He wished he hadn’t said that. Instantly Yolanda’s lower lip compressed, eyes showed wounding. Deep hurt, quickly held in.
“No question,” she said in ship-speak. And she sat back and seemed to set the armor that covered all her soul, dealing with him, dealing with Jase.
He talked frankly to her after that, warnings, bits of advice about individuals and matters she did know to watch out for. Armor stayed. In a certain measure it made frankness easier. It always had.
Regarding Tabini himself: “I know you have a good relationship with him,” he said, on that delicate topic. “I know you do, or he wouldn’t deal with you. But take two warnings— infelicitous two. Don’t back down from his baiting you. If he thinks you fold rather than argue with him, you’ll be out of his confidence in a heartbeat.”
“I’ve learned that,” she said. “What’s the other?”
“Tell him the truth.” That she pursued the numbers—at least on a small scale—was encouraging. “Third point, fortunate three: listen carefully to what he advises. There’s no one on the planet more dangerous than Tabini. Or smarter. Witness he’s survived all the assassins aimed at him—partly by being so good and so steady in office that even his detractors find a use in his being there. That’s his real success. I learn tactics from him—constantly. I hope you will. Quite honestly—” He made another real try at mending the interface he’d messed up, much as the effort seemed a forlorn hope. “Quite honestly I’m jealous as hell of your being where you are, and a little upset— well, a lot upset—at not being advised of what you were doing.”
“His order,” she said in a low voice.
“Tabini’s? Or Ramirez’s?”
“Both.”
“But who initiated?” What she said tweaked something sensitive, something to which she might be oblivious. “Who contacted whom—first requiring your services?”
Maybe she’d hoped to get out of here without discussing that matter. Maybe it was something she’d been both stalking for an opening and dreading all along. But she answered seriously, meticulously. “I honestly don’t know who did. Ramirez called me in. I don’t know whether Tabini-aiji had called him directly or he’d called the aiji.”
“It would be very useful to know that. But not to remark on, understand. I mention it for your safety. Always know details like that.”
“There was no way to know.”
Her perpetual defensiveness set him off. And he refused to let it do that, this time. There wasn’t the leisure any longer to reform Yolanda. Only to use her services. “Some things it’s necessary to know. Some things it’s unexpectedly critical to know. I’m not faulting you, understand. I’m advising you to the best of my own experience in this situation. In the interest of everybody on the planet down there, I desperately want you to succeed. I want you to do better than I ever did at reading the aiji. I want you to so far eclipse me that you’ll never get caught unprepared. Which means you’ll never get anybody killed. And I’m not sure I can claim that.” Yolanda didn’t understand him or his motives any more than she understood the minds of Mospheiran shop owners… and far less than she understood Tabini, to his long-term observation. She was a spacefarer and if an event or an attitude hadn’t any precedent on the ship— Yolanda didn’t see it. She flatly didn’t see it.
“The aiji scares hell out of me,” she admitted then, the most encouraging statement he’d ever heard out of Yolanda Mercheson. “And I’m not you, and I can’t deal with him the way you do.”
“Be afraid of him. But don’t show it. Stand up to him, and show deference at the same time. Balance the two. And you have my good wishes.” God help us, he thought to himself. She didn’t show fear because she didn’t always know when she was in danger. But she wasn’t the only one with blind spots. He’d come in that blind. He’d spent a night in Ilisidi’s basement learning that lesson. He’d had his arm broken, learning that lesson. “All right. That’s your province. You have to learn. You will learn. Turnabout, advise me—what am I up against on the ship? How do I make headway?”
She hadn’t seen that question coming, either. She drew a deep, deep breath. “You mean with Sabin?”
“And the crew.”
“Crew is easy. They know who you are. They approve. More than that, ’Sidi-ji is their darling and you’re with her. Truth is, everybody detests Sabin. Granted they’re both cold as deep space rock, the dowager and Sabin both—’Sidi-ji smiles at them. That makes all the difference.”
