Precursor (12 page)

But no one would have asked them their opinion, either, and what had been sacrificed in cargo to add three more passengers with baggage… God, the baggage!… he had no idea. Everything… all the scientific packages, all the materials tests…

Where did those stand?

What
were
they taking?

What in hell was he supposed to do to make this miracle happen?.

“I’ll work with Jase,” he said to Tabini.

“If they prove intractable, leave.”

“Yes, aiji-ma.”

“I insist on it,” Tabini said, and rose. Damiri-daja rose, and Bren rose.

Together, while he bowed, they left him.

He stood there a moment then, in the middle of the ornate carpet, next to the historic chairs. All the warmth had gone out of him.

He’d built it. He was going to ride it. He was going
with
Jase, who’d just been coopted back under the captains’ authority. If Jase chose to have that happen… and probably he should; probably the captains shouldn’t notice that humans who dealt with atevi tended to grow very strange.

So, well, he said to himself, drew a deep breath and went out, then, not forgetting to pay courteous notice to Eidi, as composed as if he hadn’t just learned he was riding a plane into orbit, to filch change out of the Pilots’ Guild’s pockets.

An agency his compatriots on Mospheira thought of as the devil incarnate.

Had he somehow, somewhere failed to relay that to Tabini?

And Tabini had talked to Shawn?

He walked casually toward the foyer, where he regained his escort.

“Nadiin,” he said simply, taking his leave of Tabini’s security. “Nadiin-ji,” he added, the warmer address to men he knew, and walked outside the heavy doors in his own security’s company.

They, he suspected, had known something was going on from before they picked him up at the airport. They might not have known where he was going, but they’d known they were going with him, and were bound by the aiji’s orders to let him go through this long evening of dinners and conversations—

While his personal belongings were doubtless packed, moved, attended to…

They walked down a hallway resplendent with antiquity and scrutinized by a hundred hidden watchers, electronics, spying devices, all of the panoply of the iron-handed ruler of a world civilization… who didn’t damned much move anywhere without his knowing it.

“Well,” he said to Banichi and Jago, not accusingly, only to assure himself the needful things were done, “not surprised, were you.”

“Nandi,” Jago said quietly. “To be sent up to the station? We were surprised by the destination, not by the fact that we would move.”

“Nand’ Jase doesn’t know.”

He considered that, as they approached the lift. “He’s going to be shocked.” As hell, he thought.

“I think he will be,” Banichi said.

They stood at the lift. He suddenly realized he had no notion which button to push, whether to go to his apartment, or down to the train. “The staff has packed?”

“While you were at supper,” Banichi said.

“Tano and Algini are going,” Jago said, and punched in for the lowest level. It
was
the train. “Likewise Narani, Sabiso, Kandana and Bindanda.”

“Bindanda.” One of Tatiseigi’s. His mind went flying off on a suspicious tangent, involving Ilisidi’s long association with Tatiseigi, Tatiseigi’s occasional opposition to Tabini, and the likelihood more than one element of the Association had been brought in on this before he had.

Bindanda, a quiet, polite spy.

Four security, around a fifth point. Himself. Nine, with the servants. A very fortunate number: ’counters had devised it, in harmony with the space center and shuttle.

One wondered how those numbers fit in with the station and the Guild.

“Narani’s quite old for this excitement,” he said as the car arrived.

“He avows his health will withstand it. He’s left Tagi in charge of your apartments, moved Edoro into Tagi’s place in your coastal estate, nandi, with your approval.”

The warmth hadn’t yet come back to his hands. He stepped into the lift.

He hadn’t his most comfortable clothing; he had only what he stood in.

He and Jase had made extensive preparations to set up an atevi residency on the station. There were items of baggage. There were pieces of equipment.

“Are we displacing all the cargo?” he asked.

“One believes so,” Banichi said.

He didn’t know what he was going to tell Jase.

«
^
»

It was back on the train… going the other direction, a passage punctuated by the click of the rails and the whisper of the car’s passage against the wide and narrow portions of the tunnels.

He sat with Banichi and Jago, sure his baggage from the airplane would turn up, at least the needful things. The computer would turn up. He was entirely sure of it.

“Did the dowager know?” he asked, out of a moment of silence.

“I believe she made great haste in arranging a flight” Banichi said. “That’s all we know.”

Bindanda was one of the number. If Tabini had deceived his redoubtable grandmother, that deception would have meant very unhealthy things going on within the Association. Tatiseigi was always an uneasy ally.

“One is honored” he said of the dowager and her dinner. “I’m glad she came.”

Jago lifted a brow. “She has no return flight arranged,” Jago said, “that we know.”

She might well have decided to stay and become a thorn in the side to Tabini, or so Tabini would claim.

Yet it was remarkable how close that apparently divided house could stand, in crisis… no few of the aiji’s enemies had discovered it.

Ilisidi had brought herself and her security, for what was bound to be a period full of speculation among the lords: what would the paidhi learn? What would Tabini agree to? What would be the relation with Mospheira?… that was bound to follow his ascent into space.

God, he didn’t want to think about the flight. He’d survived watching the flights, had nervous fits watching the landing. The switchover in engines was a miracle the technicians swore was flawless, but it always seemed a chancy thing to do, cut off perfectly good engines several miles above the ocean.

A part of him wanted to go to the one atevi physician who monitored his health and ask for total sedation. He wasn’t sure he could do this; he’d been shot at, shot, and chased down mountains; but engine switchover scared hell out of him.

