Explorer Page 9

  He gave a wry smile. “I shall, nand’ dowager.” Half-frozen in the temperature the dowager favored, he took it for leave to go.

  “Don’t coddle that boy,” she snapped.

  “Yes, aiji-ma.” He reached the door, slipped out. Servants, waiting all this time, breaths frosting in the chill, conducted him back through the labyrinth to the foyer.

  Banichi and Jago had passed the brief interval at tea with Cenedi—doubtless the eccentricities of the ship-aijiin had been the topic of the hour. And likely the dent in the hall had been a small issue. Last week it had been a spring-gun, and a sailing-plane launched from a slingshot prior to that.

  “I need to speak with Gin, nadiin-ji,” he told them, once they stood in the warmth of the main corridor. I’ll call her, he’d almost said, meaning the intercom. He’d been an hour upstairs and that unacceptable notion just leapt out. He thought instead about going to her office, but that venue was not as secure, and if he was going to violate Sabin’s clearly expressed wishes for secrecy, he wanted not to risk spreading the news to Gin’s team. “Suggest to her staff she would be welcome in a social call.”

  “Asicho hears,” Jago said.

  “One will advise Narani,” Banichi added.

  Done, then. His arrangements moved with many more parts, but well-oiled, efficient. A dinner event of adequate size and service would happen if Ginny Kroger’s staff and his managed to communicate. He could imagine it. Yo! Gin! It’s the atevi, gracelessly shouted to Gin’s office, would get a cheerful Mospheiran answer: Sure I’ll come. What time?

  Mospheirans viewed themselves as fussily formal.

  They walked back to his apartment, where he shed the coat in favor of a dressing-robe. He was able to sit down and take notes, while invitations to Gin percolated through the vents, and while Banichi and Jago consulted Asicho in the security station, catching up on any untoward bit of business that might have gone on—the dent seemed the notable item on five-deck. He made a file, meanwhile, out of the upstairs conference, neatly indexed for points of particular interest, robotically translated, down to the point where the mindless machine couldn’t tell the difference between like words and where his staff couldn’t be expected to figure the meaning.

  Noon passed. He skipped lunch. Jago brought him the transcript of the verbal exchanges upstairs, and he traded them Jase’s tape.

  “There’s not too much to translate here,” he said, “but index it carefully, nadi-ji.”

  “Yes,” Jago said, and added, just as the door opened. “One believes that will be Gin-nadi and one of her staff.”

  “Excellent,” he said. They hadn’t disturbed him with the report, but the mission was accomplished. And as Narani showed Ginny into his makeshift study, Jago deftly picked off the aide and requested him, in passable Mosphei’, to come for a separate, far less informative briefing.

  “It’s all right,” Ginny assured her aide, who had to be used by now to the concept that when lords talked, aides made themselves invisible.

  “Tea, Rani-ji,” Bren requested. “Do sit, Gin. I take it you’ve heard a bit from my staff.”

  “At least the topic and the source.” Ginny settled—sixtyish, no different than he’d first met her: thin, gray, with an inbuilt frown that hadn’t been an instantly endearing feature when they’d first met. Nor had the habit of challenging him. He’d come to treasure that bluntness, and her. “I take it the senior captain isn’t supposed to know we’re talking.”

  “She knows she won’t prevent us talking. But it is sensitive.”

  “Our problem or hers?”

  “Both. I think in this we ought to accommodate her. If this does get out at the wrong moment, it could cause problems.” Narani provided the tea, aromatic, safe for humans, tinged with fruit and spice. “Thank you, Rani-ji. We’ll manage.”

  “Nandi.” Narani politely withdrew—not the microphones that assured everything would be available for reference, but withdrew, at least, his visible presence. Ginny assuredly knew they were bugged, and came here without objection: it was just procedure, and she came.

  And came, not infrequently, for the company the stuffy Mospheiran notion of hierarchy didn’t give her within her small technical staff. Back on Mospheira, or in Shejidan, one held short, sharp meetings. Onboard ship, with far less diversion—meetings lasted, especially in the atevi section. Lasted through the afternoon, if need be. With tea and refreshments.

