Not the dowager. The lift door opened and she emerged with Cenedi, perfectly in command.
“We shall see you at supper,” she said, “paidhi-ji.”
“Honored, nand’ dowager.”
What else was there to say? He didn’t plan to eat. His mind was off into a dozen more scenarios, frantic in its application. War or peace was a hell of a dessert choice, and somehow in his management of affairs, his nudges this way and that, his quest after a piece of tape had ended up in a confrontation between aijiin.
Well to have it now, if it was going to happen, while they were still at dock and had options. The thought of Ilisidi pent up in a ship with a captain whose murder she fondly wished—a captain who was the only captain capable of running the ship’s operations—was unthinkable.
God, he wanted to stay on the ground. He wanted to go back down to the planet and go back to his estate with his staff and wait there for it all to be over… but that wasn’t a choice he’d given himself.
He had to get the authorities through this set of formalities, and he had to ask himself if Ilisidi thought she was going to ask for the ship’s log or if his search for the records had become a complete side-channel to the dowager’s intentions of running matters wherever she was. Certainly no one had informed Sabin she was second to the aiji-dowager on her own deck.
If anyone did have to convey that information, he knew all too well who the translator had to be.
They arrived into a scene of managed chaos, the midst of null-g preparations for the invitation… preparation which their constant communications net had already set into motion.
Bundles were everywhere in the paidhi’s quarters, soft bundles, in general, which floated where they were not jammed tightly in, bundles that should give forth their contents and then fold down inconspicuously and with little mass.
Bundles were lodged up near the ceiling and a few were tucked into the narrow passage between bed and bath, rather like the egg-cases of an infestation of insects; and the bed itself—fortunately extendable—had a transparent half lid of sorts, which had not come down, and behind which a few smaller parcels were tucked as if for ready reference. Bundles were secured in the bath, bundles were stored in the shower stall, besides one that seemed to have exploded, strewing far more wardrobe into the zero-g of the premises than it could reasonably have contained.
Amid it all, Banichi and Jago had cases of electronics yet to set up, two of which they immediately emptied, donating them to Narani’s urgent demand for a flat surface. They were still searching for the pressing-iron, and exactly how they proposed to use that in null-g remained to be seen.
“Press cloth in these circumstances, Rani-ji?” Bren objected. “The second-best shirt will do. I’m sure it will do.”
“Paidhi-ma,” Narani objected, “I beg you allow us to try. For our pride’s sake, nandi. The coat has gotten rumpled, among other calamities. And the captains are invited.”
Staff continued their unpacking, cursing the insistence of ship security on inspecting certain of the items in an entirely unacceptable fashion, and at the last moment, of stowing the contents of the baggage cart in a haphazard hurry. Things had gone askew from plan, and it wasn’t in any way the atevi-ordered arrangement of rooms that let the staff do their duty in an orderly way. The staff was entirely distressed.
Meanwhile there was the scale of things. Banichi and Jago had quarters adjacent to his, and communicating by a door between as well as their own corridor access. A suite of rooms, the charts called the arrangement, each with clear floor about four strides long and two strides wide, which turned out to be, when occupied by atevi, human strides, if they were able to stride at the moment—and entirely too small. Niggling minor problem—storage for atevi-scale clothing was impossible in the tiny lockers provided for the original colonists. Greater problem: low human-scale ceilings made it very scant clearance for tall atevi such as Banichi even to stand up, once they were standing, and made a room in which four or five atevi were drifting askew a very small-seeming room indeed.
Those were situations for which they had been moderately prepared—at least in planning, before they tried to maneuver past one another. The closet and the food-storage closets were both what the ship called suites, and those were full, at the moment, Bren was told, of floating bags. The unpacked clothing would ultimately fit on lines to contain and order the wardrobes, once there was gravity, which now there was not. The unpacked security equipment had clamps and braces which did not mate to the room, rather to more gear that itself had to be fixed in place under these conditions, and which had to stay in place once there was gravity.
More, the galley stores and the security equipment included heavy items, and in the grand scale of things, even the dowager’s invitation took second place to the need to get the heavy equipment and bundles sorted to the bottom and secured before undocking—before the simulated gravity sent the heavy things crashing down on the light ones. And on that score, there had been argument. Crew had advised them in a written communique not to take things into quarters, to leave them in cargo until after undock, and he had said no, they would take them in nevertheless. So doubtless crew who had shoved things into the cabins were quite smug about it all. So a jaundiced suspicion could guess.
And here they were, everything in their own control, if one could call it control—with a formal dinner unexpectedly at hand and baggage everywhere.
His luggage, however, was bulk rather than mass, and at least posed few breakage hazards.
“Just pad the equipment with my bags,” he told Banichi and Jago, when there was question of bringing Tano and Algini board for a few hours to do the installation while they pursued lisidi’s notion of formal entertainment. “We aren’t going to be able to get this installed before we move. My shirts won’t break. And we shouldn’t pull Tano and Algini off internal security. I truly don’t like that notion, Banichi.”
