Destroyer

  “Yes!” Cajeiri said, that disconcerting atevi yes, absolute, expectant, and in this instance, exultant. The topic was closed, deal done. The paidhi and he had a small secret. God help him.

  “Young aiji,” Bren murmured by way of parting courtesy, ducked his head and escaped out the service access into the brighter light and comparative breath-strangling heat of the dowager’s foyer.

  There was frost on his coat sleeves. His fingers would not bend.

  “Bren-ji?” Jago was there, distressed for his condition, glowering at Ilisidi’s man, who quickly shut the door as the shivers seized him.

  “Perfectly fine,” Bren said, trying not to let the shivers reach his voice. “I had to delay to advise the heir his festivity may be deferred. There was negotiation.” A gasp for warm air, which seemed heavy as syrup, difficult to get into his lungs. He had dealt with Tabini-aiji, and marveled how often Tabini had had the better of them. The skill was evidently inheritable. He succeeded in drawing a whole breath. “I shall call on Gin-aiji, too, nadiin-ji. A matter of courtesy.”

  “Frozen through,” Banichi said, disapproving the staff that had not found a way to get him through the space-chilled corridor. Courtesy even yet would have fortified him with hot tea, if he asked, but he waved a disorganized protest, wishing no delays in his business. He had his thoughts collected, more or less, and staff’s energies were as short in supply as drinkable tea and candy, in these latter days of the voyage.

  But on his way out of the dowager’s domain, paying automatic courtesies to staff, he kept ticking off in his head the little list of necessary duties, the people who needed to know, in his small society aboard a ship with over five thousand humans, all of whom knew his face, but of whom he only knew a handful.

  Gin Kroger—Dr. Virginia Kroger—was their robotics expert, chief of robotics engineering, essential to their success, once upon a time, and glad to be completely useless on the way home. Gin-ji, as the Ragi language had it, nowadays spent her time at her computer, designing and tinkering, as she put it, like a teenager, enjoying a year of unprecedented leisure to create and hypothesize instead of supervise and shepherd scholarly grant requests through committees.

  She designed one hell of a race car, that was certain, and the design wars and the toy car races between her engineers and his atevi staff had drawn bets from ship crew as well as bets from her own staff and the two atevi households. If explosives had been part of the rules, no question Banichi and Cenedi would carry the day—but it was sheer speed and agility, involving an obstacle course through several blocked-off corridors, so it was even odds who would win this round. The trophy, an un-drunk bottle of brandy adorned with ribbons, had gone back and forth numerous times.

  And dared he recall that it was not alone Cajeiri’s birthday that was upset by this arrival? Bets were already laid. A great deal of planning had been done. The bottle had sat in Gin’s office for two weeks. There had to be vindication.

  On down the hall, past the atevi-zone security doors by the lift, and through a set of doors to the right, they reached a hall quite happy in its humanly linear arrangements, a hall that lacked compensatory wall-hangings to keep the place harmonious and the ship safe, and instead had the racing odds taped up, the whole record of events.

  Both the human and the atevi wings of five-deck society lived by numbers and design, each in their own way.

  There was no guard, no sentry. He knocked on Gin’s door. “News,” he called out. “News, Gin.”

  In the splendid informality of Mospheiran ways.

  The door opened.

  “I heard!” Gray-haired, age-impervious pixie Gin flung her arms about him—went so far as to pat Banichi and Jago on the arm, no matter the visible twitch of hair-triggered nerves, likely in their apprehension she might hug them. “I heard!”

  “They say we’re dropping out extremely close to the station,” he said. “I hope this is good news. Jase stopped here, too?”

  “He called, at least. Come in. Everybody come in. Can I get you a sandwich?”

  It wasn’t that large a cabin, but Gin was already hosting Jerry and Barnhart, amid the detritus of dinner.

  “We’ve eaten,” he said.

  “Well, you can certainly drink. We should crack that bottle.”

  “I suppose you should. You have it.”

  “Pour him one. Pour them one,” Gin said, intending Banichi and Jago to join them.

  “No, in all good will, nand’ Gin,” Banichi said. “We shall stand. You won quite fairly.”

  They were on duty, freely translated. And hadn’t won, and wouldn’t partake. But the paidhi wasn’t, well, not that much on duty. It was after dinner, and he sat down long enough to pay the courtesies and share a small glass of very excellent Midlands brandy.

  “We were going to call you. We’ll send half to your quarters. It’s only fair.”

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “Half and half. We won’t get a chance tomorrow. Have to drink it all tonight. You’d better take half. We don’t want to be hung over when we make drop.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” he said. “And I can’t stay long. I have to get back to my staff.”

  “To good comrades!” Jerry proposed next. It was not quite that deadly word friend. And then: “To success!”

  “To success,” he said, lifting his small glass. And, perhaps due to that one sip of brandy, it began to truly sink in that they had indeed made it, that they were on the threshold of home, that, thanks to them, angry aliens would not show up on the world’s collective doorstep—well, there were a few complications, and a great difficulty yet to enable them to cast loose from the Reunioners’ past mistakes, not to mention that they still had a few human troublemakers aboard. They had rescued from certain oblivion something near five thousand people—some more grateful than others. They averted an alien war certain people’s stupidity had done its best to start. And they had gotten themselves back with minimal losses.

