Precursor

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Good.” He left all such questions to his security, trusting they could manage it far better than he, and would. “Get some sleep, Banichi-ji. If you can leave it to someone else, do. Tano and Algini, too. This all starts very early in the morning.”

  “One does recall so,” Banichi said. Banichi had a new set of systems under his hands in the security station, ones Banichi had helped put together, and he knew Banichi had that for a powerful attraction. “Tano and Algini, however, have gone to meet Jasi-ji in his room.”

  “To sleep there?” He was astonished. Did they think someone in the Mospheiran mission might have any designs on Jason’s life?

  But they were careful; they were atevi, and they were careful.

  “For safety,” Banichi amplified the information, “Replacing two of Tabini’s staff.”

  “Where are they sleeping?” he wondered, stupid question.

  “Nadi, they will hardly sleep. We will survive lack of sleep.”

  “Of course,” he said, as Narani, too, entered the central hall, this inner circle of fortunate encounter. A baji-naji inset was above, below, and several places about. No soft green and blue here: definite, entangling black and white and color that fought like dragons in every design.

  “Will you have any late supper, nand’ paidhi?”

  “No,” he said. “Thank you, Rani-ji, I can’t manage another bite, and I fear I had at least half a glass too much tonight, with Jase.” His head was light. He’d run from supper to late tea with Tabini, to here, all nonstop.

  He turned, saw all the staff together, in various doorways all eyes on him.

  He’d been afraid, a moment ago, thinking on the morning. In the moment Jase had left he’d mentally expected he’d be alone, like the Mospheirans; but he wasn’t, he wasn’t ever. They wouldn’t let him be. “Nadiin-ji, thank you, thank you very much for coming.”

  “A grand adventure,” Narani said, a man who should be, if he were Mospheiran, raising grandchildren… but here was a model of discretion and experience for a lord’s house. “A great adventure, nand’ paidhi.”

  “Your names are written,” he said, bowing his head, and meant it from the heart… meant it, too, for the starry-eyed, enthusiastic young woman, Sabiso, who’d come primarily to attend Jago, for the Atageini who had come, rotund Bindanda, who carried the eastern and old-line houses of the Association into this historic venture.

  “Nandi.” There were bows from the staff, deep bows, a moment of intimate courtesy before he went into his bedroom, before Bindanda and Kandana attended him there.

  He’d used to think of it as an uncomfortable ritual. Now he took comfort in the habit… carefully unfastened the fine, lace-cuffed shirt and shed it, sat down to have his boots removed, all the items of his clothing from cufflinks to stockings accounted for and whisked away to laundry or whatever the solution might be on this most uncommon of evenings. He didn’t inquire what they’d brought and what they’d left or what they might do with the laundry. If he named a thing they’d left, they’d send clear to the Bu-javid to bring it, and God knew it would turn up.

  “Good rest, nand’ paidhi,” Narani said, managing to turn down the bed and to bow, quite elegantly and all at once, as young Kandana, a nephew, hovered with a robe. “And will you bathe?”

  “Yes, Nadiin.” He accepted the bathrobe Kandana whisked into place, stepped into slippers… should the paidhi-aiji walk barefoot, even ten meters down the hall? The staff would think him ill-used.

  It was a very modern bath… porcelain, far newer than the general age of the fixtures in the Bu-javid, but there was absolutely nothing lacking in the quantity of water in the sunken tub. Bren slid into the soft scent of herbs, slid down to his nose and shut his eyes, while the extra half-glass of vodka seethed through his brain, blocking higher channels.

  A shadow entered, a dark presence reflected ghostly on dark tiles: Jago, likewise in her bathrobe.

  “Shall I bathe later, nandi?”

  So meticulous in slipping in and out of the role of bodyguard. Perhaps they were a scandal. He was never sure. He had no idea how Banichi construed matters, and suffered doubts. He wasn’t sure even how Jago construed matters, except that he wasn’t utterly surprised at her turning up now unasked, after this crisis-ridden day.

  “Now is very welcome, Jago-ji.”

