It was the security station, but not without his cup of tea, and, of greatest import, with his security staff at hand, to keep current with what he heard and form their own conclusions.
He had showered, gathered his wits—dressed even to the morning-coat.
He had had half the tea, and set the cup down on the console near him as he sat down.
Jago sat down beside him. Banichi had thrown a robe about himself—no one had disturbed Banichi until now, in one of his rare chances at peaceful rest—and hovered behind his chair. Tano and Algini, at the far end of the room, worked in their Guild’s equivalent of fatigues, with the addition of a light jacket—ready to fall onto the cots in the small adjacent alcove if they were so lucky—if this letter-flood proved an alarm over very little.
“Which will you wish first, nandi?” Tano asked him.
“The aiji’s,” he said, and immediately it reached his screen.
Bren-ji,
the message said. At least it was still the intimate address.
Ramirez-aiji is dead. So I understand. This was by no means unexpected.
Your duties are removed, considered, and assigned to lord Geigi’s discretion. Worry no more for them.
I have honored you as a lord of the aishidi’tat. I have accorded you place and appearance among the highest in the Association. I have seated you among the household in view of all the great and notable of the world.
I have given you a lord’s estate, a lord’s title and position. You are lord Bren.
What, preface to removing it? Dissatisfaction? He certainly saw the signs. He hoped it didn’t unravel everything he’d done with Mercheson.
Now I make you my representative in the provinces and associations of the heavens.
I have instructed lord Geigi, your close associate, to rule over the station during your absence, in particular to exert the authority of the aishidi’tat over the station’s management and personnel.
Wait, there. Representative in the provinces and associations of the heavens. It at least wasn’t a demotion. It did sound like one of those honorary titles to which elderly lords retired when they were due for honor, fancy clothes, long titles, but no power at all.
I appoint you chief negotiator to all you may meet, with all needful authority.
Not a demotion, one could say. God. Maybe Tabini was perfectly serious. What did he get next? A request to subdue that territory, the way the aiji had asked him to take the space station?
Understanding that great distances and long journeys lie ahead, within your domain,
Understatement, aiji-ma.
… nevertheless I send my son, heir to the aishidi’tat, to witness the conduct of foreign dealings, to be instructed in things which no ateva has seen, and to grow in wisdom. I shall look forward to his safe return.
To the best of my ability, aiji-ma.
Regarding the surprise which this turn of events may have occasioned you, I did not inform you of negotiations with Ramirez-aiji because I wished to provide you with no excuse on which to hang anomalous behavior, therefore making it sure you would report such small details to me, as you have routinely done.
If the ship-folk had done other than fuel the ship, I knew that your suspicions and opposition would set your agents immediately to learn the extent and reason of their actions.
I gave Ramirez-aiji his requested secrecy from station and crew, but did so in the sure knowledge the paidhi-aiji would never allow him to proceed beyond his agreement.
Damned atevi penchant for cross-checking, that was what Tabini claimed for a motive—keep everybody checking on everybody, and not trusting Jase, Jase being within Ramirez’ man’chi. Of-damned-course Tabini didn’t rely on Jase in any agreement with Ramirez.
And if he hadn’t heard half he’d heard, he would have believed it was the whole truth: an ateva, however adept in human relations, couldn’t get past the implications of an association, not on a gut level. Jase had been outside the pale, so long as he was promoted to a lesser rank of captain, so long as he was Ramirez’ protege. Even the paidhi-aiji might have been under just a little shadow of suspicion in Tabini’s reckoning— because of Jase, because he was up here, and out of Tabini’s convenient reach: it was certainly a situation Tabini just wasn’t used to.
And to an ateva mind—of-damned-course—Ramirez’ death would free Jase from that man’chi and make everyone associated with him easier to trust.
Tabini had opened a behind-the-door communication with Yolanda—a double-check, very logical in atevi affairs… perfectly fine excuse, if, in accepting it, he followed the logic to the needful conclusion and took no detours past what he now thought was the truth.
There were facts, however, contingent on those assumptions that were pertinent. Even a master politician in atevi affairs could be mistaken about human loyalties. Jase was not more trustable now, quite to the contrary. The captaincy settled on him would make him responsible to the ship after Ramirez’s death in a way Ramirez had never been able to get him to be during his life. Now even Yolanda said—watch Jase. Rescue Jase from Sabin. And Tabini would believe him more. The old problems in the interface were not necessarily solved.
Ramirez-aiji came to me with the report regarding the survival of three hundred individuals on the remote station.
Came to him, was it? To Tabini? Interesting… answering what Yolanda said she didn’t know. It meant at least there’d been a tight focus to the approach, one item, not a general fishing expedition on Tabini’s part… he found that reassuring regarding Tabini’s understanding of the hazards.
And three hundred alive. There was a datum to remember.
Three hundred individuals, however, was a damned tiny crew to try to maintain air quality, water, heat, and sustenance on a battered space station—read, a very tiny crew to try to keep the station power plant going for what might be decades, in some very small area of the station—he’d learned that by experience—all undetected by outside observation.
And no outside fuel-gathering or processing, not with that small a population: hence the absolutely critical matter of Kroger’s robots. Certain priorities became more understandable.
He declared,
Tabini’s letter went on to say, regarding Ramirez,
that he has no man’chi toward the leadership aboard the remote station. More, he has declared them anathema and has joined as third in association with the Presidenta and myself, committing his successors to abide by this agreement.
In effect, he has committed himself and this ship and all future ships to join the aishidi’tat, considering the earth of the atevi his residence forever.
God, was that right? Could what Tabini understood Ramirez to agree to—possibly be the case?
If it was so, here was where the mistranslations Yolanda might have engendered on that topic could be very, very scary. Diplomats of two species and three governments used long-managed, absolutely precise language describing international relationship, lordship and ownership. And the juniormost paidhi, least fluent in Ragi, had been handling an impromptu interface between two leaders who spoke just enough of each others’ languages to get into the very trouble generations of paidhiin had worked midnight hours to avoid.
Ramirez was dead… of what? Something he’d said? Something that had sealed his death warrant, because it contradicted what he’d seemed to promise?
Yolanda had probably tried to define her idiosyncratic terms, and she had the dictionary… but the interface could have blown up from that very effort to define terms. Anything could have been a trigger—a promise not fulfilled, an agreement seeming to be doubled back on—a death supposed to be imminent, but that didn’t come off on schedule. Nuances were the devil.
And an amateur had tried her best, and preserved secrecy both parties wanted, and now one of the participants was suspiciously dead.
The same amateur who was going to have to take over his job.
But it wasn’t the time to let his blood pressure rise, above all else. Calm. Quiet. Work with the situation that was, not trying to trace the dangerous turn from years back, not taking any hypothesis as true, no matter how many legs it seemed to stand on… but…
Damn. Damn Yolanda, that she hadn’t come to him.
Damn her… but did he have the cold-blooded understanding of the situation sufficient to go to her and say, You may have killed Ramirez. Please be more careful, nadi.
There was more.
entrust you now with the treasured past, the stable present, and the unpredictable future of the aishidi’tat.
Unpredictable certainly described it. And Yolanda was the translator.
I think with greatest personal pleasure on our sojourns in the country, paidhi-ji, and will miss your attendance in court. I have consoled myself once more with the sight of your face, knowing that the time was short.
There had to be a better reason. Surely. Tabini had asked him down there and waltzed him right back to the station only to see him, saying nothing else?
Yet, knowing atevi, say all that Tabini would—and often— that number-counters were superstitious fools and the bane of his existence, Tabini was still atevi, did still look at the numbers of a thing. Gut-deep, maybe, for atevi sorts of feelings, dared he think Tabini had wanted to have a physical look and a little less theory behind his decisions?
Maybe he’d wanted to assure himself one last time of the qualities of the paidhi-aiji, before he did something so irrationally, impossibly foolish as commit the dowager out there, with his son.
What was he to think? That Tabini had made an emotional decision?
But the ceremony itself—facing change, change Tabini might have timed, that ceremony not only got him down there and Ilisidi in from the east, it also got various troublesome lords into arm’s reach… where Tabini’s canny security and direct access to the Assassins’ Guild could insert agents onto their staffs, where he might make linkages that might be useful—who knew? Going to court was proverbially like visiting a plague ward: you might exit in apparent perfect health, but even the watchful and prudent were apt to have contracted a few unguessed contagions.
Trust that those lords knew that—but they were also bound to have seen both the shocking changes in Shejidan and the power—the evident economic and political power—of the aiji.
That would certainly bring some sober second thoughts on the part of any potential troublemaker.
Farewell for a time, paidhi-aiji. Prepared and strengthened by your services, I look forward to receiving you again at court and hearing firsthand the marvels of this new territory.
He took a sip of cooling tea, and cleared the letter over to the rest of the terminals with a disseminate command—for his security staff to read, and be entirely amazed. He’d read it. He’d have to read it a dozen times before he’d found everything buried between the lines.
Lord of the heavens? Paidhi to strangers?
He wasn’t confident. He wasn’t at all confident. But his authority… at least wasn’t diminished. Tabini wasn’t angry at him.
Dared he say the paidhi had had an emotional reaction to the thought that Tabini might have had an emotional moment toward him?
How tangled the relationship became.
“Did you contact Jase, Tano-ji?”
“Inquiry stopped at C1, nandi.”
“One rather thinks the stoppage behind all these messages was not C1, however,” Bren said. “And Jase may simply be sleeping, like reasonable people.”
“Mogari-nai, then, assuredly.”
“Almost certainly,” Bren said. “Give me my brother’s letter, Gini-ji, and read the aiji’s.”
Toby’s letter went up on his screen—a letter straight to the point.
Sorry I hung up on you. You hit sore spots. Maybe you had to.
Mother improves and worsens day by day and I don’t know what’s going on. They’re calling in a new specialist. That’s all anyone knows. I sent some flowers in your name.
Damn it, Toby, if I wanted to send flowers, I would have.
But was that right to say? Was it right not to think that, this time, all matters of his policy about his family were suspended? This could be the last time. Ever. A bouquet of flowers—what was that, in the long battle they’d waged, he and his mother, he for his freedom, his mother for her concept of what the family was?
I sent her some in my name too, and in Jill’s, and the kids. And I’m going on a three-day sabbatical… going to find Jill and see if I can explain one more time. Tell her the same old things, one more time. I don’t think it’s going to help, but I’ll try.
Barb’s with Mother. She wants to do this. Mother seems to improve when she’s there.
But you’re right: I have to go pull pieces together and see if I can get back what I had. That all relies on Jill forgiving me. If she does, there’s something. I don’t know if the kids can forgive me at this point. They don’t have the perspective. But Jill might be my advocate with them… even if we can’t get back to where we were
Don’t go in expecting defeat, brother. Don’t ask for half of what you need. You can’t ever win like that.
But I can’t help, either. I’ve done enough of that. Entirely enough. I’ve become part of the problem. Yours—and hers.
I know my troubles can’t matter much on the scale of things you routinely deal with…
Oh, don’t give me that, Toby; you damn well know you’re pushing a button—a damned sensitive one.
I really do know that, Bren. And I’m glad you’re out there doing what you do. Personally I don’t know what to do with all the changes in the world. We agreed to the paidhiin to make change easier for atevi and maybe now we need paidhiin just to explain to the rest of us ordinary types where all this scary stuff is going so fast.
But you ride the wave, and the world’s just going to change, isn’t it? We have to cope with the station and space and the aliens and all of it and just carry on in spite of it all. I think that’s one of Mother’s difficulties, that the world just isn’t the way she thinks it is—and now I’m not sure it’s all the way I always thought it was. I’m not sure I like what’s happened. I know I don’t like you having to go off from the island and not being here, and I miss you. But that’s not anything either of us can help, and I know I can’t even imagine what you’re dealing with right now. I guess I thought I could do the other things for you and take the weight off your shoulders, but that’s stupid: the one thing Mother wants is her whole family, all the time, and she wants everything her way. I think you’re right: it’s not what she ought to have, even for her sake—it seems damned late to try to make that point, but it’s not for want of trying, all these years, is iti You tried. Now I’ve tried. For a while I thought I couldn’t be happy until Mother was happy, because I wouldn’t have done my duty; and that’s what’s got me where I am and her where she is—and neither of us is happy.
So I’m going. I’m going to try one more time if Jill will believe me this round.
I left Barb there at the hospital. She wanted to, days ago, and now I’ve let her, and she’s there, and I’m not.
You’ll be able to get hold of me through my messaging.
You were right. I’m admitting it this time.
Forgive me.
—Toby.
Forgive you? God. You still haven’t gotten the point, Toby. It isn’t forgiving you; it never was. There is no forgiving. We just are. That’s all I ever asked.
He sat still a moment, finger crooked against his mouth, holding in the urge to say something, do something, intervene in Toby’s life one more time. But that was right on the same level as forgiving. They needed to let go. He’d always needed to let go. In the end, he was like their mother, and he hadn’t let go of her or Toby when he needed to.
His staff said nothing to him. But a silence had fallen in the room.
He composed himself, cool and calm.
“Next letter, if you will, Gini-ji.”
Dear Bren,
it began, the dreaded letter from Barb.
Dear Bren,
I’ve tried to write this a dozen times at least over the last three years and I still can’t put in what I want, so here goes.
The short answer is, I’m with your mother. We’re peas in a pod, aren’t we, mother and daughter, all that important stuff!
I know you can’t be here. I’ve learned a lot over the past ten years, and I know it doesn’t matter a drop in the ocean that I understand anything—well, maybe it does matter a little, so I’m saying it anyway.
I know you are what you are, and that’s all part of the package. I take the one with the other, and that’s not all right, but it’s what I’ve got and it’s the bed I’ve made for myself, so here I am, still in love with you, still in a mess. What’s new?
Out of the least likely source—a kind of understanding. It brought back one of the better evenings, one of the best evenings… the reason he’d thought he was in love with Barb, a naïve long while ago.
She’d married, suddenly, stupidly, bought herself a world of discontent and grief over his failure to be what she wanted— but over all, had there ever been anyone on Mospheira who understood him better?
Couldn’t he have talked with her?
She’d developed a genuine tenderness toward his mother.
And wasn’t there virtue in that? Didn’t he owe her more than he’d ever paid her?
Toby’s gone to the coast for the weekend. He’s kind of in a state. I don’t know whether he’s heard from you since the phone call. He said you made a lot of sense, whatever that means, and I asked if he’d called you and he said he’d write later, so I hope he will.
And what about mum, Barb? Can we possibly get to the damned news, for God’s sake?