“One can try to secure things,” Banichi said. “Or we can draw personnel from Cenedi, perhaps before launch.”
“I’m sure I have enough clothes. I’m sure I have far too many clothes. Do it, Banichi.”
Meanwhile the domestic staff, which had expected a decent interval to do its necessary arranging, now searched to find, among other necessities of life, old-fashioned vegetable starch, which they intended to boil—one asked—in a sealed bag in the microwave… which also had to be unpacked and secured. One did not want to imagine the zero-g consequences of a burst bag of starch.
They had, however, located the pressing-iron—which fortunately was electric, not a flatiron as the old arrangement had been.
Plugging it in, however, required a unit and a small, unreasonably mislaid adapter to mediate between its three-pronged plug and the ship’s power clips. That was well enough: they needed the adapters for the microwave, too.
The staff oh so rarely missed a social forecast. Narani had so carefully had his less formal second-best pressed, protected, and ready for what had, to Narani, seemed likely: an informal dinner with the dowager.
They had certainly been sandbagged. Caught out, half-prepared—excusable, under the pressure of their sudden departure; but now there was no margin.
“I could surely make do with the casual coat, Rani-ji,” Bren reiterated, foreknowing the futility of that protest; and, no, no, even yet, absolutely not. Narani would perish of shame if he sent the paidhi-aiji to a state dinner in his second-best coat and trousers, and he would not admit defeat, yet, no matter the lack of adapters.
Not to mention that Banichi and Jago had to have their formal uniforms and everything of their individual spit and polish, and the equipment that went with them. That necessity had Asicho in a dither, because those hadn’t been readied, either.
There was at least time to bathe, once Asicho shifted the baggage out of the paidhi’s shower, and Bren simply turned over the clothes he was wearing, trusting no crew would be floating by in the common hall, and took refuge in the anemic fog-showe
r, which at least was unaffected by lack of gravity.
It was fifteen minutes of comparative peace until the shower beeped a warning, sucked up the moisture and turned itself off.
Asicho waited with a soft, sweet-smelling bathrobe, zero-g and all.
Meanwhile the adapters had turned up, and staff, having microwaved their starch to slimy perfection, prepared his shirt for ironing.
There was something remarkably tranquil about the aroma of fresh ironing. And Banichi and Jago reported one emergency solved and their quarters secured: they had unmade their beds, corralled the fragiles in small bundles of bedding and secured them under the lowered transparent bed-lids.
Bren settled to dry his hair and check last-moment messages.
Of mail, there was none but a parting well-wish from Lord Geigi, which he answered fondly, and with kind thoughts for the one atevi in all the world who probably wanted most to be here:
I shall attempt to secure pictures to show you…
Then, in that momentary pause, somber and thinking of very far places indeed, he composed a letter to his mother, hoping Barb would read it to her.
Aboard now, and thinking of you.
I wish I could be two people, one to do things a son and a brother ought to have done, especially in these last years that I haven’t been in reach.
I think of winter in the mountains, the cabin we used to use. I think of the seashore we visited. I think of the kitchen and sitting in the morning drinking tea, and I want all that to be there when I get back. I have to go, for the safety of all we work for—but I’m coming back, and I want you to bake that really spicy teacake, and I want a few mornings to spend just like that, sopping up tea and teacake and telling you everywhere I’ve been.
Then I want to take a good few days of the vacation I’ve got coming to fly you up to the mountains and see if that cabin’s still there. It’s the good memories that sustain me.
I need you. Take care of yourself. Give my love to Toby.
With all my heart, mum. Take care and be good.
Bren.
He nerved himself and sent, a button push that necessitated a reach after the retreating computer.
He trusted C1 and Mogari Nai at this point. He had to. He had to trust very many people for everything.
He left the computer fairly securely parked against the wall, near his bed, and concentrated on the hair-drying, Asicho being busy with Jago’s uniform, and Banichi’s.
His shirt when it arrived had lace so crisp it rattled, lace inserted through the coat-sleeves before he put his arms in, which was the secret by which the court achieved true extravagance of dress. Bindanda snugged up first the shirt and then the frothy, razor-edged collar while Narani supported the coat from behind and kept his hair out of the lace points.
Fashion, fashion, fashion: a little out of current, he knew, but a statement, nonetheless, a declaration, a respect for the dowager and her table.
He took a strange reassurance from the lace and the excess, like some ancient warrior of the archives putting on armor, some sense of atavistic participatory extravagance that declared a class, a club, a secret society to which the dowager and he belonged. Which was in a sense the truth. It meant that she would know him, she would read him accurately, and perhaps, if things went badly, listen to him much more reasonably than if he had arrived, as he had argued to do, in less than his absolute best. Narani was right. Narani’s instincts said find the damned starch and steam the silk coat to rights, for the sake of all of them.
He anchored himself by a handgrip to have his hair dressed: Asicho spread a silk scarf across the brocade coat shoulders, and her skilled, fine fingers rendered the braid with little tugs that tried to pull him loose from his mooring.
