Defender

  The aishidi’tat built a starship in orbit over their heads. Don’t forget, don’t forget the old ways… that was the end of what Tabini had said.

  But there were details… details so damned full of thorns a conscientious translator needed gloves. The atevi nervous system, the atevi body and brain that interpreted the degree of threat and promise in that twos and threes business and he couldn’t guarantee that even Shawn Tyers would understand what it felt like in that room, the absolute terror, the threats, the resolutions, the business of an atevi association, an aishi, being transacted in face to face encounter and gut-level emotion.

  Where did humans have an analog—except a funeral among passionately feuding relatives?

  And how to describe what it most felt like—

  What it most felt like was the moment in a machimi-play when the holder of secrets divulged them, and set the fox among the chickens—so to speak—and sent things into freefall, all points of reference revised, usually with weapons involved.

  And what did it mean, now, when conservative Ilisidi happened to be the highest-ranking ateva who had ever gone to space—and her pro-space, pro-foreigner grandson assembled the leaders of the nation to lecture them on anti-foreigner traditional values in her own words, while she was conspicuous in the audience and in new and conspicuous guardianship of the aiji’s butter-fingered heir?

  It could mean, on the one hand, trouble—that grandmother Ilisidi, newly custodian of her ally Tatiseigi’s grandnephew, simultaneously Tabini’s heir—was being outflanked by a maneuver that far outdid the previous dangerous push-pull maneuvers of that private relationship. If that was the case, it could more than get someone killed… it could remotely mean Tabini was about to shove Lady Damiri out the door.

  Or, conversely, that Damiri and Tabini together had decided to push young Cajeiri out the door, effectively to disinherit him—

  Was riding a mecheita through a formal garden that unforgivable an error?

  He couldn’t think it of Tabini or Damiri, or of Ilisidi, but even this far along in his association with the atevi, he couldn’t imagine he understood what the familial relationships were, or what atevi felt.

  They didn’t feel friendship, among first points. They didn’t know love. They obeyed a different set of emotions. They herded. They flocked. They rushed to a leader in time of distress, and that leader was distinguished primarily by qualities a human regarded with suspicion: an atevi leader led because he had no higher emotional attachments, and flocked to no one.

  A leader took care of his own. A leader preserved those he led. A leader became passionately distressed at a threat to what was his.

  But the high leaders, the aijiin, didn’t bring up their own children. They passed them around, fostered them out to high-level relatives and trusted associates to be tutored, taught manners—and to form associations with those same relatives on whom the whole structure depended. Cajeiri had been with his great-uncle Tatiseigi. Now he was with Ilisidi. He might not be with his parents again until he was nearly adult.

  The boy would never, perhaps, forget this assembly in the tomb of his grandfather. That speech from his father would brand itself on a boy’s memory. Even given species differences, that was likely true.

  But how did a human understand the situation that might logically relegate a child elsewhere? Or even dispose of him? It happened in the machimi, in the hard, brutal feudal age. One didn’t hear of it happening in modern times.

  And there were some things he had always been a little hesitant to ask even the atevi he trusted with his life. But the questions nagged him.

  “Nadiin-ji,” he said, as the rails clicked beneath the wheels, as the car took a turn he well knew, “Mospheiran humans regard their children very highly, protect them at all costs, and Mospheirans generally don’t hand off their children to raise—” He supposed in that understanding his own father was not quite respectable, but he tried to simplify the case. And tried not to insult the people he lived with. “So I remain perplexed about Cajeiri’s situation, to put it very delicately. Is there satisfaction with him? Is he in any way the focus of this ceremony? Why did Tabini ask me here, and why is Cajeiri suddenly with Ilisidi, when I thought he was with Tatiseigi, and has that anything to do with this event?”

  They were mildly amused, and perhaps a little puzzled.

