Текст книги "Precursor"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Protective of Jason?

A reproof of the dowager for that invitation… disquiet, apprehension of what the dowager might have said or asked?

Why had the Mospheirans gotten their request faster than they’d wanted or expected?

He had to get his wits in order, or endanger the whole damned Western Association, not to mention himself and his bodyguard.

Wake up, paidhi-ji; that was very likely the thought in his bodyguards’ minds, too. They were all but telegraphing signals at him. Realize there might be danger. Defend us. Use your wits.

There was some advantage in having Jason debriefing early, having a man they knew for certain was well-disposed to atevi go up there to counter any negatives Mercheson might have given in her report. Atevi didn’t know Mercheson nearly as well, and didn’t have that much confidence in her, not as they had in Jase-paidhi.

No atevi mission above the technical level had yet reached the station. Pilots and technicians had gone, in the shuttle tests. Those were canny, intelligent individuals under strict instruction how to react and what to do; but no one below could know how those contacts might have gone, off the set script. Tabini wasn’t comfortable with Mercheson’s recall; Tabini knew all the unpleasant history of the Pilots’ Guild, being a student of history other than his own.

That was a hellish load of responsibility under which he served. The Mospheiran government trusted him. The delegates from Mospheira had made gestures toward trusting him. Tabini trusted him. Jason trusted him and wanted to stay down here. He was overburdened with trust and vastly undersupplied with information.

“One does wonder what she wants,” he said mildly, a question utterly without offense to ask in the context of his own bodyguard. He invited response.

“One does wonder,” Banichi said, denying he knew anything worth saying, and Jago, with the equivalent of a shrug:

“She does regard him as within her influence.”

Regarded Jase as an associate, in other words… one who couldn’t be taken from her without dealing with her in some fashion: that was true; it was why Tabini would have called her with that information, probably personally, though the dowager disdained telephones.

“Interesting,” he murmured to Jago’s remark, and noted that Banichi didn’t in the least disagree with his partner’s assessment. Thatrang alarm bells. Jago, the junior in that set, speculated beyond Banichi’s answer: not ordinary in a sober moment. He could conclude both of them thought so, then, but had no solid knowledge of Ilisidi’s motives, and therefore Jago, juniormost, advanced what they could say… once they nudged him into question, dropping their small bombshell of information between them: She’s here, and, She’s involved.

“So what else is going on?” he asked his security. “Who cleared the visas for the Mospheirans?”

“They are cleared,” was all Banichi could say. It was, then, all Banichi knew.

“The Atageini matter is resolved,” Jago said.

“The staff has sent the requisite letters,” Banichi informed him. “The contract is canceled.”

That was a relief. The lord of the Atageini had complained of encroachments on associated territory… the minor squabbles were the bread and butter of court intrigue, rarely accidental, usually a maneuver for position. The land was in contention, and likely the subassociation resident on the land had set up the conflict; assassinations had seemed likely.

And a niece of the head of the subassociation was seeking a union with a neighbor lad who wasn’t within her association. Social convention strained at the seams, interpersonally speaking, and that was how associations widened… if uncle Tatiseigi of the Atageini gave his approval, which at last report would be a cold day in a human hell. Tatiseigi, Tabini’s uncle-in-law, was as hidebound as any lord on the mainland, and what hadn’t been true three hundred years ago was, in Tatiseigi’s book, suspect. They had thatboiling on the border. It was suddenly quieter, for no good reason. Tatiseigihad changed his mind, then. Ilisidi, a distant associate, was back in court.

Go to the island for four days and the landscape rearranged itself.

“Damiri-daja favors the union,” Banichi said, meaning Tabini’s wife. “Nand’ Tatiseigi does not.”

“And Ilisidi?”

“She has had no known contact. But one asks.”

Things shifted and shuddered: the structure of the associations changed constantly, but the overall outlines remained the same; and Tabini and his wife’s uncle carried on a moderate, courteous warfare, within social limits. Men had died over it; but it looked as if violence was avoidable this time, only an old man asserting his power to be disagreeable and old-fashioned… and the aiji-dowager possibly bringing her foot down. He remained disturbed on that account. Tabini had been under siege in his own house. Jason was out from under the roof, unreachable.

The space center began to look like a refuge from the storm. Hehad to go persuade Tabini that sending Jase as the Pilots’ Guild wanted wasn’t a good idea, that perhaps Jase should catch some unanticipated malady, a contagion… the ship-folk had worried, at least, about contagion. But he didn’t know, now, what the repositioning of atevi meant, combined with the moves of the two human governments.

He was still thinking as the train climbed the steep of a very familiar hill. The windows might be curtained in red velvet and sealed in bullet-proofing, but Bren had no need to see out when they entered the distinctive region of echoes and the more level pitch just after the hill.

They were coming to the station. Algini and Tano rose from their seats, stood poised at the door to secure its safety—routine. It was unlikely there would be any assault, but counting the high position he did hold, and things shifting in the court, there was always a remote chance of those doors opening on a hail of bullets.

The car wheezed against the hydraulic brakes, and the doors opened.

No bullets. Bren rose, shouldered his computer, walked ahead of Jago and behind Banichi as they exited down to the platform in the high concrete tunnel. They were in the bowels of the palace, beneath the hill they had seen from the plane. Palace and gardens were above them.

