There were a lot of terrible secrets in Ajuri, some of which the Guild itself might want to know, and would not want out in public, either. And there were a lot of possible grudges. Nomari had been younger than Jegari and Antaro when his family had been murdered and he had gone into hiding, the only survivor.
But—were those people out on the lawn able to guarantee anything but their votes in the clan? They had no license to protect him, except to fend off attackers if attacked. The Guild had to take over, if Nomari wanted to prosecute anybody still alive.
Nomari was not firmly in charge, clearly, if they had three people missing.
And if there was still Shadow Guild out and about (certainly Ajuri was as good a place to look for them as any) it was definitely not a good time for anybody in Tirnamardi to go too far from the house, or for anybody to take chances, even domestic staff, who were never supposed to be attacked. The Shadow Guild had no hesitation.
That meant he had to think twice even about today’s little adventure, slipping out to the pens. Every time he risked himself, he risked his aishid, who had no choice but put themselves between him and an attack. The same was true of Uncle, for anybody on Uncle’s staff just going after groceries, for that matter. It was not safe. If three people were supposed to be here and now could not be found, they could have met with trouble, or they could be trouble.
So somebody should decide fairly soon whether Nomari should have what he asked for, and whatever they decided, once they decided it, that was going to cause a lot of argument, with good people and bad ones, and it still would not be safe for a while.
That was inconvenient.
In his wildest imagination, he had hoped until tonight that Great-uncle would do something really extravagant and grand, like gathering up all these people and escorting Nomari to Shejidan himself, putting Great-aunt Geidaro on notice to vacate or be arrested on the spot.
Instead, however, it was Geidaro who had paid them a visit, putting pressure on Uncle. Geidaro was on one level a skinny old woman with a bad temper—but on another, she was really scary. And now, with the greatest threat to her control quite conspicuously being supported on Uncle’s lawn?
He bet that Great-aunt Geidaro was trying to figure something to do, and what she did could be crazy and desperate, nothing legal, nothing through the proper Guild.
Great-aunt also had to be wondering where she could go and what she could do if things went wrong. Managing a factory might keep the former lord of the Kadagidi out of trouble, but Great-aunt was too old to change her ways.
Something bad was going to happen to someone before it was all settled. Cajeiri really began to think so. Great-aunt seemed to be doing nothing since her visit, but that likely meant only that she was contacting people the way every lord had to do, to avoid the phone system, and arranging to stop Nomari somehow.
And who would she likeliest be sending messages to, if not Great-uncle Shishogi’s people, wherever any of them were left alive?
He’d used to tell himself, when things grew scary, that maybe there were things he missed, things he failed to know, and that grownups were doing smart things a boy might not see. But he was older now, and he had people around him whose actions he knew how to read. So things were, he thought, exactly the way he saw them. Everything around him seemed to him to be waiting to explode.
He would have moved to approve Nomari if he were in Uncle’s place, he said to himself. He would have made a decision and he would have done something before Great-aunt had a chance to think things through. That argued that maybe Uncle was not all that slow, and somewhere people were moving, and things were getting done.
He just hoped the majority of those things were on his side.
5
“One is completely dismayed.” Bren tapped the mute as the credits began to roll on Gin’s documentary. “It is far worse than I thought.” He’d never actually crossed into the Reunioner section, and what he had seen at the time had been primarily through body cams of atevi security, some footage of which Gin had included, likely with Geigi’s help. What he had seen just now— “This— How could anyone have justified this? It was cruel and it was stupid, nadiin-ji. It was, above all other things, politically stupid, even if one had no moral consideration.”
Because there had been choices. While there had been shortages of space as well as supply throughout the human side of the station, the station Mospheirans had lived in luxury, compared to this. Atevi would have shared. They had shared, where it came to building materials and water. Yet the Reunioners—station-born as no Mospheiran was, and more aware of the criticality of station integrity than any Mospheiran or atevi yet born—hadn’t rioted. Not until after Tillington had closed the blast doors. Not until an operation to extract the children, who had scattered after an attempt to hold them hostage.
Had Tillington even believed what he was saying, that the Reunioners were truly a threat to the station? The arrival of the kyo ship hadn’t pushed the buttons that closed those section doors. Tillington had pushed them, an emergency measure—against helpless people who’d already experienced one kyo attack, when they, outside of the team that had originally negotiated with the kyo, might have been his only source of accurate information on the kyo.
The Reunioners weren’t the ones who’d panicked. Or reacted in baseless hate.
“One might have asked,” Banichi said, “how Tillington got past the examination for participation in the program, but then one recalls a certain Ajuri who not only infiltrated the most secret depths of the Guild, but manipulated us for two generations before we found him out. It is difficult, under those circumstances, to cast strong judgment on the human system.”
“Unfortunately, Tillington was an appointment, never required to pass an examination. His social affiliations should have raised alarms. His connection with the corporations helped corrupt the system so that the corporations themselves saw cooperation with him as their route to survival. He was never slow to take credit for things that went well, and to be sure he was on Mospheiran records as the originator of ideas, the agent of good actions.”
