Precursor Read online

  “It’s very good of you,” he said. He was pleased. A measure of the times and the current size of his office. A subordinate must have passed it, so that she could actually surprise him with an import. His job had grown far, far beyond stamping import manifests.

  “With appropriate fruit juice?”

  “Thank you,” he said, as a glass… with unseasonable ice, decadence in the dowager’s opinion… turned up in a servant’s hand, and settled in place in front of him.

  Another servant presented a glass of the dowager’s own preference, one of those alkaloid stimulants that could kill a human, or make him wish it had. “So, so, nand’ paidhi, how fares your mother?”

  “Well. Very well. Complaining of my desertion on a holiday.”

  “The Independence Day.” Ilisidi showed herself amused, and well-informed. “Independence from us. What a curious holiday, under the circumstances.”

  “A historic, a traditional occasion.” The inference belatedly dawned on him, that there was in that human ship overhead another threat to Mospheiran independence. “Equally, Mospheirans secured their independence from the Pilots’ Guild all those centuries ago by flinging themselves onto the planet in parachutes. I assure you… there’s certainly no national urge even yet to rush into the arms of the Guild. Even those who wanted to go back to space have their doubts.”

  “When you first landed, atevi thought you’d fallen from the moon. Now the sun’s a star and the morning star a planet. What a strange world we’ve made! Try the relish. It’s from the garden at Malguri. I did inquire of its safety.”

  “A fond memory.” He did help himself. Relish and other pickles were exceptions to the rule of propriety, of kabiu: nothing but what grew or was customarily hunted during the season was kabiu. What was preserved as a condition of its recipe and served during a subsequent season was acceptable: such were liquors and other products of time and fermentation, which had no season but readiness. Likewise smoked or pickled meats.

  And the dowager would not be wrong about the alkaloid content. If she flatly meant to poison him, she would never, on a point of honor, assure him of its safety beforehand.

  The relish was, if peppery, quite good with the egg, that standard of atevi appetizers.

  “The sun is a star,” the dowager reprised, serving herself another two eggs and a dollop of relish, “and the Pilots’ Guild so mistrusted by the Mospheirans has now offended another species. So they say.” Old, old news; but in that statement the dowager set the topic of the encounter. She knew about the human mission; she was well-briefed. He formed the hypothesis she’d come across the continent to have supper with Jase; and now with him; and that Tabini couldn’t prevent her three-hour flight or her interference, but might not be pleased with it.

  “We don’t know that it was an offense the Guild committed, nand’ dowager. This strange species may have attacked the Guild for its own reasons.”

  “Ha. Simply ill-natured, do we believe? Humans launch out from their own star, lose their way, and come here—such is our great good fortune. They fall on our heads. Now they go out looking for their own misplaced planet and manage to offend unidentified neighbors. Given their record, I doubt it was simple bad luck.”

  “The Mospheiran government, frankly, shares that opinion. Though logically, one can’t exclude bad luck.”

  “They have no sense of felicitous design. Baji-naji.” That was to say, chance and fortune could overset the pattern, however good or bad. “And this frantic exchange of paidhiin? Acceptable to you?”

  “I’d like to hold Jason.” They were on diplomatic and personal thin ice. Tabini hadn’t asked yet. ’Sidi-ji asked, for her own reasons, which she had not divulged. He tried to deflect closer questioning on the exception he was about to advance with Tabini… if he could find a way through Tabini’s door. The dowager might be a resource, or fuel on a fire. “I’ll mourn his departure. I need his help down here.”

  “They don’t present us a successor. Just this fellow Cope, who’s made a nuisance of himself. Will they?”

  “I don’t know what they intend. One may come down with the next launch.” It was what they’d done with Mercheson.

  “They’ll debrief our Jason before they send the next one.”

  “I think that’s their intention.”

  “Understandable in them. Dare we take that motive for what it seems? —More to the point, do you take it that these ship-folk have interests in accordance with yours? I shall never expect they accord perfectly with ours.”