“You know that smile’s not necessarily a good sign.”
“I know, but they don’t know it, and they worship her. Besides, I think she likes it. Well, like isn’t it, is it?”
“Like’s fine with things. Not people. There’s your difference. She likes their approval. She doesn’t like them, because they’re not in her association. Think in Ragi when you think about atevi.”
“She favors their applause.”
“She drinks it like good brandy. If they’d only worship Sabin, Sabin would warm up, don’t you think?”
He saw the body language, disengagement from the very concept. “Not likely. Not ever likely. —But Sabin gets the ship through. We don’t have to like her. If the ship itself’s in trouble, I’ll promise you, you want Sabin on deck.”
“Next question. Do you want her in negotiations?”
Another long breath and a deeply sober thought. “Only if you plan to nuke the other side.”
“Major question. Is she for us, or is she for the authority that sent you here? Does she like what we’re doing here? Or is she against it?”
That brought another moment’s thought. “Honestly, I don’t know for sure. I don’t think Ramirez knew… she doesn’t like atevi, she doesn’t like Mospheirans, and I’m not sure she likes the crew, for that matter. The best thing is, she won’t be here, making decisions. Don’t ever say I said that.”
“Encouraging,” he said. So he’d asked the questions. He’d had his answers, all he knew to ask for. Except one. “Did Ramirez tip Tabini off, that he was dying?”
The question scared her. She was far too readable. Far too readable, still, for safety in court.
“Face,” he snapped, as he’d used to say to Jase, as he’d said to Yolanda more than once. And expression vanished from her face, well, at least that one vanished—quickly replaced with a frown.
“I thought I could be honest with you,” she said.
“You can be. You’d better be, for about five more minutes. Then give expression up for the duration, except inside this apartment, with this staff. Damned uncomfortable pillow, the secrets on this job. Did he tell Tabini?”
“He told him. Therapy wasn’t taking. He was having mental lapses—that’s the truth, Bren. It scared hell out of him, more than the heart condition, because he was forgetting things. And he told me to tell Tabini to get ready, that there was the alien threat, that the world had to get ready, that the ship had to be ready, constantly…”
“On three day’s notice?”
“On three minutes’ notice,” Yolanda said. “We’ve been able to pull out of here at any moment, for the last three months— with whatever crew could get aboard. But we haven’t done that. We told Tabini the truth about the aliens and about the situation back on the station, and we asked for fuel so if some armed ship showed up we had some fighting chance against it. And, ultimately, so we could go back and settle what has to be settled back there.”
“Meaning.”
“Meaning to get that station shut down. Make the gesture. Aishimaran to thema.”
Almost untranslatable: sweeping the boundary. Clearing troublesome disputed areas from an associational edge. Atevi neighbors would exchange property to achieve border peace, in a world with neither boundaries nor borders as humans understood the term—a process arcane and fraught with hazard.
“Tabini’s word?”
“His word.”
“Probably describes it very well. But that program in itself has an assumption—that
the gesture will be read the way humans or atevi would read it.”
“But we have to do something.”
“Third assumption,” he said. “You’ve already done something, in staying out of there. Now you think there’s no choice but go back. But that’s out of my territory, too. I can’t claim I know what’s wise to do. Two smart men, on more facts than I have, agreed it was a good idea. —Did Ramirez intend to die?”
“He was having attacks. The fueling being finished—he was talking with Tabini about breaking the news. About timing in telling the truth. Then the robots were ready. And the day he heard that, he had an attack. He worked past it. I knew.” She tried to keep the still, dispassionate face. “Ogun knew he was in trouble. I don’t think Sabin did, but I’m not sure. Then the last attack. And he wanted to talk to Jase, I guess. And he should have left it to me to brief Jase, because it wasn’t secure there in the clinic, but there were probably other things he wanted to say, too.”
“Like?”
“Things he’d say to us. Personal things. Like apologizing for having us born. For putting on us what he’d put on us. Not quite a normal life, is it?”