  His staff did deserve half that bottle.

  “Djossi flowers,” Gin said, recalling a prior conversation. “But it’ll be fall. We have it all figured.”

  “Will it?” He had figured it too, and hoped it would be, and that the shuttle would be up there waiting for them, but he’d happily take bitter winter in their hemisphere, if it set his feet on the ground again and let him look up at a tame and healthful sun on a white sand beach.

  “Absolutely,” Jerry said.

  “We have our invitation to come up to the bridge soon as we get there,” Bren said. “That’s firm, from the top.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Gin said. Here, it verged on humor.

  “So,” Bren said, “seeing they’re going to put us in so close to the station, and figuring we may have a fairly short time to dock, I wanted to issue a formal invitation now, while I have you all in reach. I want you, each and all, to visit my place on the coast, on the continent, as soon as you find it convenient. No great political problems. No fuss. It’s quiet. Remote from most everywhere. Boat and swim—well, it’s cold on that coast, but still, you can last a little while in the water, and there’s nothing predatory in the bay to worry about. All of you. Any of you. If you have trouble getting a visa over to the mainland, give me a phone call. I intend to buy myself a boat, my own boat, with all my accumulated back pay, which I think I may have earned, and have a real vacation. Maybe sail somewhere they can’t find me, oh, for at least a week.”

  “To vacations!” Barnhart said, lifting his glass.

  So it went. He hadn’t intended to stay as long as he did. But half a glass later he began to ask himself why he wanted to go back to quarters, where there was absolutely nothing urgent waiting for him, where staff knew absolutely what to do and how to pack up. He stayed a little longer, thinking, like Cajeiri, that they would all go their ways and there was no real prospect they would ever share another such evening, never again as they were. They had gotten to be family, the ones of them who had com
e up from the planet. He would go down with the dowager and with his own staff, Gin would go her own way, back to the hallowed halls of Mospheira’s largest university, and the government. Her staff would scatter.

  While Jase—Jase, who was planetary by adoption, at least—

  He wasn’t sure he would get Jase back on the planet again, not when Jase had worked into the captaincy they had insisted on giving him. Jase had protested it. But he saw Jase forming ties of his own among his own shipboard cousins and kin, in ways a shipborn human had to have been set up to want very badly. He’d had no particular job that anybody understood; now he had universal respect from his cousins.

  And could he fault Jase, who was understudying their senior captain, Sabin, and who was winning that hardest of all prizes, Sabin’s professional acceptance?

  Jase didn’t know what was happening to him, yet. Jase didn’t acknowledge it, but he had his own idea that Jase wasn’t going to resign his captain’s seat any time in the near future . . . or that if he got down to the planet, he’d find his way back to space.

  “I’ll miss you,” Bren said to Gin, and made it inclusive. “I’ll miss all of you. Take me up on the invitation. I really mean it.”

  “Goes without saying,” Gin said, “any of you or yours, in my little digs in the city. This whole scummy group will keep in touch.”

  Best of intentions. Best of hopes. In his experience, people didn’t ever quite get around to it . . . didn’t visit him, at least, maybe because he didn’t find the time to visit them, either. Something always intervened. Whatever direction he planned, events shoved him some other way. Some emergency came up. Ties grew fainter and fewer, especially to humans on Mospheira. Even his own family.

  He was getting maudlin. He wasn’t twenty any more. He was getting farther and farther from twenty, and he still considered himself an optimist, but lately that optimism had gotten down to a more bounded, knowledgeable optimism about his own intentions, a pragmatism regarding his own failings, and a universe-view tinged with worldly realism and personal history. He didn’t believe in the impossible as wildly, as passionately as he once had. Knowing had gotten in the way of that. And what he knew depended on an experience that included betrayals, and his own significant failures to pursue personal relationships across very difficult boundaries of distance and profession.

  And when he got down to thoughts like that, it was a clear signal not to have any more brandy.

  “Got to go,” he said after a suitable time of sitting and listening in their, admittedly, technospeak society. By now Banichi and Jago had gotten involved, since Jerry had gotten the notion to reschedule the car races, this time as a station event, and Banichi, conscious of his lord’s dignity in the station environment, had demurred and thought it might not be the thing to do.

  It was the first crack in their society. It had already come, and on such a small issue.

  There was nothing practical to do but agree with Banichi, that their schedules were unforeseeable at present, but surely they knew why Banichi had refused, and that time wasn’t the only issue.

  He excused himself and his staff, thanked them one and all, made protestations of lasting correspondence, collected their half of the brandy and promised to see the engineers in the morning.

  “I’ll miss them,” he said as they walked back into the foyer between the two wings, Jago carrying the trophy bottle. “These are very good people, nadiin-ji.”

  “Indeed, nandi,” Banichi agreed, and Jago: “Gin might truly visit the estate.”

  Rely on Jago to mind-read him in a situation, even cross-culture.

