Precursor (6 page)

Thoughtful,
hell!
Not of him, not of Jase, not of the unusual haste that was manifesting around him.

But having fallen already into the expressionless mode of atevi among strangers, he’d also begun hearing things through a Ragi filter, began to adjust his eyes, so that Banichi and Jago looked ordinary, and it was the humans who looked strange. Such was the order of the majority of the world, except for Jason Graham, and, briefly, Yolanda Mercheson.

And he knew every nuance of his guards’ expressionless expressions, understanding by that immediate advisement that he was being set on his guard, so far as Banichi could go against the aiji’s orders. He didn’t know why, didn’t take anything for urgent information, guard-your-life information, but his bodyguard was just slightly on edge about something.

Welcome home.

“Very thoughtful,” he echoed Tom Lund. “I’m sure the aiji hopes this mission goes well for both the island and the mainland.”

Three times was a charm, didn’t the proverb say?

The fourth launch of a newly-built shuttle, however many missions its exact predecessor had flown in the skies of the earth of humans, still didn’t feel secure, not to him. It didn’t feel that secure to Jason, either, not to anyone who’d sweated through the first, problematic docking. Not to anyone who knew why there’d been an hour-long cabin blackout on the third flight.

Why the rush? he asked himself.

The haste couldn’t feel that secure to the four Mospheirans, either.

Every time he thought about the possibility of a post-launch emergency, with two places in the entire world with a long enough runway, he found his palms sweating. Mercheson had made it safely to orbit. Jase would. He didn’t effectively give a damn about the Mospheirans… and did.

No cargo, well-thought test plans thrown to the winds…

“Shall we escort our guests to the facility, then?” he asked Banichi and Jago.

“As you wish,” was Jago’s answer… elegant, smooth, reasonable, and not a hint in her official bearing that there was ever anything but business between them, or anything in their meeting but well-oiled routine. “The van can accommodate us all,” she said, “nandi.”

With Banichi, then, she led the way down the stairs. The usual van was waiting.

“Watch the steps,” Bren said, starting down after her. All the stairs on the continent were higher steps than standard on Mospheira. He didn’t forget; he didn’t trust them to remember, and turned once and twice, hearing too much haste and suspecting too much sightseeing behind him. Rain slicked the ground. A brisk wind was blowing—tousling the Mospheirans’ hair, disturbing a strand or two of his despite his braid, but never, ever disturbing the precise single plaits that swung between atevi shoulders.

The van rolled forward as his bodyguard reached the tarmac. Banichi and Jago opened the double doors of the van and with the others settled inside, leaped inside themselves with a spring-rocking bound, pulling the doors to after them with a businesslike thump.

The van rolled off on its way, comfortably appointed, windowless, with no access to the drivers, whose identity Bren suspected as two more of his personal guard.

The van was armored: it was never a particularly quick acceleration. It heaved on bumps like a boat on rough water, while humans sat on seats out of human scale, sharing close, jostled space with a species who owned the planet by birthright. The humans stared at close quarters. In dim conditions, atevi eyes reflected gold under bounced light. Jago’s gleamed from her seat in the dark corner. Bren didn’t look to see the Mospheirans’ reaction to that, only thought to himself that Jago damned well knew the effect on humans, knew it spooked him, knew it would spook the Mospheirans, and didn’t take precautions against it.

Jago was mad, damned mad, at something.

Banichi added his stare to the chatoyant glare, and then looked away, not a word said at the moment.

Then, in Ragi, looking at Ben, “Pleasant flight?”

“Yes, sir,” Ben said quietly, in Mosphei’.

Banichi was pushing it and knew exactly which ones of the humans were translators.

Beyond that, it was silence: Banichi prodded, Jago smoldered in silence, and Bren wondered in increasing desperation what could have gone wrong so quickly… besides Tabini’s bloody-minded obstinacy and the Guild’s picking a fight neither Jase nor he could win. Possibly both of them had understood Tom Lund’s unfortunate, offhanded remark.

Ample opportunity for trouble. It was with them. It had gone to the space center with Jase.

The van, having made the long crossing of the security zone of the airport, bounced sluggishly and went down a steep ramp.

Somewhere behind them, massive hydraulics operated… the security doors, inside the space center at the northwest end of the airport, the new wing. Bren recognized the route, had absolutely no question they were on it, finally in it, and safe, at least in that regard.

The van leveled out, pulling to a halt with a low-tech complaint of over-burdened brakes. A thump sounded at the side of the van, someone hitting the doors, and a warning horn sounded outside.

Banichi and Jago left their seats, opened the doors in response to the signal from outside, and let them out into the dimly lighted concrete tunnel of the center. The white-and-black baji-naji emblem was conspicuous on the metal doors that faced them.

It was the emblem of Fortune and Chance, those governors of all cast lots, appropriate symbol for the shuttle as it was historically appropriate for the halls of government.

Nothing about the opening vista offended the eye. The columns that supported the roof were felicitously grouped. Atevi would be comfortable with all that met them, though the guests were doubtless oblivious to that felicity, even the two from the FO. It was concrete, black and white and gray, full of shadows and echoes… but it opened onto a table with a black vase, white flowers, a single, rising strand of blooms. It was a statement: felicity, ascent, under a stark white arch.

Banichi led the way up to the platform, stood at attention as an inner security door admitted them all at once to warmer, more decorated hallways.

Now, now it was the human reception area. The lowering of tension was palpable as his human companions met the soft brightness of the lights, the subtle pastels—felicitous colors to atevi, to be sure, soft green and blue, both quiet nature colors: that was what the human heart wanted. He and Jase together had picked out this scheme for the human comfort zone and approved it… he and Jase had planned this, as they’d planned everything about the center. They’d ordered human-scale furniture from Mospheira, and they’d translated the shuttle specs, a mammoth undertaking.

