Inheritor

by C. J. Cherryh

  He truly wished the Direiso matter were settled. He didn't trust any stated changes of direction or belief on her part. Even if atevi emotion and politics made it instinctually natural for her to make such changes, he wouldn't believe them. He'd never met the woman but he knew he didn't like her or any one of her followers.

  Another psychological warning flag. He couldn't feel it as natural, he couldn't judge in his own blood and bone what was natural for any atevi to do, and he couldn't help but think how very, very delicately poised the whole of human and atevi survival was right now.

  Lose Tabini? There'd be a bloodbath the like of which the world had never seen.

  Let the conservatives on Mospheira get out of hand?

  Same result.

  He was just outright shaken by today's events. He admitted it to himself finally. He'd been riding a fierce downhill course, and leaping from point to point to point until it was damn well no good mapping out where he'd been: where he'd been didn't exist any more. There was no going back to the atevi state that had existed, once upon a time. There was no dealing with the government on Mospheira that had sent him. The people he was loyal to hardly had any power left.

  The plane was a pure, unheralded, no-damn-reason accident. Near accident. He was safe. So was a very chastened teenager.

  His fingers were wrinkling. He had to go out and breathe air again. Problems were not his problems tonight. Supper was waiting. A very fine supper, prepared by a cook who accommodated his needs quite expertly.

  He shut the water down and exited into the cooler air outside, wrapped instantly in a thick towel, a comfort and luxury of having servants which he did enjoy; and which by his order to this all-female staff was the job of one of the older, more — motherly — women.

  But a blink of water-hazed eyes showed him not a maid who had flung it about him, but Tano, continuing the personal attendance Tano had given him on the trip. He told himself he should decline Tano's attendance: the man had worked harder today than he had by twice.

  On the other hand, since it was Tano, he was able to ask him —

  But no, dammit, no. He wasn't going to ask about the content of the other messages that might be disasters awaiting his return. He'd been near a radio, and within reach of security communications, and his staff (forty-seven secretaries and a skilled supervisor devoted to such problems) would have known how to call him if there were anything amiss, including unreadable foreign language telegrams or phone calls. The one bombshell he'd picked out of the basket he'd chosen precisely because it was a telegram, and by that criterion urgent and newly arrived.

  There couldn't be any more surprises. Peaceful dinner. Quiet sleep. Back to routine. It was all he wanted. Parsing verbs at Jase. A walk in the gardens — suitably guarded.

  He let Tano wrap him in more warmed thick towels, a human vice grown harmlessly popular among atevi, although some still used the traditional sheeting. He accepted an informal and human-sized pair of drawstring trousers, a shirt, and a short, wide-sleeved lounging-robe which was adequate for an intimate dinner in the private dining room. He let his hair, toweled to a residual dampness, rest on his shoulders, as a gentleman or a lady could, in private and before a trusted staff.

  A shadow turned up in the tiled doorway, along a row of several such showers.

  Jase, coatless, dressed in a dark shirt. His dark hair just barely, in half a year, grown long enough to braid, was tied back and still falling loose around his face. The servants would not have let him out of his room without a coat. Or he'd been — troublesome thought — ignoring the servants.

  "There you are," Bren said cheerfully, trying to ignore the glum look Jase gave him. "One wondered about your whereabouts, nadi."

  "I don't know where else I'd be." Jase hadn't spoken in the Ragi language. There was no cheerfulness on his face. But it was a homecoming. One supposed. "How was the trip?"

  "Fine," he said, persisting in Ragi and in cheerfulness. Jase wasn't supposed to speak the human language. Jase had agreed to follow the regimen by which he'd learned: no Mosphei' at all. "How have you been, nadi-ji?"

  "Fine." Jase switched to Ragi. "I hear there was trouble in the peninsula."

  "Saigimi. Yes. Correct noun choice, by the way. — So you did hear."

  "Not that much," Jase said. "But the staff was worried."

  "Security was in a little hurry to bring me home. But nothing serious. — And you, nadi-ji? Nothing wrong, I hope."

