but their nerves were wound tight, all the same. The passing of a lord was rarely without shock-waves, and somewhere in their atevi nerves was engrained the belief that, species differences aside, some human might at any moment run berserk through the corridors. That it was not that likely to happen in a carefully selected crew was beside the point. If humans failed to do it, some ateva might do it for them, and Geigi surely had his hands full at the moment.
“Lord Geigi has made the official announcement to the staff,” Tano reported, then, from his personal communications. “He’s assured them that the transition is smooth. He’s requested that non-essential staff go to quarters and official staff express appropriate condolences to official channels.”
Get off the streets, that was. So to speak.
Get off the streets and be polite to the humans until whatever might happen had happened, simplest way to deal with the crisis.
Points to Geigi for simplicity: no explanation, just clear instruction.
Mospheirans, on the other hand, were likely to populate the bars—there were several devoted to Mospheiran taste—and speculate. Depend on it, there’d be a dozen conspiracy theories in the Mospheiran section by the end of shift, and they’d build on each other.
Among the crew… the conspiracy that had attempted to take control of the ship, however, was old business and quiet. Tamun was dead. Jenrette had his allies under watch… under close arrest, it was likely, by now, without explanation, knowing how thoroughly and quickly crew tended to deal with emergencies. Mospheirans might insist on due process and rights, but as Jase put it, rights don’t mean anything when the ship moves. Meaning that acceleration and emergency overruled everything. And if it wasn’t an operational crisis, it was close to one. Their security would already have a heavy hand on matters, and ship crew would not gather in bars or even talk on the job.
“I have sent to Mogari-nai, nandi,” Tano said, seated nearby. “Fifteen messages are in progress to Mospheira… one other is in progress to Shejidan.”
There was the difference between the cultures, in a nutshell.
Among atevi those fifteen calls home might indicate fragmentation. Maogishi. Breakdown of order. Among atevi, that rated attention.
“That’s to be expected,” he said. “Department heads and a couple misusing their business clearances. Likely corporate calls, too. No threat of fragmentation. Just informative calls.”
“The halls remain peaceful,” Algini said.
“Best, all the same, if the human work force stays at work—if nothing else, to be near official channels instead of sources in the bars. I hope Paulson uses good sense.”
“It seems so,” Algini murmured, hardly diverting attention from his console. “There is a request for a communications stand-by. Will the paidhi add an address to lord Geigi’s?”
“I hardly need to,” he said. “Lord Geigi will do best.”
“I have the aiji’s line, nandi,” Tano said. “I have Eidi, at least.”
Tabini’s head of staff. “Pass it to me, Tano. —Eidi-nadi?”
“Nand’ paidhi?” The voice, the rational, known voice from the planet was very welcome, water in a cosmic desert.
“Eidi-ji. I need to speak to the aiji, utmost emergency.”
“Nand’ paidhi, I regret—the aiji is unreachable even to the utmost emergencies. I can bring the message myself, under my own office, nandi, as fast as I can run.”
God. Was something wrong down there? Or was it simply Geigi’s call, beating his?
“Eidi-ji, Ramirez-aiji is dead, of natural causes. Ogun is ship-aiji now, Sabin second and Jase Graham third. The station and ship are quiet. The transition is peaceful, policies remain in place, but unofficial calls from the Mospheiran district on the station are already going out to the island.”
To the news services, one might as well say, and from there straight to the rumor mill. Of all times C1 had been the choke-point, inconveniencing the free flow of information, it failed them now.
“I will bring that message, nandi, as fast as I can, understanding its importance. Please remain available.”
“I shall,” he said. “Thank you, Eidi-ji.”
The contact winked out, but that was all right. The message would go as faithfully and as fast as the man nearest Tabini could bring it to him. Eidi understood the importance. He had no doubt on that score.
And now the adrenaline more or less ebbed out of him in disappointment and frustration, knowing he could not speak to Tabini and could not get an immediate resolution out of the situation. Things weren’t going to be simple, not when the changes were this high up the decision-making apparatus.
A week ago, before Tabini’s phone call, the whole world had been running more than smoothly. Now… with Ramirez dead and Tabini pursuing some arcane piece of internal politics with his predecessor and the legislature that he still didn’t understand—and his own family having waited until precisely this week to have a serious crisis… things had gone straight to hell.
In the small nook of his mind he reserved for private business, he did earnestly wish Toby would answer his messages and take at least one crisis off the docket. He thought perhaps if their mother was in hospital Toby might be there, and not in touch… though Toby was usually better than that, and usually checked periodically through the day, if he’d put a call in…
Well, now things were worse on that front. He couldn’t call Toby now, not in the middle of this goings-on. Every call he made to the island was going to be suspect as political in nature. He couldn’t do anything quietly any longer.
But Toby must surely realize that the moment the news broke. Toby would learn what was going on and then figure out that it was all on him to make contact—that it had to be.
“Nand’ Gin is calling,” Tano said then, a seat removed from him at the console. “She wishes to speak to you, nandi. Will you?”
Ginny Kroger. The unofficial and far more competent human power on the station. “I’ll take it,” Bren said immediately, and picked up an ear-set. “Gin? This is Bren.”
“Bren, I’m getting disturbing rumors. Are you hearing any?”
“Ramirez has died. Unfortunately that’s no rumor.”
“Heard that. But that’s not the rumor I’m talking about.”
Did he ask her to spill it, and risk the security of the communication?
But if it was a rumor, it was evidently loose, and a little late for secrecy.
“Something you can say here, Gin?”
“Talk in the halls. No secrecy here.” Time for a breath. A big one. “Talk says the lost station’s not destroyed, Bren. That it’s still crewed. That the captains knew it all along.”
That couldn’t be true. It couldn’t. His heart stopped a beat.
No.
His deepest instinct said he and Ginny damned sure shouldn’t be discussing this over the intercom, but his conscious brain said that if it was in the halls, it was a little damned late for secrecy and about time someone official spoke to the situation. “First I’ve heard,” he said—understatement. “Gin, at this point that’s just a rumor. Report anything else you hear: talk to Jago, on my staff. She can translate somewhat.” Best if Gin could get to Feldman or Shugart, the official translators, but they were both in Paulson’s office, and probably going berserk at the moment trying to monitor atevi internal communications, granted they weren’t stalled trying to figure the intricacies of Geigi’s message down to Shejidan. “I’ll try to trace the rumor through channels.” He was in the political stream up here. Ginny wasn’t. But Ginny had access to the workers. “You try to trace it through the tunnels.”
“I will,” Ginny said. “Keep me informed.”
“Same,” he said to her, and punched out as he swung around in his chair to face an apprehensive staff. “Tano, get Jase on com. Use the beeper.” Jase carried a pocket beeper they had very rarely used… granted Jase had it on him at the moment. If he was in a security lock-down, they might have objected to the atevi beeper. “Send him a code one.”
See me. Emergency.
“Yes,” Tano said, and punched buttons. “Done, nandi.”
“Workers in Gin-nadi’s hearing,” he said then, informing his security staff, who might not have followed all that transaction in Mosphei. “Workers are carrying a rumor that the ship didn’t find the remote station destroyed, as they reported, and that crew remained alive aboard it. That this was something the captains knew.”
“Then the source is reputed to be the captains?” Tano asked.
“It would apparently go that high—if it’s true at all.” Everything they had done here to secure their mutual future depended on the ship’s assurances that the aliens that had attacked and destroyed the remote space station couldn’t possibly have gained information from the ruin—that the destruction there was complete, and that no data on the location of their own station could have gotten to the aliens.
