Precursor (24 page)

The servant staff meanwhile was gathering up belongings, to rearrange their living space after hardly more than a couple of hours aboard the station.

Banichi and Jago, Tano and Algini, were in a close four-way conversation in which the communication panel figured. On the one hand, he was too preoccupied to inquire and yet thought he should find out.

And he had to tell them, too, what he knew of station structure. “This communication center will be much the same in various apartments,” he said to them, “linked to the central control systems of the station. The ship will be linked into that system, with all its equipment. There might be bugs of all sorts, more sensitive and harder to find than anything that Mospheira’s ever heard of, Nadiin, or anything we might have given the aiji. We don’t know what these people have developed in two hundred years, with all they’ve been through.”

“We ourselves have nothing to conceal,” Banichi said, “nandi, and trust our associate will not translate for them.”

“No,” he said: Banichi didn’t use Jase’s name, and for the same reason, he didn’t, himself. “Because they’re humans, Nadiin, it’s very easy for me to assume I do understand them. I resonate to certain things in this culture the way metal resonates to the right pitch… but Jase and I speak different languages with the same words. One’s own ancestral culture is not the easiest thing to ignore; not always the easiest to identify, either, or to tell from instinct.”

“So one understands,” said Banichi, who owed man’chi to a human.

“So one understands,” Bren said somberly. He looked at the servants as he spoke. “We doubt the ship-folk’s security has become fluent in Ragi. They’ve had three years to do it, but use either the most courtly or the most vulgar language. I forgive you any impropriety. We doubt they’ll acquire the skills to deal with either extreme, no matter what they find in a dictionary. I intend to annoy the aijiin of the Guild; too much comradeship will let them make dangerous assumptions, and I have no wish to repeat the mistakes of the Landing. Let them detest me, nadiin, let them think me entirely unreasonable, so long as they assume nothing and presume nothing. That may not make matters entirely comfortable from moment to moment.”

“Shall we fear for our lives?” Bindanda asked.

He at first thought,
Ridiculous
, then had to take a heartbeat to be honest with what was at stake. “Recall there’s no air beyond the outer wall, and that delicate machinery maintains air and light and heat within. They fear mistakes, and fear them justifiably. Every door will be too low for you, every seat too small; security will take
alarm
at your height and your manners, which are contrary to their own. Bow often. If a human looks at you with hostile appearance, smile, however you may think it rude, or however you may find it difficult. Smile even to persons of high rank. Smile at me, as well, even in public. Remind yourselves to do it. Even if their intentions are the worst, we have a mission here, in the aiji’s man’chi. I rely on you all for my life.”

“Nandi.” Narani bowed deeply.

“Smile doing so, Rani-ji.” He did so himself, instantly, and provoked anxious laughter from the staff. “Even you, Banichi-ji.”

Banichi turned from his examination of the television, gave him a dour look, a dire smile, and all the staff laughed, including Jago, including Tano and even Algini.

“So,” Bren said with a small ironic expression, “we await the baggage, we await the betterment of our quarters, and we prepare to deal with whatever comes. Nadiin-ji. My machine, please.”

Jago gave him his computer, and with it he settled in the smaller of the chairs and set to work finding files. Yes, the ship records
were
available. And Jase’s notes, on particulars of every member of the Pilots’ Guild, every acquaintance he had, every officer, every piece of history.

Trust that information?

Yes. He did. He discovered even his scruples were useful to Tabini, that his human nerves remained sensitive to human concepts of betrayal… that served the aiji. The penalty was a live and touchy conscience about what he did, but intellectually, yes, he knew Jason had hedged the truth and then, in later years, amended it, quietly, just changing a detail or two.

Now he did believe the record, as he believed Jason. His file regarded more than a hundred of the crew.

Senior Captain Ramirez was seventy-one as the ship counted time.

Senior captain, a son, a daughter, both privileged into command training: command within the Guild had descended down very narrow lines, all but hereditary unless the offspring failed the academic tests.

A wife of fifty-some years, deceased. Marriage on Mospheira was often transitory, sometimes lacking entirely. Marriage on
Phoenix
was lasting, rank-linked, alliances of power that just didn’t break, not without dire consequences.

He’d asked Jase whether to believe Ramirez. Jase had written:
Ramirez picked me and Yolanda to
go
down. In a sense, if I have a father… he is. He signed the papers, at least, that drew the samples out of storage. He wanted us born because it was a new age. He didn’t expect what happened
.

Jase had written it in Ragi. They’d been talking late that evening, in the sitting room in the Atageini apartment, inhaling a wind laden with
djossi
flowers.

He still could all but smell the flowers and the fire when he thought of that conversation… when Jase had repeated in Ragi, “We have no man’chi, except to the ship. And our mothers. We have ordinary mothers. But Ramirez sent me. He’s looked out for me all my life. Encouraged what I studied. I suppose that’s having a father.”

“I couldn’t tell you, either,” he’d said to Jase.

No man’chi, except to the ship.

Jase had pursued the old knowledge for its own sake, because Stani Ramirez had had the notion of returning to the world they’d left behind to set up a trade route, a stellar empire. Things had gone monstrously wrong, then, within Jase’s lifetime.

Jase said… and they had cast everything on believing Jase… the Pilots’ Guild was here to set up a defense of the world. The station they’d left at that other star hadn’t stood a chance.

“I saw the pictures,” Jase had said, that night that Bren had found himself absolutely believing the alien threat. “Only a few of us actually went aboard the station. There was a meeting then, when we’d pulled away. Some of the crew said we ought to try to find the aliens and settle accounts; some said we should just run elsewhere and not risk an enemy tracking us home. But there were all the records on the station. There were the charts. Some thought the station crew might have destroyed them; but most thought they didn’t have the chance. We voted to come here, hoping they’ll wait to digest what they took.”

