Precursor (40 page)

It must be a slow morning in the control center, Bren thought, gratified. It was, in fact, the shuttle.

“
Got to close the show
,” Cl said. “
I’ll leave you attached to camera 2 on, say, C45
.”

“That’s wonderful,” Bren said. “Delighted, Cl. Thank you.”

“Interesting,” Tano said, much as Banichi had said, as Cl punched out.

“More cooperation than we’ve had, Nadiin,” Bren said. “That man is not cautious with us. Others are. Interesting, indeed.”

His security returned questioning looks. “We had early cooperation,” Bren said, “very wide cooperation, and easy agreement with those who were already agreed. I don’t think it attributable to my powers of negotiation, rather to understandings generally made verbal. Now we have these long delays.”

“Dissent,” Jago said.

“And placatory gestures from the servants,” Banichi said.

It did, however atevi the view might be, seem to describe the situation with Cl.

“It’s not safe to press, however,” Bren said. “No more than in an atevi household. The man is a subordinate.”

He settled to work after that small show, imagining that someone thinking more down a human track would have negotiated that camera view much earlier; that very probably Kroger’s team had asked; and that it was something Cl could grant on request, something to amuse the guests and, like the unmarked hallways, to tell them very little.

They were due to meet with Kroger this evening, supposing that came off on schedule. Certainly Bindanda came to question him diffidently about his selections and his menu: “Excellent,” he said, “and one might have a sweet or two. That will please them.”

“Nandi,” Bindanda said, and went off to their galley stores, with Narani in close supervision.

The household ran without effort; it moved and buzzed about him, rarely disturbed him except to renew his supply of tea, while he sat at the small desk and composed letters and replies to various correspondents.

To Toby:

Write when you can. My love and my apologies to Jill and the kids.

There was no letter today. He wasn’t that surprised in the silence.

To his mother, with ulterior motives, both to hear from her and to hear whatever she might have heard about Toby…
if
she had heard a thing from Toby, which she might not have.

Double reason for checking up on her.

I’m doing fine. It’s an interesting place up here.

He struck that beginning. She might take offense at his doing fine in an interesting place; it was somewhat self-centered on his part. He tried again.

I’m just checking to be sure you’re all right. I hope Barb is improving. I want you to take care of yourself, and be assured I’m fine. I hope you’ll keep me posted on everything, and I want yon to be sure to get enough rest. I know how you tend to push yourself. I think I inherited it. Do stay to sensible places. You know how certain elements are dangerous when I’m in the news, and I think I am now. I imagine that I am. Know that I love you.

He’d achieved a certain distance in his communication, after sending that other letter, that possibly hurtful letter. He worried about it, worried about it a great deal, and thought now that he’d been too harsh, too self-centered on his own part, to take every move his mother made as self-serving and self-centered. She
was
concerned for him, God knew. She was a mother. She had a son off on a hitherto unreachable space station telling her things were fine while armed security watched over her and everything she did. He’d been desperate; he’d shoved too hard to be free.

What I wrote was honest at the time but one of those things that one starts thinking about; and both your sons love you a great deal. At something over thirty I’ve reached that stage of wanting to be free and to pursue my own course. Kind of late, but there we are. I haven’t taken Toby’s course, home and house and all. And I shoved far too hard when it came to it. Now that I’ve done that I find myself regretting it and wanting to know how you are and to tell you I care. Not to change my mind, but to tell you I care. Both are human, I think.

The
I think
loomed out at him on rereading. In all honesty, it was an
I think
. He
didn’t
know for certain any longer, or hadn’t since his teens, when he’d gone into the University program and begun to separate from the culture he’d been born to.

I don’t know what more I can say, except to take care of yourself in all senses. I wish I had been able to stay longer. We both needed that. But I’m doing a job here, the results of which I think you are able to see now, and which I hope will give those kids of Toby’s a future.

He wrote to the heads of committees.

We are making progress and hope for your patience. While there are agreements in principle, there are many details yet to work out of what I hope will be a good cooperation between our peoples.

He wrote it until he began to see every flaw in the hope.

And he settled down with Jago for a lengthy talk over the southern provinces of the
aishidi’tat
, their ethnic questions, their material resources and willingness to mobilize, those divisions of loyalty and wealth he knew, but which a human didn’t
feel
with the accuracy an ateva felt the divisions, and which a human couldn’t know with the breadth and depth of an ateva’s being immersed in them lifelong while being wired to feel the tides of provincial resentment.

Was a little town building a railroad to a spaceport? Ask what various provinces might do once they saw prosperity within their reach. An ateva might make a pot to continue in the economy for a hundred years, and an ateva might utilize every scrap of a fruit, down to the peelings; but atevi also might have a color television in a house in which electric wiring was strung along the side of a stone floor, under exposed wooden rafters, some of which might have been replaced in the last century.

Atevi made families and ties within man’chi, and passed these houses, and their debts and their projects, from one generation to another, and had both the most informal barter arrangements and the most rigidly traditional activities… give or take what humans sent them.

Atevi when they came to the station might bring families, including aged aunts and grandfathers, which humans in their economy and focus might not understand.

“Will it be like taking service in a household?” he asked Jago. “Or will husbands and wives come?”

“Perhaps both,” Jago said. “As husbands and wives make unions in a household.”

Atevi unions, like human ones, could be ephemeral. “Unions within a household last. They seem obliged to last.”

