There were deep flushes, suddenly extreme nervousness… the sort of young flightiness and uncertainty that he wished had a Narani in charge… he wished he could have two of that gentleman—indeed, two of everyone he was taking with him; but it wasn’t possible, and he had to rely on Yolanda’s honest intent and his servants’ discrimination regarding hazards.
“Security may indeed resort to lord Geigi or to the dowager’s men with any matter that requires their attention,” he said to them further, which was instruction mainly for Tano and Al-gini, “or that might suggest consultation. One trusts their discretion. And as for the staff in general, don’t ever hesitate to report a matter, however trivial, to security, at whatever hour. Better too much information than too little: you’ll learn what’s necessary. As for Geigi’s staff, or the establishment the aiji-dowager may leave, one is sure they’re very good, they’re discreet, and one believes, Tano-ji, Gini-ji, you can rely on their advice… as you can rely on Geigi’s or the dowager’s man’chi, if the matter is of mutual concern. Also, Mercheson-paidhi is within your charge, not the other way about. Make her comfortable, advise her, correct her as you’ve corrected me. She’s new to the office. She will make mistakes which will stem from foreignness, I am confident to say, rather than from fault in judgment.” Please God, he thought, saying so. “Support her with advice. Leave critical judgments to Tano and Algini. They will know.”
He rarely saw those two look worried. Even Algini gave him a look when he said that.
“I have every confidence,” he said.
The ship stood at 98%. They had an advisement for all non-crew to board.
Whatever went on in the offices, on the island, on the continent, even in the apartment, stopped being his problem.
God hope the house of cards he and Tabini had built lasted long enough to provide a pattern for the girders of a whole new world.
God hope he got home sometime close to schedule.
Could he ever have dreamed he’d be making this trip, a decade ago?
Ogun had trained crew, a newly-refurbished station, brand new factories and the plans for a starship… if the people he left couldn’t manage with those assets, he didn’t know what more he personally could do for them.
He had already dispatched Bindanda and Asicho to board ahead of them, with his written authorization, which he trusted ship security had honored, and now sent two of the servant staff with another authorization, with two motorized trolleys all loaded with their baggage—those just far enough ahead of them to make it through the lifts and checkpoints and not impede their progress. The dowager’s baggage was somewhat ahead of theirs, so staff advised him, also with authorized staff. Boarding for the rest of them—was down to the last minutes.
He and Banichi and Jago said their goodbyes to Tano and Algini in the security station, and again at the door—that was hardest.
One didn’t hug atevi, not as a rule. He broke that rule, for his own soul’s sake, and embarrassed them.
“It’s the human custom,” he said. “Indulge me, nadiin-ji, for my comfort, and take good care of yourselves. I value you very, very extremely.”
“We are most extremely honored,” Tano said, “paidhi-ji.”
“Bren-ji,” Algini said, and carefully, uncharacteristically, hugged him. Then Tano did. Bren all but lost his composure, and might have if, when he walked away, he hadn’t been in company with Banichi and Jago and Narani and the chosen servant staff.
They had increased their estimate of those going. More had found an excuse this morning—I wish very much to see this place, was one, and: My father would never forgive me if I left the paidhi-aiji vied with I wish to leave my mother’s name in this far place.
Ship authorities had said they had room enough for a few extra. For the whole apartment, if they wished. So the list grew a little, and Narani recalculated the numbers and ordered more compartments opened, which one authorized, a simple message to the ship—no fuss, no extraordinary effort.
Could a human or an atevi wish better staff around him?
And walking down that corridor, realizing how close they were to boarding and how close he was to letting loose the reins of the unruly political beast he’d ridden breakneck for his whole adult career… he experienced a certain momentary euphoria.
“Baji-naji,” he said to Banichi and Jago in that giddy feeling. “Baji-naji, nadiin-ji, if it doesn’t work now, if Mercheson-paidhi can’t make it work, and if Geigi can’t, on what we’ve built—” He said it to convince himself, after his dark night of doubt. “—I don’t know what more I can do.”