I told your mother I was going to write to you. I told her you were back on the station, and she said that was like you and she wasn’t surprised. I asked her what she’d say to you because I was going to write this letter and she just said get here when you can.
How is she, Barb? Dammit, can you just say?
I know things are the way they are. So I’ve gotten to thinking how the station is part atevi and part human. And even if I can’t handle the mainland, I think I can handle that.
Damn you, Barb. No, I’m not taking you back. I can’t.
So I ask myself, kind of wistfully I guess, if I could find a place there, the way we used to be, just on occasional weekends, Bren.
Nothing formal or permanent. I tried the wife business and found out I’m not cut out for that, and I know you’re not cut out to marry. It doesn’t stop me loving you, whatever you think. I know about the atevi woman, and I’m actually glad you’re not alone. But whoever you’re with, if she can understand, too, and if it ever gets convenient for me to be up there, maybe you can put in a word for me with her. At least say thanks and I understand. I’ve lived a lot of life in the last six years.
Meanwhile I’ll argue your mother into understanding. I’m good at that. I practiced six years on myself.
Forever and ever,
—Barb
What was there left to say for Barb?
That Jago, exasperated and angered by the push and pull Barb had exerted on him before now, had offered to file Intent on her?
That she was, at least at the edge of his thoughts, his one remaining vestige of a human relationship neither birth nor the job had settled on him—the only lasting one he’d made for himself, for its own sake.
And, oh, by the way, she was divorced and free again. Never mind his whole world had changed.
There was a kind of tragedy in that. Desire for warmth and foreknowledge that she always stopped when the temperature passed the bounds of her own convenience. There was his mother in a capsule, the woman who’d taught him how to negotiate from the cradle up—negotiate for love, for career—for survival.
And if there was a member of his own species who could handle his mother, it was Barb; and if there was a human association he didn’t want to rekindle to all its old heat, it was Barb.
Get here when you can. That his mother had said exactly what Barb reported—along with I’m not surprised—oh, that statement he believed. That complaint was so familiar it sounded warm and smelled of pancakes.
Well, it wasn’t the nicest love a son could have, but it had kept him and Toby warm their lives long, and there was good news in the packet, after all. If Toby was off after Jill under these extreme circumstances, maybe Toby had finally gotten an inoculation of sorts.
And Barb was with their mother. Peas in a pod, and damn if she wasn’t right.
And he was out of the picture. He might not ever see his mother again. It was a real possibility. But he could only think of escape, on that front.
Go, he wished Toby. Go with all you’ve got. Change. You can do it at that age. I did. Take Jill out on that boat and don’t answer the damn radio.
“Put the files on my computer, Gini-ji. Thank you.”
He wanted them, not for sentiment, but to remind himself of the facts of the situation every time he grew maudlin.
And to rethink Tabini’s moves, if it became pertinent.
“None so bad,” he said to the four of them. “It explains some things. I can assure you all that Barb’s not coming with us.”
Jago had a look on her face that defied translation.
He added, for her benefit, “Another solar system is too close.”
The news would break soon, that the ship was going. The station and the ship were constantly observed by hobbyists. Its absence would make the news even if Tabini didn’t announce it—and he was sure that Tabini would announce it first. His mother, Barb, Toby—perhaps the President of Mospheira to boot, though one rather thought that his old ally Shawn was a willing co-conspirator with Ramirez and Tabini—were about to learn that the world was, once again, not what they had expected.
“The dowager’s letter,” he said.
This one, it turned out, had come in by courier, not electronic at all—and not within the electronic system the ship could spy on. Tano leaned and gave it to him, a small, familiar message-cylinder.
The door had opened, and he and Jago alike had failed to know it. They were tired.
We will board a few hours before the ship leaves,
the dowager’s note said.
We have sent certain personnel to board and secure premises. We trust that you will find our arrangements adequate. We understand your mother is ailing. We express my grandson’s concern, and mine.
We understand you have taken Mercheson-paidhi into your hands and set her in authority over your household. My staff will respect that perimeter and assist her as necessary.
He showed that letter to Banichi, and it went from him to Jago, and on to Tano, and Algini.
“Will you answer, nandi?” Tano asked quietly.
“Before we leave,” he said. He dismissed all thought of sleep tonight. He thought it might not be until tomorrow night. “Apologies to the staff, nadiin-ji. I’ll have breakfast. Might as well take care of business that has to be done. Staff may have to get sleep as they can—if they can sleep, let them. Tea and cold cakes are enough.”
In no wise would Bindanda permit that to be his breakfast, or the staff’s. Tea there certainly was, and warm cakes, and a reasonable breakfast, an any-hours buffet in the dining room. The dowager’s staff might find it scandalously impersonal, but his own staff had found certain useful compromises in crisis, in the breakdown of regular hours. Bindanda had recognized the signs, and quietly arranged an excellent table.
There was, in fact, very little for the paidhi to do physically, beyond sit at a keyboard and initiate communications to all manner of agencies that needed information and direction— agencies that had thought they knew who it was they were dealing with and now had to change their entire way of looking at things.
There were dozens of memos, this and that tag-end of information and transmission of contact names and communications channels, all to release as the ship undocked, and he had to remember the content, in case there needed to be changes.
There was a letter to the long-suffering staff on the planet, informing them they had to deal with one more set of requirements.
Please assist Mercheson-paidhi and amend her errors fearlessly, as you have done mine. Her frowns are only for her own effort: she has a good heart.
There was a letter to Geigi, wishing him good fortune. There was one to the dowager, stating he was in preparation to board.
And, among other things, there was a list, for Narani, of those things which staff might not think he needed. Certain picture files he wanted—if anything should happen out there, if they in fact were about to be taken by aliens, he could erase them along with things far more injurious. But he wanted the pictures with him for his sanity’s sake, simple images of the coast, the gardens, of his residency in the Bujavid—and of people, oh, no few of people—Toby, on the boat, in that disreputable hat, smiling. Toby’s kids, building castles in the sand…
He didn’t look long. Here wasn’t a good time to look. It called up far too many possibilities of things he could do if he could only get the time, the contact, the cooperation, and he didn’t have the leisure of that much time.
He sought out reports on ship-status, which was 41% ready, whatever that meant—and he called Kate Shugart and Ben Feldman on C1 for a brief word, in essence: “You’re the ones with University training. Mercheson outranks you and she’s had immersion in the language, but you have the technical channels. Work with her and use them. You know the urgency.”
“Yes, sir,” the answer was in both cases, no question, no demur. They did know. That was their value.
Meanwhile news reports came in from Mospheira, and he saw the distress in headlines: Alien Menace Revealed from the seedier press and President Reveals Pact from the more reliable, neither of which made breakfast sit easy.
Shawn’s public statement said, briefly,
We have cooperated with our allies in deliberation and preparation based on information now declassified. In accordance with plans made jointly with us and with Shejidan, Phoenix captains will, as agreed with us, undertake a carefully defined two-year mission back to their abandoned base, first to be sure conditions are as anticipated and secondly to retrieve certain personnel who have maintained the base as an observation post. They will then close operations there and return to us, to their permanent base at the station. No alien action is anticipated and none has been detected.
One wasn’t sure what the world expected to see at this distance, unless the aliens exploded a star or flashed a high-powered beacon at them. And in the limitations of lightspeed—an islander’s mind still struggled with the scale of things—they still wouldn’t receive the message for a number of years.
The planned operation has no bearing on station construction. Key Phoenix personnel will remain on the station and actively participate in the program as planned. There is no change in agreements or schedule.
So what else could they say? Shawn was no fool, either: Mospheira historically distrusted Phoenix crew. They were nervous about atevi strangeness on general principles and previous bad experience—but generally they knew what to expect with atevi. Distrust of Phoenix, however, had far, far more history with Mospheirans, and the very first conclusion anyone on the island would draw was, It’s all a sham. We’ve been double-crossed. They’re stealing the ship. We’ve been conned.
Still, the worst the seedier report had to say was,
The aliens could be looking this way at this very moment. The starship under construction is dependent on politicians for every bolt and panel. The legislature can debate day to dark, but the real threat is clearly out there…
They could have said far worse. The thread of trust was stretched very, very thin—but common sense prevailed. He took two antacids and drafted the most important letter of his career.
Aiji-ma, I stand in receipt of your letter and am honored by your personal favor.
As always, I will strive for the benefit of your household and the aishidi’tat, and all allies. I will do my best, aiji-ma. All information at my disposal makes me sure that the other station is under Pilots’ Guild authority. On evidence of past behavior of this Guild, I am determined that this Guild should by no means contact strangers in our name, and I will do all needful things to settle the situation in a stable fashion.
He was certain that Tabini knew what was happening in the ship, as he was certain Ilisidi was far from idle in her apartments. But he reported, all the same.
—Jase-paidhi has been appointed one of two aijiin to go with the ship. If only because the other captain must sleep, I believe he will periodically have real authority over the ship’s dealings, although he lacks technical skills and would by no means intervene in ship operations. I also predict he will not defy Sabin-aiji’s will except in demonstrable need, but he is not without intellectual resources and resources of authority, and I know he will be a valuable ally.
Ogun-aiji will remain here, as you may by now be aware, and I strongly urge, aiji-ma, that the aishidi’tat press forward in alliance with him in the building of the second ship, and the training of atevi personnel to manage it, as the most extreme priority.
Tabini who had had only rudimentary knowledge of his own solar system when he first came to power now had to understand the machinations of a human power at a remote station.
And he had to command and use a starship… considering the personally unwelcome prospect of losing Phoenix.
I have certain safety concerns regarding Mercheson-paidhi, who I understand will stand in my place, by your express invitation. I ask she also be allowed use of my apartment and all the resources of my staff in that service. They will save her duplicating my efforts in setting up and maintaining lines of communication.
Further, I am aware of certain areas where there may have been direct contact initiated by Ramirez, aiii-ma, and I am alarmed by the possibilities inherent in conversation unexamined for ambiguities. Mercheson seems a person of great competency and good will toward yourself and the aishidi’tat, and will perform honestly, I believe, but she is still a relative novice, not thoroughly conversant in court protocols and not as alert to nuance as she herself would wish.
I ask, therefore, that you yourself mediate where she is concerned, aiji-ma, no matter how provoked. I ask that you deal gently with Mercheson’s inexpertise and that you impose calm on all dealings that may result from error. The sane and good actions of reasonable individuals may still be misinterpreted, but the good will between Ogun and the aishidi’tat is too valuable to let fall, as I know that you are earnest in your desire to preserve all parties from needless harm.
For that reason I believe both Mercheson and Ogun-aiji may be in immediate danger from various persons and agencies ill-disposed toward the treaty. I have taken Mercheson into my quarters and advised her to stay there. I am at present unable to surround Ogun-aiji, but am seeking ways to protect him. I ask that their safety be assured without diminishing their independent authority, so that they may maintain their utmost value to the treaty association.
For the rest, aiji-ma, I cannot predict what I may find regarding the alien threat nor can I do so until I see what the situation may be at the remote station. I hope for the best outcome and will bend every effort to achieve peace.
I have no doubt of the aiji-dowager and thank you for approving her participation in this extraordinary venture.
I look forward to our next meeting, baji-naji, aiji-ma. Remote as I may be, I shall turn my mind often to your generosity and your many good deeds toward me, and hope to bring you favorable news.
It wasn’t a particularly brilliant letter. Humanly, he couldn’t write to an atevi lord what he felt at depth. Professionally, he couldn’t instruct the aiji how to deal with Mercheson in a single letter. Politically, he dared not say half he wished he could say: it was only a letter—and it might go astray.
He sent it the rounds of the staff. They praised it. Banichi and Jago would not flatter him, if it wasn’t adequate.
By then he’d made several assaults on familial letters—and erased them in despair.
And there was no word from Jase, none from the aiji-dowager.
Yolanda waked, having overslept her watch for two hours, and emerged, ribboned and braided, in court dress appropriate years ago—walked about as quietly as she could, but he called her in.
“Jase is out of contact,” he said. “Have you any means to call him?”
“I can go after him,” she said.
“I want you safe, Landa-ji. Can you call him? Can you call Polano, or Pressman, or anybody?”
“I know someone who can get to Pressman,” she said.
“Go try,” he said, not even caring what channels communication ran to at this point. “Tell him to call me.”
“Yes,” she said, and went out to the foyer, to their communications in the security station.
She clearly had some resources of her own. Inside fifteen minutes she came in with a portable communications unit, and contact.
“Jase,” he said.
“Bren.”
“You all right?”
“No problems. I was downtimed in the tank. Trying to absorb some of the schedule detail. It’s all right, Bren. Are you all right?”
“Going crazy here. I’m needing details of our accommodations. This came as a surprise to me.”
“No one’s contacted you.”
“I think it’s assumed I’m working through the dowager. This isn’t the case. I’ll be taking Banichi and Jago and four staff, felicitous seven, thank you, plus our foodstuffs, our furnishings, our belongings. What’s our limitations?”
“Nothing. None. You’ll be on deck five—they were going for four, and I explained there was no atevi going on deck four—”
“Thank you.”
“You’ll have five virtually to yourselves. It’s operational, the plumbing works, the lights all work, and there’s nothing on maintenance. That’s room enough to swallow everything you’ve got in the two residencies. You could take the whole staff if you chose that…”
“I’m leaving an establishment for Ms. Mercheson, who’s taking over duties here—who I think you know is here. Her service is at Tabini’s request. It’s not negotiable. She’s detached from crew, to the paidhi’s office. Is that going to be a problem?”
“No. That’s accepted.”
“I’d like to see you to go over some of this. Can we set a time?”
“Today?” Jase made the offer, the essential is-it-critical?
“When’s convenient?” He made the matching counter. Criticality’s your call.
“First off shift after undock. My breakfast. Your dinner.”
“Date.”
“You got a flood of mail, I noticed.” That meant: Is there anything wrong I need to know?
“Yes, yes: the news broke. I’m up to my ears in it.” It was all Mosphei’ and ship-language, nothing hidden, and everything hidden: they passed information the way they’d learned to do in the Bujavid, where every wall had ears, and most of all he took reassurance from Jase’s tone, and the simple fact that Jase was personally in touch. He knew about the tank. Jase had an immense amount to absorb; and he was utterly, terribly vulnerable when he did it. He wondered that Jase could find the courage, at the moment. “I’ll take care of it. As things stand, I’ll be packed in fairly short order; I understand the dowager is packed—”
“Her gear is already boarded, along with some few personnel.”
“We’d better really get moving, then.”