  Smoothly then she shed the robe, tall and black and beautiful as some sea creature… slid into the water and let it roll over her skin with a deep sigh. In the next moment she submerged and surfaced, hair glistening… still pigtailed: with that propriety alone, she could answer a security call naked as she was born, with never a sign of ruffled dignity: she had done so, on occasion, and so had he, and so had his staff. There was no mystery left, but there was admiration for what was beautiful, there was expectation. One didn’t say love in dealing with atevi, as one didn’t say friend or any of those human words… but bodies knew that despite differences, there was warmth and welcome and comfort. She might technically be on duty;there was a gun with the bathrobe, he was relatively sure.

  But she pursued his welfare here, strong, graceful arms keeping him warm, when all at once he felt the chill of too much air-conditioning above the water surface, and the heat of an atevi body beneath. The water steamed in the refrigerated air, made clouds around them, steamed white on Jago’s bare black shoulder, and on her hair.

  Large atevi bodies chilled less rapidly than human, absorbed heat and shed it slowly, simply because they were larger; and tall as she was, she could pick him up and throw him with not an outstanding amount of effort. But that wasn’t in their dealings, which were mutual. The dark blue walls reflected him more than her. She was always warm, and he was chronically cold. Across species lines, across instinctual lines, their first engagement had been a comedy of misplaced knees and elbows; but now they had matters much more smoothly arranged, and had no difficulty in a soap-slippery embrace. Hands wandered, bodies found gentle accommodation under the steaming surface. She enjoyed it; he did. He was recent enough from Mospheira that he was conscious of the alien, and fresh enough from converse with Jase that he still had his human feelings engaged.

  And not knowing to this hour whether these interludes with the source of her man’chi were permissible for her or a scandal to her Guild, he still found no personal strength or reason to say no. He found a gentleness in the encounters that never had been with Barb… his weekends with Barb had been more intense, more desperate, less satisfying. He didn’t know which of them had been at fault in that, but he knew that what he and Jago practiced so carefully respected one another in a way he and Barb had never thought about. There was humor; there were pranks; there was never, except accidentally, pain.

  He struggled not to let his heart engage. But his heart told him what he and Barb had called a relationship hadn’t been the half of what his heart wanted to feel. He had asked, or tried to ask, whether Banichi and Jago had their own relationship; and Jago had said, in banter, Banichi has his opinions; and Banichi never managed to take him seriously… never quite answering him, either; and it was not a question he could ask Tabini— how do atevi make love.

  He was not about to ask the dowager, who—he was sure— would want every salacious detail.

  It was sure above all else that Banichi would never betray his partner, that she wouldn’t betray Banichi, not under fire and not in bed.

  It was sure between him and Jago that the man’chi involved, the sense of association, flowed upward more than down, and that no human alive understood atevi relationships in the first place—

  But the more he involved himself in the atevi world, the more he knew he wasn’t in a pairing. He’d assumed a triangle;and then knew it wasn’t even that, but deep in some atevi design, a baji-naji of their own convoluted creation, and deeper and deeper into feelings he knew he wasn’t wired to feel as atevi felt, not feeling as they did, only as he could.

  God help him, he thought at times, but she never asked a thing of him. And
they went on as formally and properly in public as they’d always been, always the three of them, she and he and Banichi, and four and five, if one counted Tano and Algini, as it had been from the time Tabini put them together.

  He’d been in love in his teens, when he’d gone into the program, with the foreign, the complex, the different.

  She certainly was. God, she was… pure self-abandoned trust, and sex, and her exotic, heavily armed version of caring all in the same cocktail.

  They rested nestled together till their fingers and toes wrinkled, while the heater kept the water steaming.

  They talked about the recent trip to Mospheira…

  “Barb came to the airport,” he said.

  “Did you approve?” she asked.

  “Not in the least,” he said.

  They talked about the supper with the dowager.

  “Cenedi looked well,” he said.

  But she never talked business in their interludes. She had, in whatever form, a better sense of romance than he did, twining a wet lock of his hair about her finger. She’d undone his braid. Her tongue traced the curve of his ear and traveled into it.