“Bindanda has successfully boarded,” Banichi reported to him. “He reports the quarters are heated and lighted and he has set himself to stand guard at the entry, to establish a perimeter, pending arrival of the baggage carts.”
“Jase-aiji has communicated with Tano,” Jago added— electronically connected as ever, “and given clearance for the baggage and staff to board. We’re expected at our convenience, likewise the dowager, who will follow us.”
It all felt completely unreal of a sudden, as giddily impossible as it had seemed possible a second ago. He was a kid from Mospheira. He was a maker of dictionaries in a little office in the Bujavid.
What in hell was he doing in the execution of an order like this one?
He had no business exiting the solar system. He felt the whole concept as a barrier, a magical line that, if he crossed it, would simply evaporate him, a creature that would burst like a bubble in the featureless deep of space.
Yet Jase had exited and entered several solar systems in his life. The ship did it as routine. Magic didn’t apply. He had no business being scared of the process, or supposing that disaster would swallow them up without a trace or a report. Hadn’t Jase had to have faith in boats, getting out on the sea for the first time, and figuring out that the sea was deep, and that he was balanced on a rocking surface high up—relative to the sea bottom. It didn’t matter that a body falling into the water floated and didn’t plummet straight to the bottom—it hadn’t convinced Jase’s gut. And knowing that this ship had done this again and again successfully—in atevi reckoning, were those not good numbers?
As the shuttles had good numbers?
Hell with that. He’d gotten more timid about airplanes, since flying the shuttle.
He’d begun to hold onto the armrests of airplanes, trying to pull the plane into the sky. Stupid behavior. Anxious, animal behavior. He told himself again and again what made airplanes stay in the sky… the way he’d used to tell Jase, who truly didn’t like zipping along near a planet’s surface… and didn’t starships work on perfectly rational principles he just didn’t happen to understand as well as he understood airfoils?
In the station’s informational system, Banichi now reported, the ship had reached a mysterious 99% and holding.
“The dowager has decided to accompany us in boarding,” Banichi said further. “Her party will overtake us at the lift.”
So. So. A deep breath. Time to wait for protocols. He stalled his small party at the lift door.
In due time, at the dowager’s pace, with her staff and with Lord Geigi and his men for escort, Ilisidi and Cajeiri arrived and joined them at the personnel lift. The dowager was of course immaculate and fashionable in a red fur-cuffed coat, and the heir-apparent, neatly pig-tailed in the black and red ribbons of his house, wore a modest black leather coat, red leather gloves, and a quiet demeanor vastly different than his arrival.
Terrified, Bren thought with sympathy for the boy.
Sent from Tatiseigi’s ungentle care to Ilisidi’s and Cenedi’s, and now exiled to travel to the ends of creation in a human-run ship. Was ever a boy faced with more upheaval in his few years?
He was very glad Lord Geigi had come to see them off… considerable inconvenience, all the bundling-up for the cold core, a disturbance in the schedule of a man who got only a little more sleep than he had, Bren was very sure. Still, the man’chi was very tight,
very sure, and it would have been sad had Geigi not stirred himself out to walk with them.
Hug Geigi? Not quite.
“Paidhi-ji,” Illisidi said with a polite nod, the intimate address, acknowledging her traveling companion.
“Aiji-ma.” He bowed at the honor. “Nandi.” For Giegi, with human affection.
Banichi had called the lift, at the dowager’s approach. It arrived at precisely the grand moment.
“Young man.” Ilisidi offered her arm to her great-grandson, and the boy took it ceremoniously, escorting his great-grandmother with the grace of the lord he was born to be. They boarded. Cenedi and his men, and the dowager’s servants— small distinction between the two duties—held back. Geigi made a subtle wave of his hand, cuing him to move: that was the way it was, a difficult matter of protocols, and Bren moved, heart racing, thoughts suddenly a jumble of remembrance that, no, he was not demoted, and that Geigi, to whom he was accustomed to defer, gave place to him in the personnel lift—
As if he were higher rank.