  “My interests don’t diverge far at all from those of the associations, and I don’t know, nand’ dowager, in all truth. Mospheira doesn’t know, either. No one does, not me, not Jase, no one but the officers of the Pilots’ Guild… and possibly even not all of those.”

  “Hereditary officers. Lords of their association. Ramirez?”

  “As a father to him. A stern father.” It didn’t mean quite what it did to a human, but it meant man’chi.

  “This business of being one of Taylor’s Children.”

  “Just so.”

  The servants took away the egg dish and replaced it with the seasonal meat, a large, fan-spined fish. It sat atop the platter staring at them from a bed of blue-green weed, but its body was a sculpted white pate dotted with small green fruits.

  The rule was generally to avoid blue foods and mildly suspect the white, but he trusted the dowager, and took a serving without question. A servant set a cruet of herb-flavored vinegar beside his hand, and he applied it.

  “Excellent.” A friend of the household could never take for granted the sacrifice of a life, however spiny, or the artistic efforts of a cook preparing the dish. “Truly excellent, nandi. My thanks and my admiration.”

  “Duly accepted, paidhi-ji.” Warmly said. “Now. Tell me this tale, not as you told it when we were ignorant of stars and shuttle ships. Tell me the tale as if this time I shall understand destinations. What is this business of Taylor’s Children?”

  “Taylor was the pilot, the first pilot. Phoenix set out centuries ago from the earth of humans to a station construction site, going to a star within sight of the earth of humans. But the ship suddenly flew askew, and turned up instead at a deadly dangerous star, out of fuel, or nearly so.”

  “Sabotage?”

  “It’s given it was an accident of subspace, one of those mathematical questions the Astronomer Emeritus—”

  The imperious wave of an elderly black hand. “So. Continue. The birth of the children.”

  “Proximity to the star would mean the early death of those who went outside the ship; but they had to acquire fuel. They used the construction craft intended for station construction, craft with little protection. Heroic persons went out, knowing the exposure would surely kill them. Indelicate as it is to say— they left their personal legacy in frozen storage, not out of vanity, but because if they were so lost, they wished to have a community of sufficient variety for a healthy community. They knew they were in trouble. They died in great numbers.”

  “And they gathered fuel to move the ship to safety.”

  “Even so.”

  “Here. And this Taylor-captain guided the ship safely to this harbor before he died.”

  “Yes.”

  Jason had been her guest yesterday, and he’d wager anything that Jason had told her the same tale in carefully compared detail. He stayed close to the canon.

  “So,” Ilisidi said, and had a bite of fish. “All those born of this legacy are named the sons and daughters of Taylor. And they had come to the earth of the atevi. Taylor died. The pilots wished to stay in space and search for home; the ordinary folk instead chose to land and become a problem to us.”

  “The Pilots’ Guild respected the rights of atevi not to be bothered or contacted. They wanted to move off to the red star, leaving no station about this planet beyond what they needed for a very small base. But the colonists didn’t agree. They saw a green planet much like their own. Certain ones leaped o
ff on the petal sails and fell into the world.”

  “To a welcome, after initial difficulties,” Ilisidi interjected, more expert than he in this phase of atevi history. “We were entranced with change and your technology. We became addicted to these offerings.”

  “While the ship left on its search, leaving some persons on the planet, others running the station. But as conditions grew harder on the station, and as the atevi did welcome the Landing, more and more humans came down.”

  “Increasing our good fortune,” the dowager interjected wryly.

  “So many left the station couldn’t function. They could shut it down and prepare it to wait, in which case it would take less damage, but shutting it down seemed to necessitate leaving. When the ship came back, after elapsed centuries… all the surviving humans were down here, and everything had changed.”

  “Yet the ship had had children. They populated the ship with this legacy.”

  “They rarely access it. When they do, they treat those children as special, outside the regular lines of descent. They don’t tell whose child they were, so as not to create any sense of preference in their history. They call them all Taylor’s Children.”