In due time there came a great deal of thumping and bumping in the hall.

“Shall one investigate?” Jago asked.

“Let them proceed in their own way,” Bren said, much as his security chafed to be of use, and to know what was going on. Moving out, he thought,
probably crew quite, quite annoyed with the guests from the planet
.

The thumping went on.

Banichi settled to reading, Jago, Tano, and Algini played a game of chance. The servants were similarly engaged, casting dice, darting glances at the door.

In time the light by the door flashed once, twice, and the door opened.

A man in uniform said, “Mr. Cameron?” as if he couldn’t tell which was which. “The area is yours.”

“Thank you,” Bren said, keying a total shutdown.

He rose, walked unhurriedly into the corridor, and surveyed
^a
pile of baggage, three more humans, two with sidearms, and a space of corridor which he gathered had just become an atevi residence. “Very fine, I’m sure. We appreciate your work, Nadiin.”

“Captain’s orders,” the man remarked coldly, and walked off, stiff-backed.

Bren’s nerves twitched, cultural reaction bristled just slightly, but he’d triggered that; he’d done it consciously, and he didn’t answer, just stood and watched as the crew, likely the displaced personnel, stalked out.

Well,. well, well
, he thought, wary of creating lasting anger; or the assumption atevi could be insulted with impunity.

“Crewman!” he said sharply.

There was a fast look, a wary look.

“One regrets the inconvenience. Those dislodged will receive compensation, if they will make me aware of their names.”

“Johnson, sir.” The jaw was set. “Johnson, Andresson, Pressman, Polano.”

“Three names known on Mospheira,” he said, disobeying his own instructions to his staff, to smile. Possibly they were doing that. “One I don’t know. Interesting. We will import goods once cargo delivery begins; let us know what you think fair return. Jase Graham may recommend certain items.”

The stance was less hostile, though uneasy. The foremost crewman returned a sketch of a salute. “Yes, sir. Where do we turn that in, sir?”

“There will be a desk here. Tomorrow if you wish. It may take a while, but we have a long memory.”

“Yes, sir.” The man wavered into a move backward, and all four left, to talk, perhaps to officers, not unlikely to other lower-ranking crew. Likely bribery and compensation broke a good many rules.

The door shut.

Banichi arrived beside him. “Shall one inspect for bugs?” Banichi asked. “Or leave them?”

“Search. Let the staff unpack. One shouldn’t, however, remove their bugs… or destroy the communications panels. Yet.”

“Yes” Banichi said, satisfied.

The search they would make was technical, beyond his competency. He did trust Banichi wouldn’t short out the sta-tion’s power systems or ring a fire control alarm.

And there the cargo stood, a mountain of black canvas and white packing crates, the galley, kitchen supplies, Banichi’s own gear, clothing… weapons, if the Guild had kept its word and stayed out of their baggage. Their electronics surely weren’t as sophisticated as the equipment they passed through, but there was, to be sure, the quality of the persons using it. He thought of a shipful of technologically sophisticated spacefar-ers spying and eluding one another for centuries; and he couldn’t quite imagine how adroit competition could make them, whether worse, or better… but knowing the aiji’s court as he did, Bren rather bet on his own allies.

«
^
»

The servants would not possibly permit the paidhi to enter the apartment they had chosen for him until they had, of all improbable things, produced from the baggage and arranged three small scroll paintings by the doorway.

Farther, in the main corridor they spread out a mat with auspicious and harmonizing symbols, a unification of one in a hallway otherwise appallingly blank.

It all depended on numbers of items with which they had to deal, which they could not possibly have judged without seeing the place, and Bren had to wonder what other adornments they had brought that rested unused. Narani’s sense of felicitous design was undisputed. His ingenuity was extreme.

More—Bren had tried to ignore the racket, and not to ask— they had shifted furnishings, taken other chairs from tracks, traded between rooms, hung small, portable artworks, and set up a kitchen, all in four hard-working hours that by now had entered the mid of the night down in Shejidan.

“Nadi-ji,” Bren said to his major domo, standing in the central hall to view it, “you’ve worked a wonder.” He walked farther, considered the positioning of a desk in the center of the room they proposed for his, and how, within the outside corridor, and by tools and options they had likely found in security’s kit, they had removed and taped a small table to the corridor wall, managed a vase containing dried grasses with three small stones meticulously arranged, and a dish for message scrolls, should any miraculously appear.

Loose furniture might horrify station authorities. But he was vastly touched.

The chairs within his room numbered three, the bed had a piece of tapestry draped across it catty-angled, and he had to imagine how much better his staff felt.
He
felt the tightness and the devotion in their arrangement… in human terms, felt warmed and comforted in senses that had learned to count flowers and colors of flowers in a vase almost as naturally as atevi brains registered that kind of information. They had made it far warmer, far more welcoming, a brave atevi gesture in a world otherwise steel and plastic.

“Thank you, nand’ paidhi. At what hour will you have breakfast?”

Minds were more comfortable with understandable decor, and bodies were happier with things on schedule.

“Nadi-ji, a small breakfast, on schedule as Shejidan judges it, if you please. I may nap, but wake me.”

They were happy in the praise, and went off to perform their miracles in whatever they had arranged as the official kitchen, likely as well their own quarters, where the servants’ hall would develop its customary jokes and pranks and irreverence, free of the lord’s affairs.

“Much, much better,” Jago said. “But tiny doorways. Poor Sabiso.”

The lump on her head had not gone down.

“Even on Mospheira doors are taller,” Bren remarked, one of those small windows of information which once in his career had been restricted. “We must have compromised, when we built houses together, before the War. Beware of ladders and stairs, Nadiin. Either they saved materials and heating and cooling as best they could when they built this place, or this is actually the scale of the remote ancestors.”