“First watch tomorrow is soon enough. If you wait until fourth, you’ll be mixed in with crew boarding. Senior captain’s expressed a preference to have all non-crew on before the board-call goes out. We’re leaving people. There’ll be partings. We want to give them room.”
We. Jase had finally included himself among the captains, mentally. “Understood. We’ll make it. No problem. We’re packed fairly light, considering. If you need to contact me, don’t worry about the hour. —And if you just want to stop by before that for a sandwich, we do compare more than favorably with the crew lounge.”
Jase seemed to be amused: at least he skipped a beat, and since Jase’s sense of humor usually vanished under stress, that response was reassuring. “I’m sure. Take care. See you after undock—maybe before, but that’ll be on business.”
“See you,” he said, and gave the unit back to Yolanda. “He can’t get loose. But he seems all right.”
Yolanda had stayed and listened, with never a sign that he ought to extend the questioning.
“He seems fine,” she said. He trusted her instincts, at least on that issue. And his exchange with Jase—the sort they’d learned to make in Shejidan—was like old times, all the old signals, crisp on the uptake and easy in delivery. Jase was fine, at least as regarded his freedom and his safety now.
Jase was attempting to gain an expertise he’d hitherto dodged and defied. In no wise could he bring himself up to speed with this late start, but he could learn what was going on, what was routine and what wasn’t—if schedules meant the technical minutiae of ship-function, the things that should happen from undock to the moment they exited the solar system.
Jase wasn’t idle. He’d never thought it, but he began to understand what Jase seemed to be undertaking, finally—not wholly surrendering to Ramirez’s plan for him, no, he knew Jase’s stubborn self-will. Jase hadn’t given in. But Jase was far too clever to choose ignorance, either. Information came available to him, and Jase grabbed it while his feet were still—so to speak—on station decking, and before his range of choices diminished. Yolanda worried about his state of mind, and maybe a friend ought to worry about him battering himself against his own ignorance—but it was Jase: it was pure Jase, this headlong attack at a problem he could single out for his own.
Worry later, he thought. Right now Jase was doing things that made thorough sense to his longtime partner—if not the healthiest choice for a man who needed real sleep. There wasn’t much of that going on in his own apartment, either.
By supper, his staff adamantly, with a flourish, presented his favorite dishes, clearly determined that the paidhi should have a regular, sit-down meal and an hour-long hiatus in his problems.
After supper, better still, Narani reported their own packing complete, ready for boarding at any moment, while the ship-status showed 42% complete. The departure wasn’t moving on schedule, he was sure, and he hoped for a reprieve—any reprieve, from any source. Tabini saying, no, he didn’t have to go—that would do… though it wouldn’t happen, and it shouldn’t happen. There were worse things than going. Staying, while someone who’d make a mistake went in his place—that was worse.
He stayed up re-drafting letters until he knew he made no sense, and accidentally failed to store the right copies, three of them in a batch.
That was how things were going. He’d had two brandies, and sat staring at one of the pictures he’d chosen to take, thinking of camping on Mospheira’s north shore, and Toby’s yacht at anchor just off the cove.
Fire, fire on water, that night they’d fought off Deana Hanks’ hopes of a war, around the beached wreck of a boat.
They’d had some successes… the side of reason and interspecies sanity. They weren’t out of hope. They’d won the big ones.
But to this hour he’d utterly, wholly, failed his family. He didn’t have time left to do the things he needed to do, there wasn’t a relationship he had on the island that he hadn’t offended, and as things stood now, Barb had heard the news and learned he was on his way out of the solar system. He’d failed to send the letters he still had to send; he’d lost the draft, and his mother and his brother had to get the news the hard way.
So he had to get the letters written—again—not as good as they’d been before he lost the drafts, but the best he could.
On two brandies—he tried.
Dear Barb,
I have to thank you for your loyalty to my family, particularly in the last few years.
I can choose the right words for the job I do, but I never said the right things at the right time between us— maybe because I didn’t listen that well, maybe because I had too much of my attention elsewhere, and presumed too far… all of which is behind us at this point. We still rely on each other in ways in ways I have no right to ask—but knowing you’re where you are, where I can’t be, leaves me deeply in your debt. I hope, but have no right to ask, that you’ll shed some of the good advice you’ve given me on my brother and my mother.
I count on you, without a right or a claim, and I can only pile the debt higher. With more good memories than bad
—Bren.
He didn’t send, not immediately. He slipped it into an electronic folder to send when departure was imminent. The words finally came to him. The dam was broken.
Toby, by the time you read this you’ll know the situation, where I am and why I can’t be there. I can’t ask you to explain this one to Mother. I just want you to know I couldn’t have a better brother.
For your kids, for you and Jill… for all of you, I have to do this.
For all the rest of it,—
It was like writing a will. It might well be one. And he couldn’t dwell on the situation, or grieve over it—the job didn’t budget time for that.. It never had.
I wish you the life you need and deserve.
Maybe after this there’ll be time for me to pay you back at least a fraction of the favors I owe you. My fondest memory, the best human memory I have, is the sight of you at the rail of the old Molly yacht, sailing in to save our skins. That, and you and the kids on the beach. I didn’t get a family, except yours. I wish I’d been a better brother.
I wish everybody my best.
At very least—forgive me the bad bits and be sure I’m thinking of you often.
He knew he ought to edit it. He knew there were two brandies on all that correspondence.
Dammit, what more could he say or do?
His staff was still at work—Jago, who had slept no more than he had; Banichi who, also, a certain number of years ago, had not cared whether the sun circled the earth or the earth circled the sun—it was, Banichi had said, immaterial to his job.
He supposed in a certain sense it still was immaterial to Banichi.
He tried to achieve that calmness of soul.
He took a deep breath and transmitted.
The ship, by morning, miraculously stood at 92%, which argued that elapsed-time had nothing to do with whatever the ship was doing.
With that, too, came a page of loading instructions for all the in-quarters equipment, instructions which—after the initial computer scan did the very rough translation—contained only minor glitches to send the staff into fits of laughter. Don’t have sex with inappropriate equipment was the absolute favorite, which looked immediately to become a salacious proverb in the household. Always be playful with officers ran a close second.
It was a profound relief to laugh—if the paidhi hadn’t a dire presentiment of a situation that might be all too frequent in Yolanda’s tenure—which perversely brought hysterical tears to his eyes. He wiped them, and tried to steady his nerves, especially when Yolanda exited her quarters to find out what the laughter was about.
Handed the document in question, she looked at it. “Playful,” she said, frowning critically.
Good for her. She’d caught that one.
And blushed at the other. “Oh, dear.”
There was hope, Bren thought, and went off to the study to quiet his nerves. But there one of the servants gave him the routine message list.
Nothing from the planet. A vast, deep silence from that quarter.
Blocked again? It might well be. Tabini wouldn’t want a smoothly-running operation distracted.
The fact that he had family in trouble—that didn’t register, on an international scale. It didn’t possibly register. He tried not to feel anything, not worry, not anger, not frustration: leave it to Toby, leave it to Toby, leave it to Barb.
Assuming his letters had gotten to them.
And still rely on them—because they were who they were, and they didn’t need his advice, and it was only for their comfort that he wrote, not because they had to have a word from him. Wasn’t that the point? Wasn’t that what he had to rely on, ultimately?
He met briefly with the staff that would stay behind, Tano and Algini momentarily surrendering their posts to Jago. Narani attended to answer questions. The rest, those staying, were the youngest faces, including most of the female staff, the youngest over all—and given Yolanda within their care, Narani’s choice of the oldest of the women as chief of household seemed apt enough.
“Staff will come up from the world to assist at your request,” Bren told them. “If you request. In all points except courtesy to Mercheson-paidhi, you will still remain my staff, nadiin-ji, with senior authority over the premises, and I leave you a letter with my seal to make clear that you have that authority. You’ll watch over my property and the integrity of security here, under Tano and Algini, who will be the ultimate authority in that regard, reporting where they deem fit. Please be circumspect in your actions, stay generally to the section, and consult with security in technical matters. You will act for Narani, and you will stand firm here. Only the aiji’s own directives can override my orders. Not Lord Geigi’s will nor anyone else’s—not Ogun’s, not even the aiji-dowager’s staff— will take the place of my orders, and you will not consult other households except through Tano and Algini, who may use their discretion whether to take an order from those sources. Do you agree? Staff will obey senior security in matters remotely regarding security. Mercheson-paidhi will have reasonable authority in the house, but you may refuse an order long enough to consult with Tano and Algini as to that order’s safety.”
There were deep flushes, suddenly extreme nervousness… the sort of young flightiness and uncertainty that he wished had a Narani in charge… he wished he could have two of that gentleman—indeed, two of everyone he was taking with him; but it wasn’t possible, and he had to rely on Yolanda’s honest intent and his servants’ discrimination regarding hazards.
“Security may indeed resort to lord Geigi or to the dowager’s men with any matter that requires their attention,” he said to them further, which was instruction mainly for Tano and Al-gini, “or that might suggest consultation. One trusts their discretion. And as for the staff in general, don’t ever hesitate to report a matter, however trivial, to security, at whatever hour. Better too much information than too little: you’ll learn what’s necessary. As for Geigi’s staff, or the establishment the aiji-dowager may leave, one is sure they’re very good, they’re discreet, and one believes, Tano-ji, Gini-ji, you can rely on their advice… as you can rely on Geigi’s or the dowager’s man’chi, if the matter is of mutual concern. Also, Mercheson-paidhi is within your charge, not the other way about. Make her comfortable, advise her, correct her as you’ve corrected me. She’s new to the office. She will make mistakes which will stem from foreignness, I am confident to say, rather than from fault in judgment.” Please God, he thought, saying so. “Support her with advice. Leave critical judgments to Tano and Algini. They will know.”
He rarely saw those two look worried. Even Algini gave him a look when he said that.
“I have every confidence,” he said.
The ship stood at 98%. They had an advisement for all non-crew to board.
Whatever went on in the offices, on the island, on the continent, even in the apartment, stopped being his problem.
God hope the house of cards he and Tabini had built lasted long enough to provide a pattern for the girders of a whole new world.
God hope he got home sometime close to schedule.
Could he ever have dreamed he’d be making this trip, a decade ago?
Ogun had trained crew, a newly-refurbished station, brand new factories and the plans for a starship… if the people he left couldn’t manage with those assets, he didn’t know what more he personally could do for them.
He had already dispatched Bindanda and Asicho to board ahead of them, with his written authorization, which he trusted ship security had honored, and now sent two of the servant staff with another authorization, with two motorized trolleys all loaded with their baggage—those just far enough ahead of them to make it through the lifts and checkpoints and not impede their progress. The dowager’s baggage was somewhat ahead of theirs, so staff advised him, also with authorized staff. Boarding for the rest of them—was down to the last minutes.
He and Banichi and Jago said their goodbyes to Tano and Algini in the security station, and again at the door—that was hardest.
One didn’t hug atevi, not as a rule. He broke that rule, for his own soul’s sake, and embarrassed them.
“It’s the human custom,” he said. “Indulge me, nadiin-ji, for my comfort, and take good care of yourselves. I value you very, very extremely.”
“We are most extremely honored,” Tano said, “paidhi-ji.”
“Bren-ji,” Algini said, and carefully, uncharacteristically, hugged him. Then Tano did. Bren all but lost his composure, and might have if, when he walked away, he hadn’t been in company with Banichi and Jago and Narani and the chosen servant staff.
They had increased their estimate of those going. More had found an excuse this morning—I wish very much to see this place, was one, and: My father would never forgive me if I left the paidhi-aiji vied with I wish to leave my mother’s name in this far place.
Ship authorities had said they had room enough for a few extra. For the whole apartment, if they wished. So the list grew a little, and Narani recalculated the numbers and ordered more compartments opened, which one authorized, a simple message to the ship—no fuss, no extraordinary effort.
Could a human or an atevi wish better staff around him?
And walking down that corridor, realizing how close they were to boarding and how close he was to letting loose the reins of the unruly political beast he’d ridden breakneck for his whole adult career… he experienced a certain momentary euphoria.
“Baji-naji,” he said to Banichi and Jago in that giddy feeling. “Baji-naji, nadiin-ji, if it doesn’t work now, if Mercheson-paidhi can’t make it work, and if Geigi can’t, on what we’ve built—” He said it to convince himself, after his dark night of doubt. “—I don’t know what more I can do.”
“Bindanda has successfully boarded,” Banichi reported to him. “He reports the quarters are heated and lighted and he has set himself to stand guard at the entry, to establish a perimeter, pending arrival of the baggage carts.”
“Jase-aiji has communicated with Tano,” Jago added— electronically connected as ever, “and given clearance for the baggage and staff to board. We’re expected at our convenience, likewise the dowager, who will follow us.”
It all felt completely unreal of a sudden, as giddily impossible as it had seemed possible a second ago. He was a kid from Mospheira. He was a maker of dictionaries in a little office in the Bujavid.
What in hell was he doing in the execution of an order like this one?
He had no business exiting the solar system. He felt the whole concept as a barrier, a magical line that, if he crossed it, would simply evaporate him, a creature that would burst like a bubble in the featureless deep of space.
Yet Jase had exited and entered several solar systems in his life. The ship did it as routine. Magic didn’t apply. He had no business being scared of the process, or supposing that disaster would swallow them up without a trace or a report. Hadn’t Jase had to have faith in boats, getting out on the sea for the first time, and figuring out that the sea was deep, and that he was balanced on a rocking surface high up—relative to the sea bottom. It didn’t matter that a body falling into the water floated and didn’t plummet straight to the bottom—it hadn’t convinced Jase’s gut. And knowing that this ship had done this again and again successfully—in atevi reckoning, were those not good numbers?
As the shuttles had good numbers?
Hell with that. He’d gotten more timid about airplanes, since flying the shuttle.
He’d begun to hold onto the armrests of airplanes, trying to pull the plane into the sky. Stupid behavior. Anxious, animal behavior. He told himself again and again what made airplanes stay in the sky… the way he’d used to tell Jase, who truly didn’t like zipping along near a planet’s surface… and didn’t starships work on perfectly rational principles he just didn’t happen to understand as well as he understood airfoils?
In the station’s informational system, Banichi now reported, the ship had reached a mysterious 99% and holding.
“The dowager has decided to accompany us in boarding,” Banichi said further. “Her party will overtake us at the lift.”
So. So. A deep breath. Time to wait for protocols. He stalled his small party at the lift door.