  “So Jase is a special person, of consequence within their association.”

  “A person they’re disposed to view as lacking associations. Not as an aiji lacks them, but born for a specific purpose. Captain Ramirez authorized the birth of a number of them… with ordinary mothers… for the return journey to this earth. They hadn’t known about the aliens yet. They were supposed to prepare themselves to contact the station; that purpose stayed. That’s why Jase studied languages. He said it was a hobby, but he wasn’t quite truthful at the start… not in that, not in a lot of things he later told me. He and the others… there were ten of them… they were purposed for something a lot happier than what Ramirez found when they received a distress call from the second station they’d built out there.”

  “Languages,” Ilisidi echoed, and from her deliberate tone, he knew she’d seen the flaw in the reasoning. “To greet their own descendants. Does the human language change so rapidly, then?”

  He had no answer to that. He and Jase had discussed the same question, had looked at Jase’s existence in ways Jase had never considered. Jase had said, There are factions aboard ship… and Jase had acknowledged some of those did not gracefully accept the current negotiations with the atevi.

  Ramirez had authorized the birth of the children, had had them encouraged into those very skills that would enhance their ability to negotiate… that Ramirez had planned the children to negotiate with the atevi from the start, that Ramirez had had the vision to see beyond human arrogance to welcome aid from any source available… that had been well within Jase’s understanding of his captain-father, and well within the needs of peace aboard ship that Ramirez would keep such a purpose to himself.

  But he couldn’t say that to Ilisidi. That was speculation of a nature he hadn’t even factual-basis enough to pass on to Tabini. But that Ilisidi, a veteran of subterfuge, had made the logical leap on her own… that he could well believe.

  “So. Well,” Ilisidi, her point made, continued. “With these strangely trained children in tow, they went to this other station which had called and which had suffered great damage in their absence.”

  “Exactly so. Ramirez questioned the station-folk there, and determined to come here, fall back to this base, thinking he’d find a large population and a thriving station. The ship was not happy in what it did find.”

  Not happy, yes, but that Ramirez had been surprised… that, he and Jase had decided, was highly unlikely.

  “One does imagine so.” Ilisidi silently finished a massive portion of the fish, and accepted a dish of spiced vegetables. “These are from the south. I’ve taken quite a fancy to them.”

  “A very wonderful presentation.”

  “—Does Mospheira continue to distrust the motives of the Pilots’ Guild? Or have they taken alarm at the idea of foreigners chasing the Guild here?”

  “Mercheson-paidhi tried to persuade them to cooperate fully. And to trust the Guild’s modern leaders. Especially Ramirez.”

  “Did she succeed in this persuasion?”

  “Not wholly.” He made up his mind to give Ilisidi a little information, information that might reassure her, and that Tabini wouldn’t mind her knowing. “The delegation that’s going is suspicious. The Guild will have to work to convince them. They didn’t expect to go this early.”

  “And now Trent Cope will attempt the same quick reconnaissance?”

  “I don’t know if you can call it that.”

  “And they take Jase.”

  “Just so. If I can’t find a way to persuade Tabini to rescind the order.”

  Ilisidi gave a laugh, a very rude laugh. It said her opinion of how likely Tabini was to backtrack.

  He tried further. She was an ally, if he could win her. “ ’Sidi-ji, the Pilots’ Guild would be fools either to offend the aiji or to deal with Mospheirans in any preference. Nature put the resources in Tabini’s hands.”

  “Nature,” Ilisidi scoffed.

  “So to speak,” he amended that. “But they already know they can’t get a thing from the Mospheirans but workers who speak their language. A considerable resource. What they don’t

  comprehend is the danger of having atevi and humans in close contact. We’ve warned them. They still don’t comprehend because it flies in the face of experience. People who live together a long time should grow closer. Not more angry.”

  “And the Guild originally was the party to respect atevi rights.”