  “So?” Ginny asked him, and he told her in great detail.

  “Lied to the crew, too,” Ginny said with a shake of her head. “Lied to the Guild, lied to Jase—lied to everybody. Not surprising.”

  “On Ramirez’s side, there was some reason. It was a useful lie. And one Ramirez could have predicted would give him maximum maneuvering room with us. But still—”

  “But still. But still. But still.” Ginny, the guest, lifted her cup for a refill. They’d gone through one pot and were on their second. “You know, you always wonder what things would be like if there weren’t these diversions into deception. Unvarnished truth never seems the ship’s first recourse. The expectation that the crew would be rational. The expectation one’s allies might just realize that ship command hasn’t told the whole truth on any major point in the last three hundred years . . . I mean, don’t they figure we’d figure, sooner or later? That crew would?”

  Bren poured the bottom of the pot for himself. “I think they figure we’ll figure they’ll be lying and they’d only confuse everyone if they told the truth.”

  “Point,” Ginny agreed. “But from the absolute start. From the very start of them going in, Ramirez, faking that image. Damn him. Chasing aliens, for God’s sake. And he’s the good guy.”

  “We assume he was on the side of the angels. Jase assumes he was. These days, Jase isn’t any more sure of that than we are.”

  “Hell on Jase, stuck up there with Sabin-bitch for company. You think he can get those other records?”

  “We’re moving ship tomorrow. He’s sticking close to Sabin. He says he’ll try.” Jase didn’t know a thing about ops, or rather, knew as much as he’d been able to pick up by hearing, but he’d never so much as been on the bridge for a look around before being named captain by the aforesaid Ramirez. “I won one thing. I’ve asked—insisted—both the paidhiin should be on the bridge at arrival in system.”

  “And Sabin said?”

  “Oh, she’s not totally in favor. But she agreed.”

  “Good God.”

  “Sabin is not optimistic about this mission.”

  Ginny sipped the dregs of her tea. “I insist on optimism at this point. I’m ready for the alternative—at least the one that gets us out of there fast. But I hope there’s fuel waiting for us and my robots and my staff don’t have a thing to do but connect the lines and suck up the good news and load survivors. At a certain point I don’t care what Jase’s ancestors did. I want to get home. I want to win this.”

  A lengthy mining operation out in a stellar wilderness was one alternative. There were far worse ones to contemplate.

  Like running straight out into alien guns.

  “Let’s hope,” he said. “Let’s hope for a fast, simple homecoming at the other end.”

  “It’s springtime back home,” she said meditatively, Mospheiran-like pouring herself another cup. “Did you know? Tourists on the north shore. Nice little bar in Port Winston. Orangelles. That’s what I imagine. Orangelles, orangettes, limonas and chi’tapas. You can smell them in the air.”

  Fruit flavors. Flowers. Orchards in bloom.

  “I’ll settle for salt air and the waves,” he said, since they were indulging fancy. Best air on earth. Best sound in the world. In his memory, he discovered, it was less Mospheira’s north shore and more the sound of his own cliff-shadowed beach, a strip of white sand under the balcony wall, a little floating pier, lord Geigi’s huge boat tied up there.

  And the faces. And the voices. Bren-ji, they’d call him. And they’d all understand when he
wanted to go barefoot at low tide.

  But they were there. He was here. Lord Geigi was running the station they’d come from, trying to keep relations between atevi, Mospheira, and the ship’s technical mission functioning smoothly. A vacation at his own seaside estate was a pipe dream.

  “I’ll take a sunset on the beach,” Ginny said cheerfully. “Mind, no tourist shops. I erase those.”

  “Oh, we’re editing.”

  “Privilege of being out here in hell’s armpit. There’ll be this nice little bar, white fence, blooming vine—chi’tapas petals on a sea breeze, while I’m at it, so sickening-sweet you could just choke. Sunset, just one of those orange ones.”

  “Touch of pink,” he said.

  “Clouds and sails. Lights of the boats on the water, right at twilight.”

