Precursor

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Sir, he’s still in conference.”

  “I thought he might be rather less busy with the station’s problems.”

  “I’m told he’s still in meetings.”

  “Yolanda Mercheson?”

  “Still in meetings.”

  “Captain Sabin.”

  “Still in meetings, sir, I’m sorry.”

  “Captain Ramirez.”

  “Sir, all the captains are in meetings.”

  One wondered if anything was getting done anywhere on the ship or the station. He wanted to be cheerful for his servants’ sake, but was glum at heart, surer and surer that Ramirez had not pulled off his majority, and that the meetings Jase and Yolanda were involved in likely involved sitting under guard, in isolation, and answering occasional questions from a deadlocked association of captains.

  And that was the most optimistic view.

  A shadow appeared by his bed, utterly silent—just loomed, utterly black, and his heart jumped in fright.

  “Do you wish?” Jago’s lowest voice. “Nadi?”

  “Bren-ji,” he corrected this slide toward formality. “Some aspects of this being a lord I don’t like. Sit down.” He made room for her on the narrow bed, realizing at the same time that she and he wouldn’t fit it, or at least, not comfortably.

  He shifted to give her room, her arms came about him. Deeper thought and glum mood both went sliding away, in favor of a thoroughly comfortable association and the easy, gentle comfort of her embrace. He heaved a sigh, not obliged even to carry his weight, not with Jago, who supported him without any thought. Her breath stirred his hair, ran like a breath of summer over his shoulder, and for the next while, and right down to the edge of sleep, he didn’t think.

  But he felt a certain uneasiness, a certain sense of embarrassment, the rooms were so small, the staff pressed so close. The bed required close maneuvering.

  “You can’t be comfortable here,” he said. “Don’t wake with a kink in your back, on my account.”

  “I have no difficulty,” she said.

  He was habitually cold; he wasn’t, while she was in bed. But he truly didn’t want the closeness of the quarters here to create a difficulty.

  “Perhaps you should go for other reasons,” he whispered to her. He always felt guilty for the relationship, the event, whatever she might call it. She had a partner. To this hour he had no idea whether her being here represented some allowed breach of that partnership, or what the relationship was between her and Banichi—which was a trust he had absolutely no willingness to betray. They had never been at such close quarters. She’d always assured him Banichi understood, understood, understood, but he was uneasy, tonight.

  “What other reasons?”

  “Getting some sleep, for one.”

  “I might sleep, if nand’ paidhi weren’t talking.”

  “That’s not the point,” he said, and felt the tension he created. “The whole staff must know, Jago-ji.”

  He felt, rather than heard, her laughter. “One is certain they do.”

  He couldn’t bear the evasions any longer. He slid free and rested precariously on an arm near the edge where he could be absolutely face to face with her. “Jago-ji. I will not hurt Banichi. I have every regard for you, and I know you would never disregard him, but I worry, Jago-ji, I do worry what he thinks.”

  “He is amused.”

  “I know you say that, but a man is a man, and people are people, and they can say something, but it doesn’t make it so, Jago-ji. I have no wish to offend him. I would be devastated to create a breach between you”

  “There is none. There has never been one.”

  “Are you lovers, Jago-ji?” He’d chased that question all the years of their partnership. “Have you been, forgive me that I ask, but this causes me a great deal of guilt and worry—” He was under assault, and he fended it off, determined to get out what he had tried a dozen times to express. “—Guilt and worry, that I ever crossed any barrier that I might not have understood…”

  Jago’s body heaved gently. After an instant he knew she was laughing. A callused, gentle hand moved slowly across his shoulder. “Bren-ji. No.”

  “What do you mean, no, nadi? Have you been lovers?”

  “Bren-ji. He is my father.”

  He was stunned. He rolled back, fell back onto the pillow and stared at the ceiling. The whole universe shifted vector.

  Then the thin mattress gave, and the general dim dark gave way to Jago’s outline, her elbow posed on the other side of him, her fingers tracing their way down from his chin.

