Inheritor Read online

  "More than theoretically, Jase, the sons of bitches are calling my mother at three in the morning. She's got a heart condition. — But they're freelance operators so far as I know. Isolationists. Pro-spacers. Anti-spacers. The whole damn gamut, Jase. It's the radical fringe that wants another war. Or an end to building on the north shore. I'm sure Ms. Mercheson has had lunch with them, though I haven't wanted to act as if I were trying to affect her independent judgment. They'll be perfectly polite to her. They'll be dressed in their Sunday best and telling her atevi can't be trusted." He knew he'd wandered further than he'd intended, into areas he probably shouldn't discuss with Jase, politically speaking. But if he didn't find a starting point to include Jase on the inside of the information flow, Jase couldn't understand the atevi's chosen isolation, either.

  The hell with it, he thought. It was time to talk, seriously, about the con job the Mospheiran government was bound to be trying on Yolanda Mercheson; and he'd tried to take the high ground rather than have his own side sound like a con job. But that strategy could backfire, if Jase had gotten some report from Yolanda that painted the other side of the strait as flawless and cooperative; and he wasn't sorry to have hit Jase with the nastier truths of Mospheira's underside.

  "There's a lot of humans," he said, in Ragi again, and more calmly, "who don't want atevi to go to space. And among those, some are crazy. Some are honest, law-abiding citizens."

  "An infelicity of two: you mean — some are neither."

  That was a first. He was pleased. If Jase had gotten that far, they could talk, and he was ready to do so. "Just so, nadi. Better and better. Another such improvement and I might well present you at court."

  "Not — quite ready for that, I think."

  "But very much better. I don't know if information helps the digestion, but that's the truth from my side. What's yours?"

  A slight hesitation. Then: "My father's dead."

  For a moment he didn't even hear it. Or didn't believe he could have heard what he thought he had.

  "God, Jase. — When?" He couldn't figure out how Jase would learn such a thing. Whenever the ship called, it created a stir in the household; and he hadn't heard of it.

  "Four days ago. — I got it from Yolanda. I haven't even been able to call my mother. Security wouldn't let me call the ship because you hadn't left instructions and I couldn't reach you."

  That was the distress over the period out of contact. That was the aborted conversation before supper.

  "Damn. Damn, Jase, what do I say? — I'm sorry."

  "It's one of those things, you know. Just one of those things. He just — just was working —" The glass trembled in Jase's fingers, and he lifted it and drank. "An accident. Yolanda had talked to the ship. She heard. She thought I already had. She offered condolences — All right?" The glass met the small table. Click. "But I haven't been able to call her back. I found out four days ago and I haven't been able to get hold of you. I haven't been able to call the ship."

  He had to revise a great many estimations of Jase, with this performance, both cool-headed and confrontational, recklessly so: Here's what I know, be damned to you, I want off this planet.

  No wonder Jase had been bearing down on the lessons in the last several days. To the point of hysteria, alternated with cold, clear, bloody-minded function. He was speaking now in Ragi and doing it with steady self-control.

  "Jase. I didn't hear. I don't know why I didn't hear. And I don't know why you didn't get a call from the ship. I'll ask official questions. I'm extremely sorry."

  The facial nerves were very well under control, as perhaps his were. He forgot, he feared, to adjust between languages. Between mindsets, he forgot to respond in the human sense. He forgot to use human expressions.

  "Jase." He switched to Mosphei' and, like an actor assuming a role, brought expression consciously to his face. "I didn't know. I'm going to find out why I didn't know. I know that atevi will be concerned that you didn't learn this in any proper way."

  "Can we use the word 'care' here? Are we finally permitted?"

  "In this, Jase, I assure you the staff would care."

  "Shed tears, I'm sure."

  "No." He refused to back up from the attack, and equally refused to attack back. "But making demands like that serves no one. — I'm sorry. I'm extremely sorry. I put you off and I'm sorry. I wish I'd been here. I am here now. Can I do anything?"

  "No. I've been keeping up with my studies." Jase's tone was light, his eyes distracted by something across the room. The wall, perhaps. Or a blowing curtain. "It's the only choice I have, isn't it?"

  "Is your mother all right?"

  Slight pause. Restrainedly, then: "I have no idea."

  "Damn. Damn, Jase. I will straighten out the phone situation."

  "I'd like to talk to my mother. Privately. If you can arrange that."

  He didn't know what to say. "I'll arrange something. As soon as I can. Do you want to speak to her tonight?"

  "If she's gotten to sleep, I'd rather not disturb her this late." The ship-folk had sensibly adjusted their day-night schedule to the Mospheira-Shejidan time zone. And it was still evening up there on the ship, as it was evening here, but he didn't argue that fine point with Jase, either.

  Excuse, he thought. And asked himself why, and with what motive, and didn't come up with charitable answers, a reaction he didn't trust in himself. He was angry. He didn't know why that was, either. He didn't think he was angry at Jase. Or the staff. Having just talked about his own home situation, he knew why he might be angry.

  He wasn't sure, though, why he was angry, or at what he could even be angry, and was far less certain that his anger would do any possible good to anyone.

