Defender

  The inner hatch meanwhile opened. A gust of cold air came in, biting cold. Gloves were definitely in order, but Bren hadn’t found his—and now he recalled where his were, not in the carry-on at all, but in his casual jacket. And that was deep in diplomatic baggage down in the hold. The onworld household staff had not been apprized of the fact he would go directly to the spaceport from the ceremony.

  Station personnel, meanwhile, met them as they disembarked, cold-suited, masked, stationed there to be sure they used the lines and that no one went drifting out a hundred meters to the far recesses of the docking mast.

  Cold—yes. It was cold, a cold so bitter it hit the roots of the teeth on the first breath. Bren used his coat-tail on the safety-line, having no wish to lose skin; and Jago, seeing his predicament, simply took hold of his arm and drew him along. It broke no few regulations—but he arrived at the end of the safety line without frostbitten fingers.

  The personnel lift that faced them was nominally sheltered, but it had been waiting a few minutes—it was bitter cold as they entered it. Atevi workers would have certainly understood if the aijiin had taken the lift first and all to themselves, leaving them to wait it out in the cold, but on his standing order Banichi held the lift door open once they reached it, packing the workers in as they never would do in the security-conscious Bujavid—workers with their cumbersome luggage, to the confusion and embarrassment of the protocol-sensitive novices. On the planet, common folk had no wish to mingle too closely with aijiin, who sometimes drew bullets. Up here, there were no bullets to fear—but there was the consideration of frozen fingers and power-conservation.

  “A different world up here, nadiin,” Bren said to all and sundry. “Here we do differently. Pack in. Pack in close. Customs will meet you downstairs.”

  They all made it in, pressed body to body. Banichi pushed the button and the lift banged into motion, bringing the floor up under their feet.

  Baggage settled. The air warmed with the body-heat of a packed elevator—the other reason for packing it close—and Bren, with his hands beneath his arms, drew breaths of air that no longer quite burned his lungs.

  Atevi spring court dress was not adequate for this transit, even with the vest. Ginny was far more comfortable in the tatty parka, and had the hood up. Rime was on the metal as the car stopped at the station main deck and let them out into customs—a set of tables and low-level x-ray and sniffer apparatus easily rolled in to meet the flight—in what was otherwise an ordinary station corridor.

  “Let the paidhiin out!” the cry was within the lift, and workers pressed back in an effort to give him and Ginny the scant courtesy they could manage. Those nearest the door had to get out first, all the same, and simply bowed as they walked out through customs—a privilege of rank they didn’t decline.

  There they parted, having their own separate welcoming parties waiting. For him, Tano and Algini were both there, welcome sight—tall, black figures in black-and-silver uniform. Kate Shugart, from Ginny Kroger’s staff, had come to welcome her. The hellos were warm enough, and reciprocal between staffs, but: the cold above had set into travelers’ bones, and the desire for a warm drink and home overwhelmed any inclination to linger for social pleasantries.

  Bren and Banichi and Jago walked along with Tano and Algini—rare that those two simultaneously left the security station, but it wasn’t likely to develop a crisis in half an unattended hour, if things were going as usual.

  “And how are things?” he asked Tano. “Any calls?”

  “Oh, very well here. No calls. Jase Graham will be your guest tonight at dinner, nadi-ji, unless you object. Bindanda is doing his utmost.”

  Bindanda, that loan from Tatiseigi, was a very creditable chef, besides having done double duty as security and anything else that came to hand. Narani, his head of staff, would have made the judgement call accepting Jase as a guest tonight, but that was no problem. His staff had standing orders that Jase might be his guest whether he was absent, present, or en route.

  Besides, Jase had so wanted to go down on this trip, having found a rare quiet moment that he could take leave of his regular duties. It hadn’t happened. Ramirez had called at the last moment, senior captain, and there it was: no trip.

  “I trust there are no crises. Nothing behind this invitation.”