And if that weren’t entirely true—if the conflict out there was still going on—
Banichi appeared in the doorway. “Were workers or crew the source of the rumor?” Banichi, with his earpiece evidently attuned to proceedings in the security station, was completely briefed, and had the salient question.
“I don’t know,” Bren said. “But I want to know. Jago’s out in that section. Is she aware?”
“Now, yes,” Banichi said.
There was an increasingly queasy feeling at the pit of his stomach.
Tabini unavailable, Ramirez dead, the newly-arranged captains off to their private councils, and now rumor cast doubt on all their agreements—all the ship’s many promises and protestations, all oaths, all reassurances—
This was very, very bad news. And it wouldn’t raise trust, among the Mospheiran workers.
“We’d better get an official answer for this one, fast. Keep trying to get Jase. Contact C1 as well as the beeper—” C1 being Phoenix-com. “Put me through as soon as possible.”
“Yes,” Tano said.
“If it’s only a rumor,” he said to his staff, “it’s still serious. If it isn’t—we’ve been lied to. But we don’t assume that as first choice. It may be more complicated than that.”
Meanwhile Tano pushed buttons and tried to find Jase.
“C1 doesn’t respond,” Tano said—and that was more than troublesome. “I believe a recorded message is saying all communications are routed through station central until further notice.”
Not good, not good at all. Bad timing, if nothing else.
“Use the operations emergency channel.”
“The ship is fueled, Bren-ji,” Banichi pointed out.
Phoenix, once all but helpless, was not, at the moment.
“Gini-ji. Get Paulson.”
“Yes, nandi.” Algini moved, then signaled him the call was through.
“Hello? Paulson?”
“Mr. Cameron?”
“Paulson.” The relief was a cold bath. “Rumor’s running the halls. C1’s not responding. I think we need a little extraordinary security out there. Keep workers on their shifts. No shift-change, do you agree? Restrict the bars and rec areas. Call it a funeral.”
“You’ve heard the rumor.”
“What have you heard?”
“That Phoenix lied to us.”
That wasn’t the construction he’d like to put on it. But that was certainly a Mospheiran gut-reaction—a mild one, considering the history of lies the ship had told the colony from the beginning, and the distrust there still was, on the planet, among those whose ancestors had parachuted into a gravity well to escape Phoenix’ iron grip.
“We don’t know all of it. We don’t even know a legitimate source, unless you’ve got better information than we do. As far as we know, it’s just loose talk that’s gotten started.”
“We’ve already put the word out: we’re holding employees at posts, we’ve canceled all breaks until further notice and shut down private calls. Supposedly somebody overheard something in the infirmary. Some worker. When Ramirez died.”
Paulson wasn’t the sort of director who heard rumors. No one told Paulson anything. Except now it seemed as if someone had. Someone had told everyone.
A worker had come into the infirmary with a cut hand. And been treated in the area where Ramirez died.
“What did they hear?”
“Ramirez told Graham that the station out there is still operating. Still has crew on it.”
Ramirez himself. He was stunned at the indiscretion. But maybe a dying man hadn’t had choices.
And what did he say to that?
“Can you find that worker? It’s got to be in infirmary records.”
“It’s not all, understand. Ramirez ordered Graham take no extraordinary measures to keep him alive. Said that he wanted to die. The ship was fueled and he was ready to die. That’s what’s being said around.”
He didn’t doubt the details. Now he wasn’t sure he doubted the central rumor. A deep and volatile secret had broken out of confinement.
At worst construction, they were betrayed—and not for the first time. His own Mospheiran heritage welled up in him, in deep, angry suspicion.
He shut it down. Tried to think instead of react.
“We don’t have all the facts,” he said to Paulson. “I’m asking, keep your workers exactly as you have, out of places where they can gather and theorize. I’m applying to ship command for a clarification. Talk to that worker if you can. Let’s find out the truth.”
“When you know what’s going on, I’d appreciate a call.”
“Deal.”
Still no answer to the beeper, and no help from C1. Bren punched out on Paulson and looked at his security team.
“Did you follow, nadiin-ji? Ramirez-aiji in dying said to Jase-paidhi that there were indeed people left behind on the other station and that at that time it was operational. He said, at the same time that he had fueled the ship and that he was ready to die.”
“Perhaps we should visit Jase,” Banichi said. “Jago and I.”
If they were on earth, they would have other recourses— they might well have sent a messenger from the Guild. They weren’t on earth, and hadn’t, and he didn’t want to start a war with the ship-crew.
“We’re going to have to advise the aiji,” Bren said. “That on a priority. Put another call through, Gini-ji, to Eidi, to anyone you can get.”
“Put on the vest, Bren-ji,” Tano said ominously, meaning the projectile-proof one that restricted his movements and his breathing, and no, he didn’t at all want it, one more ferocious inconvenience in an already maddening hour—but under the circumstances and with what was riding on the lives of a handful of critical personnel, he had no choice but agree.
“I shall,” he said. “I shan’t forget it, Tano-ji.”
“Jase is calling back,” Algini said suddenly, and Bren snatched up the ear-set.
“Jase?”
“Bren. I have a page from you. I’m on my way to a meeting.”
“Jase. I don’t know if you know, but whatever Ramirez told you—it got out. That the other station wasn’t destroyed, for starters. Is that true?”
There was a slight pause. Possibly command hadn’t known rumors were flying. He had the impression that, wherever Jase was, he had just stopped dead in his tracks.
“Is the rumor true, Jase?”
“Bren—” A short pause. Desperation in the tone. “Bren, I can’t talk about this here.”
He lapsed straight into Ragi. “You’d better know it’s not secret. It’s being talked about among the workers. My staff knows. It’s being reported on the planet.”
“The crew doesn’t know, Bren. We don’t know. Don’t let it out.”
“It is out. I understand what you’re telling me…” That… God, the crew had not a clue and the captains had lied to them. That possibly Jase had had no clue either, and that was why Ramirez had told him: he could believe that Jase was innocent. “Is that the truth, Jase-ji?”
“He said so,” Jase admitted. “I was afraid the techs had heard.”
“I don’t know if a tech heard, but a worker in for treatment overheard. It leaked to the Mospheirans, Jase, and there’s no stopping it.”
“I can’t say more than I have right now. Bren, I’m asking you, don’t call Tabini yet.”
“I have to call Tabini. Every Mospheiran with a phone link, every corporate officer and the communications techs— they’ve already been talking. If you don’t want a bigger crisis than we already have at this point, Jase, don’t cut me off from Tabini. If merchants know it on the North Shore waterfront, damned sure I’d better advise the aiji very soon that we have a problem.”
“Bren, I can’t say—I don’t know—I think Ogun has something to say about this. I have to get to the meeting. Wait. I ask you. Wait.”
All over the station-ship hookup, communications that shouldn’t get out of a security folder were flying back and forth like mad. “Jase, you know where my loyalties are. Tabini ignorant is far more dangerous than Tabini informed.” Jase, damn it all, hadn’t given an official order in all the years he’d warmed that fourth seat. And didn’t want to start now. “You were fourth seat and maybe it didn’t matter. But now you’re third. Like it or not, somebody who knows had better make a decision. You keep channels open for me to Mogari-nai. You know Tabini. You know the consequences, dammit, if he should be surprised, especially now, especially now, with critical meetings going on. You know that.”