  A hesitation. And in the human language: "Welcome home."

  Welcome home.

  A little edge to that, perhaps. A little irony. Or friendliness. He wasn't sure. It was a term they'd had to discuss in Mosphei'. Jase hadn't understood what home was in relation to this planet, one of the myriad of little human concepts that had somehow not made it back from the stars unchanged. Home to Jase's original thinking was a world. Home was Earth. Home was, equally, an atevi star neither Jase nor his parents had ever seen, to which they'd returned from wherever they'd gone for nearly two hundred years.

  And whatever home meant, Jase had never in his life been out of the steel world he'd been born to, until he'd entered a tiny pod and plunged into this world's atmosphere.

  "Home, yes, nadi." Bren gave the ends of his hair, which reached the middle of his back when it was loose from its braid, a final squeeze of the towel. Tano was still standing there, along with two of the female servants. Jase had been practicing disconnecting the face and the tones of voice from the content, but it wasn't appropriate here. Or there were other interpretations. Jase had a temper. He'd seen that proved. But he wasn't going to light into Jase with lectures. "Relax. It's staff. Is there a problem?"

  "No."

  Which meant Yes, in that leaden tone of voice.

  Fine. Disasters. He saw it coming. There'd been a crisis in the household.

  But it didn't need to preface supper. Dammit, he refused to have it before supper. Not unless there'd been bloodshed.

  "Can it wait until after dinner, nadi?"

  Jase didn't answer him. It was a sulk. It was aimed at him.

  He was in the witness of atevi, both servants and security. He was under a noble roof. He was getting angry — as Jase could make him angry, with a human precision no ateva quite managed. And, dammit, he wasn't going to argue. He made his tone smooth and his expression bland. "All right, if it can't wait, let's go to the library."

  "All right," Jase said in that same dead tone.

  He led the way. Jase walked with him quietly down the short curving hall from the baths to the main hallway and back to the isolation of the lady Damiri's private library, mostly of antique, fragile books.

  Tano followed. Tano, having it unshakably in his atevi mind that Jase was of a different leader's man'chi, would not allow him alone in Jase's presence, or at least not far alone in Jase's presence when Jase was acting like this. It was well possible that, species aside, Tano picked up some of the same signals he did, of his anger, and that he wasn't damned patient at the moment for one of Jase's tempests in an atevi teapot.

  Tano took up a post outside the door when he followed Jase inside and shut the door.

  "So what is it?" Bren said.

  "Just —" Jase lapsed into his own dialect. "Dammit, you could have phoned, that's all."

  "For what?"

  "It doesn't matter! I waited. I waited every evening. I couldn't even get the damn security to say what city you were in!"

  Tano and Algini outranked the security he'd left guarding Jase, that was why. But it was petty business. Not the real issue. Jase began arguments by diversion — he'd learned that, and all right, Bren thought, he could chase diversion, if that was where Jase wanted to take this conversation at the moment; and they'd pretend to talk, and pretend to reach a conclusion and have the real issue for dessert.

  In the meanwhile, and in Ragi:

  "Security is security is security, Jasi-ji. They're not an information service. Don't swear about them. They do know that word. — And
I'm sorry. I couldn't phone and, frankly, risk what you'd say without your knowing you were compromising my security. I'm sorry. I warned you I'd be impossible to reach. I called you four days ago —"

  "For 'Hello, I'm fine, how are you?' Thanks!"

  "I told you I wouldn't have a secure phone and I didn't. This afternoon, with the situation what it was, radio traffic had to be at a minimum. What the hell are we arguing about? — Is something wrong?"

  Words didn't come easily in moments of fracture, and the paidhi-aiji knew, hell, yes, he knew, he'd expected it. Jase was close to nonverbal at the moment, too frustrated to find a word in Ragi or otherwise — and he himself, years of study, he'd been through it, too, the moments of sheer disorientation across the cultural interface. Jase's ship didn't remotely comprehend what they'd sent Jase into, without the years of training, without the killer selection process in a University that weeded out candidates with any faults in self-control, and Jase had made heroic efforts at holding back his temper — so much so that atevi had begun to realize they had two very different personalities under this roof and occasionally to observe the fact.