In due time, at the dowager’s pace, with her staff and with Lord Geigi and his men for escort, Ilisidi and Cajeiri arrived and joined them at the personnel lift. The dowager was of course immaculate and fashionable in a red fur-cuffed coat, and the heir-apparent, neatly pig-tailed in the black and red ribbons of his house, wore a modest black leather coat, red leather gloves, and a quiet demeanor vastly different than his arrival.
Terrified, Bren thought with sympathy for the boy.
Sent from Tatiseigi’s ungentle care to Ilisidi’s and Cenedi’s, and now exiled to travel to the ends of creation in a human-run ship. Was ever a boy faced with more upheaval in his few years?
He was very glad Lord Geigi had come to see them off… considerable inconvenience, all the bundling-up for the cold core, a disturbance in the schedule of a man who got only a little more sleep than he had, Bren was very sure. Still, the man’chi was very tight, very sure, and it would have been sad had Geigi not stirred himself out to walk with them.
Hug Geigi? Not quite.
“Paidhi-ji,” Illisidi said with a polite nod, the intimate address, acknowledging her traveling companion.
“Aiji-ma.” He bowed at the honor. “Nandi.” For Giegi, with human affection.
Banichi had called the lift, at the dowager’s approach. It arrived at precisely the grand moment.
“Young man.” Ilisidi offered her arm to her great-grandson, and the boy took it ceremoniously, escorting his great-grandmother with the grace of the lord he was born to be. They boarded. Cenedi and his men, and the dowager’s servants— small distinction between the two duties—held back. Geigi made a subtle wave of his hand, cuing him to move: that was the way it was, a difficult matter of protocols, and Bren moved, heart racing, thoughts suddenly a jumble of remembrance that, no, he was not demoted, and that Geigi, to whom he was accustomed to defer, gave place to him in the personnel lift—
As if he were higher rank.
Because he was leaving, perhaps, and numbered in the dowager’s party, not, silly thought, that the paidhi-aiji, if he even retained the title, in any way outranked the lord of the station. Empty honors, Tabini had paid him. The paidhi wasn’t any lord of the heavens, and hadn’t any claim to Geigi’s man’chi.
God, no. He didn’t want Geigi or the dowager to change the way they dealt with him. He didn’t want a paper title. He supposed it augmented his rank in dealing with Sabin… no matter it was meaningless, but he suspected Geigi was, if charitable, amused. He hoped Geigi wasn’t offended. He hoped the dowager wasn’t about to make some issue of it all.
He didn’t want any more. He wanted to retire to his estate on the coast for at least a month and look at the stars from the deck of a boat—Toby’s boat, at that.
Instead, the lift arrived, and they all fitted in, the same procedures they used when taking the shuttle down to the planet. He hoped that workers would communicate and the baggage wouldn’t stall in their path, and that it would all happen magically, so that the newly appointed lord of the heavens didn’t end up in interstellar space without shirts or Bindanda’s cooking supplies.
So much had to be a miracle. So much just sailed past his numb senses; and meanwhile he had to muster intelligent small-talk, in a station where the weather wasn’t a possible topic.
“So much done so quickly,” he said to the dowager as the lift rose.
“Did you hear from my grandson?”
“I did hear, aiji-ma.” He feared he blushed. And it wasn’t a topic he wanted to discuss, his elevation to mythical lordship. “One was very gratified by his letter.”
“Ha,” Ilisidi said, one of those ambiguous utterances. “Politics.”
And Geigi: “My staff is in communication with your quarters, nandi-ji.” Oh, he was glad to hear warmth in Geigi’s tones. “Does Mercheson-paidhi favor fish, do you think?”
“She will be greatly honored by your attention, nandi.” Fish was almost always safe. And he did remember. “She does favor melon preserves, extremely. All varieties of fruit.”
“Ah.” Geigi was pleased to have a personal knowledge. And his ability to get foodstuffs off the planet was scandalous. “One will manage.”
The apartment might be awash in melon preserves. “I’ll be in your debt if you can show my successor the refinements, nandi. One wishes she might have had the benefits of the dowager’s estate, as I did.”
“Ha,” Ilisidi said again. “Benefits, is it?”
“I found it so, dowager-ji. It taught me a very great deal.”
“The paidhi listened,” Ilisidi said, and tightened her grip on the boy’s arm. Gravity was at the moment only a function of the car’s movement. “As some should! Do you agree, boy?”
“Yes, mani-ma.”
“Grandmother will do,” Ilisidi said sharply. “Aiji will do better. You have official rank here, if I say so, and we’ll see whether those shoulders are strong enough, yet. So I say, today. Who knows for tomorrow?”
“Yes, aiji-ma,” This quietly uttered, a young soul sharply keyed to the dowager’s voice—
Mecheiti racing wildly on a hillside, breakneck after the dominant. Reason had nothing to do with it. Bren didn’t know why he flashed on that, of all moments when he’d nearly died. But it was the fact of native wildlife. It was the fact of atevi instinct: it was the nature of man’chi…
He witnessed it, he thought. He didn’t feel it. But he intellectually understood the boy had learned to twitch in certain ways to instincts that were life to his species, and held tightly to his grandmother’s hand.
That was reassuring to everyone concerned.
They braked. The door opened in a waft of cold pressure-change that frosted metal surfaces.
This time, however, it was not the old familiar sights—not the shuttle dock, with the hatch leading to whatever shuttle sat in dock.
It was dock 1, and a long snake of yellow tubing, which led, he understood, to another, grapple-reinforced tube, where Phoenix rode.
Baggage must have cleared. He didn’t see it.
“Well, well,” Geigi said, “it seems this is the place.”
“So one assumes,” Ilisidi said. Suited workers now appeared in the tube, out of the bend inside it. “One assumes we have an escort. Go, go back to reasonable places before you freeze, Geigi-ji.”
“Safe voyage,” Geigi wished them. “Safe travel, safe return, aiji-ma, Bren-ji.”
There were bows, such as one could manage, reaching out for safety lines strung along the wall.
Then Geigi and his men were inside the lift, they were outside, and the door shut at their backs with appalling finality.
Phoenix was surely at the other end—intellectual knowledge, but with no view of the dock, only the tube leading to the hatch, it felt rather like being swallowed by some giant of the fairy tales.
The workers beckoned them on. Ilisidi didn’t question, rather proceeded down the handline in the only direction possible.
“One can’t sail off here, aiji-ma,” Cajeiri observed. “Are those the captains?”
“A sensible person wouldn’t try to sail at all,” Ilisidi retorted. “And those are workers. Don’t gawk. Don’t chatter. It burns the lungs.”
Burn, it did. Breath seemed very short. Or the paidhi was breathing very rapidly.
“A small load of baggage was ahead of us,” he said to the workers as they met. “It all should go to fifth deck, my possession.”
“Yes, sir,” the worker said. No argument, no delay, no fuss. “The tag was all in order. It’s well ahead of you. Go right along. Sir. Ma’am.”
Things went with frightening finality.
This is real, a small voice said to him, but for the most he felt numb—not as much fear of the trip itself as reason said was logical, rather more a sense of danger to the things he was leaving: fear of what might change while he was gone, family he might lose, people who might carry on their lives without him, and get to places and situations to which he was irrelevant.
I’ll come back, he said in his heart. I’ll make it back.
But that part wasn’t wholly in his hands any longer.
Now the unwinding of the yellow serpentine showed them an open hatch, and it swallowed them up, a large hatch, that had no trouble taking in all their party at once, with room left over for one of the workers, who punched appropriate buttons and threw switches. And bet that atevi security, his and the dowager’s, recorded those movements, and the accompanying confirmation of lights.
The outer door shut. Then the smaller of the inner doors opened, and their chill gusted out with them into a corridor as bare, as purely functional as the access tunnels on the station: panels with steady and blinking telltales, gridwork deck, ladders going up and sideways—a puzzle to a ground-dweller until a ground-dweller’s mind registered the obvious fact that he was drifting and didn’t even know which way was up. The air smelled vaguely of paint and plastics and something that could be oil, or solvent. Fans roared.
It was a tubular corridor—ending in a pressure door, again, like the station accesses.
“A grim place,” Ilsidi pronounced it, but alert to everything around her.
“This way, if you please,” their guide said: his clip-on badge, on a close look, was ship security. “Captain Graham’s compliments, I’ll be your escort to your quarters. Mr. Cameron, if you’d please advise everyone watch the doors as we go.”
“He presents felicitous greetings from Jase-aiji.”
“Who is not here!” Ilisidi said, displeased.
“Who is managing the ship to keep it safe, aiji-ma, and sends security to direct us past hazardous equipment. I’m very sure it’s proper.”
“We demand Jase.”
“Aiji-ma,” Bren said, “it’s by no means certain that Jase is physically on the ship.”
“Are we to believe that planning is so slipshod, as not to include any inquiry from us? Are we to believe that this is the degree of care which attends our voyage on this chancy vessel? We do not budge from this corridor until we have assurances.”
This very cold corridor, this corridor the cold of which had, after the deep chill of the dock, penetrated his coat and his gloves and started into his human-sized body.
But bluffing? No. Not Ilisidi.
“She demands Captain Graham, specifically,” Bren said. “Protocol requires it. So we’ll stay here.”
“You can’t stay here, sir. You’re in a traffic area.”
“I agree. I respectfully suggest this place is very cold, and I personally will be very grateful if Captain Graham is aboard, and makes every effort to get down here, so we can resolve this before we become a traffic problem.”
Their guide had a baffled look, and relayed that fact on his personal electronics: “Gran Sidi’s aboard and wants Captain Graham to take her to quarters immediately.”
There might have been discussion. Or incredulity on the other end.
“They’re in the corridor, sir, and won’t budge.”
“The aiji-dowager has suggested,” Bren added, “that if he fails to appear this would be a major breach of protocol, not auspicious at all for the voyage. Downright unlucky for the ship.”
The worker relayed that, too, as: “The aiji-dowager’s upset, ma’am, and Mr. Cameron’s saying it just has to get done. Something about unlucky for the ship.”
Another silence. And if there was a superstitious streak left among the crew it regarded the ship itself.
“Captain Graham’s in a meeting, sir.”
He could suggest they get Sabin down to the entry corridor if Jase wasn’t at hand; but he didn’t personally want to deal with Sabin, especially Sabin disturbed from her work.
But still—setting a precedent with the dowager demanding Jase, dealing with Jase—it made sense. It was a means of getting hands on Jase at will. So he bit his lip, refused to shiver or to show any discomfort at all. “I’m afraid we’ll stand here until he can find the time.”
The security man relayed that. Meanwhile Cajeiri examined a panel with a mere glance, then an inclination sideways. And received a severe tightening of the dowager’s hand on his arm, if the slight lift of his head was any sign.
“Captain’s on his way,” the man said then, with evident relief. “But he’d like to meet you on fifth level. It’s warmer, Mr. Cameron, if you can persuade her to go on through.”
Nerves twitched. Not polite, that unadorned common pronoun. But it wasn’t time for a lesson in protocols, not here.
“Aiji-ma,” Bren said in a low voice, “there’s a reception arranged in greater warmth on fifth level, and Jase-aij will meet us there, with your kind consent.”
“Very good,” Ilisidi said. And waved her cane forward. “Let this person lead, paidhi.”
“Lead on,” Bren said to their escort. The language had been clipped, moderate, but still touchy. “She says you may go in front of her.”
Their escort gave a misgiving look at their party in general, at very large dark-skinned, black-uniformed atevi bodyguards, who drank up the available light in the forefront of the party, and who had moved closer: the paler colors of the household staffs were much to the rear at the moment. Their escort might not like it, and wouldn’t at all like the weapons in evidence, and certainly wouldn’t like the intransigence in the entry corridor. But there they were, ordered to fifth deck and their escort glided out, using the ladder for a handhold, into the first intersecting corridor and up to a lift.
The lift opened at a button-push and cast a bright, reasonable light into their shadowed steel passage. They boarded the lift and rode either up or down, a slightly startling set of paths and tracks, to a brighter area facing a seal-door.
Their escort opened it and led the way.
The atevi-repaired station corridors were still lighter than this, brightly lit and of felicitously pleasant tones: but here the green and brown paneling of the original station was indisputable, unhappy prophecy of the decor beyond. No one could invent those muddy shades on purpose: it was, Bren suspected what the extrusion medium tended to do with the dyes they injected to better a natural puce. The same kind of switches for lights and section-seals were ubiquitous, as if the master kit that had built the station had been applied here—or vice versa, and that meant their staffs could manage these panels without much confusion. He was sure Banichi and Jago had taken that in instantly.
One wondered if the service accesses also existed here, that network of tunnels that allowed service inside the station’s workings.
Grim, human-style Malguri, it was, at least on this level, with moderate improvements in the plumbing and far worse to endure in simple inconvenience.
Ilisidi was taking it all in, stoically refusing to be appalled.
The aiji-apparent, however, looked around him as if he expected the walls to spew forth marvels—or to implode from age and decrepitude. Cajeiri hadn’t seen the station at its worst— had lived in baroque splendor, among centuries-old porcelains, on hand-worked carpet, under gilt ceilings. He had seen, in fact, nothing in his young life more primitive than the new sections of the space station. He clung to the ladder rungs along the wall to keep from another ignominious drift, and tried not to jump when section door locks banged and moved, letting them through to another area, another corridor.
“Mind,” Cenedi said as they went, “these doors are likely the same as on the station: they close without mercy, in the blink of an eye, to keep all the air from rushing out into the ether of the heavens, young sir. If you see red flashing lights, stand where you are. If yellow, run breakneck for the next section and hope not to be cut in half.”
“Where do they steer the ship, nadi?” Cajeiri asked.
“Elsewhere,” Ilisidi interposed. “Where boys don’t need to be.”
“But I want to see,” Cajeiri said as they glided along.
“There may be supper,” Ilisidi said, “and who knows, I may not wish supper tonight.”
That was a threat. Cajeiri was immediately not happy. He still stared about him, head turning at every new door, every corridor they passed, youthful jaw set and the dowager’s own glint in his eye.
Bet, too, if there was any similarity in the species, that every inquisitive bone in that young body longed for all of those emergency measures to go into effect at once—just the once, of course, just to find out.
Cajeiri had behaved admirably this far. One remembered, seeing the occasional look, that set of the jaw, that this was, in fact, Tabini’s son, and Damiri’s.
One well remembered, too, what it was like to be that young, that active, that under-informed. And on this excursion one was damned glad that no one less than the Assassin’s Guild was in charge of the boy.
They reached a new section under their official guidance: three crewmen turned out to meet them—with a small presentation of cut flowers, no less, to the lady they called Gran ’Sidi.
