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 beforehe 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 thisone suit Tabini—to get a force aboard, outright takethe 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 andthe boy’s survival, because Tabini expected extravagant things of the extraordinary people he gathered from all across the world. Tabini routinely sent his grandmotherinto 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 runit, 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 knowthis 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 notlose 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 notsacrifice 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 notJago 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 youto the aiji, nandi; it takes no detours. I think I speak for the staff, except Bindanda. And hisis more aligned with us than otherwise.”