  Jasi-ji, madam Saidin had put it to him, is rather more excitable, is he not, nand' paidhi? Is this a correct observation? Or have we offended him?

  By no means is it your fault: he'd said that to Saidin in early winter.

  Consequently it was his job to cover for Jase's failures in composure now in spite of the fact that he himself was too tired to reason. Atevi outside the staff weren't going to understand Jase's difficulties, and wouldn't, and didn't quite give a damn.

  He gave it a few seconds while he watched Jase fight for composure, careful breaths, a deep, difficult calm. Improving, he said to himself, while his own blood pressure, even with evidence of that improvement, exceeded his recent altitude.

  "Bad day," Jase said finally, and then, having won his approval, had to add, "I can see you're not in the mood to discuss it."

  "I'll discuss it." He hated himself when he agreed to suffer.

  "We have cook waiting. I don't want to stand between you and supper."

  "Control your temper, nadi." Jase had spoken in Ragi. Bren changed languages. Fast. While he had his temper in both hands. The atevi language reminded him of calm. It exerted calm, force of habit. "Face."

  There was a scowl on Jase's face at the moment. It vanished. Jase became perfectly calm.

  "Is there a danger?" Bren felt constrained to ask, now that reason was with them both. "Is there something I can imminently do something about? Or answer? Or help?"

  Jase had been locked in this apartment for six months trying to learn the language, and there'd been moments of frustration at which the monolingual staff, without the experience Jase was going through, could only stare in confusion. There were moments lately when not only the right word wouldn't come, no word would come, in any language. There were moments when, helpless as an infant's brain, the adult mind lost all organization of images and association of words simultaneously, and the mental process became less than three years of age. Deep fluency started by spurts and moments.

  Jase seemed, this day, this hour, to have reached saturation point definitively and universally.

  "I'm back for a while," Bren said gently, and, which one didn't do with atevi, patted Jase's shoulder. "I understand. We'll talk."

  "Yes," Jase said, in Ragi, and seemed calmer. "Let's go to dinner."

  * * *

  CHAPTER 5

  « ^ »

  Jase sat at one end of the small formal table and Bren sat at the other as the staff served a five course supper with strict adherence to the forms. The staff might easily have kept less formality with the paidhi nowadays, though he was generally careful of proprieties, but he wanted Jase to learn the formal and correct set of manners, the correct utensil, the correct grip, the correct posture, the correct communication with the server: he had left orders, and the staff had mercilessly followed them, even today, when he would as gladly have omitted them.

  Jase was in effect a child, as far as communication went, and in some regards as far as expectations of the planet went. Bren had said that to Saidin, too, and she perhaps put Jase's fits of temper in that basket along with her observation and with his recent declaration that the staff were all rain clouds — ghidari'sai uchl'sa-ma — when Jase had wished to tell Saidin he'd possibly offended members of the staff — jidari'sai uchi'sa-ma.

  Rain clouds had instantly become the running joke in the household the day before Bren had left. The staff had been accustomed to believe Jase couldn't understand.

  And before he'd left he'd had delicately to explain to Saidin that, yes, Jasi-ji did understand the joke; and yes, Jasi-ji had been embarrassed, and, no, Jasi-ji would not pursue the matter of the staff's laughter to anyone's detriment, so they need not worry, but it was time not to laugh any longer.

  Possibly that was what had blown up while he was gone. Jase might be a child in size to the atevi, and might use the children's language, which didn't have the rigid expectation of correct numbers, but Jase was not a child, and Jase had been on edge since before he left on the trip.

  The staff brought in the third round of trays and served the seasonal game.

  "I've been battling the irregular verbs," Jase said conversationally. "The staff has been very helpful. No more rain clouds. Get. I've been working on get. Indivisible plurals."

  "Common verb. Defective verb?"

  "Defective verb?"

  "Old verb. Lot of use. They break."