“Welcome aboard,” the head of the little delegation said in passable Ragi, all solemnity.
Ilisidi took the flowers like a queen, lacking a free hand, what with the cane—drifting slightly sideways at the moment. But she snagged the ubiquitous ladder-rungs with the head of the cane and managed a little nod, which greatly gratified the delegation.
“We are here to occupy our quarters,” she said, of course in Ragi, complete cipher to the crew.
“She is pleased,” Bren translated—it was not dishonest of a translator to meet reasonable social expectations on either side, in his practical and practiced opinion. “And she expects the atevi section is close—with Captain Graham, to be sure.”
“On ahead, sir,” their escort said, “and the baggage is ahead, too, and Captain Graham’s on his way this very moment. Through here, sir, ma’am.”
Very good news. Their escort opened a side door, where Bindanda had stationed himself—welcome sight. Cenedi quietly appropriated the flowers, incongruous but not unaccustomed accouterment for security, and they continued through, into a place not only populated by their own staff, but better lit and much warmer. The ship immediately had a more auspicious feeling, despite the mud-colored walls.
Cenedi had had staff aboard for hours, going over every minute detail of their accommodations, checking for bugs as well as inconveniences, one could be sure.
And Ilisidi’s security had a camera live. As they passed the door, Bren caught the shine of an uncapped lens clipped to a uniformed, leather shoulder.
And what was that for? Bren asked himself in dismay. The lens certainly wasn’t uncommon, but he was sure the lens had been capped during their trip up the lifts, possibly protectively so, during the intense cold—he had no idea of its limitations. He was sure he’d have noticed otherwise.
But if they’d uncapped it, bet that lens was live and they were transmitting. Was that for security review, privately, something relayed ahead to their staff, in the new quarters?
Something sent farther away, back through the hull, to lord Geigi? He wasn’t sure they could do that. Surely not. So there was a security set-up already active within their section— someone receiving.
He was not unhappy to know they had record of the route and the button-pushes that brought them here.
But for all he knew, Cenedi’s men were making a video record for quite different reasons, a record perhaps to go out to Geigi, then to Tabini, who would be interested, to say the least.
Or—knowing Tabini—was it to go out to every household that owned a television?
Confirmation for the dowager’s political allies that she was well and alive and in charge of her own armed security, on this ship, in this mission?
Atevi couldn’t like the structure they saw—though atevi had gotten used to the concept of twos on the station. Everything in the corridors—doors, and window panels in offices, was configured by ship-culture, convenient sets of two, pairs, that anathema to the ’counters, more than vexation to the atevi sense of design: an arrangement of space that hit the atevi nervous system with the same painful reaction nails on a chalkboard caused for humans, and worse, he understood, if one were standing in it, experiencing it in three dimensions.
But some enterprising soul had painted two pastel stripes wandering the corridor, two, branching into five, then felicitous seven, right across the green tile.
Someone had arranged a spray of brightly colored plastic balls—seven—on strands of wire, from wall to wall, like planets and moons against the mud brown of the wall paneling.
The effect was less than elegant… the sort of thing that turned up in crew lounges. But seven. It was a valiant attempt at kabiu.
And colored paint. Where had paint turned up in their baggage? It had been at a low priority in station-building, wasn’t manufactured on-station even yet: it had to be freighted up.
Had Jase had that stripe done? Had the dowager’s staff prepared for the spartan environment? Atevi couldn’t have done something as garish as the orange planets.
Staff drifted out from the offices, the dowager’s, welcome sight on both sides, and the staff who’d brought their baggage turned up from further on.
“Thank you,” Bren said to their escort, with a little bow as automatic as breathing and quite impossible in null-G. “We’ll be very comfortable here.”
“I’m to show you temperature and emergency controls, sir.”
There was a potentially explosive foul-up. “I’m sure you’ve shown the staff,” Bren said, drifting slightly askew—difficult to maintain formality at odd angles—“and deputized them to show security personnel, who will show me and the dowager what’s needful for us personally to do. That’s our protocol, sir. Believe me, Captain Graham will confirm it.”
Trust them, that the ship would not explode from this deck.
“Then is there any need of me further?” their escort asked.
“With thanks, sir, —one trusts Captain Graham is here.”
“He’s in the section, sir. He’s on his way.”
The door behind them opened at that very moment. He heard it, and when he turned, drifting, to look back, Jase was there.
Thank God.
“We’re just fine, then. We’ll all be fine. Thank you, yes, that’s all we need.”
“There will be no walking about,” Ilisidi was telling Cajeiri quite firmly, in this place where, at the moment, walking was a euphemism, “no leaving your quarters without security escort, nadi.”
“But this is all like a house, mani-ji. Surely—”
“Nothing is sure here!” This under her breath, with a hard jerk at Cajeiri’s hand. “Hear me!” Bren tried not to notice the preface, as Ilisidi, disgusted, turned a sweetly benevolent glance toward him, and toward Jase, as Jase sailed to their side, and stopped.
Jase, in a blue uniform jacket, with the Phoenix insignia, the closest to captain’s estate he’d yet come. The emblem looked like one of the wi’itikiin, the flying creatures of Malguri cliffs, rising from solar fires—atevi, having heard the legend, thought it very well-omened.
The inner door shut, making everything private, including Jase with them.
“Jase-aiji. How kind of you to come.”
“Aiji-ma,” Jase said quietly, distantly to Bren’s ears.
The offices inside were all lit up, with atevi staff unpacking their own equipment.
And the stripes braiding their way down the corridor, past the windowed offices immediately in view, branched out to two side corridors in the section.
He’d approved the arrangement the dowager’s staff had provided: numerous staff sleeping rooms, back near the kitchens, and two bedchambers, two office/studies, for himself and for the dowager. They used a vast amount of room—they’d added staff, and only scantly advised the ship, which had, for all he knew, discounted the advisement: certainly there’d been no highlevel reaction. Of room there was no shortage, so instructions said, and their baggage requirements remained negligible to the scale of things.
“I hope everything’s in order,” Jase said. “I hope you’ll be as comfortable as we can provide, aiji-ma.”
“Acceptable, ship-aiji.” This, from the mistress of ancient Malguri, the dowager who slept on bare ground and still outrode two humans. “But association and man’chi. How stands that?”
“Firm,” Jase said. The reassuring answer. “Still within the aiji’s man’chi. And my ship’s.” One could have two man’chiin: the whole aishidi’tat was a web work, and two and three and four associations at once was a benefit, not a detriment.
“Accept this,” Cenedi said, and handed Jase one of the pocket coms, “to keep us in close touch. The dowager relies on you especially, nandi, in this voyage. She will call on you whenever she has a personal question. She wishes to have this clear.”
Jase bowed his head—the rigorous instruction of the court made that act the simplest, most basic reflex. “I’ll endeavor to answer the dowager’s questions.”
“So what will the schedule be, if you please?” Ilisidi asked.
“If the dowager please—” Court expression for a brief stall, a gathering of words. “We’re transient.”
“Moment to moment,” Bren muttered, on autopilot.
“Moment to moment.” Jase scarcely blushed, seized on the apt word, and the omen fell unremarked. “Reliant on the numbers, aiji-ma, as crew boards. We have to have a precise calculation of mass. We’ll leave dock and calculate, we hope, in about four hours. Crew boarding has begun. It can be very fast.”
“Very good. And we will then walk decently on the deck.”
“As soon as we’re underway, aiji-ma.”
“Is this where we stay, mani?” Cajeiri asked, sounding disappointed. “It looks like a warehouse.”
“This is manifestly where we stay,” Ilisidi said sharply, “and one will be grateful, great-grandson, that the facility will soon be operative and that the lights require no lengthy and laborious fire source, not the case everywhere in the world, as you will one day learn to your astonishment, I warn you. Apologize!”
“One regrets, nandiin.” Meek response.
“One accepts,” Jase said.
Ilisidi steered her charge onward, toward her own side corridor. Cenedi attended. Staff bowed, such as they could, adrift.
He and Jase had a moment, then—a solitary moment, after Jase’s quick, confidence-establishing trip to this deck. At times, Bren thought, when he could do his old job, merely translating, correcting Jase’s small lapse, he could sink into flow-through, not paying attention to what he said. At such moments he became a device, not a thinking being.
But he wasn’t merely a recorder. And he knew he was close to panic, in zero-gravity, amid universal reminders they were all but launched. His eyes tended now to dart to details, and to miss all of them. Thoughts scattered. What became absolutely necessary eluded him, at the very moment he needed to gather the facts in and make sense and use the brief chance he had— like this one, to talk to Jase, to have things firm—to make requests, demands on Jase that might break an association, break a friendship, see disaster overtake them… he wasn’t at his best. But time and the hope of remedy was slipping away from him.
“Jase.” He got the word out. “Office.” He changed languages. “Need to talk.” Remembering that Ragi was the most secure code they could use, he shifted his mind back into that track. “A moment only, nadi.”
“I haven’t got time,” Jase said urgently in ship-speak. “I left a briefing—”
“Jase-ji.” He snagged Jase by an arm, gripped the ladder with the other, and pulled Jase loose from his handhold, hauled him bodily into the right-hand office, the one Cenedi and his staff weren’t occupying.
Jago attended him in, braked with a gentle toe touch on a cabinet.
He’d kidnapped a ship’s captain. And he was gripping too tightly, too urgently.
Jago made a signal to them. Wired. Meaning Jase.
“In private,” he said to Jase.
Jase hesitated, looked down at the grip on his arm. Bren let go.
Then Jase reached to his collar and pinched a switch.
“Can’t be out of contact long,” Jase said. “Sabin’s not happy with how much time I’ve diverted here. Silence is going to be noticed.”
“The paint down the hall. Your idea?”
“My orders. My sketch. Crew’s execution. Caught hell for it.”
Jase, practicing kabiu. He didn’t ask about the orange plastic planets.
“Damned good,” Bren said. “Excellent move. Impressive.”
“You didn’t hold me here to discuss the paint.”
“Speak Ragi. Jase, I have a question. Not a pleasant question. —Jago-ji. The meeting with Mercheson. I have it keyed up.” He had his computer. He opened the case, sailed it gently to her. “Play it.”
“Nandi.” Jago simply pushed the button, the computer floating in her grip.
“So will you,” Yolanda’s voice said, that sound-clip, right there. “… where you are—and I’m glad you’re going. All I know—all I know of what’s out there—if Ogun doesn’t know, and he hasn’t told Sabin, then there’s two names. There was a three-man exploration team that went in. I know that Jenrette was one of them; and two more got killed.”
Jase’s lips had become a thin line.
“Tamun was trying to catch Ramirez, and they ran, and Tamun’s mutineers shot them. Jenrette’s still alive, but they aren’t. I didn’t used to think so, but now I ask myself whether Tamun suspected something, and if that was why he was trying to overthrow the council—but Tamun couldn’t get at it, when he was one of the captains. He couldn’t get the proof, or didn’t release it. So we didn’t know—and now he’s dead. And that scares me. All that scares me.“
“Shit,” Jase said.
“Log record?” the tape went on, Bren’s own voice, alternate with Yolanda’s.
“Common crew can’t get into the log file. I guess not even all the captains can. There could be a tape—they usually make one, through helmet-cam. But if there is, it’s deep in archives.”
“Tape of what?” he’d asked.
“Their going onto the station. Through the corridors. That’s all I know. Which is what everybody in the crew knows. But didn’t know they knew. That’s the hell of it. We thought the report was just what you’d think it would be… which it wasn’t. And now if there was a tape, orifjenrette knows something—he’s the only eyewitness. And he’s attached to Jase.”
“When did she talk to you?” Jase asked, appalled.
“Does it matter?”
“It bloody matters. Is she all right?”
“You have to ask that?”
Jase wasn’t pleased. Jase had a temper. But right now Jase looked stark scared.
“I put her into my apartment,” Bren said, “with my staff, with instructions to protect her against the consequences of telling me the truth. —You didn’t know I’d done that.”
“I heard she was there. I didn’t hear the circumstances. Obviously I didn’t.”
“But you’re scared.”
“I’m damned upset! This isn’t a small affair, Bren. This is explosive.”
“It took Yolanda some thinking, I imagine, to see past the obvious. I didn’t see it, first off. Did you?”
“See what? What are you talking about?”
“Ragi, nadi-ji. Give me the benefit of your thoughts, if you will. Dare we say you know what I’m talking about, and we’re both distressed about what Mercheson said?”
“I didn’t expect Yolanda was involved any longer. I thought she was out of this, once Ramirez died.”
“What was she out of?”
“Ship politics.”
That covered the known world. “You were personally involved with her,” Bren said, determined on confrontation. “Then, surprise, nadi-ji, you weren’t. You couldn’t face each other. —I could have predicted that breakup, forgive me. It’s the job.”
“It was her job, as it turned out.” The job she’d done for Ramirez, the job she hadn’t told either of them about. “Wasn’t it? Or do we know something else?”
“You didn’t know what she was doing when you broke up. But it was there, nadi. Secrets are bad bedfellows.”
Ship-speak. “They’re killers. None of which is here or there with what she’s charging.”
“And you’re still mad. You were damned mad when you found out what she’d been doing with Tabini and Ramirez. But you were mad before that. You canceled her out. You didn’t deal with her. You didn’t talk. That was bad business, and I didn’t know how to patch it. Our conversations stopped, too. She avoided me as well as you. I attributed it to the severance of relations with you. As it turned out, she needed help, and I was blind.”
“She could have asked for it. Weren’t you mad, when you found out what she was up to?”
“Damned mad. And jealous. I confess it. Confession’s good for the soul. Isn’t that what they say? Maybe hers is quieter now.”
“I suppose it is. I don’t know where the hell this is going.”
“Well, for one, nadi-ji, I think she still cares and I know what bastards we are to live with under the best of circumstances.”
“None of your business, and thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Listen to me, nadi.” Back into Ragi, under cover, into a different framework of thinking, before thinking spiraled out of parameters in ship-speak. “The man’chi underlying is the same, hers and ours, different than the ship. There’s a human truth in that, like it or not, and I suggest you listen to the whole conversation, in which she expressed deep concern for your safety and your welfare and the reasons—there were reasons— why she didn’t feel free to come to either of us. I’m sure jealousy exists in your feelings toward her, but not professional jealousy. I think jealousy of Ramirez doomed your relationship.”
“That’s nonsense.”