They’d defused the atevi resentments of the two-doored shuttle design, they’d found compromises… they’d ended up with three hatches on the shuttle, and atevi, who’d dug in their heels for decades—fighting every advance Tabini-aiji tried to bring them—had gathered enthusiasm for the most incredible advance of all.

For three years a handful of atevi engineers, he and Jase and to a certain extent, Yolanda Mercheson, with their respective staffs, had shared every breath, lived and breathed the shuttle, the space center, the program.

“Nice,” Lund said of the decor.

Bren took a breath. Let it out slowly. Lund meant a compliment. He and Jase had
hoped
for just such ease in humans when they came to these rooms. Cope hadn’t even said that much when he’d come down four weeks ago, yet Cope had lived those four weeks almost exclusively in these rooms because he’d had motion sickness
only
when he’d left this facility… had had it all the way across the strait at night on the plane, had had it in his new residence on Mospheira, probably would have it in his new offices, give or take the drugs that held it at bay, and despite his suggestions to State to try to limit Cope’s exposure to changing light conditions and contrasts and open horizons.

He’d grown sensitive to such details, thanks to Jase. Irregularities in lighting were an indication of failing systems, to a ship-born human… large spaces were a particular fear, or so Jason had explained to him: a sensible fear of impact.

Make the corridors interrupted with cross-corridors and nooks that could be a refuge in acceleration: the center did that. Zero chance the space center would ever accelerate, but small chance that blue that comforted Lund and his friends was sky, either. It was something to do with hindbrain and childhood security, he supposed, not intellect.

So Lund liked the decor… didn’t apparently notice that there were no steps to make humans labor or to trip up atevi strides. Elevators handled all level changes. Control panels and wall switches sat at intermediate height, a little high for humans, not too low for atevi.

And the flowers on the table, an atevi welcome in this area, were a carefully chosen arrangement—no different than the species familiar to Mospheirans, but felicitous in number and color, given the blue and green: they were spring, and hope.

“Lovely flowers,” Kate was kind enough to say, perhaps making conscious amends for Lund. She and Ben might understand. The others might finally twig to at least that. Mospheirans were remarkably stubborn in their insularity, but the news channels had been full of unbridled analysis of atevi ways in the last three years. In the end, he’d sent his own reaction in an interview, trying to satisfy a burgeoning, fearful curiosity without weakening the strictures that kept the species from unofficial contact. Adventurous types on either side of the straits had tried contact in rowboats, and successful, live venturers, even escorted back by the authorities, were damned dangerous to have expounding in the press and over the airwaves.

How long could they hold two curious species apart, with a narrow body of water separating them?

That, apart from hostile aliens in some other solar system, was one of the worries inherent in the space program… in this launch, in Jason’s recall, and in this mission. Atevi
would
grow close, again, to humans.

The door to the lounge opened.

And there Jason met them—his dark hair starkly, badly, shockingly cut. In three years Jason had carefully grown the beginnings of a respectable braid, that badge of atevi dignity, and now he’d cut it, along with his ties to the earth… God alone knew in what frame of mind when he’d gotten the orders from above. Jase wore a dark-blue jersey, black trousers, and, God save them both, that frayed fishing jacket Toby had given him three years ago.

“Jason Graham,” he introduced himself to the Mospheirans, as if television hadn’t broadcast his image all over the planet at least twice a week. He didn’t quite look at Bren, not looking him in the eye, at least. “Jase is what I go by.” Duly, Jase shook hands, smiled, did all the right and human things with the newcomers: Bren accomplished the introductions, wanting all the while to ask the essential question, but they were waist-deep in newcomers and unanswered questions.

“Mine’s the first room,” Jason said to the incomers, indicating the first of the twenty rooms in circular arrangement around the common room: no head, no seniormost: King Arthur’s revolutionary arrangement. It set atevi teeth on edge. To atevi eyes, it was social chaos. War. “Plenty of room, this trip. We have space for more.”

All cheerfulness… which certainly hadn’t been Jase’s mood when he’d gotten the order to fly, and was not what he expected from Jase, not with that haircut.

Bren waited, offered polite, required courtesies. Considered the coat, the performance, because performance it surely was… and God alone knew how Jase had gotten out the door past their major domo wearing that; God knew how he’d saved it from the servants.

But the jacket was a map of explorations. There was an abrasion on the elbow, where Jase had tried to fall in the ocean. Jase had begged, pleaded, and demanded his visit to the ocean—for ulterior motives, as it had turned out. But Jase had fallen in love with the sea.

And what did it say, that, going home, Jase chose that ratty, salt-weakened jacket and a shirt he knew had seen three years of wear? What had Jase been thinking, and what must the servants have thought, when Jase took something to his hair.

“Where’s the shuttle?” Tom Lund was forward enough to ask.

Jason didn’t give them the expected, verbal answer. He walked over to the wall and pushed the button that motored the blinds aside.

The gleaming white, bent-nosed bird out on the tarmac seemed about to lift from the ground of its own volition. It looked small… until the eye realized those service vehicles that attended it were trucks.

“God.” Ben was the only one with a voice. “My God.”

And Kate: “It’s big.”

When ten men set their hands to a rope and pulled in unison, amazing amounts of weight slid.

When an entire civilization worked in concert to accomplish materials and training for a tested design, three years produced—this shining, beautiful creature.

“
Shai-shan
,” Bren said, standing behind the group, finding a voice. “
Favorable Wind
.” He’d seen
Shai-shan
from framework to molds to first flight, and now Jason’s life, Jason’s departure from the world, rode on these same wings. He’d translated every line of her. He’d all but given birth when she lifted off for her maiden flight, a curious emotion for a maker of dictionaries, a parser of words and meanings.