“I know. I know. I’ll hold your channel open. I can do that. But that’s all I can do—I can’t go rushing around giving orders right now, I can’t, under these circumstances. Tabini misinformed isn’t damned good either, Bren, is it?”
“Somebody in command knows the truth. Somebody in ship-command damned well better know, Jase, and—hear me on this—there had better not be any surprises.”
“There won’t be. Bren. Trust me. We’re about to address the crew on intercom. Get everybody out of the corridors. Secure all stations. We’re asking the same of crew. Wait for Ogun. That’s all I ask. One favor. Communication silence until then. One favor. Please.”
“You know what you’re dealing with. You know. We’re secure out there as we’re likely to be. But don’t lie. Absolute truth to these people. They deserve it. Once in several centuries, they deserve it. Hear me?”
A small pause. There was desperation on the other end of the link. “I didn’t know, Bren. I didn’t know. Crew didn’t know. I’m not even sure Sabin knew. Now I think we’re going to find out. Be patient. I’ll talk to you tonight.”
Historically, it wasn’t only the colonists the Pilots’ Guild had lied to, and lied to habitually, as if the truth was the automatic last recourse of any situation, the one commodity always to be kept in reserve.
“Tonight,” Bren said. He at least believed Jase—whose mangled Ragi had contained half a dozen egregious and inflammatory mistakes. He filled in the blanks, filled them in with knowledge of Jase, where nothing else would serve.
And Jase punched out to go to his meeting.
He sank back in the chair, dumbfounded—speechless for the moment.
We’re going to find out, Jase said.
Hell, Jase, worse for the crew this time than for Mospheirans. They set up the station out there. Wasn’t it their ancestors who crewed it?
And assuring us the aliens couldn’t have gotten any clue to let them track the origin of that station back to this star—oh, well, again, just a little cosmetic exaggeration. Don’t worry. It’s not that likely.
Likely they won’t come here and blow the planet up.
Bloody hell, what excuse is Phoenix command going to tell us all this time, Jase?
He couldn’t let the distress reach his face—first lesson of diplomacy among atevi: never look upset. He looked at the ceiling a moment, away into white-tiled space, drew a deep breath, then faced solemn atevi stares with as much calm as he could muster.
“Well, Jase and I have had a lively discussion. As you heard.”
“One heard,” Banichi said.
“Jase says the captains will soon address the crew, nadiin-ji. Jase says he didn’t already know what Ramirez is alleged to have told him, so I suppose if we’re patient we may hear at least as much truth as the other captains have to admit. I’m. not pleased, I may say, and I’m doubtful how much truth we may yet hear. Jase says we’ll have Mogari-nai available.”
“What measures shall we take?” Banichi asked him— Banichi had to ask, in matters involving humans. On the planet, among atevi, Banichi was inclined to know.
This one, unhappily, was up to the paidhi to figure out.
But once lied to—where did people start believing again?
“One wishes one knew, Banichi-ji. One waits to see what is said, one supposes, and then one tries to determine whether we’ve now returned to the truth… or whether there’s only a new lie.”
“Does this entail a quarrel among the human associations?”
“One isn’t sure where the lines are,” he said. “One isn’t sure whose side certain individuals may be supporting.”
“The ship being refueled,” Algini said, “they can choose to leave.”
It wasn’t the first time his staff had raised that point. The last time had been in deep concern when Tabini had agreed to the refueling in the first place.
“There would seem to be very little we can do about it,” Bren said.
“We have studied the matter,” Banichi said, “and there might be something we can do about it, if we take certain key points within the ship.”
Why was he not surprised his staff, independently and quietly, had come up with a theory of how to do it?
And he had to decide, quickly, whether to let them try.
But what was next on Ramirez’ agenda? Or what might Ramirez have known? What might be coming in?
Dared they risk damage to the only ship they had—when they couldn’t, themselves, operate it?
“We know more than we did, nadiin-ji, but we don’t know what Ramirez knew. Before we make such a move, I hope I have time to talk to Jase. And I hope Jase comes to visit us with answers.”
Shipmates: the captains regret to report very sad news, Senior Captain Stani Ramirez has passed away suddenly of natural causes, much mourned and missed by us all.”
Funereal music had prefaced the announcement. The meeting—Jase’s meeting—had produced, officially, an official announcement on every channel, one, channel 2, given over to a captioned translation into Ragi—Jase’s, Bren strongly suspected. There was one ill-omened error of numerology.
“Services are set for 1800h in the crew recreation area stationside. All but critical personnel will have the choice to attend.”
Phoenix froze her dead—for disposition later, the word had always been. At some time Phoenix would send her departed crewmen to a rest that forever escaped gravity wells, but it hadn’t happened yet. One assumed that for Ramirez. But they were hurrying to hold the memorial, no preparation. They had an hour.
“This concludes the funeral announcement. A security bulletin follows.”
Damned well time, Bren thought.
“A rumor has arisen which has raised alarm among our allies. The captains have accordingly released the following accurate information. …”
Be truthful. For God’s sake, be truthful, Jase… and be accurate.
“Certain information regarding the station at Reunion was kept secret due to the necessity of duplicitous negotiation among the allies—”
God, Jase, actomen’shi, not eshtomeni?
“Reunion exists. It suffered extensive damage and loss of life during alien attack. A small number of survivors decided to stay on the station, maintain a general communications silence and effect repairs such as would give them the capacity to refit and refuel Phoenix for a further, longer voyage, only should Phoenix find no resource here.
“In the event of a second alien attack or imminent disaster to Reunion, Reunion staff is to destroy the station with all personnel and all records.
“Phoenix command has pledged to Reunion volunteers that Phoenix will return as soon as possible to their relief.
“A list of known survivors will be available via C1, appended to this bulletin.
“The Council of Captains reminds the crew that we have no information as to current conditions at Reunion. There has been no communication with Reunion since, for the protection of all persons.
“This is Captain Graham. I ask our allies be tolerant of my foreignness and make all utterances respectful and fortunate in your minds. It is the intent of the ship-aijiin to work closely and frankly with our allies.”
Well done. Well done, Jase.
As well done as could be, give or take a few glitches and one piece of accidental honesty—or maybe Jase had thought it best to tell the whole truth.
Jago was back. The whole staff assembled at the security station, leaning in the door, not venturing further into the small room.
The content was explosive enough with the crew—who couldn’t be damned happy with what their captains had done in maintaining secrecy. No democracy on the decks, that was sure. No debate about a decision to leave Reunion personnel in place… but Phoenix wasn’t a democracy and never had been.
The list of survivors rolled past. He didn’t personally know the names to look for, but he recognized crew surnames. There were living relatives—how close, and how emotionally viable the ties that bound them to ship-crew might be debatable, but the names told him there were ties, and the list numbered over two hundred individuals…
Two hundred individuals to keep a station alive.
But ask, even so, whether that list was definitive or not, or whether even Ramirez had known all the list or all the truth. The history of lies and half-truths was just too old, too long, too often.
And in all his career he doubted he had met a situation as disillusioning and as disturbing.
“I think one may transmit to Mogari-nai,” Bren said. Eidi still hadn’t gotten back to him, or acknowledged the second call, which might mean that Eidi had had to leave the Bujavid to carry his message—or it might mean that Tabini had heard the first one and wasn’t going to acknowledge a subordinate so disorganized as to chase one message with another within minutes. It wasn’t for the aiji in Shejidan to beg details. It was for the paidhi to compose his information in logical fashion and send, and he sent. He dropped his information, piece by piece, into the gravity well and waited for some echo, any echo, to tell him how Shejidan was reacting, what Tabini was thinking, what Tabini wanted him to do about the unfolding situation.