  “I’ll go with that.” He liked that image. It wasn’t really maudlin. Ginny wasn’t a maudlin sort. She edited that out, right along with the tourist shops and their shell boats and paper flowers. In favor of chi’tapas. “I’ll give you one. Big stone fortress on a stony hill. Huge wall and a gate. The ground’s so steep grass won’t grow in a solid mass, just sort of little shelves of grass and bare ground between. Thorny brush. And it’s one of those gold sunsets above the hill. There’s light in the windows, and there’s supper waiting, and you’re riding in on mecheita-back.”

  “You’re riding in,” Ginny said with a laugh. “I’m walking on two feet.”

  “Most dangerous place to be.” Mecheiti had fighting-tusks, short ones, and didn’t mind stepping on a pedestrian or knocking him flat, at very least. When the herd went, the individuals went, the dreadful fact of an atevi cavalry charge—unstoppable as an avalanche; forget steering. “But there’s roast something or another for supper—”

  “Oh, stop. I’m going to die. Roast, with gravy.”

  “Brown gravy.”

  “Hot bread. Fruit preserves and real butter.”

  “Egg pudding. With chi’tapas.”

  Sigh.

  “We’ll get back,” Ginny promised him doggedly. “We’ll get back. I can’t deliver you roast and gravy in a castle, but I’ll buy you dinner at Arpeggio.”

  “Date.”

  “Jago’s not possessive?” Slow wink from a woman as apt as Ilisidi to be his grandmother.

  “Totally practical. Well, mostly.” It was good to exchange human-scale jibes and threats. He’d come very much to appreciate this woman’s steady, slow-fuse humor in recent years. “All this talk of food. God. Want to drop in for dinner?” He’d halfway thought Ilisidi might propose a supper on this eve of change. But she hadn’t. Staff hadn’t contacted staff, which was how lords avoided awkward situations. “Can’t promise roast and gravy either.”

  “Deal. Absolutely. Your cook—your food stores—I don’t know what you do to it, but it sure beats reconstituted egg soufflés and catsup.”

  “Don’t say catsup near Bindanda’s egg dishes. He’ll file Intent.”

  “Anything for an invitation. Can Banichi and Jago be there? I’ll practice my Ragi.”

  “Delighted. You might have Sidi-ji as a fellow guest; and we might end up there, instead, but I swear you’ll get dinner. Trust me.”

  “Either will be glorious. Believe me.”

  A dinner.

  It posed a pleasant end to a day that overlooked a sheer drop. He hated the ship moving. He hated that whole phase of their travel.

  He hated worse the anticipation this time. He needed company, he found. He pitied Jase. He wished he could find the means to get him back—if only for an hour.

  But hereafter Jase belonged to the ship. Had to. That was the way things had worked out . . . at least for the duration.

  4

  In the end it was his cook in collaboration with the dowager’s, and a table set in mid-corridor—anathema to ship safety officers—and both staffs and the lords of heaven and earth at table. Pizza seemed the appropriate offering, a succession of pizzas, with salad from the ship’s own store, and atevi lowland pickles, and the dowager and her staff delighting in salty highland cheese on toast. The aiji’s heir adored pizza, and was on very best behavior. A new hanging adorned the hall, which had had all its numerology adjusted for the occasion. Cajeiri’s reputation was safe.

  There was adult talk, translated, and a fair offering of liquors, and a warm glow to end a rare evening.

  “An excellent company,” Ilisidi pronounced it.

  “One applauds the cooks,” Cajeiri piped up—an applause usually rendered at the main course, but it was still polite and very good behavior, and entirely due.

  Bren offered his parting toast. “One thanks the staffs that lighten this voyage—for their cleverness, their hard work, their unfailing invention and good will.”

  “Indeed,” Ilisidi seconded his offering.

  “I also thank all persons,” Ginny said—in Ragi, a brave venture, “and one offers sincere respects to the lords of the Association and to the aiji’s grandmother and to the aiji-apparent.”

  That called for reciprocal appreciations, before they went to their separate sections and their several apartments.

  Over all, Bren said to himself, it was like the voyage itself—an astonishing event, a mix of people on best behavior and divorced from those things of the world that usually meant diplomats working overtime to take care of the agitated small interests. An event that would take a month to set up—they managed impromptu. They had very little to divide them, at least on this deck.

