Precursor (25 page)

“Never considering felicity,” Algini said quietly. “Does one think so? Perhaps we’ll adjust those numbers, nandi, and this time the station will be fortunate.”

As if the lack of flower vases explained all the calamities that had befallen this station and the other… not that any of the staff attached to Tabini’s court believed the numerology with the fervor of the religious.

“One might say,” Bren replied, “never considering harmony among the residents; and that is infelicitous in the extreme. Let’s hope we can set things in much better order, baji-naji.” Given the workings of chance, the devil in the design.

The message tray set outside was so hopeful, so gently expectant of proper behavior.

And considering that, he truly felt he had a base from which to work, a base from which any
other
delegation from the aiji could work.

He entered his room, sat down at the desk, and opened up his computer.

“The clock says rest,” Jago admonished him.

“One small task,” he said. He looked at his watch and performed a calculation. “It’s a number of hours until my meeting with the captain. The Mospheirans are surely first on the agenda. They don’t get to rest. And
they
have to eat the local food. Jasi-ji didn’t recommend it. I, on the other hand, look forward to a fine breakfast.”

“Nandi,” Jago said, amused, and withdrew.

There was no question of pursuing what they had pursued in the apartment in Shejidan, under Tabini’s roof. Some questions simply were not to be asked, and Jago reverted to grand formality, left, probably to have no more sleep herself. Banichi and Tano and Algini were doing setup within the room they had appropriated, however quietly. The security module, like the very carefully negotiated galley, was meticulously thought out, very portable, piecemeal. Crates and baggage had disappeared in the general transformation. His security was happy.

He ticked down the list of crew, with a mind accustomed to numbers, in a language that utilized calculation in every simple statement… a skill at memorization acquired over years of study and experience in the very dangerous years of Tabini’s court. He reviewed names, everything Jase had told him about persons he might meet, their relationships, their spouses. Monogamy was the rule, occasionally serial. Offspring of high-ranking crew tended to be preferred into slots, but had to be capable of the rigid, computer-mediated training courses. Families had been split in the colonization. There’d been a lot of fatalities before the ship had returned, over a thousand lost with the station, and many still-extant families had lost members… it wasn’t considered polite to talk about the fact. In a society where everyone knew everything, discussions about such things were shorthand, and interpersonal understandings were intense and fraught with assumption. There was no one to tell. People swallowed their grief and just went on. The mere notion of people Jase regarded as essential to his welfare vanishing over a horizon had disturbed him, but more to the point, Jase had taken two years even to mention how it troubled him, or even to figure out why he paced the floor and grew furiously angry in their separations.

Jase had gotten better about it. Jase hadn’t mentioned it in their parting with the world, but it was implicit in Jase’s regret for leaving, his wish to have the freedom to come back… there was not a whole damned lot Mospheiran or easygoing about Jase Graham, and he called himself normal and sane.

He had assembled that kind of data on Jase into a profile that might fit the captains: quick explosions, a tendency to compromise their way through conflicts on the one hand and yet to store up points for future explosions, all grievances carefully inventoried. No one on the ship could get away from anyone else. Resolutions had to happen, sooner or later, and bare hands fights happened, weapons anathema in a family dispute. But the captains enforced absolute order, and isolation was a heavy, dreaded punishment among people who were never, ever, separated from each other.

Jase had volunteered to drop onto a planet among strangers and aliens. Jase had learned to speak a language of the earth of humans, that no one else spoke, because Jase, born of a father dead for centuries, had been destined to
be
different. He’d been born to make contact with the former colonists, no matter how they’d changed.

Jase… and Yolanda Mercheson.

This… from two of the
Phoenix
crew: separate by job, separate by choice, in their own strange way competitive and
jealous
of their relationship with Ramirez… it was likely foredoomed not to lead to friendship, even if it had led to love-making.

And both of them were different from Mospheirans—how different he hadn’t quite figured until he entered a verbal shoving match with Ogun, and saw the responses that had unnerved him in Jase ticking into action, one after the other.

He took notes for a paper he meant to write, notes in Ragi for a paper in Mosphei’. He’d been a maker of dictionaries, once upon a time, and still could find common ground with scholars like Ben Feldman and Kate Shugart, on Lund and Kroger’s team.

But in the contents of that paper, an explanation of foreign ways, he found himself possibly unique, possibly the only one but Jase who could see in what particulars they were strange to one another… possibly the only one but Jase who could spot the shoals and rocks onto which the Mospheirans might well steer; or the crew of
Phoenix
, since there was no right or wrong in it. Foremost of Mospheiran hazards, the Human Heritage Party had not the least idea how strange humans could get, on a world, on an island; on a ship, locked in close contact, communicating only on things everyone already knew. They thought “original humans” were their salvation; and there were no longer any “original humans.” Both sides had changed.

His staff came and went in the corridor… easy to know the servants’ soft footsteps and his security’s heavier booted ones. He found himself surrounded by sounds far more homelike, despite the prospect of the encounter tomorrow.

Then, unintended, he thought about the island, the city where he’d been only a day prior, Barb running across the gray, stained concrete of that hangar, dignity thrown to the winds…

Flinched, inside.

A damn bus.

He wondered whether Barb was improving… or wasn’t; wondered what lasting damage there might be. With the faults she did have, if their places were reversed, Barb would have moved heaven, earth, and the national borders at least to communicate with him.

Not to reach him, not to live with him in a world where she didn’t want to be; but at least to call him, to say, “Bren, are you all right?”