  “Just so. But they’re desperate now. As a human, nand’ dowager, and speaking with all my understanding of the situation, I believe that desperation is real, and that it may drive them to fear atevi less than they ought, or to listen to Mospheirans who may not be well-informed Mospheirans. Above all else, I know Jase knows the truth; it’s valuable they listen to him, but if they get him up there, where he doesn’t have current contact with information, we’re left with Cope, who can’t hold his food down, and whom I don’t find agreeable; and with some other stranger they’re going to drop in our midst, which I don’t favor. There are aliens. There is a danger. There may be small omissions in that truth, but I haven’t lived with Jason for three years without knowing he’s more valuable to us than he gets credit for. If you can intercede with the aiji, do.”

  “Jason hasn’t lied to us. On that, everything rests.”

  He swallowed a bite that proved just a little large, and took a slow drink to correct it, trying not to let nerves show. They might win. They truly might win. “I have no doubt of him.”

  “Do you not?” She rapped the table sharply with her knuckles, shaking the liquid in the glasses and causing ice to shift in the pitcher. “Do you not?”

  He had not fortified himself against all her tactics. Some still worked, and this one could shake atevi out of their certainties.

  It made him think twice, however, how very, very much relied on Jason’s truth: how much of their information came from Jason; how all their confirmation with the paidhi on the island did agree… but in all of it… in all of it… trust figured prominently.

  “Nand’ dowager,” he said calmly, “I have asked myself that question for three years, the same I asked at the beginning. I know I’d entrust my life to him. But the responsibility I bear to the aiji and the association to be sure of the truth… doesn’t allow me to believe anything without question.”

  “And this Mercheson-paidhi, whose associations you don’t thoroughly know?”

  “Just so.”

  “I’d thought a human might have a more exotic answer regarding trust and confirmation.”

  “My own mother has associations I don’t thoroughly know, and consequently there are things I won’t tell her. Man’chi doesn’t apply, but gossip in the wrong places is a universal problem.”

  Ilisidi laughed, that short, sharp laugh that said so
meone had, after all, taken a turn she didn’t expect.

  “So does my grandson have associations of dubious connection,” Ilisidi said, still amused, and utterly serious. “Tatiseigi of the Atageini still rests uneasy. —Paidhi-ji, you never lose your edge.”

  “I treasure the dowager’s good opinion.” God, were the gift-servants in his own household informing, however indirectly, the aiji-dowager, as he well knew even Banichi and Jago were informing Tabini? “I hope still to justify it.”

  “Is your amorous bodyguard one of those items you don’t mention to your mother?”

  He blushed. He knew he did… but Ilisidi had been in on this romantic intrigue from the first night.

  “I try not to.”

  “Deceiving one’s own mother.” The fruit had disappeared. Ilisidi laid down her utensil and leaned her narrow chin on an aged fist. Golden eyes caught the light, wreathed in wrinkles. “I take it, then, she would still disapprove. On the other hand… is she celibate? Or would she tell you that?”

  His mother? He was shocked to think… no, she wouldn’t tell him. She was completely isolated, completely cut off from relationships outside the family… give or take Barb. She’d separated from his and Toby’s father and never had another man in her life that he knew. By now that was a fairly long record of no outside associations, but frankly, no, he didn’t know what his mother did when he wasn’t in town.

  Ilisidi laughed, salacious amusement that was her wicked delight in a still active sexuality… in which he was relatively sure Cenedi figured somehow. He never understood atevi sensibilities in that regard. They had a great reserve outside an association; an unnerving lack of verbal reserve within one—and he suspected he simply didn’t come wired to understand on what grounds she laughed—a fact which he was sure contributed to the joke.

  “Your face turns an interesting color,” she said.

  “I’m sure it does.” She’d learned the meaning of a blush: and in all the years of their association he hadn’t quite figured out the precise point on which his embarrassment both charmed and amused her. God knew, with ’Sidi-ji, there were far, far more dangerous relationships. And he always played the game… won her help, sometimes against very heavy odds.