And watch over their other responsibilities.
Mospheira didn't care so much, Bren told himself, if it let both its Ragi-speaking paidhiin, him and Deana, travel out of its grasp; there were other students in the University. Someone's son or daughter could replace either of them. Of course.
Jase shifted. Bren heard the creak of the other chair. Jase was worried about Yolanda. Justifiably so.
As Mospheira's allowing Deana Hanks to cross the water meant risking her life. If Mospheira lost her, that meant they had no translator who'd actually been in the field advising them, and their maze of security precautions was going to operate very slowly in giving anyone outside the State Department access to documents: the aiji's blockade order, which he hadn't translated, must either have come in Ragi and sent them scurrying for advanced translation, or in atevi-written Mosphei', which wasn't supposed to exist. He did wonder which.
But the readily obvious fact was, the government didn't give a damn whether it talked to atevi so long as it thought the ship up there would deal with them.
It would, however, panic at the thought of Yolanda Mercheson leaving its shores or the ship aloft cutting them off cold from the flow of technology that was coming to the atevi. There was a level of self-preservation in the President's office that hated adventurous doings, and that wouldn't let Deana Hanks take Yolanda with her. He reasoned his way to that conclusion.
There were also people in charge of Deana: Deana who did not have the intelligence or the authority she dreamed she had. She was not a random and stupid threat until she was in the field dealing with atevi. They, the they who controlled her, didn't know how bad her handling of the translation interface was, which was their major flaw. If there were atevi experts able to know how bad she was, there wouldn't be an intercultural problem. They liked her because what she told them would work was shaped exactly to fall into their plans, and that was their blind spot and her reason for getting the post.
But they had to be restraining her from her wilder notions, or God knew what would happen.
And somebody could keep Hanks on the island. George Barrulin could, if he could get through to him.
But the paidhi-aiji was out of phone numbers that would mean anything, and he couldn't get through to George. They fired everybody in the whole Foreign Office. God!
"Bren," Jase said.
He opened his eyes a slit. And saw Jase sitting opposite him, elbows on knees, cup in both hands, with a downcast look.
"Bren," Jase said in human language. "I want you to understand something."
He had to listen. Jase's voice had that tone. He sat up, tucked a foot across his knee, and tried to look as if his brain were working.
"The business about my father," Jase said. "I don't have one. Fact is — fact is, he is dead."
"I'm sorry to hear that." Politeness was automatic. Understanding what Jase was getting at wasn't.
"No," Jase said. "He died hundreds of years ago."
A glimmering of understanding did come, then. "Taylor's Children. Is that what you mean?"
The ship had had its heroes — those everyone owed their lives to: the original crew and the construction pilots, the ones who'd mined and fueled the ship in the radiation hell they'd first had to survive, had left their personal legacy in cold storage, all they knew they'd send into their ship's uncertain future.
And such individuals, drawn from that cold-storage legacy, had not been the lowest members of the Pilots' Guild, when the modern crew let them be born.
When — rarely — they'd let them be born.
He was sitting in an ordinary chair in an ordinary lounge in a tolerably exotic facility, but the man he'd been dealing with was not ordinary, as he understood history.
The man he'd almost called a friend — brought a bit of the cold of space with him into this little nook.
What the ship had sent them in Jase wasn't the lowest, most expendable crew member. It was one of the elite, one who wouldn't be seduced by any planetary — or personal — loyalties.
The people of the Landing, Mospheirans, hadn't been outstandingly fond of the breed. The privileges of that elite was one of the issues that had led to the Landing. And now the ship sent one down to the planet?
"I must say," Bren said mildly, "I'm surprised. I take it you do have a mother."
"One I'm very fond of. One I want to get back to."
"One can understand how much you want to get back. One can understand very well."
Jase looked at him a little curiously, and didn't ask. But maybe, he said to himself, Jase didn't know there'd been a rift between the ship's crew and the colonists. Maybe that was one of the informational dropouts over time — things like weather, and currents, and sunrise.
"What I want to tell you," Jase said, "is that I am telling you the truth. I'm not keeping secrets from you. And I'll tell you all of it. But I want your help."
"For what?"
A slight move of Jase's eyes, a gesture to the side, to the communications center, he supposed. "To talk to the ship. To warn them what's going on and to tell them to send someone else down here, if something happens."
"Is that what you'd tell them? I'd think it would be 'Get the hell out of here. They're crazy down here.'"
Jase shook his head. "That's not my conclusion. I don't know what's on the other side of the water. Yolanda said at first she was all right. She was having a lot less problems than I was. But things starting going bad. I've heard other codewords, that just meant worry. When she gave me this one — I was scared. You weren't there. And then things started blowing up. I don't think it's coincidence she called me about the time your government started making trouble over here."
Your government. Mospheira. It was a hell of a thing, that statement, he'd had to parse that to know which government Jase meant.
"Telling you the family crisis story was supposed to get you to get Yolanda over for a sympathy visit. And it went wrong. It just went wrong. The ship knows there's something wrong on her side of the water. But if I don't call soon they'll think there's something wrong on this side, too."