  “Not that we know,” Tano said—which covered a very extensive information-gathering apparatus. “The priorities committee met on schedule. Lord Geigi sent word to our staff that there were no surprises on the agenda.”

  “Very good. I have to see him, tomorrow if I can. There’s progress on the robots—they’re here, in fact.”

  “Yes, paidhi-ji.” Not only Tano, but Banichi and Jago were listening, absorbing, putting pieces together, the most competent staff any man could ask for. They knew instantly what it all meant. They swept up every crumb of detail he gave them and would bend heaven and earth to make things work on schedule.

  “One trusts the broadcast of the memorial made it up here.”

  “Yes,” Algini said.

  “Curious, was it not?”

  “Indeed,” Tano said.

  “Do we have any theory what it meant?”

  “None, on the surface,” Banichi said.

  “What it meant,” Jago said, “likely defines itself in meetings yet to come. Curious, indeed, nandi.”

  But not their meetings. Not their risk. He’d been of use, perhaps, only as a symbol of the space effort. Tabini surely knew about the robots his shuttle was shipping up off his continent

  … and that was something Tabini would announce, a triumph of persistence, if nothing else, a new phase in the construction.

  C1early space would be a topic in the upcoming session, and Tabini showed his cards—so to speak.

  Home again, home in every sense, where he had his own information-gathering apparatus. He had considerable power onworld. It was nothing to the resources he had here, in what had become his office, his residence, his steel-and-plastics world.

  Home, and setting to work with a whole new set of parameters, given Ginny’s surprise. Home, where Geigi, who was nominally in charge of the atevi side of the station, was far less enigmatic, and where things ran more or less predictibly. He drew a deep breath, worked chilled fingers, walked a corridor he knew to a lift he knew and rode it in close company with his own staff.

  There was a subtle anxious mindset that took over when he was on the planet, in the constant knowledge that at any moment, at any slight miscalculation, he could meet a bullet and end all the work he did or hoped to do—and with it, hope for lives that he had no right to risk. Visits down there, under any level of security at all, had gotten to be a calculated risk. Up here there was more and more to be done, and down there the pace of change pushed the planet’s less stable residents to greater and greater agitation. There was simply no replacement for him, and he had to admit he had no right, no personal right to take stupid chances with his life. That meant downhill skiing was right out, along with bad-weather flying or boating, and he hadn’t been on a mecheita’s tall back in four years. Not that he didn’t miss those things, dream of those things—but at least—at least, up here, things ran, and he could stop anticipating disasters.

  The curving corridor apparently ended in a door like all the other doors, but Algini keyed open the security lock, let them through into a whole self-contained world. It was the door of the Little Bujavid, as atevi called it. Lord Geigi’s residence was at the start of this new corridor, the paidhi-aiji’s at the end, and two unoccupied apartments in the middle, ready for any atevi lord who found it necessary to be here on short notice: Ilisidi had been the first inspiration, and the Astronomer Emeritus had visited as recently as half a year ago.

  It was atevi decor from the first moment they passed the door, a muted color here and there, a great deal of white or near-white. The hall-end had the baji-naji conspicuous, next Bren’s own doors.

  Baji-naji. Chaos and overthrow: appropriate enough
emblems not only for the space program but for the paidhi-aiji’s household and this whole section: they all found more than a little humor in the notion.

  But the baji-naji had a table beneath it, a wooden table with a single river-rounded stone: chaos underlain with, comparatively speaking, the most stable thing in the universe, their own precious world, the place that sent them.

  His major domo Narani had done that understated exterior arrangement for the hall. Atevi visitors had greatly admired it. A photograph of it had reached the news services, as a result, and Narani, his modest major domo, from a small rural estate, with a peasant-bred practicality to his designs, had accidentally created a widely copied fashion throughout atevi society, an entire artistic movement in Shejidan that found approval on both sides of the conservative-liberal battle. His back-to-basics traditionalism that harked back to country modes and primitive expressions—so the practitioners of kabiu’tera declared. Narani might have had a whole new career on the planet, a respected master—if he were willing to leave here, which Narani was not.