  “Regarding the invitation,” Banichi said—Banichi had had that question a dozen times in the last few days, “one still fails to understand the reason. We have kept a careful ear to the Guild, Bren-ji, and no one has given us a clue. Regarding the heir, Tatiseigi has appealed to the dowager to take the boy in charge: the dowager has received Tatiseigi, and the boy packed his bags last night.”

  “The dowager’s plane has entered the hangar,” Jago said. “Her crew has taken quarters in the Bujavid.”

  That was interesting: Ilisidi was not, then, returning to Malguri immediately. She was staying in the Bujavid with the boy in tow, and staying at least long enough to warrant a hangar for her private jet.

  “One fears for the porcelains,” Banichi said.

  “His own parents would not—forgive me for a distasteful question—harm him?”

  “No,” Jago said quickly. “No, nadi-ji.”

  What do they feel? was the question he tried to ask, and wondered whether he ought just to blurt it out and trust his long relationship—but Banichi and Jago themselves were father and daughter: he had had a parent-child relationship right in front of him for years, and still couldn’t quite decipher what they thought, or felt, except a strong loyalty—no, they existed within the same man’chi, and that was different: they’d served the aiji before they attached to him, still within that man’chi, and that told him nothing about their own ties to each other.

  “I remain bewildered,” he said to them.

  “So are we all, Bren-ji,” Banichi said. “So are the lords in the Bujavid. So are the newsservices.”

  “That’s at least informative,” he said. “They did broadcast it.”

  “To the whole aishidi’tat,” Jago said.

  “And the station, I’ll imagine.”

  “One believes so,” Banichi said.

  “Curious. Troubling, nadiin-ji.”

  “Your staff is troubled, too,” Jago said. “But we detected nothing aimed at you, nandi.”

  “Rather I’m aimed at someone else, perhaps.”

  “Yet we don’t detect that, either,” Banichi said. “And we gather nothing from usual sources. It’s all very curious.”

  “What is the relationship of a child to parent?”

  He amused them. Jago laughed softly. “It depends on the parent.”

  “It depends on the child,” Banichi said.

  “This child, nadiin-ji. I know I could never explain either of you.”

  “Cajeiri is bright, precocious, and the porcelains are in danger. If one could advise the aiji, best foster him to our Guild, to teach him where to put his elbows.”

  “Everyone has something to teach, is that it?”

  “To the aiji’s heir?” Banichi asked. “Very many have something to teach.”

  “Yet he has no security to speak of. When no one else draws a breath without security.”

  “He has a great deal of security,” Banichi said, “in the man’chi of those in charge of him. He learns to rely on them. And they learn what he will do.”

  The train reached another curve. The protected windows obscured everything outside, but he had a vision of where they were, a brief stretch of wild land before the airport.

  “Do you suppose this transfer of the boy to Ilisidi’s hands, coupled with my presence, coupled with this honor to Valasi, and her attendance, and mine—all sums up to a declaration of peace in the household? Ilisidi supporting the aiji’s push to space?”

  “Her visit to the station did that quite well,” Jago said.

  “Yet something might be afoot in the east,” Banichi said. “Or something might be brewing closer to Sh
ejidan.”

  Never mind that atevi had no word for friend or love. Enemy translated closely enough. One who threatens my interests applied on both sides of the strait.

  What they thought of a human’s prolonged association with the dowager as well as Tabini— Well, atevi had an untranslatable word for a person who bridged a gap and created an association they’d rather see in hell. Troublemaker was close. And that described him, for sure.

  And Tabini made a point of having him down to the planet and then sending him back, dragging him like a lure past certain noses?