She accomplished the ribboning immaculately, he trusted, not taking time to find a mirror: white, for the paidhi’s professional neutrality in a minefield of heraldries, associations and rivalries.
After that, in that coat of silk both fine and thick as armor, he could drift slightly askew from the ceiling and floor, let his computer drift in front of him on voice-command, and gather his thoughts over his notes and charts of ship structure and space allotments. Not a pleasant contemplation, but he had before him an assembly of his accesses, his resources, in the not-inconceivable eventuality of the dowager creating a breach with Ogun and with Sabin.
And a hostile collapse of the entire political structure.
Hadn’t Tabini said from the beginning that he intended to rule the station, that he intended there be an atevi starship?
Would this one suit Tabini—to get a force aboard, outright take the ship for himself?
God, no. There was the boy. Would Tabini send his only child into an arena of conflict?
Damned right, if it set his enemies off their guard, he thought, not wanting to think it: yes, Tabini would, and he would do it without many second thoughts, expecting success and the boy’s survival, because Tabini expected extravagant things of the extraordinary people he gathered from all across the world. Tabini routinely sent his grandmother into situations like that—granted his grandmother was the greatest threat available.
It was possible.
Not advisable, not what he wanted to think about—but possible.
“If we need to get out of here in a hurry,” he said to Jago as she drifted by, “do you have account of the route?”
“Always, Bren-ji,” was Jago’s answer. She anchored herself by a hand against the ceiling, a very easy reach. “Shall we plan?”
“Possible,” he said. “Remotely possible. I’ll do all I can to assure it doesn’t happen.”
“Yes,” Jago said fervently.
“You’re in touch with Cenedi?”
“Constantly,” Jago said. His staff, ordinarily entirely independent, had attached themselves and him to the dowager’s— convenient, until it came to him doing anything independent, or establishing his own priorities. Like preventing a war. Or theft of a starship.
Which, God, he wasn’t sure he wanted to prevent. How could they run it, without Sabin?
“I have every confidence in Cenedi,” he said to her. “But I have utmost confidence in you and Banichi, nadi. Utmost. You are not to accept a rear guard position, or to desert me at any time.”
He conflicted man’chiin in that statement, and knew it. Theirs flowed up to Tabini himself, and by small detours, to him in the main, and to the dowager as Tabini’s representative: there was no time at which that man’chi to Tabini wavered.
“I know this place, these humans, and these circumstances,” he said, revealing his logic in the statement. “And the dowager ought to take my advice, but, infelicitous pair: may not. I fear a move to take the ship itself. And I will not lose from the household the two of your Guild I most trust to know and understand and defend the interests of the house, all to save some other man of the dowager’s household. I will not, Jago-ji. If any such infelicitous thing should come about, I most assuredly will need my most experienced staff around me.”
That at least occasioned Jago a moment’s consideration… possibly because the paidhi was an utter, forgetful fool and the communications she wore was live and directed to Cenedi’s staff; but it was late to moderate that statement, impossible to call it back, and, on a third thought, if it penetrated Cenedi’s consciousness of a dangerous situation, good.
He touched his own coat, in the same position in which his bodyguard wore their electronics. It was a question.
Jago touched the same spot. “It isn’t,” she said. “We don’t communicate with their staff, when we’re inside. Paidhi-ji, we would tell you.”
That was a relief. And in itself, that statement told him where man’chi lay.
“I will protect the dowager,” he said, to ease their uneasiness, “but will not sacrifice myself or my guard or my staff that I have trained up here for very important work. I feel no call to do that. And if they were to attempt to take the ship—I don’t know what we would do with it, nadi
-ji.”
“We completely agree, paidhi-ji.”
This was not Jago off-duty, who slept with him. No, this was Jago in official relationship, and for atevi officers, instinct-driven to take such orders from the highest in the household, it was a profound, a revolutionary statement, with implications for the rest of the voyage—if they had a voyage.
“I’m sorry to have placed you in such a position. But in my estimation, we have no choice but to maintain my independent judgment.”
“The aiji gave you very great authority. I speak for Banichi as well,” Jago said. “And our man’chi flows through you to the aiji, nandi; it takes no detours. I think I speak for the staff, except Bindanda. And his is more aligned with us than otherwise.”
Revolution, indeed.
A paper lordship.
Or was it? His staff had read it. And they took it seriously.
A lord in his own province—and his was the heavens themselves—could say no to very high-rank.
He was astonished. Appalled. “Jago-ji, keep me from foolishness. Say so to Banichi, Jago-ji.”
“Oh, he knows,” Jago said. “But I will tell him, nandi.”
She went on her way. He folded up his computer, finding his lands trembling.
Absolute novice’s mistake, that with the possibility of interconnected communications, and he’d made it. But gut-level, too, he’d relied on his staff, and wasn’t disappointed.
Lord of the heavens?
A rival to Ilisidi?
From a carefully insulated center of his brain that might be mostly atevi, or mostly human—he honestly didn’t know what he thought.
He’d been blindsided. He’d made one mistake. From now on he had to be flawless.