Inheritor Read online

  "So are there any messages in?" he asked Jase, meaning messages from the ship, via the big dish at Mogari-nai.

  "The regular call from Yolanda."

  "So how is she, nadi?"

  "Fine."

  They spoke the atevi language in the exchange. Madam Saidin dropped by to put a note beside his plate.

  Join me after breakfast, it said. It bore Tabini's signature, was entirely in Tabini's hand, a rarity. Unless

  I

  there's urgency about your report. I shall expect you at the usual time.

  "No," he said with a glance up to Saidin. "Thank you, nadi. I can leave matters at that. I don't need to reply. This is a confirmation only."

  "News, nadi?" Jase asked.

  "An appointment tomorrow, with the aiji. Routine matters. — Although nothing's routine at the moment." He saw expression on Jase's face. Or had seen it. "Jase?"

  "No," Jase said. And drew a breath. "Glad to see a human face."

  Meaning he had an appointment and was bound out of the apartment and Jase was alone. Again.

  "The mirror gets old," he said to Jase with all sympathy, "doesn't it?"

  "You said I'd get past it. I frankly don't see how you've stood it alone."

  It wasn't the time to lecture Jase again about reliance on one's native tongue. Like it or not, one had to give up one's native tongue at least for a while if one wished to make that mental jump to full fluency. Jase couldn't give it up, because Jase was their source of technical words: Jase had to stay connected to the human language because Jase's job was to take concepts in shipboard engineering terms and teach him enough engineering and enough of the ship's slightly skewed-from-Mosphei' way of speaking to get it translated accurately enough for atevi engineers. He was having to deal far more in the human language than he ordinarily ever would on this side of the strait, and the back-and-forth was keeping him off his stride, too.

  But tonight everything he was picking up from Jase said that something major was wrong with that situation — or with some situation. Jase wasn't talking after that last glum statement. Jase took a sip of guaranteed-safe tea and dipped bits of seasonally appropriate meat into sauce one after another with studied mannerliness, not engaging with him on the issues.

  Damn, he was so tired. It wasn't just today. It was all the sequence of days before. It was the months before.

  It was Saigimi. It was the meeting tomorrow. He knew Jase had reasons. He knew Jase had been through his own kind of hell in isolation, and he felt sorry for his situation, he truly did, but he was suffering his own post-travel adrenaline drop, and had no mental agility left. He wasn't going to come across as sympathetic, humane, or even human, if Jase wanted to push him, and he didn't know whether he could postpone their business until the morning without offending Jase, but that was what he should do.

  Next course, the last course: Jase asked one servant for two bowls, baffling the young woman considerably.

  "Asso shi madihiin-sa," Bren said quietly. "Mai, nadi."

  "Mai, nadi, saijuri." Jase echoed him and made a courteous patch on the utterance, with good grace. Maybe, Bren thought, Jase was working through his mood and getting a grip on his emotions: he chose to encourage it.

  "Difficult forms," Bren said in Ragi. The conditional request and the irregular courtesy plurals, six of them, were to create felicitous and infelicitous numbers in the sentence. "You were never infelicitous."

  "One is pleased to hear so." The courteous answer. The flatly correct answer.

  The courtesy plurals weren't the easiest aspect of the language. Jase had tottered along thus far using the ath-mai'in, commonly, the children's forms, which advised any hearer that here was an impaired speaker and no one should take offense at his language. Damn some influential person to hell in Mosphei' and it was, situationally at least, polite conversation. Speak to an atevi of like degree in an infelicitous mode and you'd ill-wished him in far stronger, far more offensive terms and might find yourself filed on with the Guild unless someone could patch the situation.

  "I just can't get the distinctions," Jase said bitterly. "I'm guessing. You understand me?"

  "It's like the captain," Bren said, drawing his inspiration from sailing-ships and human legend. "Never call the captain mister. Right? And the more important the person, the greater the politeness-number: just err on the side of compliment."

  "I know it's a melon!" was the approximation of what Jase retorted.

  Jase clearly wasn't in a mood for mild corrections. A servant was fighting laughter.