Hero? No. Tillington had wanted personal power. The deals he’d made supported the style in which he’d lived and enabled the autocratic ways he made decisions. When shuttles had stopped flying, when the shortages had started—he’d never shorted himself on anything. When the Reunioners had come in, people who’d brought with them generations of station expertise—he’d indeed lost his sense of balance, seeing not an asset, but a threat to his plans and his dealings, and he’d decided to invoke ancient history as a logical reason.
His actions against the Reunioners had fouled those waters for good and all—and created all sorts of reasons for resentment. At very least they were now obliged to ground the Reunioners long enough to screen the ones that might to go back up to station life.
“How deep, or how high,” Algini asked, “does this corruption reach within the power structure?”
It was Algini’s sort of question. It was Algini’s work that had helped track the corruption within the Guild. Algini had helped target Shishogi, who had once amused the younger Guild with his resistance to modern methods—methods and procedures which would have exposed his clandestine moves in short order.
“Fortunately,” Bren said, “we have Gin, who speaks in ways the industrial officials up there understand. Secrets are currency in their way of thinking. If she preserves theirs, they will preserve hers—and to make that bargain they will trade what they know about Tillington, whose support up there is peeling away by the hour. The officials up there wield a power commensurate with their value to their superiors on Earth—and that value is increasing, in terms of their agreements with the new administrator. Gin gathers up man’chi, and deals fairly, which may be new to the presidentas of these various interests, but they can surely see that man’chi to Tillington has no future up there. He may well be tried for d
iversion of funds to his own use; and that means people who have dealt with him will hasten to wash the taint off their own hands. He will become inconvenient to his old allies aloft and below. Some in the Heritage Party on Earth may maintain their support for him, but those who support the party financially are the very ones, like Asgard, whose advancement now hangs on Reunioner science, and what it can give them. Gin is mediating agreements between Reunioners with such properties, and those companies who wish to bargain for them. And no one wants to be left out.”
“In short,” Tano said, “Tillington has become a great embarrassment to many people.”
“Unmourned,” Bren said. “I cannot pity him.” It was hard to translate, not only the words, but the moral and legal problems, to a culture which had no corporations, and where political interests were clan-linked and guild-linked—not to mention, convey it to a species with their emotional links all vested in clan and guild. There were some Mospheiran crimes which were not crimes in atevi thinking. There were some Mospheiran crimes which simply sounded stupid, or insane.
But there were actions which had a perfect congruence, and in which, no, there was no pity due. Malfeasance masquerading as mission? Atevi had just had their own fill of that on the mainland.
“Gin-nandi has most respectfully requested, nadiin-ji, that we review those elements involving the aiji-dowager and the heir. She believes they are shown in good contrast to Tillington’s bad behavior. They appear as protectors of humans and participants in the negotiations, and to that, I would agree.”
The segments involved showed the dowager and the young gentleman in Central, and showed the chess match in the kyo meeting, scenes without sound—the booms and thumps of the kyo might have alarmed the audience. They showed the exchange of courtesies, followed by the kyo ship departing the station—and the piece ended with a dissolve to the treaty document, written in three languages, and sealed with ribbons . . . a very finely detailed shot, for a historic and scientific record.
“It offered no offense,” Algini said, “to my eyes.”
“None to mine,” Banichi said, and Jago and Tano agreed.
“Rani-ji?” Bren asked. Narani and Jeladi had watched, both students of protocol, and Narani’s memory was longer than any of them could manage.
“In the old tradition, it would never do,” Narani said, “but one would concur in this, nandi. The aiji-dowager’s and the young gentleman’s importance in these events ought not to be omitted from history. And it would seem the aiji himself has determined his son is ready to appear before the public and give account for himself.” A slight bow, and a qualification. “This is an opinion in protocol, nandi. But also that it is the aiji-dowager’s personal signature on the documents. That she was directly involved—these things should be made clear to humans and atevi, nandi, so no one can ever claim to the contrary.”
“Indeed.” The aiji-dowager, more than once aiji-regent over the aishidi’tat, had always been controversial—but she had acted, consistently, when things had to be done, often against protocol and against precedent. Create a scandal? The dowager herself generally found television as inappropriate as she found Mospheiran concepts like plebiscites . . . but credit for one of her actions, when so often she had acted in the shadows?
“She deserves great credit for this,” Bren said. “People should know—she was the one who made the greatest and first strides with the kyo, and possibly saved us all from a war we could not survive. That should never be forgotten, on either side of the strait.”
“One concurs,” Banichi said. “The dowager, and the young gentleman.”
Heads nodded.