Right back to Ragi. “You aren’t related by blood, but you are by father—real father, not the centuries-dead heroes. Ramirez was the head of man’chi, and like any aiji, he worked with secrets, he kept secrets, he nourished them, bred them and crossbred them. There’s a reason he could deal with Tabini, whose whole instinct is secrecy. In that, I’m sure, nadi, that they damned well got along. And in the process, he made you and Yolanda jealous as hell of each other.”
Jase didn’t deny it.
“So he put her in an untenable position,” Bren said, “made her privy to his deception of both of us. And she couldn’t share a bed with you or a pot of tea in my household, not then nor after he died. No, she’s not the most agreeable. She detested the planet. But now she feels safest not in the society she knows from birth, but inside my household, watched over by my staff—being paidhi-aiji and dealing with Tabini. This isn’t the course either of us would have predicted for her. But she hasn’t been where either of us thought she was, nadi. She’s been in a very frightening territory, while you and I were living comfortably, building the future we thought was relatively safe. She knew. I doubt she slept well, these last few years.”
“The hell! She could have come to me.”
“Could she? And what would Ramirez have done, nadi? And what might happen with Tabini?”
Tabini had to give anyone pause. And Jase paused.
“His dying grieved you,” Bren said, “and set her adrift, nadi. Now I hope she’s found a harbor a little more calm than where she’s lived. But while we’ve been comfortable these last years, she’s had years to think, and to assemble the pieces Ramirez necessarily gave her. As translators, we’re not quite machines, are we? We do bring in bits and pieces of our own knowledge. And there she sat, a member of the crew, hearing all this about the contact, knowing who went, knowing now that there was a secret, knowing it was lurking at levels we didn’t deal with— what was she to do? You’d been taken into a captaincy she might have expected for herself. She was passed over, and still sat there, in Ramirez’s company, a repository of his official secrets—and why didn’t he appoint her to the office?”
“I’ve no idea. I wish to hell he had.”
“But she was with him, nadi, day and night; she was subject to his calls—she had all those skills. Was he going to appoint a new captain who’d have full knowledge what was going on? Who had close ties to me, and who might gain access codes? A new ship-aiji who’d be with him so often she’d unbalance the relationship with other officers? She lived in his office. Wasn’t that the point of your own jealousy? And what if that had played out among the other ship-aijiin?”
Jase had let go his handhold, so still he stayed in place, adrift. The pain and anger that had been part of his dealings with Yolanda seemed to have gone elsewhere, redirected, reflected.
“Maybe it was,” Jase said. “Maybe a lot of things were poisoned in the process, nadi.”
“Then Ramirez died and left you Jenrette… one assumes to advise you, where matters come up.”
Anger gave way to intense worry.
“He was aboard the station,” Bren said. “All the others that went aboard the station out there, I suppose, were Ramirez’s men. What bothers me—all of them just happened to die in the Tamun affair. All but Jenrette.”
“Defending Ramirez,” Jase said.
“Like Yolanda, I’ll tell you, I’m beginning to ask myself what Tamun was doing that blew matters up and started the shooting.”
“I can’t believe there was anything more in it than Tamun’s ambition.”
“He was already at highest rank,” Bren protested. “What more was there for ambition to go for?”
“Control. Authority. Real authority.”
“And what could give it to him, better than information? Jase, Jase, I’d like you to find out what Jenrette knows. I’d like you to get a copy of that tape, if you can do it, before we leave dock. Before we commit any further to this mission.”
“I can’t do that,” Jase said.
“You can, nadi. Just ask him.”
“No. You don’t understand. It’s not possible. Jenrette’s transferred to Sabin.”
“When did that happen?”
“When we made out the staff assignments. When we divided the crew, and said who was going and staying. I wanted Kaplan with me, on my staff—I trust Kaplan. I wanted to keep him and Pressman and Polano as my aides, and most of all, I didn’t want to leave them behind on the station, where Ogun’s going to appoint a fourth captain, which was the regulation way things work. That’s where they were supposed to go: they weren’t going to be aboard, the way Ogun had drawn things up. But Jenrette and I—I don’t say we don’t get along, but everything I do, it’s obvious in his opinion whether it’s what Ramirez would do, or the way Ramirez did things: he second-guesses me at every turn, I’m not easy with him, and it’s not the best situation, nadi. When I want something done, just done, cheerfully, I ask Kaplan, but I never was going to push Jenrette out. I respect his advice. So I said why didn’t Ogun and Sabin just increase their staffs, which they could use, and I’d have Jenrette and his team and Kaplan and his. That’s when it blew up. Sabin said I’d insulted Jenrette, which I was trying hard not to do. So with Sabin’s famous tact, that fairly well put the personnel question into an hour-long, angry argument—all the principals being present, including Jenrette and his unit, and Kaplan and his.”
God.
“And in the upshot of things, I exploded, I got my way and I kept Kaplan, and Ogun and Sabin increased staff by three, but by then there were hurt feelings, and Sabin said she wanted Jenrette’s experience, if I didn’t value it. I said I did want it, and it wasn’t like that and I wanted him to stay; but Sabin said if she was going to increase staff, she was senior on the ship and she got the pick of staff on the ship. She wanted him, and insisted he transfer, and there it was.”
Disaster. And worse. “When was this?”
“About six hours ago.”
Not good news at all. He shot Jago a look and had one back.
Appalling news, considering that Jenrette’s name had become an issue inside the residency, and Yolanda had just dropped out of Ogun’s reach, not by Ogun’s orders. And could a bug possibly get past Algini’s countermeasures? Could distant listening devices have been hearing, if nothing else, the proper names at issue?
Were they doing that now?
“Coincidences do happen,” Bren said. “Sometimes they really do happen, and merging staffs is always a mess. I can’t see how the ship could get a bug past our surveillance. But this is worrisome, besides inconvenient.”
“A breach could happen, nadiin-ji,” Jago said quietly. “In our craft, once a countermeasure exists, one innovates. We don’t know the ship’s limits. They are the fathers of technology.”
Constant warning. Constant caution. On truly sensitive matters, they talked on the move, in the corridors: harder to pick up. Inside the apartment, they talked behind an electronic screen, in the security station, in a very small safe perimeter.
Hadn’t they warned him? And he’d talked to Yolanda in the study.
“I want that tape,” Bren said.
“You want universal peace, too, nadi, but I don’t know I can deliver it.”
“They have universal peace, and they can lose the aiji’s cooperation, and ours, and the island’s, none of which will help them at all in whatever they’re up to.”
“We don’t know that they care. If they’re overhearing us, and I don’t think it’s happening, but I don’t know everything— they could be forewarned, even now.”
“I’m saying if we’re going to trust Sabin enough to bring members of the aiji’s family into it, we’re going to have to trust Sabin.” He said that sentence in ship-speak, in case. And lapsed right back into Ragi. “And right now and until we know more, we won’t drink a cup she pours. The tape.”
“It won’t be a tape,” Jase said. “That’s an expression.”
“How does it exist?”
“Deep in log archives.”
“Can you reach it? Can you get access?”
“I’m not senior. Ogun can,” Jase added. “We could ask him. We could outright ask him.”
“And, as you say, if we ask him, it could vanish in a moment. Permanently. And Sabin’s senior on the ship. I’ll take for granted she has the codes, nadi.”
“I believe she does.”
“It’s worth a certain risk of diplomatic difficulty, Jase-ji, to know in absolute detail what this ship met aboard the station. Can you call your former aide for a conference, some unfinished business?”
“I can’t do that to him. Bren, I can’t.”
“I didn’t say we were going to make a move.”
“I don’t know what it could entail with things as they are. And you aren’t in command of this mission, Bren-nadi. Ilisidi is. Am I mistaken?”
“No. You’re not mistaken.”
“And if her staff finds out what you suspect, you can’t tell me what she’d stick at.”
True. He drifted back against the counter, took a solid grip. Air currents had taken Jase away from a hand grip and Jase reached and drew himself back before he lost easy contact.
“I’m not going to give this up,” Bren said.
“I can try to talk to Jen—”
“Names,” Bren cautioned him, and Jase cut it off.
“I can try to talk, myself, nadi.”
“We have how long, reasonably, until the ship breaks dock?”
“Six hours at minimum. Not above twelve.”
“I want the tape, Jase-paidhi.” At a certain point in emergencies, all common sense seemed to cut out and priorities became very cold, very remote from the consequences of failure: downhill, breakneck. “I can’t claim to have created the aishidi’tat, but I created the situation, the whole structure of twigs that supports it. So I know the alternatives. I know what we had before, and I know that there can be worse outcomes than a breach with this mission. I can imagine those very well: betraying the dowager, alienating the aiji—us finding out that our allies came here to get control of our resources.”
“No.”
“Maybe a war that devastated the mainland would suit certain purposes just very well.”
“That’s not so, nadi!”
“Prove it isn’t. Prove to me your ship didn’t come here with exactly that purpose—to find out the conditions in this solar system, to fuel the ship, and go home to report, preparatory to a power grab. We have only your word that the situation you reported out there even exists. We’re betting the whole planet on details we don’t know. You’ve insisted all along nobody on the ship knows better. But now that Landa-ji, out of her private hell of the last few years, points out the obvious, that there would have been a tape record in archive, well, yes, I’d rather like to see it before I step off the edge.”
“What do you think? That the whole crew is in on a conspiracy?”
“No, I’m suggesting they’re the last to know. Either get me the tape, or say you can’t, or don’t want to know, and we’ll do it, but don’t ask me to assume everything’s all right.”
Jase’s eyes made an eloquent shift toward the door, the windowed wall. “I take for granted Banichi’s heard what we’ve said.”
“I’m sure.”
“Has Cenedi?”
It was a question. Jago’s face gave no hint at all.
“You may answer, Jago-ji,” Bren said.
“Yes to both. We are within the dowager’s household, of allied man’chi, nadiin-ji.”
“Then this is my answer. You’re within my household,” Jase said in a brittle voice, “under my roof, as my honored guests… and so is the dowager. I don’t think if it were Geigi’s house we would contemplate breaking the historic porcelains because we had a suspicion.”
“Not in the least. Nor do we here.”
“Or endangering lives.”
“Nor shall we.”
“I wasn’t aware of movements I should have known, because I was submerged in my own efforts at a very dangerous time—trying to memorize everything I could, as hard as I could, as fast as I could, after years of saying I wouldn’t. And that’s my fault.”
“We’re not speaking of fault, here, Jase.”
“For the record, it’s my fault. I know a mistake when I see it. But I won’t compound that fault by turning one of my own over to you for an open-ended set of questions, or failing to take command of operations in my household, Bren-paidhi. Let’s have that clear.”
“You’re saying you’ll help us.”
“I’m saying if this file exists, I want it, myself. I assume Sabin can get it, but I don’t know that. I assume she knows it’s out there. If she knows and hasn’t told me, or if she doesn’t know and I find out something she needs to know, I’ll decide then what to do with the information. No. I won’t help you. You’ll help me, and I’ll share information with your side.”
Jase had his moments. On the planet—he’d had a lot of them, once he’d gotten his land-legs and understood the situation; but they hadn’t seen Jase at full stretch since he came aboard and under ship’s authority.
And he had no trouble accepting Jase on a slightly opposed side of the issue.
“I’ll put that proposition to the dowager,” Bren said. “But she’ll know. What’s your advice? Do we let you go out of here, when we suspect a remote possibility that security’s been recording us, and that with half an hour’s concentrated work on the part of people your ship could have been training for a decade—assuming they’re about as fluent as the run of the University—they might translate enough to know what you’re up to?”
“Letting me leave is a real good idea, Bren. As to asking me to stay and talk to the dowager—I assume you’re going to offer—I’ve got a meeting I’m supposed to be back to, up there, that’s going to ring alarms if I’m not back. Sabin’s already suspicious.”
“Why are you afraid of her?”
Jase looked at him as if he’d lost his mind.
“No,” Bren said. “I’m dead serious. Why are you afraid of her, under the rules that are supposed to apply?”
Now Jase heard him. Thoughts raced.
“Where can you access the log?” Bren asked. “Jase-ji.”
“It’s only two places. It’s a read-write on the bridge and it’s a read-only in the nav office. It receives and logs automatically from the sensors and the cameras, on a loop—automatically stores alarms and alerts, queries the officer store or no-store on the outside camera input on an interval the officer sets.” Jase’s eyes had a slightly glazed look. “I’ve been memorizing this stuff.”
“It’s not wasted. So Ramirez-aiji had to order a store on that camera info.”
“It’s possible he erased it. Possible.”
“In his situation, at the time, considering there could be something to prove to colleages or successors to the situation— would you?”
“I’d keep it. I’d definitely keep it. But there’s one other source. There’s the men that saw it. Let me talk to Jenrette, under the guise of an apology—he has one coming—and see what he knows.”
“Let you give me a call every hour on the hour to tell me you aren’t languishing under arrest. Or better yet—suppose you take me on a tour of the operational areas and we both get hold of him.”
“You want to know what I’m afraid of,” Jase said. “She can do it. She can order security and I can’t—she’s the only legitimate authority, legitimate in that she knows what she’s doing. And I can’t replace her. Ogun can’t replace her. If she says jump, people jump.”
“One may have an answer, nandiin-ji.”
Not Jago’s voice. Banichi’s, from the doorway.
And not just Banichi—Cenedi. And the aiji-dowager, drifting slightly sideways and attached by her cane to the ubiquitous ladders.
“We will see this ship-aiji at our table,” Ilisidi said.
“Aiji-ma, I don’t think she’ll regard an invitation.”
“At our table!” Ilisidi said.
“In these conditions?”
“The crew is boarding, is it not?” Cenedi asked. “And will gravity not exist once they turn the engines on?”
“In essence, Cenedi-ji,” Jase said. “But at that point the ship will undock, which will necessitate securing all personnel to safety positions, where movement about the ship will be impossible.”
“And then, ship-aiji?” Ilisidi asked sharply. “And then? Do we shoot off like a rocket? Or glide away like a yacht? And are we not expected to eat and sleep, or do we starve and languish for the duration of this voyage?”
“Rather well like a yacht, aiji-ma, if things go well, as they ought, but for safety’s sake, one shouldn’t be about, or setting tables.”
“And when will there be supper?” Ilisidi asked.
“The schedule, aiji-ma,” Jase said on a deep breath, “calls for crew to board and settle into quarters, then check equipment and turn on the engines, as you say. And then for about an hour, a little less, as we release we will be like the shuttle during station undocking—possible for us to move about, but strongly discouraged, for the same safety concerns. By the end of that period we will have set our bow toward our destination, aiji-ma, and then there will be two hours in which it will not be safe to move about. That will cease, crew will move about and assure that everything is working as it should, and persons in charge of navigation will be taking finer measurements and assuring that we are on course. There will be another two hours during which we must be secure in our places, and then it will be possible to move about again, for about six hours—by then we will be quite far out from the station.”