“Or part amicably,” Jago said. “As one can. Or part for children, and come back again.”

That was so. Lovers within a household might get their children elsewhere, by agreement, so as not to bring children into a household that was otherwise childless.

“I would never forbid children,” he said, half wishing there were.

“But the Bu-javid is a bad place for them,” Jago said truthfully.

They were there to talk about the space station; but he looked at Jago, with whom he shared a bed on occasion, on opportunity, and wondered about children, which were not in the cards for them, certainly, biologically; and not for him, personally… he’d never wanted to leave a family of his own on the other side of the straits.

“Up here there might be children. Or not, as people prefer.”

“There were children,” Jago said, “who rode the petal sails.”

Frightening as it was, certain pods had dropped onto the world with children aboard, all those years ago.

“So there were,” he said. “And so there are on the ship itself.” Jase had told him so.

“Like Jasi-ji,” Jago said.

“And those with two parents,” Bren said. “Jase and I talked about it, how the crew knows who’s allied with whom; but outsiders wouldn’t. And they
haven’t
confined their children outside the Bu-javid, so to speak. And politics of personal relationship does exist.”

Jago raised a brow. “One sees where there is no choice.”

“No choice indeed. No other place.”

Jago heaved a deep sigh. “And how shall we map these relationships? How does one perceive them?”

“One simply knows who’s in bed with whom.” He laughed. “It’s a saying, in Mosphei’. It changes their man’chi. Or flings them out of it, when the relationship fractures. And it’s common, Jago-ji; the fractures are common. We have social structures… I’m sure within the ship they exist… to make interaction possible. Feud isn’t allowed.”

A second lift of the brow. “That was not a feud that invaded the mainland? One could have mistaken it, Bren-ji.”

It was worth a wry smile. A shrug. “Politics is ideally separate from bloodline,” he said. “Not historically true, but true nowadays. Humans did have ethnicities, once. And family ties, even smaller. But humans here have had no ethnicities, until the ship came back. Now they don’t know what’s happened to them. Now the Mospheirans may learn to think
atevi
are the more familiar culture.”

“One doesn’t know what the world would be like without humans,” Jago said somberly. “Different. I don’t think many would like to go without television, without the
aishidi’tat?
.”

“I think humans have gotten rather used to fresh fruit, and the knowledge the aiji will stop any armed conflict. It’s a sense of safety. Since the ship came back, that safety is threatened, at the very moment we seemed to have realized we had it.”

“So for us. Just when we realized humans were valuable, we discover they have inconvenient relatives.”

He laughed; he had to. “Our lives are
machimi
,” he said. “The relatives come over the hill, and want a share of the hunt.”

“And shall they have it?”

He considered what was at issue. “I think there’s room,” he said, “considering all of space, considering they’ve been industrious on their own. We simply have to add another wing to the house.”

“So,” Jago said. “Up here.”

“Up here,” he said, “where it doesn’t spoil the view. —How will it be for atevi to live here? It’s an important question. My household is the first to be able to judge. And you
have to
judge.

I can’t know whether what I’m doing, to gain the atevi their place up here, can be tolerable for you, or whether I have to modify everything to allow atevi to come and go continually. Might atevi be born here, and live here? On what you say, Jago-ji, I set great importance. Can you think of such a thing?”

Jago looked up, at the ceiling, at the lights, around at the room, very solemnly, before she looked at him again. “Atevi who live here will have man’chi to whoever leads them,” she said. “And will they be within the
aishidi’tat?
I can’t foresee. But when there are children, when there are households, they will not be under the captains, Bren-ji. They will never be under the captains.”

“I don’t think the captains worry about that so much as they worry about having no port at all.” He had to amend that, in all knowledge he had of humans. “To teach the captains that they simply have to deal differently… that’s a frightening task, Jago-ji. It does daunt me.”

“It daunts anyone who thinks of it,” Jago said. “They must be very wise, not so
kabiu
atevi who come here to deal with the ship-humans.”

Not so
kabiu
. Not so proper. Not so observant of traditions of food and manners and philosophy.

“Not to be
kabiu
makes for rapid change,” he said. “Perhaps unwise change.”

Jago thought about that a moment. “The paidhi might see very clearly on that point,” she said. “Perhaps we
would
change very rapidly here. And there would be problems.”

The thought haunted him. He wrote to Tabini:

I have conversed with my staff regarding the attitudes that this place engenders within atevi at the sight of these corridors and this stark sameness and have discussed with my second security personnel the matter of kabiu, whether it may be an essential safeguard to atevi against too rapid a change of man’chi. I think there may be merit in this view and wish that wise heads consider the matter. I brought no camera. This is an error I intend to remedy on my next visit. It is difficult to describe how foreign this place is to atevi
.

Yet the very foreignness may assist to confirm man’chi within the aishidi’tat: and certainly the small touches my staff has added have provided relief to the eyes and heart.

I wish that the aiji might give particular thought to deep questions of man’chi for those generations resident here, considering a residence as foreign as a cave strung with lights combined with the difficulty of maintaining close ties with relatives on the planet. The psychological elements are beyond my judgment, yet I continue in my belief that atevi authority here must be represented. Therefore I do not alter my course, and depend on others’ judgment as to my wisdom in doing so.

Meanwhile I expect the Mospheirans to be our guests at supper, and hope that we may achieve agreement among representatives of the planet in the face of what may still be hard and divisive negotiations.