Tabini wouldn’t rush to judgement or to action. Not in this. Silence meant that the subordinate in question should act as wisely as he understood how to do, and silence meant if the subordinate fouled up—the aiji in Shejidan could change everything in a heartbeat.
Jase, sending, would likely get no better reaction.
So Bren let it be Jase—didn’t package the information under his own name, didn’t revise word-choices into felicity and good grammar—the aiji knew Jase, and he wasn’t superstitious.
But two stations—two was one of those damnable numbers that ran cold fingers down atevi spines no matter how modern and enlightened the hearer: two hadn’t even been in consideration when they were considering building another starship: three was the plan as atevi laid it down, and two was only a stage they would pass through on their way to three.
Trust atevi personnel to weld a piece of the next frame only to say there was a fortunate third under construction.
He sent his own commentary:
Aiji-ma, this is the official statement of the ship-aijiin on information overheard by a Mospheiran worker and rumored afterward by crew and Mospheiran workers throughout the station.
This forebodes policy changes of some nature. I have received reassurances from Jase-paidhi—and will accept them in your name, aiji-ma—that the treaty stands, pending further information.
In everything that came out, he believed that Jase hadn’t known, or Ramirez wouldn’t have had to tell Jase on his deathbed.
And where was Tabini?
Engaged in delicate negotiations, and relying on the steady progress of the space program to convince the skittish east to add their earnest effort to the west. Of course we can trust the ship-folk. Trust me, I know what I’m doing. I know what I’m asking of you. All of it will be worth it. We have a firm alliance.
If Ramirez had set out deliberately to sabotage atevi-human relations and the aishidi’tat at one stroke, he’d have had to study hard to pick a more delicate, more telling moment— granted the paidhi had any true idea what Tabini was up to at the moment.
Now Tabini had to be shown taking control of a situation with the ship-folk, strongly advancing atevi positions, asserting atevi authority over the program—all through the paidhi, who was supposed to do something about it all… the way the paidhi-aiji was supposed to have been a reliable source of information.
And in spite of the quick shut-down of private station communication, he knew the shut-down hadn’t been fast enough, and that it might be the worst thing to do: it might be better just to let the most stupid speculations go out, because at least information would flow. Rumors would be circulating through the island as fast as two cousins on north shore and south shore calling one another on the phone.
“Keep our line flowing to Eidi,” he told Algini.
So the messages went down, minute by minute.
And the paidhi had acute indigestion.
Might Damiri somehow get a message, before Tabini did? Might he suggest it, if he could ever get hold of Eidi again? He was down to considering uncle Tatiseigi, and maybe blowing Bindanda’s cover and asking Bindanda to contact him directly.
Damn the luck. Damn Ramirez’ timing.
Other information was flowing. He had plenty of messages from station offices, from Ginny Kroger, from Paulson, from Geigi, the latter saying, We have sent to Eidi, but Eidi seems to have left.
He sent appropriate messages to those individuals on the station: yes, he was going to the funeral service on the station, yes, it was entirely appropriate for atevi to attend.
By all means, the most stringent adherence to forms and politeness, while everything that was going on at official levels stirred echoes—oh, very definitely the deception echoed in his Mospheiran soul—and he was one of the Mospheirans struggling hardest to make this alliance work.
“Is there any protocol in specific we should know?” Jago came to ask him on behalf of herself and the rest of the staff, regarding the funeral. It was given she and Banichi would attend, in their uniform best.
“Solemn faces and silence,” he said, “will offend no one. Respect, Jago-ji. We still don’t know any other course. I still haven’t heard from Tabini. I assume Eidi got the information to him, but I daren’t assume everything is all right down there at the moment.”
“One might safer assume that,” Jago ventured, “than assume things will be peaceful here, if Mospheirans are also in attendance. Tano advised you wear the vest, Bren-ji. All of us are in accord.”
“I shall, with no argument. Assure Banichi.”
Bindanda and his assistant had laid out full court dress, lace-cuffed shirt and brocade coat, boots and all, and he dressed, had his hair braided. It was a funeral held, to the suspicious Mospheiran mind, much too soon, but he knew it was the ship’s procedure, supposed if it was the deceased’s choice to be frozen, it certainly provided a corpse for autopsy if questions came later. Concealment couldn’t be the motive.
Geigi would be there, with no less honor… probably, too, with bullet-proofing, and an urgent desire to get information out of the captains about future steps. So with Paulson. Ginny would attend, without official status.
At least Jase was now a third of that council, and Sabin, the cipher among the captains, the one he least trusted, could not outvote Ogun and Jase. And Ogun… Ogun could rely on Jase’s vote, if he represented Ramirez’s policies, at least until Ogun forced an appointment of someone of their liking to the fourth seat and enabled a tie vote.
It was toward suppertime, and he urged the household staff to eat. His own supper was a packet of crackers, a cup of tea, and an antacid.
There was still no answer from the planet.
At 1740 hours he slipped the bulletproof vest on, put his coat on and exited the apartment with Banichi and Jago in their formal attire—in their profession, that meant armed and wired to the teeth, the formal attire made especially to accommodate the tools of their trade.
Safe, he told his nerves.
They met lord Geigi and his bodyguard likewise leaving their apartment, and joined into a single delegation on their way.
They met Paulson and Ginny Kroger, with Ben Feldman and Kate Shugart, the translators, when they reached the appointed area. There were a handful of section chiefs, a few corporation heads who were probably chiefly responsible for the phone calls down to the planet.
Crew constituted most of the mourners, crew dressed in the blues that were the ordinary for work assignment and an unused set being the best clothing most common crewmen had. They gathered in the dimly lit rec hall… no benches, only tape lines marking the rows, and they found their own places, atevi and Mospheirans constituting two rows next to one another. There was no casket, no deceased. That, too, was ship-folk custom.
It was 1755h. They waited quietly, respectfully. The hall by now was packed.
There was a screen on the forward wall. The row of lights on that end was on, the sole source of light. Ogun came from a side door, Sabin next, and Jase. Their images lit the screen, so that everyone in the hall had a view.
No flowers. No incense. But it came to Bren he’d been in this scene and learned absolutely nothing.
Ogun advanced a pace to the fore. Light from overhead fell on his shoulders, sparked on insignia, silvered white, tight-curled hair above a dark, grim face. “We’re here to honor Stani Ramirez,” Ogun said, and drew a breath as one might for a recital. “Born aboard Phoenix in Big System, the year we began Reunion. He saw Deep End, and lived through Good Hope. He piloted a refueler there, and ran operations at Hell’s Acre. He took the fourth captaincy there, when Munroe died.”
Bren listened intently, taking mental notes on events in the history of Phoenix as he’d learned it. His staff understood some of it. Geigi himself did, though the names and the imagery might elude them.
Sabin had her say. “He was an able navigator and a fair judge.” Cold, rational praise of a man who had been a good administrator and a good captain. “He resurrected the station here and stood against the Tamun Mutiny.” Sabin had backed Tamun’s appointment to a captaincy. That small fact passed in polite if knowledgeable silence. “The details are in the log. Captain Ramirez always understated his part.”