“Pish. Infelicitous two, two, and untrustworthy six, chancy ten. Clearly we are not at that point beyond return.”
“No, aiji-ma.”
“And one might demand to be taken back to the safety of the station.”
“Aiji-ma, if one has any doubts—” Jase was clearly appalled., “It’s no small thing to turn this ship around.”
“If we say this ship must turn around, it must.”
“It’s possible… theoretically possible. But I’m not sure Sabin would agree to it.”
Ilisidi waggled thin, elegant fingers. “This is a major point, is it not, Bren-ji, whether we can deal with Sabin-aiji, and whether reasonable requests will be heard. We have no desire to travel with unreliable persons. We will see this ship-aiji. We will estimate the reliability and good will of this person and invite her to our table. Or this agreement is abrogated. Do we agree, paidhiin-ji?”
Dared one say no? Dared one ever say no? And what was this agreement is abrogated?
What agreement? Bren wanted to ask.
“We shall see her in person,” Ilisidi declared. “Now.”
“Aiji-ma, crew will be boarding,” Jase said. “Sabin will be busy.”
“Busy?” Ilisidi snapped, and a whack of the cane at the ladders sent echoes through nerve and bone. “We will see her, I say. If she is busy, as you say, we shall do her the honor of visiting her. This very moment!”
“Bren,” Jase said, turning an appalled appeal in his direction.
“The dowager will see the captain,” Bren said in ship-speak.
“And if she gets up there and Sabin won’t see her—”
Where had the whole situation mutated so thoroughly— from missing records to a confrontation over precedences and authority? One thing was a given: that Ilisidi didn’t take well to no, in any language.
“We’re diplomats, aren’t we?” Bren said, with great misgivings. Jase might be a dozen things, but he was one of a few paidhiin that had ever existed, and some things there wasn’t any resigning. Ever. “That part’s our job.”
The lift had room enough, Banichi having to bend his head a little; but there they were: Ilisidi, Cenedi and three of his men, with Banichi and Jago—and attendant hardware—two humans and seven atevi, fortunate nine, in fleeting contact with the floor of the lift.
Bren hadn’t even been to his cabin yet. He hadn’t changed his coat. He’d passed a message to Narani to advise him of a supper invitation, for his household’s sake.
The lift stopped: instantly, they floated. So did stomachs. But the door opened smoothly, with a hiss of hydraulic seals. Jase had passed a message to his staff, too; and Kaplan, Polano and Pressman were right there to meet them, on what the lift buttons indicated as A deck, in a short corridor.
“Sir,” Kaplan said. “Ma’am. Mr. Cameron.” That was a damned rapid sort through the protocols: the eyes were near frantic, trying to take in this upheaval of natural order in the universe, but Kaplan asked no questions.
“Captain Sabin’s on the bridge?” Jase asked.
“I don’t know, sir. The bridge, her office, I don’t know.”
“Adjacent,” Jase said in a low voice, and drew a deep, audible breath. “Stay with me, Mr. Kaplan. The dowager’s asked to see the senior captain. —Aiji-ma, Bren-ji, kindly come and kindly don’t touch weapons.”
Kaplan, who didn’t understand the latter slightly pidgin statement, looked as if he wanted to do something or stop someone and didn’t know where to start. Polano and Pressman looked no happier as Jase shoved off his handhold and sailed down the null-g course to a wall-switch.
Bren followed Jase, desperately trusting atevi to stay with them—Banichi and Jago, and the dowager and her party. If anything went amiss up here, with armed atevi security, armed humans—
The switch opened the door. Bren expected another corridor, and offices: every other door led to the like.
This one opened on a wide technical zone: consoles, displays, flashing lights and readouts, and a number of busy technicians, some of whom looked their way in shock.
More did. Work stopped. Computers didn’t.
It was that area that Phoenix never opened to visitors—that area Phoenix had never permitted to be photographed, even if Mospheira and Shejidan both had plans of such a place: the configuration, they’d always said, the precise configuration was as secret and classified as the interior of Tabini’s apartments, the inside of the Presidential residence on Mospheira.
And here they were in the control center, heart of the computers, nexus for communications. The bridge itself was that open space just beyond the array of consoles that, in effect, ran everything above the planet’s surface.
They were in it now. Up to their necks.
And that was Captain Sabin in the brightly lighted bridge section, under a light that sheened her gray hair like a spotlight. Officers and technicians floated at fair random, this way and that, oriented to their work or their convenience. But Sabin, not the tallest, not even the fanciest-dressed—she was in a long-sleeved black tee—was unmistakeable.
“There is the ship-aiji,” Ilisidi said with satisfaction, pointing with the ferrule of her cane. “We’ll talk.”
With all the profound courtesy that implied, of who had come to whom.
And Sabin had seen them.
“No weapons!” Bren said immediately, and repeated it in ship-speak, loud and clear, with the gut-deep fright of a slip on ice. “The aiji-dowager has honored the ship’s captains by coming to them, in their residence, and comes here in courteous deference to rulers in their own domain. This is a high honor paid the ship’s command on this auspicious occasion.”
Sabin’s pitch, now. Please God, Bren thought. He’d cued her. Let Sabin once in her life moderate her response.
There was a four-beat silence. Everything froze.
Then Sabin lashed out with a booted foot and sailed toward them like a missile: techs hugged panels and got out of the way as Sabin flew from bright light to dim, from command to operations—and stopped, suddenly, with a reach to a handhold: a crisp, expert halt and a strength astonishing in a thin-limbed old woman.
“This is the bridge,” Sabin said. “This is restricted.” From Sabin that was utmost restraint. “Captain Graham.” That was utmost restraint, too. Say one thing for Sabin: she didn’t light into a brother captain in front of crew. But the anger was palpable. “I’m not going to speak to Mr. Cameron. I can’t speak to the dowager. Kindly straighten this out.”
“You’re not speaking to me,” Bren said and shot right ahead: “Through me, you’re speaking to the dowager, captain. She’s delighted to be aboard and pays you the signal honor of coming to you in your premises rather than requiring you to come to her in audience… therefore she came to present her compliments, making you a head of state, captain, and a very favored person.”
Sabin’s eyes were hard and black, still in attack mode, not a bit dissuaded. But she didn’t call security to shoot the lot of them. “That’s all well and good, sir, but I’ll call on your good offices to be damned sure this doesn’t happen again. Now if you’ll get the woman out of here, we have work to do.”
“Captain.” Jase was going to try.
It wasn’t a good idea, in Bren’s experience. He drew a breath and kept going across the ice floes. “The dowager’s come here to pay respects. There’s a reciprocation expected.”
“The hell!” Sabin kept going, but Bren rode right over the top of the outburst.
“You want your supplies, captain—I assume you want your supplies—perhaps we’d better continue this discussion in your office.”
“Here’s good enough.” But Sabin had lowered her voice, and applied her version of conciliation. “I’m damned busy, Mr. Cameron. Get her the hell out.”
“She does understand some Mosphei’, captain. Please use restraint.”
“I am using restraint. I want her off this deck. I want you and her and these people down on deck five and I don’t want to hear from you again until we’re at our destination, at which time I’ll tell you where we are and I don’t want to hear from you after that until we’re back in port at this star. Is that clear?”
“Let me convey for the dowager that she may demand to leave this ship, and if she leaves this ship the diplomatic fallout will be extremely disadvantageous to everything we’ve spent the last number of years building—which I assure you won’t help this ship.”
“Don’t threaten me.”
“Far from it. The dowager’s come here to invite you to supper this evening.”
The look on Sabin’s face was astonishing. An expression. A moment of utter, unguarded shock.
“Economical to accept,” Bren said rapidly, before Sabin formulated a reply. “Establishing a cordial tone aboard, bringing the very expert services of her security harmoniously into your service, and the services of the paidhiin, to boot. We’re good, captain. You are hearing me, and I don’t think that was your original intention. We’ll be very pleased to apply our talents to your opposition if you’ll oblige the dowager, win her good will, and make our jobs easier. Besides, she sets a very good table.”
Three expressions from Sabin in rapid succession: shock, outrage, and targeting calculation.
“You’re the damned cheekiest bastard I’ve met in a lifetime.”
“Yes, ma’am, and you’re no pushover, on the other side. If our interests really did diverge, I’d be worried, but I happen to know our best interests and your interests are the same. Besides, you deserve a good dinner, and it won’t be wasted time. You’ll score a relationship that’ll make a big difference out there… that will outright assure you come back here to a working station with resources.”
“Is that a threat, Mr. Cameron?”
“No, captain, it’s a pretty good forecast. If this relationship goes bad, everything goes bad; if it goes brilliantly, everything becomes easier. Let me add my personal plea to the case: accept the invitation and you’ll have my assurances I’ll do everything possible to persuade her of your points. I can’t stress enough how great an honor the dowager’s done you by coming here: she’s put her dignity on the line so as to make clear how greatly she respects your authority. Now it’s very useful for your side to respect and accept her hospitality.”
“Damned cheeky bastard, Mr. Cameron.”
“Which I trust refers solely to me, captain, and I hope signals your gracious acceptance.”
“There’s nothing gracious about it.”
“The traditional supper hour, for these affairs. Full dress. She’ll spare no effort to honor her guest.”
“How long am I expected to be honored? I’ve got a ship in the process of boarding.”
“About three hours.”
“Flaming hell.”
“You’ll find it worth your while. Eighteen hundred hours, senior captain. She’ll very much understand if you don’t reciprocate with a dinner of your own, given the pressure of events; but she’ll be pleased to entertain you to the utmost.” He switched to Ragi. “The captain, though pressed for time, is inclining to accept, aiji-ma, understanding the great honor you give her.”
Ilisidi inclined her head benignly. “Very good, paidhi-ji. At the fortunate hour.”
“She’s very pleased,” Bren said, regardless of Sabin’s not-quite-expressed consent. “She honors your good will. Understand, as a great lord proceeds about necessary courtesies even under fire, proving one isn’t at all harried. She views you very favorably.”
“Damned nonsense.” From Sabin it was a moderate response.
“My personal gratitude,” Bren said. “Eighteen hundred hours, at our section: staff will meet you there. The aiji-dowager’s good will and good wishes in fortunate number, ma’am.”
He turned. He managed to include Jase in the sweep of his arm toward the exit, but Jase declined the refuge and drifted there slightly askew from them.
One trusted at least there wouldn’t be bloodshed on the bridge. Sabin might have plenty yet to vent, but if appearances were an indication, Sabin was in control, and if she was thinking, she wouldn’t let fly until the two of them were in an office with the door shut.
Under those circumstances he trusted Jase could hold his own and keep his head.
“Mr. Kaplan,” Jase said calmly, “see them below.”
“Yes, sir.” Kaplan opened the door which had self-shut.
“And where is Jase-paidhi?” Ilisidi demanded.
“Preparing to account to Sabin-aiji for bringing us here, aiji-ma,” Bren said, “which I trust he can do.”
“He will suffer no detriment!” Ilisidi said, and turned and addressed Jase. “Assure us this is the case!”
“Aiji-ma, without a doubt.”
“Well!” Ilisidi said, and by now the door had shut itself again. Kaplan scrambled to open it, and they left under Kaplan’s guidance.
It wasn’t that easy, and Sabin would have words of her own, but Ilisidi expected her below, and Sabin had accepted that.
Amazing, Bren thought. Astonishing.
He could imagine several scenarios to follow, in several of which Sabin decided not to come after all, and precipitated an atevi war. Jase, if he could make the point, would faithfully inform her there wasn’t any change of plans possible, not at this point—not without the attendant war, at least.
He’d been steady enough during the exchange. Now, in the stomach-wrenching reverse of the lift action, he found his knees weak. If there’d been a floor to stand on, he thought he’d have felt them going. As it was, he simply tried not to twitch against his escort, and not to shiver as Jago cushioned their arrival on deck five. That brought a little moment of contact with the deck, and if not for Jago, he thought he would have stumbled, if nothing else, from the welter of confusing directions.
Not the dowager. The lift door opened and she emerged with Cenedi, perfectly in command.
“We shall see you at supper,” she said, “paidhi-ji.”
“Honored, nand’ dowager.”
What else was there to say? He didn’t plan to eat. His mind was off into a dozen more scenarios, frantic in its application. War or peace was a hell of a dessert choice, and somehow in his management of affairs, his nudges this way and that, his quest after a piece of tape had ended up in a confrontation between aijiin.
Well to have it now, if it was going to happen, while they were still at dock and had options. The thought of Ilisidi pent up in a ship with a captain whose murder she fondly wished—a captain who was the only captain capable of running the ship’s operations—was unthinkable.
God, he wanted to stay on the ground. He wanted to go back down to the planet and go back to his estate with his staff and wait there for it all to be over… but that wasn’t a choice he’d given himself.
He had to get the authorities through this set of formalities, and he had to ask himself if Ilisidi thought she was going to ask for the ship’s log or if his search for the records had become a complete side-channel to the dowager’s intentions of running matters wherever she was. Certainly no one had informed Sabin she was second to the aiji-dowager on her own deck.
If anyone did have to convey that information, he knew all too well who the translator had to be.
They arrived into a scene of managed chaos, the midst of null-g preparations for the invitation… preparation which their constant communications net had already set into motion.
Bundles were everywhere in the paidhi’s quarters, soft bundles, in general, which floated where they were not jammed tightly in, bundles that should give forth their contents and then fold down inconspicuously and with little mass.
Bundles were lodged up near the ceiling and a few were tucked into the narrow passage between bed and bath, rather like the egg-cases of an infestation of insects; and the bed itself—fortunately extendable—had a transparent half lid of sorts, which had not come down, and behind which a few smaller parcels were tucked as if for ready reference. Bundles were secured in the bath, bundles were stored in the shower stall, besides one that seemed to have exploded, strewing far more wardrobe into the zero-g of the premises than it could reasonably have contained.
Amid it all, Banichi and Jago had cases of electronics yet to set up, two of which they immediately emptied, donating them to Narani’s urgent demand for a flat surface. They were still searching for the pressing-iron, and exactly how they proposed to use that in null-g remained to be seen.
“Press cloth in these circumstances, Rani-ji?” Bren objected. “The second-best shirt will do. I’m sure it will do.”
“Paidhi-ma,” Narani objected, “I beg you allow us to try. For our pride’s sake, nandi. The coat has gotten rumpled, among other calamities. And the captains are invited.”