  The servant came in, hesitated, and at a slight lifting of his hand, poured two more drinks.

  But Jase said, after the young woman had left, "I'll take mine to my room, if you don't mind, nadi. I'm feeling unsteady."

  Jase rose. Bren did. One part of him said in spite of Jase's evasions and in spite of his anger he should go over to Jase and put his arm around his shoulders. He should offer — something of an emotional support.

  But he didn't. As Jase never quite addressed him with the intimate form in Ragi, though he did it toward Jase.

  Jase had never made such gestures toward him in that interpersonally sensitive language. Maybe Jase didn't think he was of status to do it. Maybe there was another reason.

  Whatever it was, they'd never made such gestures toward one another, certainly not intruded so far as an embrace, between the only two humans on the mainland. He'd held out a hand to welcome Jase when he'd pulled him from the capsule and into the world. Jase had accepted that hand, but hadn't met him with the enthusiasm or the openness the transmissions from the ship had prepared him to expect.

  The one gesture, nothing more, from either side. And somehow they'd found no way to begin again. Not in six months.

  It seemed impossible to try in this situation, when sensibilities were raw-edged and, he admitted it, when he wasn't sure he'd mean any such move toward a greater closeness with Jase, because of an anger the causes of which he wasn't himself right now sure of.

  He stood there as Jase walked away and out the door.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 6

  « ^ »

  Maybe he should have made the try. Maybe, Bren thought, he should go after Jase all the same and make the gesture and try to sort out exactly why and at what he was angry, and why (he detected so, at least) Jase was so deeply angry, too.

  But at such a juncture, what he did could intrude on sensibilities and shove the situation beyond all reason. He might instead do something he could bring to Jase as a peace offering. He might take measures to calm the situation. He might try to ease the strain on Jase and then talk to him, once the anger had settled. In both of them.

  He saw the servant standing at the door, hands folded, waiting for his order, aware, perhaps that something was wrong.

  "Is nand'
Saidin still on duty?"

  "I believe she has retired, nand' paidhi, but I doubt very much she is asleep. Shall I call her?"

  "No. Is nadi Tano awake? Or nad' Algini?"

  "Both or either, nand' paidhi. Shall I call them?"

  "Do," he said; and stood sipping his drink until a quiet step and a shadow in the doorway advised him of presence.

  "Nadi?" Tano asked. Both of them had come, and entered the room at his implied invitation.

  "Nadiin," he said, intensely aware how they would blame themselves for a failure in information. "Jase says his father has died. He had this news from Mospheira, he says, four days ago, and complains he was not able to contact his mother on the ship because security couldn't clear a call to the ship or contact me. Are we able to remedy this?"

  "I will make immediate inquiry, nand' paidhi," Algini said, ever the proper, to-the-point one; and Tano, equally atop any business he was supposed to monitor: "The record shows the call from Mospheira. The staff has it on tape. It was in Mosphei'. Do you wish to hear it?"

  "I do." It was his business to. Someone had better find out what was going on, and how much else that message had contained, and he was the one who admitted to speaking the language. He was sure that certain atevi did, even that certain atevi close to him were staying up nights increasing their fluency at Jase's expense, while Jase persisted in resorting to human language, but with what accuracy atevi were understanding the biology behind the vocabulary, he was far from certain. "Did nand' Jase seem upset?"

  "That was not in the report, nadi. He stayed to his room a great deal, that was all. One phone call came to him from Mospheira, late in the evening, four days ago. No others are on the record."

  He didn't have enough information to cue them to report information they might not know they had.

  More, he had to be extremely careful. Everything at the interface of atevi responsibility and human emotions was difficult and subject to error. As long as he'd lived among atevi, he could guess one's man'chi toward a lord, and he knew the specific man'chi of Tano and Algini and others toward Tabini, but he knew very little of their family ties or how man'chi to a lord fit into man'chi toward a mother or a father. He'd heard Tano speak of his own father, and of a desire to have the man's good opinion, but he also knew that Tano had defied his father's wishes to pursue a Guild career. He'd had Tano recommend relatives for posts as 'reliable persons,' a reliability one could attribute to man'chi, and the fact that it wasn't biologically likely for treason to operate where man'chi existed.

  He knew that Damiri had defied her clan to associate herself romantically and politically (or should that be, politically and romantically) with Tabini, who was close to an ancestral enemy of her clan, a close neighbor in the Padi valley holdings, and certainly persona non grata with uncle Tatiseigi, the head of the Atageini clan. Antipathy on the part of a clan head (toward whom Damiri held man'chi) certainly hadn't daunted Damiri — but then, few things did.

  The one wisdom about atevi family relations that two centuries of paidhiin had gathered was that the bonds of affection that held a human family together were not only not present, they weren't biologically possible.

  Different hardwiring.

  Different expectations.

  Different familial relationships and different necessities.

  One didn't know, for instance, what an atevi child expected of his parents. Food and shelter up to a certain point, yes. The point of separation seemed to be about seventeen years, maybe twenty. That was all the accumulated experience could say. Anything else was rated speculative, in the textbooks. He himself tentatively theorized that as humans had to mature beyond emotional dependency on their parents, atevi had somehow to get out of man'chi toward their parents or the family unit would never mature. There had to be a psychological break, somewhere, for the culture to function beyond the family.