Last, Jase spoke, a quiet voice, hesitant. “Stani Ramirez knew there’d be critical changes here: and he created paidhiin for the situation without ever having met one. That’s why I was born. That’s why Yolanda Mercheson was born.”
Bren didn’t see Yolanda. Hadn’t seen her in the crowd.
“If he hadn’t foreseen there might be communication problems,” Jase said, “if he hadn’t trained personnel in languages we never even expected to meet, we could have been in deep difficulty. We could be fighting each other instead of working together. He saw things ahead and he laid a course and he saw the ship through it. Taylor did that to get us here.”
Taylor. The pilot that had rescued Phoenix from its predicament.
“Ramirez made us able to survive here,” Jase said. It was a daring comparison. If the ship had a saint, it was Taylor—and Jase’s status, one of Taylor’s Children—had the place very, very quiet. Nobody expected much out of Jase in decisions.
But he’d hit them with words. He’d said things no one else could.
He’d mentioned Yolanda, when no one else had remembered her.
And Jase was right. The man who’d refueled the ship and died leaving them a hellish mess—had had the foresight to create Jase and Yolanda to study languages and cultures that had no possible relevancy to the ship; and whether he knew it or not—to make themselves different-minded enough that they could bridge that soft-tissue gap between ship-thinking and whatever they might meet on the planet.
That was Ramirez’ doing… when most of the ship’s crew couldn’t conceive that the colony they’d left behind could possibly look at things differently… and Jase was right, Ramirez was one chief reason they were standing here, because the alternatives, the pitfalls they could have walked into—were a guarantee of disaster.
For creating Jase and Yolanda, and for listening to them, Ramirez deserved a monument.
And that led to one difficult thought.
Would the man who was that foresighted, that aware of time, distances, and change—then do something so damnably stupid as to lie to them all about Reunion and plan to desert them?
Why? That was the question. Why had Ramirez held Reunion secret?
Why had the whole Reunion business not come out when Pratap Tamun tried a coup against Ramirez?
Had Ramirez—unlikely thought—been the only captain who knew?
Tamun, the newcomer to the captaincy—he hadn’t known.
Ramirez had waited until his last breath to tell Jase—as if Ogun and Sabin couldn’t. A way of putting a stamp of approval on Jase? The ticket to legitimacy in the office which Jase had fought every step of the way?
Well, for damned sure Ramirez hadn’t intended to be overheard.
The paidhi, better than most present, understood Ramirez’s position. Damned if he didn’t. In that light, he understood every maneuver the man had made. As a sovereign cure between strangers, truth was vastly over-rated.
Jase finished.
“The company is dismissed,” Ogun said.
“What about Reunion?”
The shout came from out of the crowd at Bren’s back. Shocked silence followed—about two heartbeats.
“This isn’t the place or the time,” Ogun snapped, and Ogun had the microphone. The tone went straight to the bones.
But: “Why?” a female voice shouted out, and in that breathless hush, didn’t need a microphone. Faces were obscured in the dark. Someone else, male, shouted: “What happened out there?”
“Nandi,” Banichi wanted his charge out of harm’s way, and wanted him to move to the wall.
But Bren stood still, even when Banichi nudged him. “I want the answers,” he said. Geigi also stood fast, since he did, both of them being fools, and lord Geigi’s security was also hair-triggered and worried.
Ginny and Paulson stood still, wanting answers, too.
And Ogun stood under the light, visible to everyone on the screen, his dark face frowning. Jase and Sabin were at either shoulder.
“Why?” the crew had begun to chant. “Why? Why? Why?”
Ogun held up an arm. Held it until, slowly, there was silence.
“One of you,” Ogun said, “one of you with the guts to step into the light—come up here and ask me.”
There was silence a moment. Then a single man moved into the light. Kaplan, of all people. One of Jase’s displaced guards.
“With all respect,” Kaplan said, his voice breaking. It cracked, twice, and he managed to say, picked up by the mike, “with all respect to the captains, apologies from the crew. But—” Kaplan got a breath. “We’re with you, captain, we always have been with you, and we go into the dark with you, no question, but here we’re being told things different than makes sense to us, and we don’t want to leave here with any doubts.”
Kaplan had learned something, being with Jase. It was a solid piece of diplomacy, a door through which crew and captains could fit together, if Ogun would just take the invitation and pick up the olive branch.
And Kaplan wasn’t alone. Polano and Pressman were discernible in the shadows behind him.
“Mr. Kaplan, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Phrase your question.”
“I’d rather ask the captains if they can explain better ’n we can ask, sir, because we don’t know.”
“Better than you can ask,” Ogun said. “Better than you can ask, Mr. Kaplan. Answers are in that list of survivors posted on C1, channel 2. That’s as best we have it.”
“It’s not enough!” someone shouted from the back, and Ogun drew an angry breath.
“All right. You want to know the truth, cousins and friends, the truth is, we didn’t make the choice, we didn’t have the choice. Now there is a choice to make, a last piece of business from the Old Man, and what we do about it, that’s a question before the Council. Every man and woman of you, get to a com station, personally, read the list. That for a start. Then if you can’t take orders and accept the discipline that’s kept the ship alive, get a parachute and join the colonists. But if you can take orders, if you remember who you are and what you are and what your job is, then you know why you don’t question an order except through channels. Right now my mailbox is stuffed with legitimate questions, which I haven’t gotten to, in the heat of the hour, and no, I don’t have all your answers. The Old Man didn’t, either. But I’ll tell you flat, I’m not going to have answers coming out piece by piece and individual by individual to be speculated on in the corridors out of context and with half the facts. So, Mr. Kaplan, seeing you’ve asked a general question, I’m going to respond to those legitimate letters of inquiry right now, in full. Stand to attention!”
Human bodies stiffened, unthought, automatic. Noise stopped.
Visitors stayed still, whether or not lord Geigi understood enough of what was going on. Bodyguards were ready for anything.
“First question,” Ogun said. “Are there any survivors who aren’t on the list? Answer: we don’t bloody know. If there is any other name, and a few could have been born and half grown by now, Reunion’s in a position to know. We’re not.
“Second question: do the aliens out there know where we are now? Answer: we hope not, but you know and we know there’s optics, there are antennae, and anybody looking in the right general direction could already have this star in their sights.
“Third question: why did we keep it quiet? Answer: it wasn’t our idea. But the fewer people that know, the fewer can tell—if we were so unlucky as to be asked by the intruders out there. So forget you know.
“Fourth question: why didn’t we take Reunion personnel off that station when we had the chance? Answer: that wasn’t our choice, either.
“Fifth question: what are we going to do next? Answer: that’s an issue under debate. Written suggestions will be considered. Turn them in, cousins and crew. We’ll listen.
“End of statement. I’ve disposed of a stack of memos. Don’t expect a written answer. For the rest, consider Captain Ramirez in light of what I’ve just said, and honor him for saving our necks and doing the damn best he could.
“Dismissed.”
There was utter silence. Ogun turned and walked off into the shadows. No one moved for a moment, and then crew began to murmur and to stir and to file out the doors.
Not our choice. Not our choice. Not our choice. Bren found his heart beating double time. Banichi and Jago wanted him to move. Lord Geigi was moving. But he felt his legs all but paralyzed.
Not our choice.
Damn!
He moved. He overtook Geigi, outside the door. “One can render what was said, nandi,” Bren murmured, head ducked, voice down. “In essence, there’s a hint there’s a higher authority on Reunion Station that ordered Ramirez to keep quiet. There is more. Shall we meet?”