  Half his primary security wasn’t on the planet—couldn’t therefore watch his computer, and Tabini’s security hadn’t wanted people carrying packets into the mausoleum, a situation Banichi and Jago had not, in fact, been warned of, not until two of Tabini’s staff showed up not only to assist and guard the baggage while the two of them guarded him, but to take charge of the offending object. On the one hand it could be simple indication they were being strict with the lords and didn’t want to make an exception in his case. On the other—his stomach reacted—it could have robbed him of one bodyguard or set a stranger with him, which Banichi and Jago wouldn’t allow, not even for Tabini’s men—or it could all be a ploy to get their hands on the computer. Banichi and Jago were as nervous as he had ever seen them and, when that was presented to them, about as put out as he had ever seen them. One rarely saw them vexed with the authority that ruled them all—but vexed they had been. They’d been a week on the planet, and suddenly and without warning, no, the computer couldn’t go with them into the service, even when they were told the service would run close to shuttle launch?

  So here they were, having gotten through it, headed back to orbit with no more explanation than before, but at least back into his own security, back into the safety of a closed world, where such surprises wouldn’t come up. Much as he missed the world, much as he pined for blue sky and the heave of the deep sea under him, much as he missed the people he couldn’t take with him—he knew the world up there was safe. He ran his own section of the world up there, and he knew what was going on in it.

  Down here he’d had to take the computer back, not knowing what might have been done in two hours. And he wasn’t wholly sure Algini, the best computer wizard on his staff, had the expertise or resources to find out quickly—not compared to the resources Tabini-aiji could draw on.

  The tracks clicked at a rate now that told him the engineer had clearance all the way, and that they were doubtless inconveniencing trains all over the system. They were late. But they were going to get him off the planet. If they were rushing like this, they were going to make it.

  The train took a hard right turn, the last. Jago got up and restored the juice glass to the rack, untroubled by the motion of the car.

  They had made the airport spur with that turn, not destined for the public terminal, but to the far end of the airport, which handled diplomatic cargo, spacebound cargo, and occasionally explosives, curious juxtaposition.

  They braked. “Plenty of time,” Banichi said.

  Another exposure to daylight and the chance of assassins. Bren personally gathered up his computer, but willingly entrusted it to Jago’s offered hand. The body armor chafed. He tugged at it, straightened his cuffs and saw to his pockets— ready for a dash once the train stopped.

  “The packages made it into baggage?” He even hesitated to ask, amid more serious difficulties his staff had had to track.

  “Early this morning, nadi-ji. No worry.”

  The video games for staff had made it, then, likewise Bindanda’s request for two particular spices. And the treats… those were his idea. He wished he’d been able to think of something appropriate for Jase—something that wouldn’t touch on Jase’s longing to be down here and cause more frustration than it cured.

  The car’s doors opened on a daylight he had last seen from his apartment windows before the ceremony. The view beside the car was a vast tract of concrete, a clouded sky—blue-green foliage walled off by a high fence. A van was waiting for the train, but it would not be Tano and Algini backing Banichi and Jago up this time—no: two more of Tabini’s own, stationed there to swear to the van’s integrity.

  He made the small jump down—a small atevi-scale jump that jolted his knees—to the siding. Jago brought all the hand-baggage, a trifle to her strength, and escorted him briskly to the waiting van—holding back just that small bit that let Banichi double-check that the driver and the guard were indeed Tabini’s agents. Members of the Assassins’ Guild knew one another socially, so to speak—shot at one another, under contract, that being their job, but exchanged pleasant words at other times.

  C1early everything did check. Banichi signaled them, and they boarded.

  They were going to make it. Bren believed it now, heaved a long sigh as he hit the seat and the door shut. The van moved. Chain-link fence and blue-green scrub gave way to a wide panorama.

  Then the shuttle came in view, on the runway.

  Sleek and white: Shai-shan, oldest of the fleet, the first shuttle built and the one whose crew they knew best.

  Fear of flying be damned, Bren thought—it was far safer than where he had just been. It was safer than the whole planet had become—in terms of schemes and plots, and those, in atevi society, were never without consequence.

  They halted right at the bottom of the cargo lift… cargo lifts still serving for personnel, a minor economy in a program otherwise making progress hand over fist. They were in time. They exited the van in haste, walked up onto the platform.