  "You know it's important," Bren corrected him, deadpan, deciding on confrontation.

  "Damn," Jase said, and pushed his plate back in the beginnings of what could become an outburst. Bren thought, having grown tolerably cold-blooded over the course of several months of Jase's temper-fits, thank goodness he'd gotten almost to dessert. He'd been hungry. And damn Jase anyway.

  "Jase." He attempted diplomacy. "This is the rough part. This is really the roughest part. I swear to you. The language comes to you pretty quickly after this. You've done a marvelous job. You've done in six months what takes much more than that on Mospheira. You've done a brilliant job."

  "I don't see how you do it! I can't add that fast!"

  "It develops."

  "Not for me!"

  "It will come. Maybe you'd better let me do the translations for a few days and let me muddle along with the engineering and develop the questions I really need to ask. Going back and forth is confusing. There comes a time you should be totally inside the language. You seem to have reached it."

  Jase looked aside. "Not all I've reached."

  "Well, I'm back for a while," Bren said. "And if you can just get the courtesy forms down, maybe we can go together on the next trip out. Would you rather?"

  "I'd rather be on my ship, nadi!"

  "It won't ever happen if you break down, nadi. And you know that."

  "Maybe," Jase said, with a slump to the shoulders and a sadness he'd not heard. It was defeat. He'd not seen Jase defeated. Jase turned quietly back to the table, drew a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and said: "I apologize, nand' Bren."

  The servants served the next course, a light fruit ice. Jase had two spoonfuls and wanted a drink to go with it.

  "Serve us the liqueur, nadiin-ji," Bren said quietly, "in the sitting room. We can open the windows and sit and breathe the fine spring air. The workmen are through for the day, are they not? We can tolerate the paint."

  "Indeed, nand' paidhi," the response was. "And the paint smell is much abated. One will advise nand' Saidin, nandiin-ji."

  He rose from table, waited for Jase and walked with him to the formal sitting room where other servants appeared, opening the jalousies and letting the night air waft through.

  It was on the verge of cold air that billowed the gauze curtains wide. But their chairs were near a comfortable gas-fired stove, wasteful notion, and the maids gave them lap robes and glasses of a liqueur like brandy.

  "Do you want to talk?" Bren asked. "Jasi-ji?"

  "I'm having trouble-with-a-neighbor," Jase said.

  "You mean trouble-in-the-house," he guessed.

  They were alone now in the room. "I am a fool," Jase began. Possibly he meant awkward. The words sounded alike. But Bren forbore to suggest so or to correct him further: he'd been through sessions like that, and had sympathy for someone trying to collect his thoughts in another language. "May we speak Mosphei', please?"

  "If you wish." He spoke in that language. "What's the matter?"

  There was silence. A long moment of silence in which Jase breathed as if air had gone short in the room. "I'm not like you. I don't know if I can take this."

  "Only two other people on Mospheira are like me," Bren said mildly, "and the staff completely sympathizes with your mistakes. They admire your tenacity. They shouldn't laugh, but it's very well-intentioned. If they didn't laugh, you should worry."

  "You mean it's all right if they think I'm a foo
l."

  "If you were not a member of the household they wouldn't laugh. They call you Jasi-ji. They wish to please you. That's progress. You've worked very hard and come a long way. They respect that. Dealing with complete aliens to their way of life is comparatively new for this staff. It's not something nature or their culture equipped them very well to do. They've never met strangers, either."

  "Can I be blunt? Can I be terribly blunt? I don't care. I don't want to live here. I want off the planet. I want to go back to my ship. If I have to stay here I'll die. I don't like it. I know I'm not supposed to use that word, but I can't take it here. I do like. I do dislike. I'm cold half the time. I'm hot the rest. The light hurts my eyes. The smells bother me. The food upsets my stomach. And I'm sorry if it's funny among the staff, there was a flying thing in my room — I didn't know it wasn't poisonous."

  "This morning?"

  "It doesn't matter."

  "It's spring. Flying things do come to the lights. That's informational, not a criticism. If they laughed, it was funny, Jasi-ji. And probably your reaction was. They do not mean you ill."