  “I earnestly hope she does,” he said. And from that perspective—it seemed more likely. Gin was like him, married to the job, to her robots and her computers. She was over sixty and gray-haired and while the two of them had nothing in common, except this voyage—they did share lifelong passions for things that transcended the need for family ties and picket fences.

  Jago was right, he decided, cheering up: if there was one person of the lot who might show up at his door some day, it was Gin. Djossi flowers. The memory of perfume on the air. Himself and Gin, maudlin together on a certain evening in the deeps of space, far, far from home. They’d kept one another sane, in the human sense.

  While these two, Banichi and Jago, had kept him solidly centered in the atevi world . . . and helped him keep a grip on what was important. Helped save his neck—uncounted times. And had a way of jerking him back to sanity.

  “Time we packed the duffles,” he said. “Time I finished my records.”

  2

  This is, I hope, the final entry before I transmit this letter to you. Catching the first shuttle home is at a high priority right now, maybe not an unrealistic hope, so I’ll be able to phone you on a secure line shortly after you receive the file. We’re informed we’re going to drop into the solar system, Jase swears, extremely close to the station—it sounds reckless to me, but Jase is very sure . . . and supposedly the area is clearer of debris than farther out would be, because of the planetary system sweeping it clean, so it will actually be safer than farther out. So I understand. I can’t conceive of doing much business on the station, though there may necessarily be some meetings for me to attend to, notably including a general debriefing with Captain Ogun.

  Primarily, my first duty is going to bring me down-world to inform Tabini as fast as I can, and that debriefing is going to take longest. Once that’s done, I’m actually free for a while, I earnestly hope, and I can get over to the Island and see you. I just promised Gin Kroger a vacation at the estate, but I want you to come across the straits first of all, brother, just as soon as I can get a few days free—I’ll stretch my time off into a month, if I have to get a decree from Tabini to do it, and we’ll finally take that trip down to the reef, with no duties, no starched lace, just walk barefoot on the deck . . .

  Then he wiped that out, starting with I just promised . . . and interposed what he knew he had to write: I want to get over to the island as soon as I can to see you and catch up on things.

  It was the most delicate way he knew to phrase what sat at the back of his thoughts, that he didn’t know whether their mother was still alive, that he’d ducked up to the station without a visit to the Island the last time he’d been on the planet, and she’d fallen critically ill while he was setting out on this mission. Guilt gnawed at him, for that desertion. And what could he say, not knowing? What had he ever been able to say when they were only a narrow strait away?

  Thanks for seeing to family, brother. I had no choice. I had to leave.

  A thousand times, he’d had to say that to Toby. And right now, among things he didn’t know, he didn’t know whether to address his brother as you and Jill and the kids the way he’d used to, because the last time he’d talked to Toby, Jill had walked out on him, Jill having finally drawn the line in the sand about Toby kiting off to stay a week at a time at their mother’s every crisis.

  The problem was, the pattern of minor health emergencies that their mother had started, planned or unplanned, as a ploy to get her sons home more often had extended into their mother’s truly serious crises. And he’d not been able to tell the real ones from the ones in which he’d take emergency leave, duck over to the island, and the next morning find her risen from her bed and making pancakes for breakfast, for “her boys,” who’d just put their work and, in his case, the affairs of nations on hold to get to her bedside.

  Truth was, their being there had cured what ailed her, since what ailed her was not having her sons with her and not being interested in a life beyond “her boys.”

  Barb had shown up, late in her life, Barb, the woman he’d nearly married . . . and failing a marriage to him, Barb had practically moved in with his mother, not that he’d wanted that solution. Barb had put herself in the position of his mother’s caretaker and confidant, scheming what, he was never sure, but at least their mother had had Barb, for what she was worth.

  She’d had Barb
and she’d had Toby, who’d gone to their mother’s side even when Jill laid down the law and took the kids away with her.

  So what did he say to his brother? Just . . . I’m coming to the Island, as soon as I can? That covered all possibilities, including the possibility the worst had happened in their mother’s case and in Jill’s, and that Toby had laid it all at his door.

  Toby, I have so much to talk about, so much to tell you, so much to ask. I hope to God everything’s gone well at home. I’ve tried not to dwell on it in this letter because when I do, it takes over my thinking and magnifies in the dark, and there’s been a lot of dark out here.

  Enough of that. If we come in as close as they’re saying, this should be the very last entry before I actually hear your voice on the phone, and I’m so looking forward to that. I’ll transmit this letter as soon as possible and call you from the station, as soon as I can get to a phone.

  Forgive me all my failings, which I know are many. As brothers go, you’re a saint. I want to pay you back everything . . .

  No, strike the last paragraph. He knew he never would be able to pay Toby back what he owed. He knew that Shejidan would have work for him and he’d be lucky to get over to the Island in the first two months he was back—but he was going to fight hard for that visit to be earlier.

  He was deceiving himself. Three days. Honestly speaking, except in times of intense crisis, he could almost always manage three days off. That was historically how long it took his family to run out of good will and get down to issues, which was, in his experience, just about time to head for the airport. Wasn’t that what he’d always done?