  In point of fact, Bren thought, he simply liked Narani’s arrangement. In stabilizing the chaos around the place, it did satisfy the heart—God knew what wonderful things it did to atevi sensibilities—and to him, yes, both the baji-naji and the stone were very apt, very reassuring.

  Home for certain. The door opened. There were bows, there were pleasant, familiar faces… Narani was, of course, foremost, an older gentleman, kindly and very much in charge. There was Bindanda, a roundish fellow of great creative talent—not only in the kitchen. A handful of staff who chanced to be near, men and women who came simply to fill out the number and make a good showing in the hall.

  “Nand’ paidhi,” Narani said. “There will be dinner with nand’ Jase tonight. One hopes this is acceptable news.”

  “Very acceptable, Rani-ji.” He shed the coat into Narani’s hands, and the bulletproof vest with it. The temperature was perfect, the place was perfect. Here his staff would steer him into the right clothes and the right place at the right time and he utterly could stop thinking about schedules and protocol crises. Once he would have called it lazy. With the pace of decisions his job had become, he called it necessary.

  “When my baggage arrives, unpack it. Packets. All labeled. I’ve bought gifts for all the staff. —Danda-ji, your spices should arrive. And yes, the video games. I’ll deal with my messages tomorrow if there are none urgent. —Is there, however, anything pending from Lord Geigi?”

  “Oh, indeed,” Narani said, and signaled a younger servant, who presented the message-bowl for visual inspection: it contained a good number of small scrolls, one of which was Geigi’s message-case: he knew that one very well. He picked that one out and read it on the spot.

  “Geigi advises me he wants a meeting tomorrow. Noon would be excellent, if it suits him. Anything my staff arranges with his staff will do very well.”

  There were a handful of less formal cases: atevi disputes or atevi advisements. The messages were from departments, two, by appearance, even from common workers: certain mediations with humans might properly come directly to the paidhi-aiji, a right guaranteed by centuries-old law.

  And a handful of human language printouts. His staff had rolled them into the traditional form—and he feared one of those might be a letter from his relatives, who any hour now might hear via the news services he had been in Shejidan and hadn’t called—he’d catch hell for that, when his mother knew.

  And at the bottom, an accident of shape, not priority, rested a couple of flat, sealed disks that were with equal certainty from various station departments—data he’d requested.

  Besides those, still more letters would come flowing into the mail system from the planet, following the memorial service. He could forecast that as he could forecast a storm from the smell in the air. From down there, adding to the mail he’d brought up with him, would come letters ranging from the thoughtful, well-dispositioned observations of lords he did deal with on legitimate business, to less useful suggestions from the amateur but well-meaning, and so on down to the truly unbalanced, be they harmless or otherwise—rather more of those than the real proportion, actually. He had a very large staff on the planet whose job was to filter the mail—but they did pass through the choicest crackpot letters. Such missives, however amusing, gave him a useful sense of the fringe element—and the things sane atevi might actually feel, but would not express or admit. The fears of shuttles puncturing the atmosphere and letting all the air out had diminished significantly, for instance: those were easy. The alien threat was not, and now second-class machimi had a whole new subject matter: alien invasions which came down on sails of flame, destroying cities, frightening children into nightmares. There was an ongoing machimi involving an atevi starship crew fighting off aliens that remarkably looked like other atevi dressed like humans.

  He truly didn’t approve of those, but that failed to stop them.

  Well, but he was glad to have matters underway with Geigi… and could scarcely wait to inform Geigi about the robots, which really was Ginny’s triumph to reveal first, to Ramirez and the ship council… but Geigi was more his territory, and discreet with the other two camps.