“Immediately,” Geigi said. This most inquisitive, agile-minded of lords had seen enough to have the picture. “Will my offices suffice?”
Geigi wasn’t the only one disturbed. There was Paulson. There was Kroger. He edged past Banichi to reach Ginny on the other side of the door.
“Ginny. We need to meet.”
“Damned right.”
“You and Paulson? About an hour? Geigi’s offices?” It gave him and Geigi time for discussion.
But it wasn’t only them he wanted. He dived down the hall, Banichi and Jago taking full strides to catch up. He’d hoped to catch all the captains. As it was, Jase saw him coming and waited for him in the crossway of the corridor, all the while the outflow of mourners passed them on either hand.
“I didn’t know,” Jase said, first off. “I had no idea until the Old Man told me.”
“I believe that,” Bren said. “I’m meeting with Geigi. Do we get an official presence? It would be useful, Jase-ji. It would be damned useful.”
“I’m not one of the captains. I’m a fill-in. I’ve always been a fill-in, you know that. I don’t know if I can get Ogun—”
“You tell me this. Why did Ramirez tell you the truth? Why were you on his list to inform? And did Ogun and Sabin know?”
“Ogun knew,” Jase said, telling him volumes about relations between the captains.
But the point might finally, accidentally, have hit.
“Jase. Ramirez is dead. He didn’t let you resign. At the last, he told you because he wanted you where you are. Can’t you figure it?”
“I can’t make a decision for them!”
“You’d better,” he said, and Jase looked desperate. “That’s what you’re finally for, Jase. It wasn’t just a translator Ramirez wanted. You were paidhi. That wasn’t it. That didn’t satisfy him. He named you a captain, and navigation and administration damned sure weren’t your talents. He knew that. But he wanted someone on the captains’ council who could promote understanding. So will you do it? Will you come? Use your voice, negotiate with Ogun, finally wield what Ramirez handed you? Dammit, Jase, you’re the swing vote when they deadlock. And Sabin backed Tamun. I’m betting they deadlock. Will you come?”
“Yes,” Jase said, and on half a breath— “Yes. I’ll come.”
They all met around the conference table, behind three closed doors and under the watchful eye of Geigi’s internal security in the reception area outside. Their own security stood around them, a row against the walls. Jenrette was there with his partner Colby, Jenrette and Colby just having seen their captain to rest. They came now in the service of the most dubious captain to hold the office, but come they did, dutifully and soberly: Ramirez’s men, representing that policy. Polano, Kaplan and Pressman were there, officially displaced by Jenrette and his partner, but still in attendance on Jase—one assumed, at Jase’s orders, maybe because Jase wanted them under his protection after Kaplan’s speech in the assembly. Jase had learned his politics not only on the ship, but in Shejidan, and Jase knew the value of a supporting man’chi, even among humans.
Impressive contingent. From no power, all of a sudden Jase came in with a solid, determined presence.
So did the aiji’s wing—tall, dark, and armed. While Paulson and Kroger arrived with no more than Paulson’s secretary, a nervous man in a suit, who set a recorder on the desk and ducked back. Paulson was evident and touchingly anxious about his record-keeping. Everyone else, depend on it, was wired as well as armed.
Small use that was going to be in a mostly atevi meeting. But there was a keyboard, and Bren took it for himself, being a fast typist and the only one completely fluent. There was a single screen, above a low cabinet.
“You first,” Bren said in Ragi, and tested the keyboard. “Jase-ji, if you don’t mind. You have the answers the rest of us want. I’ll be translating, one language to the other, back and forth.” The alphabets weren’t at all the same, but the keyboard had a fast switch. He waited to see which language Jase would use.
“Nandiin-ji.” Jase looked into infinity for an instant, then locked onto the here and now. It was Ragi. Bren toggled the Mospheiran symbol-set and typed. “I honored Ramirez-aiji. I continue to honor that man’chi. Ogun and Sabin may vote me out at this hour—and, nandiin-ji, let them. But Ramirez is gone, and I have to do now as I see fit. And I’ll give you what I know, respecting the treaty Ramirez made with the aiji in Shejidan.”
I honored Captain Ramirez, Bren typed concurrently in Mosphei’. I continue to honor him. Ogun and Sabin may vote me out of my post at any time, and I will not contest that. But Ramirez being gone, I have now to do as I see fit. I’ll tell you what I know, honoring the treaty Ramirez made with the aiji.
There was the Jase he’d known on the mainland. Thank God.
“And the other captains?” Bren asked.
“Ogun-aiji will stay by agreements,” Jase said, “and I vote with Ogun, generally. In that light, I don’t think they will appoint a fourth until Ogun and Sabin can resolve their differences, because I can prevent it, if I vote with one or the other.”
“And these differences, nand’ Jase?” Geigi asked.
Jase considered. Bren tried hard to think, typing between species-separate languages. Hindbrain was completely occupied, and the rest of the brain just listened, hoping for peace in the room and no repercussions outside, down the line.
“Differences in style,” was Jase’s answer. There it was: stone wall. Jase didn’t discuss internal ship politics. That was probably wise, Bren thought. And stopped typing to gather a thought, a necessary question of his own.
“What agreements, nandi?” he asked Jase in Ragi. “And what prevented Ramirez-aiji from removing station personnel from Reunion at that time?”
“I don’t know,” Jase said, and said it in ship-speak. Toggle-flip. Mental shift, to another world, another entire logic-set. And likely, at the core of his being, Jase hadn’t wholly noticed he’d switched. He was thinking ship now, and spoke its language.
Bren knew that kind of transaction, at gut level, he knew.
“Ogun knows that answer if anyone does,” Jase said further. “I don’t.”
“Are those remaining on Reunion… Guild?” Bren asked bluntly.
“It may be,” Jase said faintly.
Pilots’ Guild. Bad word with the Mospheirans. Very bad word. Kroger’s face and Paulson’s said it.
“It’s likeliest that’s who’s in charge,” Jase said. “Some portion of the old Guild, at least. Someone or some group of it. Ogun says he isn’t sure what passed between Ramirez and station leadership. If he does know anything beyond that, I’m not sure Sabin does. Which is reasonable. She came to her post during the voyage.”
“And Tamun didn’t know.”
“Logically, no. Tamun would have used the information in a heartbeat, if he’d known. He’d have torn the crew apart.”
“One believes so,” Bren said in Ragi. It was the strongest argument that Sabin hadn’t known—Tamun having been her protege. He saw a frown on Geigi’s face—perplexity displayed for Jase as an intimate, the dispassionate atevi mask momentarily dropped… perhaps on that very point. “Let me add, too, in explanation for Lord Geigi,” Bren interjected, “that Gin-ji and nand’ Paulson have a bitter history and an ancestral anger with this Guild, because of past deeds.”
“Be assured I’m not Guild,” Jase said, flatly, in ship language. “As for Guild being on the ship… if it didn’t all transfer to the station at Reunion, if there’s any vestige of it left on the ship, the majority of us aren’t aware of it being here. I think Ramirez intended, by creating Yolanda and me—especially in appointing me where I am—that we break with the past. The whole ship has no illusions what the Guild did. We know the responsibility it bears for the way it dealt with the colonists. Guild leadership dealt badly with crew, for that matter. And for us, for us, in terms of our making our own decisions, the Guild’s become just a name on a remote record. A thing captains might still belong to as a matter of course and never think about or reference when we’re away from the leadership. What the crew wants right now is an answer why we went off and left people who probably didn’t have any choice about being left under Guild authority. In that sense, they don’t like or trust the Guild any more than you do.”