Bitterness. Deep bitterness. Maybe it wasn’t wise to answer at all. But he did. “Most of us don’t have normal lives,” he said. “Especially in this business.”
“But were you always paidhi-aiji? Didn’t you grow up? Jase and I—we’d have liked to have known our fathers. We’d have liked to have something but a necessary, logical, already made choice. We’d have liked to fail at something without it being a calamity that involved the Captain’s Council.”
“I don’t envy you in that regard. But you came out sane. And decent. And worthwhile. It’s what we do, more than who we are, that makes our personal lives a mess. If we didn’t do what we do for a job, ordinary people might figure out how to get along with us.”
“Jase and I tried to make a relationship. We tried being teammates, we tried being lovers—not having any other candidates. We weren’t good at it. Something about needing to be loved to know how to love, isn’t that the folktale? We’re kind of defective, Jase and I, in that regard. Really confused input, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think.” Atevi society wasn’t a good place for a human with a problem with relationships to work it out. Himself, with a relationship in shambles and his own brother not speaking to him, he knew that. “You’re all right. You’ll be all right. Life’s long. Hold out till we get back. You’ll have a household around you. Mine. While I’m gone, I want you to come here. Live here in my household.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Advice: do it. They’re the best help you can get. And you won’t be alone. Believe me.”
Her lips went thin. He wondered if she knew where his comfort came from, or the situation he had with Jago. He was proof against anyone’s disapproval, outside the household.
And he knew what he was asking of his household, to take her in, but he saw in her the signs that had taken other paidhiin down—the isolation, the sense of alienation, the burden of untranslatable secrets.
“Here is safe,” he said. “For one very practical reason—you may become a target—take my offer. And trust these people. Completely.”
“I don’t trust. I don’t trust people.”
“Learn. With them, learn.”
Deep breath.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You can’t debrief everything in your own language. You need atevi you can trust to talk to. If you’d had someone to ask about Tabini, in Ragi, it would have helped—wouldn’t it?”
That made itself understood. Resistence weakened.
“All right. All right. I’ll see if I can arrange it.”
“You don’t see if you can arrange it, Mercheson-paidhi. You do it. And listen to me. One more question, one more sweeping question: is there anything else I’d better know? Is there anything else you suspect that Ramirez might have told Jase, that you wouldn’t have been able to tell him in a briefing? Anything you’ve suspected, or knew parts of?”
A shake of the head. “No.”
One very last question. “Why in hell didn’t you come to me?”
“Tabini might not have liked it. I didn’t know what to do.”
That wasn’t quite the defensive answer he’d expected. It made sense; and that set him a little off balance. “I could have kept your question secret.”
Hesitation. “The Old Man was pretty sure you wouldn’t keep something from Tabini. That man’chi business. And I told him what I thought I ought to do, which was ask you, but he wouldn’t risk it. He said that was why he called me in.” A moment’s silence. “He didn’t ask Jase. I guess he thought Jase would tell you everything. Jase’s attached to the planet. But I live here. He was the Old Man. My Old Man. That’s all the logic I had to go on. I didn’t want to be where I was. I didn’t want to keep the secret. But I didn’t know how to turn it loose or whether things would blow up if I did. And by then I knew we didn’t have the time we thought we did.”
“I know what you’re saying. I appreciate you made a decision the best you could with what you had to work with. And I appreciate the line you’ve tried to walk, solo, trying to preserve your worth to the situation. But the situation’s vastly changed. That’s why I want you inside the household, so you’re never confronted with an atevi question without advice. You know they could have advised you how to deal with Tabini—if they’d been yours to ask. And in time to come,” he said levelly, “and when we get back, you can even tell me and Jase the truth. We’ll all three sort it out. I think this has all finally become the same side.”
“You trust Jase?”
Shocking question. It shook him.
“You don’t.”
Her doubt might be the aftershock of a relationship between her and Jase that hadn’t worked.