Because he was leaving, perhaps, and numbered in the dowager’s party, not, silly thought, that the paidhi-aiji, if he even retained the title, in any way outranked the lord of the station. Empty honors, Tabini had paid him. The paidhi wasn’t any lord of the heavens, and hadn’t any claim to Geigi’s man’chi.
God, no. He didn’t want Geigi or the dowager to change the way they dealt with him. He didn’t want a paper title. He supposed it augmented his rank in dealing with Sabin… no matter it was meaningless, but he suspected Geigi was, if charitable, amused. He hoped Geigi wasn’t offended. He hoped the dowager wasn’t about to make some issue of it all.
He didn’t want any more. He wanted to retire to his estate on the coast for at least a month and look at the stars from the deck of a boat—Toby’s boat, at that.
Instead, the lift arrived, and they all fitted in, the same procedures they used when taking the shuttle down to the planet. He hoped that workers would communicate and the baggage wouldn’t stall in their path, and that it would all happen magically, so that the newly appointed lord of the heavens didn’t end up in interstellar space without shirts or Bindanda’s cooking supplies.
So much had to be a miracle. So much just sailed past his numb senses; and meanwhile he had to muster intelligent small-talk, in a station where the weather wasn’t a possible topic.
“So much done so quickly,” he said to the dowager as the lift rose.
“Did you hear from my grandson?”
“I did hear, aiji-ma.” He feared he blushed. And it wasn’t a topic he wanted to discuss, his elevation to mythical lordship. “One was very gratified by his letter.”
“Ha,” Ilisidi said, one of those ambiguous utterances. “Politics.”
And Geigi: “My staff is in communication with your quarters, nandi-ji.” Oh, he was glad to hear warmth in Geigi’s tones. “Does Mercheson-paidhi favor fish, do you think?”
“She will be greatly honored by your attention, nandi.” Fish was almost always safe. And he did remember. “She does favor melon preserves, extremely. All varieties of fruit.”
“Ah.” Geigi was pleased to have a personal knowledge. And his ability to get foodstuffs off the planet was scandalous. “One will manage.”
The apartment might be awash in melon preserves. “I’ll be in your debt if you can show my successor the refinements, nandi. One wishes she might have had the benefits of the dowager’s estate, as I did.”
“Ha,” Ilisidi said again. “Benefits, is it?”
“I found it so, dowager-ji. It taught me a very great deal.”
“The paidhi listened,” Ilisidi said, and tightened her grip on the boy’s arm. Gravity was at the moment only a function of the car’s movement. “As some should! Do you agree, boy?”
“Yes, mani-ma.”
“Grandmother will do,” Ilisidi said sharply. “Aiji will do better. You have official rank here, if I say so, and we’ll see whether those shoulders are strong enough, yet. So I say, today. Who knows for tomorrow?”
“Yes, aiji-ma,” This quietly uttered, a young soul sharply keyed to the dowager’s voice—
Mecheiti racing wildly on a hillside, breakneck after the dominant. Reason had nothing to do with it. Bren didn’t know why he flashed on that, of all moments when he’d nearly died. But it was the fact of native wildlife. It was the fact of atevi instinct: it was the nature of man’chi…
He witnessed it, he thought. He didn’t feel it. But he intellectually understood the boy had learned to twitch in certain ways to instincts that were life to his species, and held tightly to his grandmother’s hand.
That was reassuring to everyone concerned.
They braked. The door opened in a waft of cold pressure-change that frosted metal surfaces.
This time, however, it was not the old familiar sights—not the shuttle dock, with the hatch leading to whatever shuttle sat in dock.
It was dock 1, and a long snake of yellow tubing, which led, he understood, to another, grapple-reinforced tube, where Phoenix rode.
Baggage must have cleared. He didn’t see it.
“Well, well,” Geigi said, “it seems this is the place.”