"What would they do about it?"
"They'd attempt to deal with it, most probably attempt to deal with atevi in the notion some of them do understand Mosphei' and maybe I'd made a mistake."
He was considering that possibility. "Let's try some critical truth. Is the ship armed?"
"It has weapons. It doesn't have atmospheric craft."
"Coercion occupies absolutely no place in their planning? A little piracy, perhaps?"
"No. If they get involved in this situation, it's possible they can withhold information from one side or the other and get cooperation. It's my recommendation that they cooperate with the atevi and withhold all help from Mospheira."
"You know," Bren said, on a breath that made his voice sail higher and more casual than he wished. "You know," he said more soberly, "I think that's a reasonable position, but I haven't had a lot of luck persuading human governments about it, and we've lived on this planet a couple of centuries."
"You want the truth?"
"I think it would be a really good idea, Jase."
"If Yolanda goes —" Emotion clouded Jase's face and ruffled the calm in his voice. "If she doesn't make it, it's important to me. But not to the ultimate outcome of this business. Neither of us is that important to the outcome unless we can do our work. They give us a lot, that's what they say. But they ask a lot of us."
"You're not a computer tech who's studied languages and taught kids."
"I know computers. We had two engineering texts in the library, one French, one German. They didn't teach me a lot about planets. But I learned how languages work. That's the truth, Bren."
"You in love with Yolanda?"
"I suppose so. Yes. I am."
"But disregarding all this, say we lost you, what would your ship do?"
"Right now, they'd go on pretending everything was fine, and see if you built the spacecraft."
"If atevi got up there, my captains would negotiate. They'd have done what they want. They'd negotiate with atevi. They'd probably keep on giving them tech. As much as they wanted."
He had a very, very bad feeling that he wasn't understanding everything, and that Jase wanted his full attention for the next item.
"Why?" he asked.
"They want the atevi in space."
"Why?"
"Because —" Jase's voice was faint. "Because we're not alone. We're not the only ones in space. And they're not friendly. And we're not sure, but they could come here."
He sat, having heard that. Having heard it, he didn't want to believe it.
"You said," he recalled, "there was another station out there, at the other end of — wherever you've been."
"There was one. It's gone. We don't know who the aliens are. We don't know what they want. We tried to contact them. We had a few passes, months apart. Just a streak on one tape. And some transmissions. We tried scanning the area where we thought they were coming from. We'd moved Phoenix out. And when we got back, the station was — was wrecked. Everyone was dead. It hadn't infallen. But it was going to. We took a vote. We decided — we decided we'd better get out of there."
"And come here."
"It was the only place."
"Oh, you could have lost yourself in space. You could have gone the hell away from us!"
"It's not that far, Bren. It's about eighteen, twenty years light. You're in their neighborhood. We did nothing to these people. People — whatever they are. We did nothing to provoke them."
"We did nothing to provoke the atevi into attacking the colony, either, but we made it damned well inevitable!"
"You know that. You dealt with this situation. Maybe you have a skill — maybe you have a skill we don't. We need you."
"God, look around you! My government's not doing outstandingly well at the moment!"
"If they'd listen to you, they'd be better off."
"But failing that miracle, you want the atevi in space. You want us, or you want the atevi."
"This is the atevi star. This is their world. There's something out there that kills people it doesn't know anything about, that never did anything to them. And the atevi need to know that. We could have gone off in space somewhere and hoped they never found us. We could have tried again —"
"No, you couldn't. You thought there'd be a thriving colony here. You thought you'd get fuel for the ship here. You thought you'd rally the colony to the defense and you'd have everything the way you used to have it, with us doing the mining and the dying for you to run the ship."
There was a small silence. But Jase didn't flinch. "We thought we'd have your help, yes. But we thought we owed each other a mutual debt — a warning, and a chance for us to get out of here if you want to take your chances."
"That's a lousy patch on exactly what I said."
"That's fine. That's the situation. Now what do you do?"
He let out a long sigh and fell back into the chair cushions to look at the room beyond, communications that could indeed talk to the ship.
Then at Jase.
"Damn lot of choice you've given us."
"I'm giving you a choice, Bren. The people at the other station didn't have any."
"What in hell provoked it?"
"We don't know. We just don't know. Maybe they're just that way. That's always a possibility, isn't it?"
"Not one I accept!"
"That's what I count on."
What Jase had already said began to sink in. Unwelcomely. "Don't you lay that on me! Good God, no."
"Let me call the ship. We have armed atevi and probably armed humans and airplanes and boats and mechieti and no one knows what else. None of us may get out of this. Yolanda's already told them don't rely on Mospheira for anything. If you don't want to leave the matter of the atevi to blind luck, baji-naji, Bren, let me talk to them. I'll give them codewords to tell them I'm not compelled and I'll tell them first to trust you, to trust the aiji and the aiji-dowager and whoever they recommend. And if it comes down to Direiso and the rest of them, maybe they'll give the outsiders indigestion if they come here, I don't know. But if we die here, everything is left to chance. They could end up trusting this Direiso person."