  "You say. I made a fool of myself!"

  "And I'm sorry to state the obvious, but you have no choice — you have no viable choice but to smile and be pleasant. You knew when you came down here with no return that it wouldn't be easy. I know the exhaustion that sets in when nothing you touch or deal with is the same. I know what you're going through."

  "You can't know! You were at least born to a planet! I wasn't! I don't like this, and I don't care that the language can't accommodate like and dislike, it's what I feel!"

  "Possibly I can't imagine." He thought, and didn't say, and then did: "But I can't go home either, Jase, as I'm sure you've overheard at some time in your stay here, so be a little easy on me, if you can find it in you. I can't go home, and if we get this ship flying some u , time this next couple of years, you can go back. And you'll be a hero and I won't, not among the people that I was born with. So don't say I don't know at least something about how you feel."

  Jase wasn't prepared to grant that point. He saw that in Jase's angry expression, and didn't push the point.

  It was training. He was always professional, always rational, and when good reasons made him want to get up, drag Jase out of the chair and pound Jase's head against the wall, he didn't. This was, he reminded himself, a man capable of gentle humor and lightning wit, though neither was in evidence tonight.

  "I'm telling you," Jase said, "I don't know if I can take it. I don't know that any more, Bren."

  "And you know that it's not only you in danger if you cave in. So you won't. That's all. You won't."

  "I can't exist here and not talk to human beings except on a radio!"

  That stung. That really rather stung, right in the area of his own self-doubts. Bren sat there quite still and told himself there was nothing emotionally significant to him in Jase's unthought remark.

  But to the diplomat, it was significant information regarding Jase's view of him.

  And being the diplomat, he didn't bring that slip to Jase's attention. Pointing out that Jase might have a bias against the natives, including humans on Mospheira, was an egg which, the atevi proverb had it, once cracked, had to be eaten.

  And, in truth, it was possible he himself didn't wholly trust the Pilots' Guild, the old human distinction between crew and passengers on the ship. The crew had once maintained the passengers didn't have a vote, until the descendants of the crew needed the descendants of the passengers for dangerous and vital work.

  There was a lot of history between the long-ago passengers and the crew; and a lot at stake for the ship in that interface. The Pilots' Guild had never wanted the Landing, and had given in on the issue only grudgingly and in the confidence the project would have no support from the station management. The ship had surely expected to return to a spacefaring civilization with a well-maintained station, maybe with the original landing party dead; but not what they'd met — no station presence, no launch capacity, and a thriving planetary colony with very touchy relations with the native atevi.

  "I understand your frustration," he said finally, and maybe Jase never realized his slip, but damn sure if Jase were taking the tests to enter the Foreign Studies program over on Mospheira, he'd have washed out, right there, first for making the slip, and then for not realizing it.

  Though, again, maybe Jase did realize. Once you learned, atevi-style, to disconnect your face from your thoughts, you grew harder and harder to track in human terms.

  And old friends in the human world grew harder and harder to keep.

  "I know," Jase said. "I know that you do, Bren. But —"

  Jase left that statement unfinished.

  "You may never be what I am," Bren said. "I say that with no arrogance at all. You may not want to be. But your way to space has to go through atevi construction workers, to whom the paidhiin must be polite and infallibly encouraging, and it has to go through Tabini-aiji, to whom the paidhiin must be useful, and we can never, ever forget either fact."

  "I try. God, I'm trying."

  "I know you are."

  "Bren — Bren, tell me the truth. Tell me the honest truth. When that spacecraft goes up, am I really going to go with it?"

  What in hell brought that on? he asked himself. "Who said otherwise?" he asked.

  "I just want to hear it."

  "There'll be test flights. But when it's proven safe, you'll go."

  "Dependent on the aiji's permission, of course."

  "He'll let you go."

  "How do I know that?"

  "Well, outside of the fact he said so — which is considerable assurance — he's investing quite a lot in your education. This place. The training. Why shouldn't he want you on the job translating to the ship?"