  "If this were an ateva who had heard this news," he asked the two closest of his companions and guards, persons who, if they were human, he would have called friends, "what would other atevi expect of him? Principally, what would other atevi expect him to feel, or do, under these circumstances?"

  "If relations with his father were good," Tano said, "then one would expect sadness, nand' paidhi. He would go to his household. He would bury his father. He would confirm man'chi within his house and within his associations."

  Confirm man'chi. Confirm man'chi. With atevi, it was not only an overriding emotion. It was the overriding emotion. A homing instinct under fire. The place you'd go. The person you'd rescue from a burning building.

  "In what manner can one confirm man'chi, nadi, if I may ask such a question? Please decline to answer if I cross some line of decency."

  "An expression, nand' paidhi. It's an expression. One visits the household. One remembers. One assembles the living members of the household, for one thing, to know where their man'chi may lie now that this man'chi is put away. The household has to be rebuilt."

  "The man'chi to the dead man is put away."

  "Into the earth, nand' paidhi, or into the fire. One can only have man'chi to the living."

  "Never to the dead?" He watched a lot of machimi plays, in the standard of which man'chi and its nuances was the pivot-point of treachery and action, double-crosses and last-moment decisions. "In the plays, nadi, this seems possible."

  "If one believes in ghosts."

  "Ah." It was a belief some atevi held.

  And more had believed in them, as a matter of course, in the ancient world of the machimi plays. Such a belief in the supernatural didn't include the two men present with him, he was quite sure. But belief in ghosts of course would tie directly into whether or not the dead could still claim loyalty.

  "Also," Algini said in his quiet way, "the living will exact a penalty from living persons who might have been responsible. This does not require a belief in ghosts. But in the old days, one might equally well exact a penalty of the dead."

  He was curious. It went some distance toward explaining certain machimi, in which there seemed to be some actions of venerating or despising monuments and bones, heaving them into rivers and the like.

  But it wasn't a solution for the problem he had. "Jase is upset," Bren said, "because he can't reach his home or assure himself his mother is well." One didn't phrase a question in the negative: atevi, if cued that one expected a negative, would helpfully agree it wasn't likely. "Would security be concerned for an ateva's actions under such a circumstance?"

  "If this death was due to another person," Algini said, "one would expect to watch him carefully."

  "Or if this death dissolved essential man'chi," Tano said, "A wife, for instance. Her clan would be free to act. A set of cousins ambitious to transfer man'chi to their line. The family could break apart."

  "Would he —" He knew these men well enough to ask about very delicate, ordinarily undiscussed, matters. "Would an ateva under such circumstances feel such man'chi to the cousins, say, if they succeeded in transferring the clan's man'chi to themselves and away from his father's line?"

  "Not necessarily," Algini said and, rare for him, a dark frown came to his face.

  That warned him that perhaps he'd touched something more than theoretical with Algini. Or perhaps just inquired into too delicate an area of atevi emotion. So he asked no further.

  And because it was necessary meticulously to inform the ones who guarded Jase: "Jase would like to go back to the ship to assure himself of his mother's welfare. This he of course can't do. He says he wished to call the ship and was prevented because, he says, he couldn't get through security to reach me to authorize it. I can only guess. He does follow rules and schedules meticulously. Perhaps this results from living on a ship in space. I don't know. And he may have been unwilling to face atevi with his emotions out of control — I've told him very emphatically not to do that. It may have prevented him from fully explaining his distress to security." It was a cold and an embarrassing thing, to try to dice human feelings
so finely that another mindset could grasp logically what was going on. "I would guess that he was already exhausted, either emotionally upset since I left or trying to achieve a good result — even my approval — on my return; and suddenly an emotional blow has hit him when he was alone, immersed in a strange language, surrounded by strange faces, and under my instruction not to react emotionally with atevi."

  "Ah," Tano said, and both atevi faces showed comprehension. Of what — God knew.

  "Remember," he said, "that this is a human being, and that this is not truly man'chi he feels but something as central to his being. Understand that he is under very extreme stress, and he's trying not to react. But I have serious questions, nadiin, about the propriety of humans on that ship toward him, who may have slighted him in a major way. I want to know whether the ship tried to contact him, I want to know where that message went if someone attempted to contact him, and why he had to hear this bad news finally relayed from the island, from Yolanda Mercheson."

  "To whom has he attributed this failure of information?" Tano asked.

  "I would assume, perhaps unjustly, to Manasi himself." Manasi was one of Tabini's security, who'd moved in to run the security office when he had Tano and Algini off with him. "He suspects atevi have withheld it from him. This is much more palatable to him than the thought that his people did. But whatever the truth is, whether it leads to atevi or to his ship, I need to know the truth, no matter how much truth I later decide to tell him."

  "Nadi Bren," Algini said, "we will find the answer. We received no call from staff regarding any such matter."

  "Nadiin," he said, "I have every confidence in you. I have every confidence in nand' Dasibi and in nand' Manasi. Please express it in your inquiry — please accuse no one. I leave it all to your discretion."