“Second question.” Bren interrupted his typing. “What happened out there at Reunion, Jase-nandi, and was it the Guild’s fault?”
“The official story,” Jase began—that story was in the reports out for years: probably even Paulson and Ginny Kroger knew it inside and out, but Jase laid it on the table, in Ragi, once for all and with recent events factored in. “We’d made some sort of tenuous contact—more a sighting—aboard Phoenix, in a certain solar system, and we left and reported it immediately to the station. We did set instruments to listen and watch in that direction, but no attempt to contact these strangers. They turned up again, or what we thought might be them, at another solar system. We watched about thirty-six hours. We left. We looked at another near star, found nothing. When we went home to Reunion to report, we found it destroyed. Or what we thought was destroyed. We were there just long enough to take on a fast fuel load. That was still there, untouched. What we now know, of course—that wasn’t all that was left there, and they’d maintained that fueling port and safeguarded the fuel, but crew thought then it was just simply blind luck the refueling port still worked. We thought we were just very lucky to get out of there and travel on toward this system as our refuge. We don’t know why the attack happened. If Reunion did anything to provoke it, we don’t know. The station couldn’t have reached outside its area except by communications. It didn’t have any vessel but mining craft available to it. We don’t know what happened during the attack, and it turns out it wasn’t the devastating blow the crew looking at the station exterior assumed it was. If someone survived inside and intended to stay, clearly they survived with enough resources to assure we could fuel, and they had enough food production to assure they could survive at least two years for us to come here and report back to them. It’s been far more than two years, and we didn’t show up, and Captain Ramirez didn’t tell us there was any time agreed on for us to come back. So maybe there wasn’t an agreed time, and they won’t be surprised we’ve delayed here.”
“Two years,” Bren said.
“Travel time,” Jase said. “Round trip.”
Bren typed, in Ragi.
“One sees a difficult situation,” Geigi said. “And a dearth of answers. Jase-ji.”
“Nandi.”
“What of dangers to this station?” Geigi asked. “Is it only against eventualities that Ramirez-aiji wished the ship refueled, or does he foresee these aliens coming here?”
“I don’t know,” Jase said. “I truly don’t know, nandi. I don’t see that our interests have diverged that far. The crew does feel obliged to you and to this place. This has become—it’s become our port. And that’s a matter of man’chi. But at the same time, there are so many unanswered questions, questions they should have known. If Ramirez-aiji left instructions beyond what he told me, those records aren’t within my authority to access. Ogun succeeds to Senior Captain. He knows, if anyone does. And he hasn’t told me. But the gist of it is this—Captain Ramirez did want to go back. He didn’t want to leave those people behind in the first place, but he didn’t know what he’d find here. And when he got here, of course he didn’t have the resources behind him that we have now. That’s changed. Ask the whole planet to trust him, ask you to work so hard fueling the ship—to send it back to the other station in return for some unprovable promise given here—I think he saw from the start that that wasn’t going to work. You had to have something of advantage in the exchange. And we had to have something for ourselves.”
Among the human faces at the end of the conference room, Jenrette, and Colby, who had been with Ramirez for decades, who might have been with him that long. There was wisdom in shifting the oldest staff to the newest captain on the council. There was, in Jase’s whole bearing at the moment, the burden of knowledge Jase might not have had an hour ago.
“The Guild, when it was in power here, wanted to establish this station to support the ship,” Jase said. “And when the station rebelled, it wanted to set up elsewhere, at Maudette. When the rebellion became louder and more widespread among the colonists, the Guild wanted to go farther out, to a place they’d spotted only by instrument. That didn’t work out. But there was a second choice. And there they stopped to mine and build, nandi. They called their station Reunion. Reunion of all humankind was what they meant. Reunion under one rule.”
“Well, that’s not going to happen,” Paulson said, the first word from either of the Mospheirans in what was a deeply troubling—but not damned secret—admission. Mospheirans knew. Mospheirans had broken with the ship over that one point.
“As I said—we don’t support it, either, sir,” Jase said. “The Guild meant to build and multiply until they’d far outgrown anything that might happen here—and I suppose at the start they hoped to come back and simply absorb all the building and resource that might have developed at this planet, and have their way. They always wanted to have numerous stations, numerous colonies.”
“And they would wish to take the mainland for humans without struggle,” Geigi observed.
“They’re not interested in planets, as such, nandi. They don’t regard planets as important to them. They’ve long dismissed any attachment to any world except as a convenient way to aim and anchor their ship. The resources of a planet, if they can be gotten into space, they’re quite keen to have—but only on their terms. Always on their terms.”
“They believed they could get all they want elsewhere,” Paulson said, “if they had population enough to risk in the mining. But we threatened their authority, and rather than see our ideas create a general disaffection, they left.”
“And for this we build a ship?” Geigi asked, when that came into translation.
Jase looked as if he had something caught in his throat. “Ramirez-aiji wanted that ship built. And one also believes, nandi, that the aiji in Shejidan has been aware of the situation at Reunion and that he has other plans for that ship, himself. The aiji in Shejidan—and the President of Mospheira.”
Geigi sat back, confounded, Bren was sure, both by the information, and that Jase laid it on the table.
Tabini knew. Tabini knew.
“And what,” Bren asked quite calmly, remarkably calmly, “what do the other captains think?”
“Ramirez knew that the aiji had plans. I think Ogun and Sabin do… but I don’t think they care that he takes the first other ship, nandiin-ji. I’ve said I don’t think they take Guild orders any longer, but I couldn’t absolutely swear to that.”
“And you don’t swear to it.”
“I said I don’t take Guild orders, nor ever will. I wasn’t born to take Guild orders.”
“Ship-aiji,” Geigi said. Only aijiin had no upward man’-chi—no attachment above themselves: among atevi, it was a biological imperative—only a very, very few had all association in the world flowing toward them.
Fewer still felt no upward loyalty. Even Geigi would not claim as much for himself, or not claim it in anyone’s hearing—independent as he was, and capable of going into space and operating more or less independent of the whole Western Association and Tabini’s authority.
While Jase, their modest, quiet Jase, claimed to have no authority above him. Still, he was human, and that maverick separation didn’t mean the ability to use authority.
“Understand,” Bren interposed, “nandi, his lack of man’chi is not innate.” It was a debate even among atevi as to whether aijiin were born or taught. “But I think you understand that he’s taken a strong position, bringing Mr. Jenrette here, and demonstrating Mr. Kaplan, who spoke bluntly to Ogun in assembly, to be within his man’chi. This is not required. But he’s made that clear.”
“What was the full gist of Kaplan’s speech?” Geigi asked. “A challenge?”
“A challenge to the silence, nandi,” Jase said. “To the secrecy. And a declaration that Ramirez’s policies go on and that they won’t change them.”
“And the aiji, and the Presidenta, Jase?” Bren asked in Ragi. That admission was what still rang through his nerves, and what he was sure was percolating through Mosphieran suppositions in very alarming fashion—if not through Geigi’s atevi soul as well. “What did they agree?”
“That the world will have the next starship,” Jase said with deliberate obliqueness, “and the ship would get the fuel.
Not quite the exact agreement they’d published. Not the reassurances they’d offered that there was no way the aliens could get information out of Reunion’s wreckage.