“So one assumes,” Ilisidi said. Suited workers now appeared in the tube, out of the bend inside it. “One assumes we have an escort. Go, go back to reasonable places before you freeze, Geigi-ji.”
“Safe voyage,” Geigi wished them. “Safe travel, safe return, aiji-ma, Bren-ji.”
There were bows, such as one could manage, reaching out for safety lines strung along the wall.
Then Geigi and his men were inside the lift, they were outside, and the door shut at their backs with appalling finality.
Phoenix was surely at the other end—intellectual knowledge, but with no view of the dock, only the tube leading to the hatch, it felt rather like being swallowed by some giant of the fairy tales.
The workers beckoned them on. Ilisidi didn’t question, rather proceeded down the handline in the only direction possible.
“One can’t sail off here, aiji-ma,” Cajeiri observed. “Are those the captains?”
“A sensible person wouldn’t try to sail at all,” Ilisidi retorted. “And those are workers. Don’t gawk. Don’t chatter. It burns the lungs.”
Burn, it did. Breath seemed very short. Or the paidhi was breathing very rapidly.
“A small load of baggage was ahead of us,” he said to the workers as they met. “It all should go to fifth deck, my possession.”
“Yes, sir,” the worker said. No argument, no delay, no fuss. “The tag was all in order. It’s well ahead of you. Go right along. Sir. Ma’am.”
Things went with frightening finality.
This is real, a small voice said to him, but for the most he felt numb—not as much fear of the trip itself as reason said was logical, rather more a sense of danger to the things he was leaving: fear of what might change while he was gone, family he might lose, people who might carry on their lives without him, and get to places and situations to which he was irrelevant.
I’ll come back, he said in his heart. I’ll make it back.
But that part wasn’t wholly in his hands any longer.
Now the unwinding of the yellow serpentine showed them an open hatch, and it swallowed them up, a large hatch, that had no trouble taking in all their party at once, with room left over for one of the workers, who punched appropriate buttons and threw switches. And bet that atevi security, his and the dowager’s, recorded those movements, and the accompanying confirmation of lights.
The outer door shut. Then the smaller of the inner doors opened, and their chill gusted out with them into a corridor as bare, as purely functional as the access tunnels on the station: panels with steady and blinking telltales, gridwork deck, ladders going up and sideways—a puzzle to a ground-dweller until a ground-dweller’s mind registered the obvious fact that he was drifting and didn’t even know which way was up. The air smelled vaguely of paint and plasti
cs and something that could be oil, or solvent. Fans roared.
It was a tubular corridor—ending in a pressure door, again, like the station accesses.
“A grim place,” Ilsidi pronounced it, but alert to everything around her.
“This way, if you please,” their guide said: his clip-on badge, on a close look, was ship security. “Captain Graham’s compliments, I’ll be your escort to your quarters. Mr. Cameron, if you’d please advise everyone watch the doors as we go.”
“He presents felicitous greetings from Jase-aiji.”
“Who is not here!” Ilisidi said, displeased.
“Who is managing the ship to keep it safe, aiji-ma, and sends security to direct us past hazardous equipment. I’m very sure it’s proper.”
“We demand Jase.”
“Aiji-ma,” Bren said, “it’s by no means certain that Jase is physically on the ship.”
“Are we to believe that planning is so slipshod, as not to include any inquiry from us? Are we to believe that this is the degree of care which attends our voyage on this chancy vessel? We do not budge from this corridor until we have assurances.”
This very cold corridor, this corridor the cold of which had, after the deep chill of the dock, penetrated his coat and his gloves and started into his human-sized body.
But bluffing? No. Not Ilisidi.
“She demands Captain Graham, specifically,” Bren said. “Protocol requires it. So we’ll stay here.”
“You can’t stay here, sir. You’re in a traffic area.”
“I agree. I respectfully suggest this place is very cold, and I personally will be very grateful if Captain Graham is aboard, and makes every effort to get down here, so we can resolve this before we become a traffic problem.”