  Jase gave him an odd look.

  "True," Bren said. "The common verbs wear out. They lose pieces over the centuries. People patch them. People abuse them. Everyone uses get." It was only half facetious, and having led Jase on a small chase that tested his command of unusual forms, he thought it time for explanation: "If only professors use a verb, it remains unchanged forever. Fossils. Get isn't such a verb. It's been used by the common man."

  "It's a difficult verb."

  "It certainly is. But your accent's vastly improved. Very good. — Listen: master get and you've got the irregular indivisibles of shikira, makkiura, and shis'urna. Any three quarters of any verb in the -irei class: they rhyme with the -ra plurals, at least in the past tenses."

  "You're sure. You swear."

  "In formal Ragi, there are, I swear to you, three hundred forty-six key words. Learn those, and most everything that rhymes with them follows their paradigm."

  "You said there were a hundred and twelve!"

  "I'm speaking of the court language. You're getting far beyond the children's forms."

  "Not very damn fast, I'm not."

  "It does go faster from here. Trust me."

  "That's what you said when I landed."

  The conversation had gone to banter. To high spirits. "What could I say? I couldn't discourage you."

  But Jase didn't take up the conversation. Jase ducked his head and had a piece of fish, no longer engaging with him, and the mood crashed.

  He looked down the length of a table set with dishes not native even to him, knowing he couldn't imagine the mind of a man who'd never seen a horizon with a negative curve, who'd never seen a blue sky, never seen the rain clouds he mistakenly invoked. Jase had never even met a stranger until he'd fallen down from the sky and met a world full of strangers and unguess-able customs. Jase's world had consisted of the crew of his ship — his ship, not the ship.

  Jase had somehow acquired curiosity about things outside his steel world. That adventurousness, the ship's captain had declared, was why he'd sent Jase, who was (he and Jase had worked it out on the computer) two planetary years younger than his twenty-seven-almost-eight; and it was why they'd sent Yolanda Mercheson, who was a little older, a little steadier, perhaps. He'd never gotten a chance to know her when she landed with Jase — they'd rapidly packed her off to her job on the island — but he thought she might be a match for some of the harder heads on Mospheira. In his brief experience of her, Yolanda Mercheson would
watch anything, no matter how odd, completely deadpan and without reaction — and remark it was certainly different than they did things on the ship.

  Considering Jase's volatility, Jase's uneasiness at strange things, and his tendency to let his expressions slip his control, Bren asked himself if the ship-folk hadn't mistaken their envoys. Atevi would have accepted Yolanda's dry and deadpan humor, though mistakenly; it was too atevi without being atevi. But Jase didn't keep himself in the kind of shell his own predecessor, Wilson-paidhi, had built around himself. Say that for him: he was willing to risk everything, was willing to risk emotional and psychological hurt, getting close to the atevi.

  Jase had come armed with curiosity and a history of the atevi-human conflict that not-well-disposed humans on Mospheira had fired at the ship; and, coming from a steel-walled ship-culture which he'd hinted had distinctions of rank but not of diversity, he'd gone into the business more blind and more ignorant as to what he was getting into than a native of the world could possibly imagine.

  The personal recklessness it had taken for both Jase and Yolanda to come down here would have washed both of them out of the Foreign Studies program. Jase had been willing, intelligent, and had no essential duties aboard the ship, a computer tech, but in cold, blunt terms, the ship could risk him: low-level and ignorant. Exactly what Mospheira's government had thought it was sending into the field when it sent one Bren Cameron.

  But paidhiin had a tendency to mutate on duty. It remained to be seen what the job would do to Jase, but the ship wouldn't get back the bright-eyed and curious young man it had sent down to the world, if that man had ever really existed. He hadn't seen that side of Jase, the Jase that had existed in the voice transmissions from the ship, not since the capsule had landed; and he was, he admitted it, disappointed in the transaction. Stress and communication problems and the need for one of them who knew all the answers to tell the other when to hold that frustration in and how long to hold it all took their toll. It had certainly undermined the relationship they might have had.