In a little while, they both came back into the car, saying that the train was on its way, and would couple them on in a few minutes. Tano meanwhile offered him a soft; drink, which he took listlessly, and Algini arrived with a final paper for Banichi to sign.
What? Bren asked himself. Concerning what? His commitment to Malguri, might it be?
To the aiji-dowager’s prison, where she was dying—this notorious, bitter woman, twice passed over for aiji.
One wondered if shehad had a choice in lodgings, or whether the rumors about her were true… that, having offended Tabini, she had very little choice left.
The jet made a quick rise above the urban sprawl of Shejidan—one could pick out the three or four major central buildings among the tiled roofs, the public Registry, the Agricultural Association, the long complex of Shejidan Steel, the spire of Western Mining and Industry, the administrative offices of Patanadi Aerospace. A final turn onto their course swept the Bu-javid past the aircraft’s wing-tip, a sweep of fortified hill, interlocked squares of terraces and gardens—Bren imagined he could see the very court where he had lived… and wondered in a moment of panic if he would ever see his apartment again.
They reached cruising altitude—above the likely capability of random private operators. A drink appeared. Tano’s efficiency. Tano’s proper concern. Bren sulked, not wanting to like Tano, who’d replaced the servants he very much liked, who had had their jobs with him since he’d taken up residence in Shejidan, and who probably had been transferred by a faceless bureaucracy without so much as an explanation. It wasn’t fair to them. It wasn’t fair to him. He liked them, even if they probably wouldn’t understand that idea. He was used to them and they were gone.
But sulking at Tano and Algini wasn’t a fair treatment of the new servants, either: he knew it and, in proper atevi courtesy, tried not to show his resentment toward them, or his feelings at all, toward two strangers. He sat back instead with as placid a face as he could manage and watched the land and the clouds pass under the wing, wishing he was flying instead toward Mospheira, and safety.
And wishing Banichi and Jago were culturally or biologically wired to understand the word ‘friend’ or ‘ally’ the way he wanted to mean it. That, too. But that was as likely as his walking the Mospheira straits barefoot.
His stomach was upset. He was all but convinced now that he had made a very serious mistake in not calling Deana Hanks directly after the incident, while the attempt on his bedroom was still a matter of hot pursuit, and before Banichi and Jago might have received specific orders to prevent him calling.
But he hadn’t even thought of it then—he couldn’t remember what he hadbeen thinking, and decided he must have gone into mental shock, trying first to dismiss the whole matter and to look brave in front of Banichi; then he’d launched himself into ‘handling it,’ even to a fear of Hanks’ seizing control over the situation—meaning he was losing his grip on matters, and knew it, and was still denying things were out of control.
Now he was well past the end of his options for action, so far as he could see, unless he wanted to contemplate outright rebellion against Tabini’s invitation to an estate hours away from the City—unless he was willing to break away in that remote airport screaming kidnap and murder, and appealing to the casual citizen for rescue from the aiji.
Foolish notion. Foolish as the notion of refusing Tabini in the invitation, under the terms he had had—and now that he began to think about phones and the lake estate, and getting any call out to Mospheira, from where he was going—the request to transfer a call to the Mospheira phone system would have to go back through the Bu-javid for authorization, so it was the same damned thing.
Eventually his office on Mospheira would wonder why he hadn’t called… in, say, a week or two of silence. It wasn’t unusual, that lapse of time between his calls and consultations. And, after that two weeks of silence, his office might be worried enough to think about contacting Foreign Affairs, over them, who would tell them to wait while they went through channels.
In another week, Foreign Affairs on Mospheira might have exhausted the approved channels it had at its disposal, and decided to send a memo to the President, who might, might, after consulting the Departments in Council, make personal inquiries of his own and finally lay the inquiry on Tabini’s doorstep.
Count it the better part of a month before Mospheira decided for certain that Shejidan had somehow misplaced the paidhi.
Disturbing, to discover that individual atevi he had personally thought he understood and an atevi society he had thought he intellectually understood suddenly weren’t acting in any predictable way. He felt it as an offense to his pride that he found nothing now wiser or more resourceful to do than to pretend he was utterly naive and that he wasn’t actually being kidnapped across the country—where, face it, he could disappear for good and all. Nobody from Mospheira, not even Hanks, was going to fracture the Treaty looking for a paidhi who just might have made some unforgivable mistake.
Hell, no, they wouldn’t demand him back. They’d just send a new one, with as good a briefing as they could manage and instructions to pull in a bit and not to be so stupid.
He’d trusted so implicitly… never expected Tabini to be other than a hundred percent for atevi and his own personal interests, but he’d always believed he knew what those interests were. Tabini hadn’t resisted his suggestions: not in the rail system, not the space program, not medical research, not the computerization of the supply system. Tabini wasn’t opposed to anything he’d put forward, or, for God’s sake, Tabini could have said something, and they could have talked about it—but, no, Tabini had listened with intelligent interest, asking lively questions—Tabini’s predecessors had all listened to reason, and invested themselves to the hilt in the interlocking of ecology and technological advance, a concept that atevi were quick to understand.
Reciprocally, there’d never been anything an aiji of Tabini’s house had asked that humans hadn’t done, or given, or tried to comply with, since the War of the Landing itself, right down to his current paper regarding processed meat, which tried… triedto explain to Mospheira that commercialization of meat production was deeply offensive to Ragi, no matter that Nisebi saw nothing wrong with it and were willing to sell. That cultural adaptation went both ways, and Mospheira ought to rely on the sea, and fish, which had no season, and thereby showtheir hosts on the planet that they had made an effort to change themselves to conform to atevi sensibilities, the way atevi had changed their behaviors toward humans…
Sometimes his job seemed like rolling the proverbial boulder uphill. Just not losing ground seemed hard.
But atevi were on the very threshold of manned space-flight. They had satellite communications. They had a reliable light launch system. They were on the verge of developing the materials that, with human advice, could leapfrog them past the steps humans had taken getting down here, right to powered descent, interlinked maneuvering—terms hewas having to learn, concepts that he was studying up on during his so-called fall vacations, cramming into his head the details behind the next policy paper he might give—that he achedto give—some time in the next five years, granted the intermediate heavy-lift rocket was going to work.
Not even that they absolutely needed to take that step; but the office on Mospheira said stall, let atevi develop the intermediate lift capacity. The quality in the synthetic materials wasn’t there yet, and the chemical rocket lifter and the early manned experience would give atevi the experience and the political and emotional investment in space—atevi were much on heroes. It was a cultural decision, a scientific decision… it disappointed hell out of him, because he wanted to be the paidhi that put them a hundred percent into the business of space, and he wanted it while he was young enough to go up himself. That was his secret, personal dream, that if atevi were going to trust any human to go, they might trust the paidhi, and he wanted to be that person, and steer the attitudes if not the spacecraft—