  Amused, she said. Banichi was amused at their carrying-on.

  Not disapproving.

  But her father?

  “Bren-ji. We do not make relationships public, in our Guild. I tell you as a confidence.”

  “I respect it.”

  “One knows without doubt the paidhi is discreet,” Jago said, and found his ear, found his hands… outmaneuvering Jago was difficult, and he had no interest in trying that. For the first time he had a relatively clear conscience in her regard, and a joke to avenge. He pulled her close, dismissing the proximity of the servants as any concern to them.

  They ran unexpectedly out of bed, on the edge, and nearly over it.

  Jago simply rolled out of it, taking him and the sheets with her, and laughed.

  * * *

  Chapter 18

  « ^ »

  Jago was gone before dawn, and he was in bed when he waked, in bed with the smell of breakfast wafting through the hall.

  Bindanda and Kandana were a little reluctant to meet his eye. Had he and Jago embarrassed the whole staff, Bren wondered, chagrined. He found nothing to say, and thought he should ask Jago… he truly, urgently should ask someone what the staff was saying. It could hardly be Banichi; he couldn’t envision that conversation. He knew he would blush. Jago might be the recipient of merciless amusement, and she was hardly the one to ask.

  He thought perhaps he could speak to Tano… certainly to Tano, rather than staid, dignified Narani. He could manage to do that on the way to breakfast, which otherwise might be a very uncomfortable affair.

  He had chosen less than formal wear for a day on which he had no schedule but deskwork: a sweater and a light pair of trousers with an outdoor jacket, about adequate for the chill of the air, after which he dismissed Bindanda and Kandana, opened up his computer, and went through the send-receive with Cl, and through the usual litany of questions, refusing to give up on Jase or Yolanda or on direct contact with the captains, three of whom he was anxious to hear from.

  No message from Toby, none from his mother, nothing this time even from Tabini, who was probably considering the last one, or who simply had things to do other than give the paidhi daily reassurances. Two advertisements had slipped into the packet, one for bed linens and the other for fishing gear, and he scrutinized them briefly for any content from the Foreign Office, any hint that someone had sent him something clandestine. It was a north shore fishing gear manufacturer, one Toby used.

  But it was simply one of those hiccups of the communications filter. His mailbox on the island received such things, and he had no staff left there to filter them.

  A message from the head of the Transport Committee reported on progress in the new spaceport. They were better than their schedule.

  He half-zipped his jacket and went out into the hallway in a routine hurry for breakfast.

  And ran chest-high into a stranger.

  He recoiled, immediate in everything his security had dinned into him, achieved distance and was a muscle-twitch from diving backward into the door before his vision realized chagrin and offered respect on the other side of the encounter.

  Atevi presence on the station was entirely limited, and more, he knew this man: the name escaped him, as his heart pounded, but it was one of the stewards from the shuttle.

  “Nand’ paidhi,” the man said with a second bow. “Your pardon. Nojana, of the aiji’s crew of Shai-shan.”<
br />
  “Of course you are,” Bren exclaimed, taking a hasty breath. “How did you get here?”

  He was no longer alone in the hallway. Almost as quickly as he had backed up, the noise of his move had attracted Tano and Algini and Jago out of the security station, and Bindanda from the dining room… which might say something about Bindanda’s Guild associations: Bren noted that in the aftermath of adrenaline.

  “Banichi sent me, nand’ paidhi,” Nojana said. “He wished to confer with the captain.”

  “Parijo. The shuttle captain.” There were entirely too many captains in the broth.

  “Even so, nand’ paidhi.” Nojana, in fact, was not wearing a steward’s uniform, but the black of the Assassins’ Guild… security’s Guild, and by the height and breadth of the steward, it was Banichi’s body type, Banichi’s muscled arms and shoulders. This was not a man accustomed to passing out drinks and motion sickness pills, but it had not been so evident in his previous uniform.

  “And is this your uniform, nadi?”