  A shadow appeared in the doorway, above the steam.

  Banichi.

  He was appalled. “Jago-ji,” he said; she was aware… surprised, but not astonished.

  “Nandi.” Banichi addressed him, incongruously, in the formal mode. “Your mother has called, requesting to be patched through wherever you are. She says it’s an emergency.”

  Banichi had been exposed to his mother’s emergencies. He himself certainly had. He was remotely aware of the rest of his body, and simultaneously of the rest of Jago’s body, soft and hard in all the right places, as her arms and her knees unfolded from him.

  He probably blushed. He certainly felt warmth.

  “I regret the untimely approach,” Banichi said, “but she says she’s calling from the hospital.”

  “Oh, damn.” He was on his way out of the water as Banichi procured him his robe.

  Jago gathered herself out of the water as he slipped into the robe. He had the presence of mind to glance back at her in regret for the embarrassment, whatever it was, and knew that, in a Situation, Tano and Algini being absent with Jase, Banichi had left the security post rather than send servants into the bath to pull him out.

  Bren yanked the sash tight on the robe, on his way out the door. His mother had had her spells before… had had surgery three years ago, one they thought had fixed the problem with her heart as far as age and life choices let anything fix the problem.

  At least she was calling.

  God, could anything have happened to Toby or Jill? He had enemies, and some of them had no scruples. He’d cleared Kroger to call the island. Word of the mission could be out, no telling where, and he’d not been in contact with Shawn, to advise him to tighten his mother’s security, that he was on this mission.

  Banichi had reached the security station near the front entry, that place which, with its elaborate electronics, held the phones.

  “The ordinary phone, nadi,” Banichi advised him, and Bren turned a swivel chair and settled onto it, picking up the phone that looked like a phone.

  Banichi settled into the main post and punched buttons. Bren heard the relays click. “Go ahead,” he heard the atevi operator say in Mosphei’, that deep timbre of voice, and the lighter human voice responding: “Go ahead, now, Ms. Cameron.”

  “Mother?”

  “Bren?” There was the quavering edge of panic in his mother’s voice, real desperation, and that itself was uncommon: he knew the difference.

  “Mother, are you all right? Where’s Toby?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. Bren, you’ve just got to get back here. Tonight.”

  “Mother, I’m sorry. I can’t just—”

  “You have to get here!”

  “Where’s Toby?” Had there been a plane crash? A car wreck? “Where are you?”

  The line spat, one of those damnable static events that happened when the atevi network with its intensive security linked up by radio with the Mospheiran network. He clenched the receiver as if he could hang onto the line.

  “… at the hospital!”

  “In what city, Mother? Where’s Toby? Can you hear me?”

  “I’m in the city!” That meant the capital, in ordinary usage. “I’m at the hospital! Can you hear me? Oh, damn this line!”

  Not in the hospital. “You’re at the hospital. Where’s Toby, Mother? Where’s my brother?”

  “I don’t know. He got on a plane this afternoon. I think he should be home. I think he and Jill may have stopped at Louise’s to pick up the—”

  “Mother, why are you at the hospital?”

  “Bren, don’t be like that!”

  “I’m not shouting, Mother. Just give me the news. Clearly. Coherently. What’s going on?”

  “Barb’s in intensive care.”

  “Barb.” Of all star-crossed people. Barb?

  “Barb and I went shopping after we left the airport, after we put Toby on the plane, you know. We were at the Valley Center, the new closed mall, you know…”

  “I know it. Did she fall?” There were escalators. There was new flooring. The place had opened this spring, huge pale building. Tall, open escalators.

  “No, we just came out to go to the car, and this bus just came out of nowhere, Bren.”

  “Bus. My God.”

  “She went right under it, Bren. I fell down and I looked around as the tires came past and she never said a thing, she just… she just went under it, and packages were all over, I’d bought this new sweater…”

  His mother was in shock. She was the world’s worst storyteller, but she wasn’t gathering her essential pieces at all.