  So he could be sure Geigi’s business wasn’t the robots. The urgency was more likely Geigi’s precious fish tanks—not the decorative ones in Geigi’s office, rather the big ones that were meant to feed the space-based population. That was the project Geigi was determined to build as soon as they could spare the labor and machinery from the refueling effort. After three years, priorities were being reset, and he just bet that Geigi was intent on getting his own project to the top of the heap— especially hoping he’d come back from the planet with some new sense of the aiji’s next priorities.

  He wasn’t averse to Geigi’s program. In fact he was in favor of it. But he wondered, on his way to the bedroom, whether he could get a reciprocal concession out of Geigi. They were close associates, but that never meant one couldn’t look for advantage in a situation. It was simply the way negotiations happened in court.

  A younger manservant appeared in the hallway to inform him, a formality, that his bath was waiting… never mind the shower was always available: it was the form, the welcome home. He went in, shed the clothes into the manservant’s waiting hands, stepped into the shower and vigorously scrubbed away the residue of candle-smoke and incense that had come with him from the memorial.

  Simply shutting his eyes reconstructed that vault, and the world, and the mourners all eyeing one another up and down the rows like predator and prey.

  Poor Cajeiri. His first public ceremonial, and he’d embarrassed the house, and his present and past guardians.

  But the diplomatic relations of the aiji with the East weren’t his problem. The East-West problem all belonged to Tabini and Ilisidi now, and there was no one in the world—literally— better at handling those stresses and strains on the social fabric. The aishidi’tat stood firm. Tabini ran it; he intended it to survive, and its welfare, however habituated the thought, was just not the paidhi’s problem any longer.

  Neither was the heir to the aishidi’tat the paidhi’s concern.

  He needed to sift through the mail. He needed to solve the pressing problems up here in the heavens.

  Not least among them the matter of a fish tank and the prioritization of Ginny’s new robots.

  He let the water course over him and laid his strategy for a visit to Geigi.

  And for a phone call down to the planet, to give a hello to Toby, who’d want a reasonable answer as to why his brother hadn’t phoned when he was in easy range of a visit. That had to be a very, very carefully given excuse.

  He felt guilty about that choice. He really did. But the schedule had been rushed. He was tired from the trip as it was. Sandwiching a flying trip to the island into his other business…

  Honestly, no, that wasn’t it. Toby’s letters were full of troubles he couldn’t solve and his phone calls were harder still
. No, I can’t grew thinner and thinner as the years passed, particularly when he was in range, and please was so implicit in every conversation he had with Toby. Please come down here, please don’t be out of touch, please tell me what to do with Mother.

  Hell if he knew. There wasn’t a good answer, not outside of their mother deciding to do something different than she’d done for the last forty years. Mospheirans didn’t change easily. Their mother didn’t change, period.

  Most of all, hardest for him to deal with Toby’s queries on his marital crises: What do I do about Jill? How do I keep her?

  Say no to Mother was the only answer he knew. Don’t try to stand in where I know damn well neither of us should be. Get out of there. Don’t go when Mother calls.

  You think after all these years I’m going to have a better answer? Me, the unmarried one?

  He scrubbed his face and his hair, hard, not even wanting to think about that next communication with Toby. He couldn’t play part-time marriage counselor, or psychologist, not atop everything else. He had—

  God, he had Sandra Johnson’s plants in his baggage. And uninvited as they were, she’d gone to a great deal of trouble to give him that gift. He didn’t want to account for their accidental demise in the letter he was bound to get.

  He put his head out of the shower and spied Bindanda.

  “Danda-ji, there are some plant slips with my carry-on baggage. Would you kindly find out how to pot them?”

  In an orbiting apartment with no pots, no soil and no fertilizer. But his staff necessarily specialized in miracles, and he could do Bindanda the greatest possible favor not to drip on the floor when he made the request.

  “Yes, nadi-ji.”

  Toby, on the other hand… Toby’s problem… wasn’t something Bindanda could make go away.

  Well, he had to call Toby. He had to. He’d probably better call his mother.

  He’d do it tomorrow.