  “No, nand’ paidhi, it is not.”

  “And how long have you been here?”

  “Since midnight, nandi.”

  Bren cast a look at his own security, and, with a feeling of mild indignation, directly at Jago, whose arrival in his quarters, whose determined distraction had left not a shred of attention to the fact the seal-door had opened and closed last night.

  Jago, to her credit, met his gaze with a satisfied lift of her chin and the ghost of a smile.

  It did beat drugging his drink, he said to himself, and he had no suspicion whatever that Jago had been dishonest in love-making, only that she’d had a considerable ulterior motive.

  And he would not call down his senior staff in front of a stranger, or in front of the servants. He simply composed himself, smiled, nodded acknowledgment of a successful operation, namely deceiving the paidhi, and getting Banichi outside without consulting him—and directed his inquiry to Nojana.

  “And have you had breakfast, nadi, and will you join us?”

  “I had tea at my arrival, nandi, and I thank the paidhi for the kindness of his offer, nothing since. I would be very honored.”

  “Do join us, then,” he said, and surrendered Nojana to the guidance of Tano and Algini, with a single glance.

  Jago he stayed with a lowering of his brows.

  “How in hell?” he said in a half-whisper. “How did he get there? Did they come after him…” He could envision that the shuttle crew might have some sense of the station: this was not their first trip. “… or did he use the map?” Even with that, it was a risk, not least of running afoul of the ship-captains and the likes of Kaplan. He was thoroughly appalled. Chilled by the very thought… and yet if Banichi had done anything of the sort, he trusted it was well-thought. “Jago, I know what you did. I’m not angry. But what is he doing?”

  “He wishes to be sure the shuttle is on schedule.”

  “Have we established that?”

  “Nojana says yes. There’s been no difficulty at all. Nominal in all respects. It might leave early, except for small details.”

  “I’ve no need to have it leave early, or is there something going on I don’t know?”

  “One wishes to be certain. Banichi has been concerned about the behavior of the captains.”

  He was concerned, in that regard. But to go off across a trackless maze of corridors…

  “What if he’d been stopped?”

  “He would have been surveying for the station repairs, on his own initiative.”

  As a lie it was a decent one. “And what if he’d just gotten lost? They’ve done alterations since the charts we have, Jago-ji! How did Nojana get here? You surely didn’t ask Kaplan.”

  “No,” Jago said pleasantly, with a little shrug. “By no means Kaplan. They’ve not made signs, you think, so that the Mospheirans might lose their way.”

  “So that we would lose our way. You’re saying you don’t.”

  A second small shrug. “We walked from that area, Bren-ji.”

  It was rare these days that an atevi-human difference utterly took him blindside. He drew in a breath, replayed that statement, and it came up meaning what he thought. “You mean you don’t lose count of the doorways.”

  “Yes,” Jago said cheerfully, that disconcerting Ragi habit of agreeing with a negative. “Do you?”

  When he thought about it, he thought he might have a fair notion how to reach Kroger’s section: he counted things he saw; he’d trained for years to do that, from flash-screens at University to desperate sessions in real negotiations, real confrontations. He’d learned to have that perception, and yes, he saw how a mind that just natively saw in that way might have a better record than he did. The captains’ precautions against invasion were simply useless against atevi memories for sets and structure. It was the same way atevi had taken one look at computer designs that had served humankind for centuries and critiqued their basic concept in terms of a wholly different way of looking at the universe.

  “Amazing,” was all he could say. “Really amazing. He shouldn’t get himself in trouble, Jago-ji.”

  He didn’t say a word about the diversion last night. He couldn’t say whether if Banichi had come proposing an excursion to see whether the shuttle was safe, he might not have said no. He was very careful with Banichi and Jago in particular… as he supposed they were with him, and he couldn’t deny that they had their reason, that he was a damned valuable commodity to have up here, and that in a certain sense it was folly to have him here.