"You're not inept, yourself, Jase."
"I've tried to learn from you. Will you let me do it?"
* * *
CHAPTER 25
« ^ »
"Banichi," Bren said at the door of the little room in which the Assassins held private consultation and, having drawn Banichi a little out of earshot of the guard the Guild had placed on the meeting room, he tried to tell a man who last year hadn't known his sun was a star that aliens were hunting in the neighborhood.
"There are other suns," was the way he put it to Banichi, "and one of them is a very bad neighbor. Jase is an officer in the Pilots' Guild and he's made up his mind we're preferable to Hanks."
"A man of good taste," Banichi said calmly. "What about these bad neighbors?"
"They fly in space," he said, and Banichi said, "I think Cenedi should hear this."
Banichi called Cenedi and Jago out of the room. After three more sentences, Cenedi said, " 'Sidi-ji needs to hear this."
Jago went to wake the dowager, and in a very short time indeed Ilisidi herself had come out of the office she had chosen as her retreat, immaculate, stiff-backed, and frowning.
"More foreigners," Ilisidi said, then. "With bad manners, is it? And Jase-paidhi wants us to ally with his people, who provoked them?"
"I think we can avoid alliance," Bren said, with a hollow feeling in his stomach. "Or manage it to our advantage. But I do think the call to his ship would open options otherwise at risk should he — or I — be unlucky tonight."
"The risk seems on his side," Cenedi said, "aiji-ma, since we could then remove him from consideration were we so inclined."
"He is very well aware of the hazard," Bren said, "and has expressed the wish that the aiji-dowager take Mercheson paidhi under her personal protection as he himself is under the aiji's."
Banichi gave him a look. So did Jago, at this yielding up of rights Tabini might have contested. But contest was the operative word. There was no option without extensive negotiation if Ilisidi was the leader in the field, as she was, and there was a certain advantage in having Ilisidi step in. Having her as protector of one paidhi created a new position of authority if somehow they should fail and if Ilisidi had to contest with Direiso.
And for all persons concerned in the transaction including Yolanda Mercheson it brought paghida sara, mutual leverage. It meant negotiable positions.
Meant a place, a man'chi, a salvation — if they could stop the slide toward unreason.
A message had come in. A white paper went from an operator to one of Ilisidi's junior security to Cenedi, to Ilisidi.
And to Banichi.
Banichi picked up a sandwich from the table. And pocketed it. And another.
That, Bren thought, that was the action of a man who didn't expect a regular breakfast.
"We've just had an indication from Dur," Banichi said, "that the boy did get down safely. One thought you would wish to know. Whether he'll be safe when his parents lay hands on him is another matter, but we do at least have a confirmation that they're being met by his father's staff. Tano and Algini report movement, however."
That was worrisome.
"The fortress hears at some distance," Jago said.
"Not far enough to give it another hour," Cenedi said. " 'Sidi-ji."
Ilisidi gave a wave of her hand. "Whatever one does to make the earth link work," she said, "do. How long does this talking to the ship take?"
It took very little time, the director said. And gave the orders.
Then it was a matter of settling Jase at the console in the communications center. Jase was visibly anxious.
It was disturbing for the workers, too, Bren was sure, a human not only oc
cupying that post, but giving his own protocols and codewords to the ship in a language they had, for one reason and another, no translators here to interpret.
The ship answered. The foreign voice went out over the speakers so all the room could hear.
Then with full knowledge that the conversation was going to be monitored by a very similar center on Mospheira, Jase had to inform his captain that things were both better and worse than the ship might have feared.
"Sorry to call at this hour," Jase said, and his voice steadied. "But I've thought it over and I really need Yolanda over here."
"Yes," the answer came back. "How are you?"
"Doing very much better, sir. I've received sympathy from the atevi and I've made recommendations to the atevi government which they've accepted. I need Yolanda, though. Everybody means well, but it's hard. I want her here. I'll try to negotiate that myself, but I wonder if you can't explain to the island that I really need her for a while. Urgent persuasion. That kind of thing. Tell Sandra not to worry about me."
The whole speech was laced with codewords. If he'd had any concern that Mospheiran cooperation was still a possibility, he'd have expected a following and angry phone call. But they knew. He knew. Jase wasn't even taking pains to bury them too obscurely in ordinary conversation. He was just delivering the words and all of them could hope they were the right ones.
"Do you want to talk to your mother?" the captain asked, after hearing all of that with no comment.
"Absolutely no need to, sir."
"I'm here anyway," another, female voice cut in. "I miss you."
"Good to hear your voice, mom." This time there was a little shakiness. "I'm fine. I really am. How are you?"
"Worried about you. When am I not? How are you doing?"
"A lot better. I can't talk too long. I'll call when I get back to the city. I'm on what they call a vacation. You'd be amazed. I was rained on by a weather system and I'm sore from riding. And it's beautiful down here. But I've got to sign off now. I love you. You take care, mom. And you can take a call from me or from Bren."
"You take care. — Jase? Jase?"
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