Staff continued their unpacking, cursing the insistence of ship security on inspecting certain of the items in an entirely unacceptable fashion, and at the last moment, of stowing the contents of the baggage cart in a haphazard hurry. Things had gone askew from plan, and it wasn’t in any way the atevi-ordered arrangement of rooms that let the staff do their duty in an orderly way. The staff was entirely distressed.
Meanwhile there was the scale of things. Banichi and Jago had quarters adjacent to his, and communicating by a door between as well as their own corridor access. A suite of rooms, the charts called the arrangement, each with clear floor about four strides long and two strides wide, which turned out to be, when occupied by atevi, human strides, if they were able to stride at the moment—and entirely too small. Niggling minor problem—storage for atevi-scale clothing was impossible in the tiny lockers provided for the original colonists. Greater problem: low human-scale ceilings made it very scant clearance for tall atevi such as Banichi even to stand up, once they were standing, and made a room in which four or five atevi were drifting askew a very small-seeming room indeed.
Those were situations for which they had been moderately prepared—at least in planning, before they tried to maneuver past one another. The closet and the food-storage closets were both what the ship called suites, and those were full, at the moment, Bren was told, of floating bags. The unpacked clothing would ultimately fit on lines to contain and order the wardrobes, once there was gravity, which now there was not. The unpacked security equipment had clamps and braces which did not mate to the room, rather to more gear that itself had to be fixed in place under these conditions, and which had to stay in place once there was gravity.
More, the galley stores and the security equipment included heavy items, and in the grand scale of things, even the dowager’s invitation took second place to the need to get the heavy equipment and bundles sorted to the bottom and secured before undocking—before the simulated gravity sent the heavy things crashing down on the light ones. And on that score, there had been argument. Crew had advised them in a written communique not to take things into quarters, to leave them in cargo until after undock, and he had said no, they would take them in nevertheless. So doubtless crew who had shoved things into the cabins were quite smug about it all. So a jaundiced suspicion could guess.
And here they were, everything in their own control, if one could call it control—with a formal dinner unexpectedly at hand and baggage everywhere.
His luggage, however, was bulk rather than mass, and at least posed few breakage hazards.
“Just pad the equipment with my bags,” he told Banichi and Jago, when there was question of bringing Tano and Algini board for a few hours to do the installation while they pursued lisidi’s notion of formal entertainment. “We aren’t going to be able to get this installed before we move. My shirts won’t break. And we shouldn’t pull Tano and Algini off internal security. I truly don’t like that notion, Banichi.”
“One can try to secure things,” Banichi said. “Or we can draw personnel from Cenedi, perhaps before launch.”
“I’m sure I have enough clothes. I’m sure I have far too many clothes. Do it, Banichi.”
Meanwhile the domestic staff, which had expected a decent interval to do its necessary arranging, now searched to find, among other necessities of life, old-fashioned vegetable starch, which they intended to boil—one asked—in a sealed bag in the microwave… which also had to be unpacked and secured. One did not want to imagine the zero-g consequences of a burst bag of starch.
They had, however, located the pressing-iron—which fortunately was electric, not a flatiron as the old arrangement had been.
Plugging it in, however, required a unit and a small, unreasonably mislaid adapter to mediate between its three-pronged plug and the ship’s power clips. That was well enough: they needed the adapters for the microwave, too.
The staff oh so rarely missed a social forecast. Narani had so carefully had his less formal second-best pressed, protected, and ready for what had, to Narani, seemed likely: an informal dinner with the dowager.
They had certainly been sandbagged. Caught out, half-prepared—excusable, under the pressure of their sudden departure; but now there was no margin.
“I could surely make do with the casual coat, Rani-ji,” Bren reiterated, foreknowing the futility of that protest; and, no, no, even yet, absolutely not. Narani would perish of shame if he sent the paidhi-aiji to a state dinner in his second-best coat and trousers, and he would not admit defeat, yet, no matter the lack of adapters.
Not to mention that Banichi and Jago had to have their formal uniforms and everything of their individual spit and polish, and the equipment that went with them. That necessity had Asicho in a dither, because those hadn’t been readied, either.
There was at least time to bathe, once Asicho shifted the baggage out of the paidhi’s shower, and Bren simply turned over the clothes he was wearing, trusting no crew would be floating by in the common hall, and took refuge in the anemic fog-shower, which at least was unaffected by lack of gravity.
It was fifteen minutes of comparative peace until the shower beeped a warning, sucked up the moisture and turned itself off.
Asicho waited with a soft, sweet-smelling bathrobe, zero-g and all.
Meanwhile the adapters had turned up, and staff, having microwaved their starch to slimy perfection, prepared his shirt for ironing.
There was something remarkably tranquil about the aroma of fresh ironing. And Banichi and Jago reported one emergency solved and their quarters secured: they had unmade their beds, corralled the fragiles in small bundles of bedding and secured them under the lowered transparent bed-lids.
Bren settled to dry his hair and check last-moment messages.
Of mail, there was none but a parting well-wish from Lord Geigi, which he answered fondly, and with kind thoughts for the one atevi in all the world who probably wanted most to be here:
I shall attempt to secure pictures to show you…
Then, in that momentary pause, somber and thinking of very far places indeed, he composed a letter to his mother, hoping Barb would read it to her.
Aboard now, and thinking of you.
I wish I could be two people, one to do things a son and a brother ought to have done, especially in these last years that I haven’t been in reach.
I think of winter in the mountains, the cabin we used to use. I think of the seashore we visited. I think of the kitchen and sitting in the morning drinking tea, and I want all that to be there when I get back. I have to go, for the safety of all we work for—but I’m coming back, and I want you to bake that really spicy teacake, and I want a few mornings to spend just like that, sopping up tea and teacake and telling you everywhere I’ve been.
Then I want to take a good few days of the vacation I’ve got coming to fly you up to the mountains and see if that cabin’s still there. It’s the good memories that sustain me.
I need you. Take care of yourself. Give my love to Toby.
With all my heart, mum. Take care and be good.
Bren.
He nerved himself and sent, a button push that necessitated a reach after the retreating computer.
He trusted C1 and Mogari Nai at this point. He had to. He had to trust very many people for everything.
He left the computer fairly securely parked against the wall, near his bed, and concentrated on the hair-drying, Asicho being busy with Jago’s uniform, and Banichi’s.
His shirt when it arrived had lace so crisp it rattled, lace inserted through the coat-sleeves before he put his arms in, which was the secret by which the court achieved true extravagance of dress. Bindanda snugged up first the shirt and then the frothy, razor-edged collar while Narani supported the coat from behind and kept his hair out of the lace points.
Fashion, fashion, fashion: a little out of current, he knew, but a statement, nonetheless, a declaration, a respect for the dowager and her table.
He took a strange reassurance from the lace and the excess, like some ancient warrior of the archives putting on armor, some sense of atavistic participatory extravagance that declared a class, a club, a secret society to which the dowager and he belonged. Which was in a sense the truth. It meant that she would know him, she would read him accurately, and perhaps, if things went badly, listen to him much more reasonably than if he had arrived, as he had argued to do, in less than his absolute best. Narani was right. Narani’s instincts said find the damned starch and steam the silk coat to rights, for the sake of all of them.
He anchored himself by a handgrip to have his hair dressed: Asicho spread a silk scarf across the brocade coat shoulders, and her skilled, fine fingers rendered the braid with little tugs that tried to pull him loose from his mooring.
She accomplished the ribboning immaculately, he trusted, not taking time to find a mirror: white, for the paidhi’s professional neutrality in a minefield of heraldries, associations and rivalries.
After that, in that coat of silk both fine and thick as armor, he could drift slightly askew from the ceiling and floor, let his computer drift in front of him on voice-command, and gather his thoughts over his notes and charts of ship structure and space allotments. Not a pleasant contemplation, but he had before him an assembly of his accesses, his resources, in the not-inconceivable eventuality of the dowager creating a breach with Ogun and with Sabin.
And a hostile collapse of the entire political structure.
Hadn’t Tabini said from the beginning that he intended to rule the station, that he intended there be an atevi starship?
Would this one suit Tabini—to get a force aboard, outright take the ship for himself?
God, no. There was the boy. Would Tabini send his only child into an arena of conflict?
Damned right, if it set his enemies off their guard, he thought, not wanting to think it: yes, Tabini would, and he would do it without many second thoughts, expecting success and the boy’s survival, because Tabini expected extravagant things of the extraordinary people he gathered from all across the world. Tabini routinely sent his grandmother into situations like that—granted his grandmother was the greatest threat available.
It was possible.
Not advisable, not what he wanted to think about—but possible.
“If we need to get out of here in a hurry,” he said to Jago as she drifted by, “do you have account of the route?”
“Always, Bren-ji,” was Jago’s answer. She anchored herself by a hand against the ceiling, a very easy reach. “Shall we plan?”
“Possible,” he said. “Remotely possible. I’ll do all I can to assure it doesn’t happen.”
“Yes,” Jago said fervently.
“You’re in touch with Cenedi?”
“Constantly,” Jago said. His staff, ordinarily entirely independent, had attached themselves and him to the dowager’s— convenient, until it came to him doing anything independent, or establishing his own priorities. Like preventing a war. Or theft of a starship.
Which, God, he wasn’t sure he wanted to prevent. How could they run it, without Sabin?
“I have every confidence in Cenedi,” he said to her. “But I have utmost confidence in you and Banichi, nadi. Utmost. You are not to accept a rear guard position, or to desert me at any time.”
He conflicted man’chiin in that statement, and knew it. Theirs flowed up to Tabini himself, and by small detours, to him in the main, and to the dowager as Tabini’s representative: there was no time at which that man’chi to Tabini wavered.
“I know this place, these humans, and these circumstances,” he said, revealing his logic in the statement. “And the dowager ought to take my advice, but, infelicitous pair: may not. I fear a move to take the ship itself. And I will not lose from the household the two of your Guild I most trust to know and understand and defend the interests of the house, all to save some other man of the dowager’s household. I will not, Jago-ji. If any such infelicitous thing should come about, I most assuredly will need my most experienced staff around me.”
That at least occasioned Jago a moment’s consideration… possibly because the paidhi was an utter, forgetful fool and the communications she wore was live and directed to Cenedi’s staff; but it was late to moderate that statement, impossible to call it back, and, on a third thought, if it penetrated Cenedi’s consciousness of a dangerous situation, good.
He touched his own coat, in the same position in which his bodyguard wore their electronics. It was a question.
Jago touched the same spot. “It isn’t,” she said. “We don’t communicate with their staff, when we’re inside. Paidhi-ji, we would tell you.”
That was a relief. And in itself, that statement told him where man’chi lay.
“I will protect the dowager,” he said, to ease their uneasiness, “but will not sacrifice myself or my guard or my staff that I have trained up here for very important work. I feel no call to do that. And if they were to attempt to take the ship—I don’t know what we would do with it, nadi-ji.”
“We completely agree, paidhi-ji.”
This was not Jago off-duty, who slept with him. No, this was Jago in official relationship, and for atevi officers, instinct-driven to take such orders from the highest in the household, it was a profound, a revolutionary statement, with implications for the rest of the voyage—if they had a voyage.
“I’m sorry to have placed you in such a position. But in my estimation, we have no choice but to maintain my independent judgment.”
“The aiji gave you very great authority. I speak for Banichi as well,” Jago said. “And our man’chi flows through you to the aiji, nandi; it takes no detours. I think I speak for the staff, except Bindanda. And his is more aligned with us than otherwise.”
Revolution, indeed.
A paper lordship.
Or was it? His staff had read it. And they took it seriously.
A lord in his own province—and his was the heavens themselves—could say no to very high-rank.
He was astonished. Appalled. “Jago-ji, keep me from foolishness. Say so to Banichi, Jago-ji.”
“Oh, he knows,” Jago said. “But I will tell him, nandi.”
She went on her way. He folded up his computer, finding his lands trembling.
Absolute novice’s mistake, that with the possibility of interconnected communications, and he’d made it. But gut-level, too, he’d relied on his staff, and wasn’t disappointed.
Lord of the heavens?
A rival to Ilisidi?
From a carefully insulated center of his brain that might be mostly atevi, or mostly human—he honestly didn’t know what he thought.
He’d been blindsided. He’d made one mistake. From now on he had to be flawless.
He had to think, was what Tabini expected of him. To keep the tempers on this ship in check he had to be neither-side and both-sides for at least this evening, examining everything, taking nothing for granted.
He didn’t need a computer for that preparation. The tools he needed were inside himself: calm, and ice-cold, experienced analysis of motives.
Those things, and complete, professional objectivity in his view of participants.
There was a hard one. He didn’t like Sabin.
And how was he going to keep everything restrained and reasonable at that table?
He stowed his computer inside a locker where he knew it would be safe when down became down again. He had no intention of having a literal crash.
Tabini hadn’t set him up on this mission with Ilisidi without the cachet to go with it. His staff answered the situation, and made him put on this coat and take up the authority.
So that was what Jago and Narani and his whole staff had been saying when they scoured up starch and an iron? When only the best would do for Bren-paidhi?
He was a reasonably smart mender-of-the-interface. It had only taken him a half an hour to figure it out.
Near time to go down the hall and do his job.
Near time for them to go down there and try to prevent the calamity that thus far was headed for them.
His escort appeared in the door, Banichi and Jago in their court finery, shining silver and polished black leather. Their Guild remained efficient, while the lords rendered themselves incredibly baroque.
“A moment, nadiin-ji,” Bren said, settling on one preliminary item. He was near a communications unit, in major points like the one he’d had on station, and he punched in the same authority he’d always contacted for people behind the ship-folk’s communications firewall. “C1?”
“This is C1. Is this Mr. Cameron, on five?”
“It is.” Clearly C1 had some indication where the call originated. “Contact Captain Graham. He has an appointment. Tell him call me regarding that.”
There was a pause. It would be complete calamity, if Sabin decided at the last moment not to show, and to keep Jase incommunicado. More, if he was serving as diplomatic safety net, he had to avoid mistakes and missed appointments, and his heartbeat began a slow climb to panic as the silence on the other end stretched out longer than an ordinary transfer of communications.
“Captain Graham is en route,” C1 reported, “and says he’ll see you in 5 B.”
That was their sector. Thank God.
“Thank you, C1.” He broke the connection and drifted gently toward his security.
So things were on track, Sabin hadn’t thrown Jase in the brig yet, and the situation at least wouldn’t blow up before they even got started.