  But he couldn’t become paralyzed by the notion of his own worth, either; he had to do his job to be valuable, and that was the bottom line.

  Banichi sent him Nojana, and he meant to get the most out of the transaction.

  “This is worth the walk, nand’ paidhi.” Nojana enjoyed the food: one could hardly blame him. “Very much worth it, and I am honored.”

  It wasn’t quite proper to ask an ateva his Guild if it wasn’t apparent or if the information weren’t offered, but Bren had his notions, looking at Nojana’s athletic build. Arms completely filled out the borrowed uniform. There was a little slack across the chest, but hardly so. The height might be a little more: the sleeves were not quite adequate.

  And Nojana was a member of the Assassins’ Guild, members of his staff knew Nojana very well from before this: it was a small and very well-placed Guild, and generally supportive of the aiji, with rare and balanced exceptions. Into Guild politics the paidhi had no entry, and he thought it wise to seek none, as the aiji himself sought none.

  He certainly had a healthy appetite.

  “How long will you stay?” Bren asked, and reserved What in hell is Banichi up to? for a moment with his own staff.

  “One isn’t sure, nand’ paidhi.”

  That was a fairly broad answer, warning the habituated that the ateva in question was hedging, and if pressed, would hedge more creatively… being too polite to lie unless cornered.

  One took the answer and shut up, and asked Jago later, pulling her within his room.

  “I don’t know,” was Jago’s response.

  “All right,” he said. “But I don’t know if I’m going down with the next flight. That’s within my judgment.”

  “One worries,” Jago said. “Staff can manage this. Someone less valuable can manage this.”

  “Less valuable to the aiji because such a person might do less. If I can secure a meeting with the captains, I should secure it. If I can hold Ramirez to agreements personally, even if there’s dissent, I should do it. If I can free Jase, I should free him. In the meantime, Jago-ji, I will prepare dispatches, if I have more than a few hours.”

  “One has more than a few hours. I should say quite a few hours, nadi.”

  “What is he doing?”

  “One can’t say.”

  “Well,” he said distressedly, “well, show Nojana what he has to know and I’ll prepare the dispatches. Give me at least an hour’s warning when h
e leaves.”

  “I don’t know that I can do that,” Jago protested.

  “I know you can work wonders,” he said. “I believe that you will. —And you’re not to risk yourself, Jago-ji! You’re not to leave this place unless I say so.”

  “I can’t take such orders,” Jago said, but added quickly, “but I see no reason to go at the moment.”

  “An hour’s warning,” he insisted, and went off, precaution against surprises, to give the same instruction to Nojana, that he had dispatches that had to go to Tabini, and that Nojana should carry them.

  That meant putting his notes in order and some sort of coherency, and more, committing them to an ephemeral card, which he habitually carried since the bad old days of Jase’s descent and Deana Hanks’ attempt to land on the mainland. It had a button that simply, physically, with a caustic element, destroyed the media beyond reading, not something he liked using—he had a dire image of the thing going off while he was producing it; and his scenario for needing it involved a situation in which he might want to destroy his whole computer storage, but this was a good deal less dire, simply to hand Nojana the record and to instruct him to give it personally to the head of the aiji’s security.

  “Only to him,” Bren said emphatically. “This tab, do you see, must remain intact unless you think there’s a danger of it falling into other hands. Once you tear it off, this record will be destroyed. If an unauthorized machine attempts to read it, the result will be bad for both.”

  “One understands,” Nojana said fervently. “The record will reach the aiji’s guard.”

  “Very good” Bren said. “There’ll be another if we have time. These are the essentials.”

  “Does the paidhi have concerns for security here, or on the ground?” Nojana dared ask.

  “Here, primarily. But take care, and ask for immediate escort once you land; I don’t fancy you’ll have to ask twice.” He said that and asked, sensing a man who might have secrets, “Do you have concerns about which my security should know?”

  “I have informed them of essentials, nadi.”

  “Inform us all,” he said. “I want to hear it directly, and ask questions.”