“We also have a note from Lord Geigi,” Bren added, “that he will remand Braddock and his associates to Gin’s authority.” Reunion Stationmaster Braddock, his lieutenant, and Inez Williams, the mother of one of those three children about to be brought down, had all been gathered up for scheming to breach Tillington’s section doors in advance of the kyo visit, and they remained in custody for threatening public safety. There had been nothing saintly about Braddock’s behavior back at Reunion, but Bren personally didn’t fault Braddock for making a move to get his people out of the bottle Tillington had put them into, or for his opposition to the ship’s officers, who had not prevented the closing of the doors. The fact that Braddock had looked to seize the three children, in whom Tabini had declared personal interest, as bargaining currency in his plan was another matter. But between Braddock’s actions and Tillington’s—he could not make a great moral distinction.
What blame attached to Braddock in the attack on Reunion Station—was a completely different matter, and much of that evidence was lost. If he can eventually come down to a safe life on Earth—he would not, personally, be upset.
But experience had told him that forgiving history was only safe if one knew what one was forgiving.
“Lord Geigi will be relieved to be rid of them,” Banichi said.
“And his other, happier guests will be packing by now to board the shuttle,” Bren said, “so it will be a quieter household for him.”
“He has been greatly entertained by the children,” Tano said, “but he has a deal of work pending.”
Construction of Gin’s lander systems, among other matters. Dropping cargo that could drop safely, to free shuttle space. That would be an atevi operation, and Mospheirans would provide and package the cargo.
Things in the heavens were starting to move, pieces shifting position, and they had the final preparations to make, the simple matter of housing three children and two families.
On a world, with all that came with it.
• • •
The weather had come in faster than expected. Outside the big window, Uncle’s staff swarmed about the tents, making a second check against wind that was already making the canvas ripple and snap. The camp consisted of three large tents, each enough for at least nine people, and thirteen smaller ones.
But given the greater storm incoming, it was going to be a harder blow come evening, and staff was taking every precaution.
Cajeiri turned away from the great upstairs window while servants prepared tea in the little conservatory nook, and while his bodyguard waited, still on duty. Nomari stood beside a comfortable but modest armchair, and Cajeiri chose his own, with his back to the window, facing Uncle’s accustomed place.
They were both waiting for Uncle.
“Did you sleep well?” Uncle had asked Nomari at breakfast this morning, and Nomari, who looked as if, indeed, he had not, had answered—“Not as well as one wished, nandi.” But respecting the sanctity of the table, “May we speak after breakfast, nandi?”
So Nomari had come back with concern of his own—understandable, considering Uncle’s statements yesterday, regarding irregularities among the people out on the lawn. Cajeiri had lain awake thinking too, whether Nomari should in fact have Uncle’s backing; and whether events would somehow straighten things out. He had wondered, heading for breakfast, whether Nomari would try to gloss over the problems of his missing followers, or come in with an answer.
And when Nomari had answered as he just had—he had wanted then and there to know what Nomari had found out.
Breakfast, however, was breakfast, formal and proper . . . and a person who did not know Uncle might think he had retained no concern about the missing people at all.
After breakfast, the view of the little cluster of tents from the window offered no clue, and manners dictated he not ask now: his father’s son he might be, but it was Uncle’s place to have Nomari’s report. He felt that keenly.
So they both waited for Uncle to join them.
Uncle arrived at the conservatory nook at his own pace, took his accustomed chair, next a potted vine. Nomari sat. Servants provided tea, and Uncle took three sips before he set his cup down on his little side table. Not just one sip, which would have indicated disturbance;
not most of the cup, which might warn Nomari he was deeply upset, but a lightly courteous and leisurely three.
“So,” Uncle said. “What troubles our guest this breezy morning, beyond the weather?”
“Nandi.” Nomari gave a deep nod. “I personally queried every person in our group last night, and the three missing, while seen at first, are indeed not now to be found. Two are known, but the third, who registered as Hapeini, is known to one man as Maigin, but unknown by either name to every other in the camp. One man thought he had seen all three in the camp together on the first day, but no one reports them now. No one admits to them ever sleeping in any tent. I am embarrassed, to say the least, and I apologize. If I can offer any theory, they all three, after registering, left, perhaps at a point when the gates opened for the market truck. They may have felt uneasy when asked for their names.”
“Or they are here, but not found,” Uncle said, “which is far more troublesome.”
“I agree, nandi, and I am troubled by it. I am not done with looking. I have set others to find out what they can.”
“Well, well,” Uncle said mildly, “you never guaranteed that all these people can face a Guild inquiry.”
“No, nandi, I can by no means guarantee it. And they have become expert at evasions. But let me plead, too, that Guild uniforms in such abundance frighten them. I have told them we should trust this is for our protection—that the Guild has changed leadership and to the good—but they are still afraid.”
“Is such sentiment widespread in the camp?” Uncle asked.
“Giving their true names is a difficult point for them. But with your staff, your help, the hospitality—they are more hopeful, nandi. They greatly hope for your help.”
“Ajuri are our neighbors,” Uncle said. “And any petty record with the Guild, during their years of absence, we can forgive. They are our guests. If they are good and respectful guests, they will have the protection and the legal representation of the Atageini, should the Guild raise a question, and one would extend that representation past their stay here, should anything surface later. If the three missing should reappear, and have a good reason for their disappearance, I will hear it.”
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