  One could hold a transcontinental airliner half an hour or so, but the calculations were made for Shai-shan: she rode favorable numbers, and her ground crew didn’t like to revise them. Stewards at the open hatch door above waved at them anxiously.

  A wind was blowing cold as, with a bang and a jolt of the hydraulics, they rose up and up to the open hatch. Banichi spoke to someone on his pocket com, confirming their arrival.

  They’d made it.

  * * *

  Chapter 2

  « ^ »

  Air inside was immediately warmer. “Have I time to shed the coat?” Bren asked, and the steward said there was at least that, yes, nadi.

  Bren immediately peeled off the coat, with Jago’s help— slipped out of the heavy vest and let the stewards, who were well accustomed to such precautions, stow coat and vest discreetly in baggage.

  Hand-baggage went, too. All but the computer. Jago had that, and kept it.

  In the democracy of the space effort—and a single, rear-boarded aisle—they passed alongside atevi station workers bound for their jobs in orbit—most back from leave, a few first-timers. Bren knew no few names, and a few rose, bowing under the cramped overhead.. “Thank you, nadiin,” Bren said. “Thank you.” He found himself exhausted, after very little exertion for days—very little exertion, and a great deal of tension. He wanted his seat, which was always up in the front, where the steward was waiting. He made what haste he could.

  “Nandi.” The steward’s position marked his proposed seat, not quite the first row, this time, but close.

  The forward steward he knew very well—having shared with this crew and the shuttle team the effort that consumed their lives and energies. These were zealots, enthusiasts for the program. He was in their association; they were in his. Boarding, he was already home.

  But there were, among atevi—not too unexpectedly—a handful of human passengers, too, in the middle batch of seats. They were going up, workers who’d flown over from the island to catch the shuttle up to their jobs.

  And his own seat, forward, turned out to have a human companion—a surprise, and a very pleasant one. He liked Ginny Kroger, and had by no means expected her on this flight.

  Not his age, not his field, no longer his country… unless one counted the station itself, which for purposes of allegiances, he did. Virginia Kroger was gray-haired, thin, a woman with a fierce sobriety, a mouth that gave nothing away unti
l she absolutely astonished a novice with a grin. No fashion-plate: she wore a thick gray, ugly as sin cardigan and doubtless had an equally unstylish parka in storage: Ginny always complained of the chill on flights, and was usually prepared: count on it.

  “Gin.” He saw now that rank and courtesy had handed him this seatmate, and probably Banichi and Jago had foreknown that before they boarded. “Nadiin-ji,” he said to Jago and Banichi.

  They took his meaning—certainly had no need to protect him from Gin, and no need to spend the flight pretending not to understand a word of Mosphei’, either.

  “No difficulty,” Banichi said. The two of them had their reading and their amusements, and the hand-baggage that contained them.

  It was his first chance to talk with Ginny in half a year. The moment they reached the station, duty would take them to two different zones. And her presence on station was very rare. “How’s the island?” he asked, settling in beside her.

  “Wet,” Ginny said. Of course. It was spring. Rain was a given. “How’s the mainland?”

  “Wet. Security-heavy. The aiji’s holding a family ceremony—that was the must-see that brought me down to here, it turns out.” He bet that Gin had had a briefing from the Department of State as well as her own wing, Science, and knew he was here, but without an understanding, he couldn’t give her a reason. “But I suppose I agree with the call: I did need to be here.” Grand negligence. Let Shawn be as puzzled as he was… until he learned something.

  The hatch had already shut. The passenger comfort systems had come up. Now Shai-shan’s engines roared to life.

  “Welcome aboard,” the copilot said over the intercom, and began the rollout litany, the set of instructions, the list of horrors that a nervous flier hardly liked to listen to, but needed to, no matter how experienced: what to do if the takeoff roll aborted, what to do if they had to evacuate… all the scenarios in which a passenger had any choice.