So did facing Jason at the end of this train ride with,
Oh, well, you know how Tabini can be. He decided to send me with you. I swear I didn’t know. And by the way, we’re taking the station
.

Sorry for the inconvenience, old friend.

He was still in that psychological dislocation that a trip to Mospheira tended to bring him, that sudden trip among people his height, furniture his size, steps his convenient dimensions, language and food he’d grown up with; and now, leaving Jase in the space center, he’d just definitively cleared the air of the island enclave from his lungs, human language from his head, and human expectations from his emotions.

Now, in the obliging silence of his security, he tried to jerk all that back into focus. Banichi and Jago, sitting across from him on the red velvet seats, became two stone-faced giants in the black leather and silver of their profession, black of skin, black of hair, gold of eye…

He knew, the patterns and the battles he understood… he was valuable
here
, dammit, the world’s leading expert on the atevi-human interface. Someone else could do this part… maybe a year from now.

Jase
was the logical one.
Jase
should be in Tabini’s employ and reckon whether Tabini hadn’t tried to get Jase’s loyalty into his hands?

He knew that answer, suddenly, knew it hadn’t played right from Tabini’s point of view, and Tabini had played the hand he had left.

And what
was
the meeting Jase had had with the dowager? Fond farewell? The dowager had been her grandson’s greatest opposition—on certain causes; but at times she was solidly her grandson’s conduit of policy. Had that been a sounding-out?

And had Jase failed it… or had he never been in the running?

“Well” Bren said with a sigh, “well.” The deep-welling panic about the shuttle flight took its place in a long queue, somewhere behind having to deal with Jase, and that itself was somewhere behind his knowledge that he himself was Tabini’s… and that civilization rested very heavily on his being faithfully Tabini’s… whatever Jase was or became.

It wasn’t the situation he wanted to contemplate. Jase was likely to be mad; if he mismanaged the matter, things could get worse.

“How far in Tabini’s confidence is the dowager in this matter?” he asked his security.

“One has no sure knowledge, nadi” Banichi said. ”We were aware of movements; we did not investigate the aiji’s doings.“

“I understand that,” Bren said. More exotic and more mundane affairs came flooding into his head. “Mospheira very carefully selected four persons, no staff: and I have—what,
eight
, with baggage? This will disturb Mospheira, I fear, not to mention the delegation; not to mention the station. We should be alert to that.”

“The paidhi-aiji will
not
make his own supper,” Banichi said. “These things were agreed.”

Know to an exactitude the limitations of mass and cargo? Banichi’s native gift for mathematics exceeded the norm for his species, considerably. In human terms, he would have been a prodigy.

“How much cargo did we displace?” he asked his staff.

“Sufficient,” Jago answered, “to assure your safety and comfort.”

They had their weapons on them; they always did; and he apprehended that the kitchen likely wasn’t the only thing they were bringing along in cargo.

“They have never advised us our facility is complete,” Bren said.

“Did not this station once shelter three hundred thousand humans? And do we not reckon the crew of the ship to be two thousand five hundred at largest?”

“They have the ship,” Banichi said. “They can live there.”

“We will claim a very
fine
accommodation,” Jago said firmly, “for a lord of the Association.”

And the weapons, he wondered?

“Will they be wise,” asked Banichi, “to attack the paidhi-aiji on his first mission?”

“They’re as fond of surprises as Uncle Tatiseigi.”

“The paidhi is a very skilled negotiator,” Banichi said with supreme confidence.

Get control of the station, for God’s sake. He had to argue fast for that one. Mospheirans might not want a thing, but they didn’t want their rivals to have it.

Looking at the microfocus, he’d thought of Cope as the principal problem, and assumed Yolanda’s recall was all the Guild was going to ask for a while. He and Jase had assumed that the Pilot’s Guild would take a long while to digest all that Yolanda could tell them. Consequently, he’d been utterly blindsided by this second request, this notion of having Jase back up there.

So had Tabini. Tabini didn’t like it—but took, not the path of resistance, but the path of equal action in their system of half-formed agreements.

One wanted to know what atevi were culturally set up to expect? The machimi plays held a repertoire of treachery and double-cross. It was the common trick, in the machimi, to try to move some agents about distractingly and achieve a move not suspected, not even by the all-seeing audience.

Mercheson hadn’t resisted going. Shall we send Mercheson-paidhi? Tabini had asked. And he and Jase hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t drawn the line. Nor had Mercheson.

So now the ship captains asked more, and at the last moment. And Tabini reacted.

He couldn’t claim he himself understood the Pilot’s Guild. They were human, but they damned well didn’t feel like Mospheirans… not the old familiar, frustrating debating and delaying of the Mospheiran policy-making apparatus. The ship’s captains were autocrats. In that, they and Tabini understood one another better than the captains were going to understand what the Mospheirans were doing.

Across the barrier of gravity and distance, the maneuvering of subordinates was not easy: one couldn’t, say, as in the machimi plays, ask a major player to tea and serve up daggers.

Now the ship suddenly had Jase, whom they’d asked for, plus a lapful of Mospheirans with their agenda, and worse, an atevi presence at the same time, instead of the test cargo it expected. He could almost see it in historical dress, the blithe guests at the doorway, banners flying: refuse us or accept us. Draw swords or deal.

If it wanted to turn them around and send them back down unreceived, it still had a two-week delay at minimum to service the shuttle. It still faced the fact it couldn’t leave them all on board the shuttle for two weeks unless it meant to murder them all, because life-support wouldn’t last that long… and it couldn’t just shoot them, either, if it ever wanted to deal reasonably and cheaply for earthbound supplies.