  “Mother, how bad?”

  “It’s bad, Bren. She’s lying there with all these tubes in her. She’s messed up inside. She’s really bad. Bren, she wants you to come.”

  He was dripping water onto the counter. His feet and hands were like ice in the air-conditioning. With the side of his finger, he smeared a set of water droplets out of existence, thinking of the new counter, the new facility. He was not at home. He was not going to be anywhere close to home, and he was trying to think what to say. He tried to choose some rational statement. “I know you’re with her, Mother. —Were you hurt?” Setting his mother to the first person singular was the fastest way to get his mother off the track of someone else’s woes. He’d practiced that tactic for years of smaller emergencies.

  “She needs you, Bren.”

  It was bad.

  “Are you hurt, Mother?”

  “Just my elbow. I scraped my elbow on the curb. Bren, she’s so bad…”

  He winced and swore to himself. His hand was shaking. Jago had turned up in her bathrobe, with Banichi in the little security post, support for him. But he didn’t know who was with his mother, tonight, or how bad the damage was. Shawn’s people watched her. They always kept an eye toward her. But they’d damned well let down this time.

  “Have they assessed Barb’s damage?”

  “Spleen, liver, lung… right leg, left arm… they’re worried about a head injury.”

  “God.” On medical matters his mother very well knew what she was talking about. She made a hobby of ailments. “Has anyone called Paul?”

  “That useless piece of—”

  “Mother, he’s married to her! Call him!” He tried to assemble useful thoughts and quiet his stomach. His mother was acting as gatekeeper, hadn’t called Barb’s husband. He hoped the hospital had.

  And the time… he wasn’t sure of the time. It was well after dark now, east of Mospheira. If his mother and Barb had gone to the mall directly after leaving Toby at the airport, it couldn’t have been that late when the accident happened, and she’d only now gotten through the phone system?

  He was behind a security curtain. God knew how she’d made the entire worldnet and the aijiin and captains understand she had a real em
ergency, and now she came unglued. She was sobbing on the phone.

  “Mother. Mother, you fell down. Has anyone looked at you?” He was honestly, deeply worried. “Are you sure you weren’t hit?”

  “Something hit me. I’m not sure.” With the intonation that said it wasn’t important, it didn’t matter to her pain.

  “Have the doctors looked at you?”

  “They did.” Dismissively. “Bren, Bren, you can get a plane. Tell the aiji. You have to.”

  “Have you called Toby?”

  “She doesn’t need Toby, dammit! She needs you!”

  “You need Toby, Mother. I want you to call him.”

  “You listen to me, Bren Cameron! You damned well listen to me! The woman you were going to marry is lying in intensive care in there, and you don’t tell me you don’t care! You don’t tell me you’re carrying on an affair over there and you don’t care. You straighten yourself out and you get back here!”

  She did know. She guessed. On one of her visits, somehow someone had slipped… the tightest security in the world, and she knew.

  “I can’t. I can’t, Mother.” Barb’s kiss in the hangar, Barb running, whole and healthy, across the concrete, and a bus, for God’s sake… there was a sense of dark, malign comedy about it, a grotesque sense of the impossible, and he didn’t catch half the awful details his mother spilled to him, except that there were fractures, a punctured lung, internal bleeding.

  And knowing Barb… knowing Barb who’d been his on-island lover and sometime contact point for relaying dangerous messages from before their breakup… it was entirely possible Barb had shoved his mother for that curb and that was how Barb had gotten hit, and that was what drove his mother’s grief.

  Barb would. Grant all their failure to be a couple, Barb would. “What are her chances?” he asked, dreading to know. “What’s the damage?”

  “They’re going to do a bone replacement and a brain scan.” His mother drew a breath and grew calmer in a list of specifics. “She’s conscious. When the ambulance was coming, she said, ‘Tell Bren this really wasn’t a scheme to get him back here.’ And when they were putting her in the ambulance, she said, ‘I need him.’ Bren, she does. She really needs you. I had a feeling you shouldn’t fly back today.”