  "I might be a hostage."

  "It's not the aiji's style. It wouldn't be dignified."

  "He did with Hanks."

  "Say he knows the Mospheiran government. It's different. He chose not to shoot her."

  "I don't see the difference. What about when he wants something from my people?"

  "Have you had a hint he does?" |r- - "Don't be naive, Bren."

  "Whatever brought this up?"

  "I just want to know there's going to be an end to this!"

  "It doesn't seem to me you're being reasonable. Why do you think he wouldn't let you go?"

  "Look — I want to get out of this apartment. Who do you have to ask?"

  Maybe Jase wouldn't have washed out of the program. The paidhi, experienced in diplomacy, nearly fell into that little pitfall.

  "I can take you wherever I like."

  "Then why not on this last trip? Why not on the next?"

  Because it wasn't that simple. But Jase wasn't in a reasoning mood. "You go nowhere until you learn the verb forms." That set it at some distance. "And until you don't make statements as rash as that you just made about our hosts."

  "The hell with the verb forms!"

  First the disorientation, then the anger. He'd been there, too. At least Jase wasn't fool enough to damn Tabini. "You can die of old age on this planet if we mistranslate a design spec and the program fails. You could die sooner if you don't understand culturally where you're likely to find security wires. You can die if your insults to the aiji disturb the peace of this country. Or you can sit idle and become a ward of the state while I do your work. These are serious choices. It is not 'to hell with the verb forms.' Your choices otherwise are all unpalatable."

  He'd made Jase mad. Real mad. But Jase didn't get up from his chair and stalk from the room as he'd done once last autumn.

  "You do it even in human language," Jase said, "don't you?"

  "What?"

  "Nadi," Jase said in measured tones, in Ragi, and with no expression whatever, "one understands my options to be balanced with a felicitous fifth choice."

  "That being?"

  "The one you wish: my compliance, nadi."

  He had posed
it in a foursome, infelicitous four, when three, the human cultural choice, was felicitous. And Jase had at least felt it. "Good. Very good. You're catching on."

  "Nand' Saidin has assigned a servant to assist me. And I have worked, nadi. I work very long hours because I hope for a release from this confinement and a sexual assignation with my job."

  He didn't laugh. He didn't let his face twitch. "An opportunity."

  Jase's face went red.

  "Yes, nadi. An opportunity."

  "I'm encouraged, nadi-ji, none the less. And I shall make every effort to include you in the next itinerary. Jase, it will get easier."

  "How do you stand it?"

  A deep breath. A sip of the liquor. "Stubbornness. I had alternatives early on. Now there aren't any. You do what you have to."

  "You could quit. You could go back."

  "I'd have Deana Hanks for my successor."

  "Does that matter? Ultimately you're one man. After you, things will be what they'll be. Does that matter?"

  "Yes, it damn well matters. This is my job."

  The conversation was depressing him. He didn't want to discuss his own situation. He didn't think it would help.

  "You have people harassing your family," Jase said.

  "Where did you hear that?"

  Jase had a troubled look. "I'm not deaf. And, as you say, I do pick up things from the staff now."

  "My family's situation isn't the official situation. There is a difference, Jase, and the ship needs to know that. Theoretically —" Theoretically the government was looking for the perpetrators. But it never found them. The police never caught anyone. And he had to ask himself how long before he had to hold international politics hostage to the threats against his family and get Tabini to demand something be done.

  It was what the perpetrators wanted. It was exactly what they wanted. It would give them the leverage to threaten the government and become noisier than they were. And he tried to deaden his nerves and not react when he got news that upset him.

  "Theoretically —" Jase said. Possibly Jase didn't know that word.

  He'd not wanted, for one other thing, to lose his credibility in a descent into name-calling and accusations. He'd never wanted to bring the whole of the stresses on him into question in the household here: it would raise concerns even with the staff. But maybe Jase was able to understand the complexity of the constraints on him. Maybe he'd been around atevi long enough not to draw wrong conclusions and maybe it was time to lay some of the truth on the table, if Jase was listening behind doors. He changed to Mosphei'.