“He loved Ramirez,” Yolanda said. “He was wholly committed to Ramirez. And Ramirez didn’t trust him—because of his relationship with you, I’m reasonably sure that was the whole cause. But Ramirez didn’t trust him, in the end. You’re upset with me, with what you found out was going on. Jase isn’t. Jase is taking Ramirez’s dying just too well. Too sensibly.”
“He learned in Shejidan, maybe.” But he didn’t discount the question.
“But it hurts. It hurts, Bren. And he’s not showing it. And I can’t talk to him.”
“You’ve tried?”
“I leave messages: talk to me. No answers. Jase didn’t like what he heard. He’s mad at me. Really mad at me. I think that I was working with Ramirez, and that Ramirez went to me— that stung.”
Jase wasn’t the young man who’d parachuted onto the planet. And that fact, perhaps, had foredoomed Yolanda to find her own way through the thicket he and Jase had made of their association… and foredoomed not to get answers, and to be even further on the outside.
Association, be it noted: aishi. Aishi had that troublesome word, man’chi, nestled right in the midst of it. He and Jase hadn’t dealt with one another like two humans, in Mosphei’, where friendship existed, where friendship might have swallowed down some of the problems in silence. Instead they’d dealt in Ragi, one of them with a man’chi on earth, the other with his captain in the heavens. They’d found a means of working around the friendship part, thanks to aishi, thanks to the organization of the household, where everyone under the same roof had the same set of motives, the same interests, the same imperatives and acted accordingly, in that clearly foreign matrix.
And Yolanda?
Yolanda had landed instead in that generations-deep nest of conspiracy and humanly seductive friendships over on the island of Mospheira, after living in her close-knit crew. On Mospheira she’d rapidly learned the finer points of being on no side, of being the one true outsider in a society where there were no outsiders. All the lessons of the ship to a factor of ten. And being in a matrix that wasn’t as clearly foreign—that assaulted her human emotions with promises that didn’t pan out. Always the outside
r. Always the target.
“I’ll try to patch things with Jase,” he said. “I’ll give him your message, for both your sakes. I hope you believe I’m on the level.”
“I know what you once said to me. I said it to myself all the time I was working with Ramirez.”
“What’s that?”
“That if a side in a dispute doesn’t have somebody they think is working only for them—”
“An honest broker.”
“If they don’t have that, they can do something dangerous to everyone. So that’s what I always told mself I was. An honest broker. I was somebody working only for Ramirez, somebody who’d argue with him. The Old Man’s dead, now. Now, I’m not quite working for Ogun. But Tabini’s asked me to work for him. And I’m going to have to choose. I know I am. And you’re saying go with the atevi, and maybe—maybe that’s what I have to do, now. But I’m scared—”
“Good. Be scared. But don’t be overwhelmed. That’s where the household support will save you.”
“It may save me. But what will save Jase? He’s hellbent for going. He’ll be with Sabin, trying to make her look as good as possible, trying to mediate her decisions—trying to keep the peace aboard. That’s not good, Bren. That’s not good for him, because he was Ramirez’s, not hers, and he hates her. He really does. And on this mission is the last place he ought to be. Hear what I’m saying: he’s alone. He’s going to need help. You’re what he has. Don’t fail him.”
He considered the equation. The warning. All of it. Was it after all, love? “I won’t promise you. I won’t.” They’d gone about as deep as they could, each holding the other’s interests hostage, each of them being where the other wanted most to be, each of the three of them given what another of the three most wanted to have. “Meanwhile you get to stand between atevi and humans until I get back. You’ll have carte blanche with my staff they’ll give you. I have the links, the communications, the staff, and the experts you need. Half my staff, understand, are spies, useful spies. Don’t let on you know, even if they know you know: it’s just not done and it’ll make things impossible. Listen to me: wear the clothes, dream in the language; think in it. My remaining staff will see to your every wish. Down there, Tabini and Damiri will likely ask you to dinner, in which you have no choice. Staff will prime you on protocols. Observe them as you observe safety drills. Your life rides on it. The whole alliance rides on our survival.”