“All those years,” Ginny said. “All those years we’ve been led along with one story. And now what? What are we supposed to do about this situation?”
“Jase,” Bren said. “What are we supposed to do?”
Leave the situation as it stood, just betray the people at that remote station, never come back—and coincidentally leave the Pilots’ Guild sitting out there on the touchiest frontier imaginable, free to call the shots with an alien enemy, free to create situations that others here at this station had to deal with by f their blood and their sweat.
Or find it unexpectedly on their doorstep. There was that possibility, that could no longer be dismissed with assurances.
That station out there had records of the ship’s origin at this star. And given a decade or so, an enemy might extract all sorts I of information.
There were certain understandings that never had gotten clarified—not as chance would have it, but as discretion would have it… little details the atevi establishment never had gotten around to discussing with their Mospheiran associates. But this one—Tabini knew?
Tabini knew, and the captains up here knew, and he hadn’t heard of any agreement?
He had a lot of trouble—personally—dealing with that one.
“There will be pressure from the crew to go back,” Jase said. “And Ramirez assuredly intended to. But I think he meant to take control of Reunion. That the aiji in Shejidan and the Presidenta ally with him, if they have ships—and if there was fuel.”
He’d forgotten to type. He felt as if the proverbial ton of bricks had landed.
“What’s he saying?” Paulson asked. Folly, perhaps, to have held this multi-language meeting. At the worst moments, the translator, personally involved, lost all his threads.
Not a single tit-for-tat, secrecy and refueling in exchange for a ship. It was a whole structured, years-old alliance. With an agenda that stretched from here to forever.
“He’s saying Tabini and the President, and I assume the State Department, agreed to refuel Phoenix in exchange for title to the second, and I assume third, starship as they’re built. I assume this is an alliance.” He’d never felt what he felt at the moment, this charge of adrenaline that had his hands shaking. Anger, it might be. Humiliation, along with it. And where was his right to be so shocked? He should have known. Friend, agent, translator, diplomat, in whatever capacity, Jase or Tabini or even Shawn should have damned well told him, but he had the wit to have dug it out, if he’d been alert enough. “I assume this all happened without me.”
“And without me,” Jase said, exploding the single most natural theory in a word, denying he’d been the intermediary.
“Might you translate, paidhiin-ji?” Geigi requested reasonably.
“Yes, nandi. We’re speaking of an extensive agreement between Tabini-aiji, Ramirez-aiji, and the Presidenta, an agreement that both Jase and I deny making, but which Jase says indeed existed.”
“Yolanda,” Jase said, as if it just occurred to him who had, if neither of them had.
Yolanda.
Damn!
“We seem to have agreements in place.” Bren typed Mosphei’, furiously, while he spoke Ragi. “Yolanda Mercheson is the most likely intermediary who could have done this without our knowledge. We have reasonable suspicion now that the Guild is out at Reunion doing as it pleases, and Ramirez-aiji, commanding the only ship, the only mobile human agency, decided to come here and gain a solid base before challenging Guild authority. As it now seems Tabini-aiji, Ramirez-aiji, and Tyers’ office all concurred in this fuel agreement, and in an alliance the terms of which we still do not fully understand. Now we have the robots we’d been wanting, Ramirez is dead, and the ship’s been fueled. Jase doesn’t know how these elements intersect, but they do clearly intersect, and he and I are both taken by surprise by these events. Understand—I’m speaking without consultation. I haven’t been able to get through to Tabini. But above all, in this situation, Mospheirans and atevi need to assert our share of control. We’re not going to be dictated to, pardon me, Jase, by the Captains’ Council. We want—”
An equal say? That wasn’t the half of it. The whole vista , spread out in his mind of a sudden, one of those dizzying down-mill perspectives, safe spot to safe spot down a hillside while gravity tried to kill them all.
“We want,” he said, “more than one more patched-up promise atop promises that didn’t work the last time. Ramirez knew what he knew and he wanted certain things: he wanted the agreement. He wanted the station refitted. He wanted the ship refitted. And he created someone to contact the planet.” Also the truth. “So the Guild doesn’t have any desire for planets. Fine. We do. We care about our lives, the lives of the people we represent here, and the aiji in Shejidan. We represent the atevi, who exist only here in the whole universe—while, pardon me, humans have a homeworld somewhere none of us exactly remembers. The atevi don’t give a damn what Ramirez cared about and didn’t care about. They came up here to take care of their own business, as Mospheirans did, because Mospheirans have also gotten fairly attached to the planet they live on. I’m speaking for the aiji, now, officially, and this is what I say.
“Number one, and not negotiable: this is the aiji’s planet— which he’s chosen to share with humans on a lasting basis. So the ship can talk all it likes about their options, their choices and their problem, but they’re doing it on the aiji’s tolerance and inside the aiji’s consent, and endangering the aiji’s interests in this quarrel they’ve picked out there far remote from us.”
“A year or so remote,” Jase muttered, and Bren inserted that in the record without a flutter.
“The problem doesn’t go away,” Jase said. “You can’t wish it away. You have to deal with it. We have to deal with it. Ramirez lied to us, but it turns out he didn’t lie to the leaders of the planet. So it wasn’t that he didn’t care about the planet’s future. But the ship is fueled, and we’re supposed to go bring Reunion under our collective authority—”
“And disrupt our lives, our futures,” Paulson said.
Bren stopped typing. Lost the thread. Found his argument, Mospheiran to Mospheiran. “Is it only our lives? It may not be our trouble now, but when their trouble spills onto our doorstep, won’t the people you represent be very much in favor of having a say—and the power to speak for their own futures? I’m not that surprised to be left in the dark: the aiji has that power, and he’s used it. But it’s much harder to maintain secrecy on the island, Mr. Paulson, as you know—still the President managed it. Hard to keep a secret on a ship, I’ll imagine, too. And Ramirez did. We were all hit. But you know what? In the last ten years, we very different people have developed the same interests, and we’ve come to work together, and thanks to that secrecy and not knowing any better, we’ve spent ten years together building resources we now have to use.”
Paulson, by his expression, wished he were rather on the North Shore, fishing, at the moment. Paulson was essentially a labor administrator, a financial officer with a background in town planning, who honestly imagined if he did go to the North Shore and went fishing someone else would solve the alien problem. It was Ginny Kroger, the non-official, that he was talking to and hoping for.
And Ginny, rock-solid Ginny, God save her, simply nodded, thin-lipped and resolute—probably thinking of the politics of getting a phone call through channels to the President, past Paulson’s legitimate right to do it first and officially.
Trust Mospheira to have trammeled up their lines of action. Never trust putting anyone in office who’d act rapidly, and never approve anyone who’d ever let responsibility for a mistake sit an hour on his doorstep. That was the wisdom of the Mospheiran senate, as long as there’d been a senate. They wanted a stainless manager who wouldn’t do anything startling or sudden. They put in Paulson.
Ginny’s job, in Science, wasn’t a senate-approved post, which was how she survived. Why she’d come…
He suddenly had a bone-chilling surmise that Ginny was Shawn Tyers’ catspaw, Ginny and her robots—not briefed on all of it, likely, but not as deeply shocked as he was.
“We will inform the aiji,” Geigi concurred. That was, give or take a phone system that worked, a one-step process, and an atevi lord who didn’t take quick responsibility for a situation would find Tabini calling him.
And what would either of them say? We now understand, aiji-ma?
No. He didn’t. He didn’t understand at all.