  Pizza, that food of sociality and good humor, had been the very thing.

  A social triumph.

  The dowager had genteelly remarked on the change in the hangings, without remarking on the dent. Cajeiri had surely realized she knew, or he was not her great-grandchild.

  Ginny had gotten her company of engineers through an evening mostly in Ragi, without a single social disaster and even with a triumph of linguistic achievement at the end. She’d likely polished that speech for hours.

  And, as Cajeiri had very aptly pointed out, the joint efforts of the two staffs had turned out a success. In a long and difficult service aboard, there had to be some moments to cheer, and this was one.

  We should have done this before, he thought, and wished Jase had been able to come down. That would have made the evening perfect.

  But Jase had had—one hoped—a night’s sleep by now, if Jase dared sleep. It was near the end of Sabin’s watch.

  One day, one very long day, at the end of which, guests all departed to their separate venues, Bren could sit in his dressing-gown and review his notes, by a wall on which two potted plants had run riot. Gifts from home, those were. They’d seemed to grow with more vigor during ship-moves. Humans didn’t like the state they entered, but the plants thrived, given water and food and light enough.

  He read until he found his eyes fuzzing, then took to bed. Jago came to bed shortly after and they made love . . . well . . . at least that was what Mospheirans called it.

  Atevi didn’t. Jago didn’t. He didn’t care and she didn’t. There was no safer companion, no one who’d defend him with more zeal, no bedfellow as comfortable in a long and difficult night. She came to distract him and herself, and it worked. He did sleep.

  And waked, and finding Jago asleep, he slept again, thinking muzzily of station corridors and of the petal sails of his ancestors, dropping down and down through the clouds of a scantly known world, onto atevi struggling to master the steam locomotive.

  God, who’d have thought, then, where they’d all be, now?

  “Stand by,” a voice said at oh-god in the morning. “Ship-move in one hour.”

  Now? They weren’t waiting until watch-end? It was Jase’s watch. The ship didn’t move on Jase’s watch. But the robot maintained night lighting. It had to be.

  Sabin was likely awake to supervise. And it was Jase’s techs and officers that needed, one surmised, to exercise their skills in—for the first time this year-long voyage.

  “Shall we
be on duty, Bren-ji?” Jago asked out of the pitch darkness.

  “One hardly knows what we could do,” he said, and then did figure what they could do with an hour to wait, because they couldn’t go out into the corridors, rousing staff to risk their necks.

  At the end of that hour the count went to audible numbers, and he and Jago counted, and tried to time themselves to the ship’s curious goings-on.

  It felt strange when the ship did go. It made a giddy feeling, and after that life went on, just a shade light-headedly.

  “It’s very strange,” Jago murmured.

  “Well, if anyone asks, we can say we did it.” Bren burrowed his head into her shoulder, and tangled unbraided hair, gold and black. He had the illusion of the verge of downhill skiing. It was like that.

  Top of the hill. Big long slope below. Biting cold. Right now he was warm, but if he got out of bed and moved about, he’d be cold—everyone was, continually, when space was folded and the ship was where things from the workaday universe didn’t like to be.

  Space did fold. That was what Jase said. He didn’t understand it, but atevi mathematicians were intrigued.

  Long, long slope.

  Downhill on the mountain. A streamer of white and a whisper of snow under skis.

  Toby would be on his heels.

  Except he and his brother Toby had left the mountain a long, long time ago.

  A world ago. Their mother had been in hospital when he’d left the world, uncertain whether she’d live. The aiji had called him to duty and he’d gone, leaving Toby to deal with the world . . . as Toby did and had done, all too often. As Toby’s wife and kids did and had done, but it grew harder and harder. Another kind of steep, steep slope, and he couldn’t help Toby or his mother, and he couldn’t patch things, and he couldn’t turn back time.

  He was lost, and confused for a while, and seemed to dream. The world became a veil of spider-plant tendrils, branching to more and more little worlds, and he wasn’t sure which one he wanted. But one of them Jago was in, and that was where he went.