Barb didn’t deserve to be hurt. His mother didn’t deserve to be pacing the hall of a hospital all night, scared out of her wits. They fought, they disagreed on everything, and still cared, that was the crazed sum of it all, one he’d begun to accept and one he wasn’t sure Barb yet realized.

He wondered whether his brother Toby had gotten a flight and gotten to their mother, and whether Toby and Jill were doing all right… Jill had happened into a life she’d never contracted for, watched over by security agents, national security haunting her street, following the kids. Toby’s marriage had had its rocky moments, and now Toby’s kids were getting old enough to understand how their freedom was circumscribed by their uncle’s unique job, and how their lives were complicated by a dozen random lunatics who under Mospheiran law couldn’t be arrested.

The whole family was kept balanced on edge, waiting for his visits, as if somehow he kept defining and redefining things, as if he was the one keeping them from living their lives. The fact was, they were bound together, hurt one another: Jill, involved by marriage, didn’t put her foot down hard, and should.

Small hours of the morning. Those kind of thoughts.

He rested the hand with the stylus against his chin, concentrated on the computer screen, buried the files in arcane atevi code which no one on the station would likely crack.

He got up then, called Kandana, undressed, and lay down in a bed Bindanda arrived to turn down for him.

“Sleep soundly, nandi,” Kandana said, and Bindanda echoed him.

“And so must you both,” he said, and shut his eyes, refusing to think of where he was, or what he faced, or what he had to do—beyond take out a title on the station.

The door shut, leaving the room in utter, depth of space, dark. Air whispered briskly through probably ancient duct work.

And in that deprivation of senses he drifted down, waking once or twice, asking himself in panic where he was, and whether he was blind.

“Jago?” he said once.

But realizing, remembering, calming himself after the separate frights, he found it impossible to resist rest, of which he’d had notably less than his body needed.

As deep a sleep, while it lasted, as he’d slept in half a dozen weeks.

The door shot open, and light flared into Bren’s face. He waked in alarm, finding one central reality: Banichi dressed, immaculate, and backed by Narani and two servants. “Time to wake, nadi-ji,” Banichi said.

He collapsed backward into the pillows, telling himself he was in orbit.

Truly in orbit.

Jase wasn’t there. Banichi was.

Jago. Narani. Tano and Algini.

He had a meeting with the captains.

The mind had been very, very far away. He’d been walking on a beach, somewhere in his childhood. He’d heard kids laughing.

“Nadi?” Banichi asked.

Banichi could come through a firelight with his hair un-mussed. Bren did not find himself in that condition. Restarting his heart was one priority. Convincing exhausted limbs to move took second place.

Getting his brain organized was a mandatory third.

“I’m moving,” he said. Banichi, over the years, had learned not to assume until he saw a foot out of the bed; and he put the necessary foot out, into very, very cold air.

“God, I don’t think I want to do this.”

“Shall one wait breakfast?”

“Bath,” he said, gathered himself up with an effort, and went to the small bath, hoping desperately for hot water.

It was instant. He hit the wall, managed to get the water adjusted, told himself it wasn’t the shower he was used to; but soap was there, oiled soap with familiar herbal scents: Narani and the staff had everything in order. And when he came out of the bath, his servants were ready with his robe and his clothes.

He sat down to have his hair dried and braided in its single plait.

“Did you sleep, nandi?” Narani asked.

“Very well. What’s the time until my meeting?”

“Two hours,” Narani said serenely. “One thought you might wish to sleep.”

“One was very correct,” he murmured, having his hair tugged at. He discovered his eyes shut. “Tea,” he said. It arrived in his hand, preface to breakfast.

Narani finished.

He stood up, passed the teacup to Kandana, after which he dressed, taking time to assure the set of his cuffs, and walked out into the hall that now was the heart of the atevi mission.

Servants bowed.

Tano occupied a canvas, atevi-sized chair in the room opposite his, the chosen security station, next to the outside access… with a fair stack of electronics and a massive console.

Where in hell did that come from?
he asked himself. He was moderately shocked, and turned to find Banichi waiting for him at what was now the dining room.

Certain things he didn’t want to know. Certain things he might investigate only if the captains asked him. God knew what else might exist, besides the galley that he and Jase had carefully designed to work with station electronics.

Doubtless, that set of equipment found compatible power supplies, too. If it was patched into the room electronics in any unreasonable way, he didn’t want to know it, at least not before his meeting.

Inside the next open door, that which, with two desks secured together, served as their dining hall, places were set for three, himself and Banichi and Jago, two canvas chairs of atevi proportions, and his. Algini was there to draw back his chair for him, and as they three settled, Sabiso brought in a tea service.

He couldn’t bear the curiosity.

“You aren’t doing anything I need to know about,” he said to the two of them, Algini having melted out the door. “Banichi, Jago-ji, surely nothing hazardous.”

“We know what conies and goes,” Banichi said, “and we listen, Bren-ji. Should we not?”

“Listen as you wish,” he said, as Narani arrived with Kandana, who bore a great, wonderful-smelling serving dish, the contents of which he could guess as a favorite of his. “Nadiin, you amaze me.”

Kandana set down the platter, and Narani removed the cover. It was
amidi ashi
, a delicately shirred egg dish.

“
Eggs
, Nadiin?”

Narani was delighted with his success. “We have a few,” Narani said.

Dared he think that all his security wore their operational blacks, not courtly elegance; and that made into the uniforms were devices the function of which he generally knew as location, protection against sharp weapons, and objects for quiet mayhem? There were small needles, and several sharp edges within what otherwise seemed stiffening.