They were safe now, beyond the reach of all but the most adept assassins… there existed a short list of likely offended parties, but there always was that. His enemies were fewer now. They knew, he knew, the assassins they hired knew that taking him down would create far too disruptive a vacuum. These days a determined few did pursue him, but the most, he was in a position to be sure, pursued him only for policy, and would not be willing to meet the retaliation of the aiji: paper threats. Or less than paper: his bodyguard, empowered by the aiji, informed him there was no valid Contract in the Assassins’ Guild.

In that relative assurance, his mind trying to form arguments for Jase’s immediate usefulness… and the nature of a nonthreatening illness… he entered the lift with Banichi and Jago, Algini and Tano as usual seeing to the baggage, while the three of them rode up to the level on which he had his now-permanent apartment.

It was a historic residence that had lately been the abode of the Maladesi… center of an association which had been, since the debacle of resistance to the space program, utterly absorbed.

Small loss, Tabini said; upstart newcomers, Damiri-daja said, though Bren regretted the passing of anything so incredibly old it antedated Mospheira, and felt a small guilt for his improved fortunes. He didn’t needa lord’s estate… he’d once argued. Now he knew the need of it. It was for his staff. His servants. The convenience of his security.

The Maladesi servants had understandably remained with elements of their historic association, absorbed into other groups. But certain servants had come in from the clerical staff, some had been recommended by Tabini, or through his security. Certain ones had even come from redoubtable Uncle Tatiseigi of the Atageini—a matter of some nervousness, but if the old man offered, one would assault the old man’s sense of taste to assume he would use a festive gift to launch assassins… he would, but not as an invited guest at the birth of a grandson, Tabini’s heir: it was old-fashioned manners, largesse and celebration.

And the apartment had been generally gone over with a finetoothed comb for remaining bugs and security breaches… when a lord of the Association moved, it necessarily occasioned changes far more extensive than changing the locks on an apartment. Interior doors had been moved, screens erected, both to confound assassins and to change the numerology of the patently unfortunate rooms.

The locks, of course, were both changed and upgraded, some to lethal levels… all of that. His staff contained no one that Tabini’s security had not passed… an atevi lord of older standing might have had reason to object to that thorough an infiltration from the aiji’s estate, but he was grateful. Banichi and Jago were from Tabini’s staff, before they had given him their man’chi. Hewas within Tabini’s man’chi. There was no contradiction at all.

Jase was within Tabini’s man’chi, too. That… was an argument.

The head of staff met him at the door, took his coat—Narani was the name of this major domo, an elderly and distinguished gentleman from the mountains. Two grandchildren, three former wives, and three sons were all on staff, not to mention lateral relations of wives and sons, including two current husbands… all staff.

Most remarkably and quite literally the heart of it was the population of a small fishing lodge, simply given to him in a very feudal fashion, along with title to the residence that was the source of the staff. The servants there had grown too numerous, in several centuries of marrying and begetting and birthing, to be confined to the maintenance of a lodge the aiji rarely visited. They were only half Ragi in ethnicity, ignored by Tabini’s father—this was a recommendation—somewhat remotely tied to Lord Geigi, a thoroughly reliable lord of the south coast… and delighting in a lord who actually visited the district, and brought his very family and honored mother to visit, no matter their oddness.

Or as Narani had put it, they had rusted in their former service, little called upon by the aiji, and now luxuriated in a service in the very heart of the court, their historic lodge likewise elevated to unprecedented prominence and wealth. Tourists came to the district to see “the paidhi’s country estate” in hopes of the exotic and outrageous, Bren was sure.

His staff survived his mother’s residencies with remarkable fortitude, not to mention Toby’s children.

Even Tatiseigi’s former servants avowed his service to their liking.

“The mail, nadi.” Narani assisted him with the coat, delivered the garment to a maidservant, and with a nod indicated the small silver bowl on the ornate, ivory-inlaid table by the entry.

Not unexpectedly, messages had accumulated, formally delivered message cylinders of silver, gold, ivory, and the like, each unique, most with some small felicitation or solicitation for the paidhi’s office—these cylinders were from the lordly ranks. The ordinary run of mail, arriving by common post, now had a staff of hundreds in full-time employment: would the paidhi kindly respond to a small association in the hinterlands who suspected the sighting of three meteors was a landing of spacecraft?

Granted.

Would the paidhi tell schoolchildren whether they might write to a school on Mospheira?

They might exchange greetings, no more. They could not let down the barriers that prevented free access… not for lunatics in rowboats; not for innocent schoolchildren.

Those were the kind of things the staff handled, up to certain levels. Messages in the silver bowl were likely to be departmental meetings, committee meetings, and policy conferences. Some might have heard about Jase’s departure. The whole court might know, it being late afternoon.

But why was he not astonished to see the dowager’s message cylinder among the rest? And where was Tabini’s?

“Rani-ji,” he addressed his major domo. “When did the aiji-dowager’s message arrive?”

“Within the last hour, nadi.” Narani had not mentioned Jase. But the house was very sober, very quiet compared to happier homecomings. The servant who had taken his coat went away, head bowed, without a sound, and Narani had not a word to say about the shirt cuff.

They stood in a white circular entry hall, reflected in three massive gilt-framed mirrors, before which sat three gilt-and-silver tables on which sat very massive bouquets… gold seasonal flowers in blue-and-green porcelain vases. The marble floor held, three times repeated, the baji-naji symbol in black-and-white marble; the same design echoed on the ceiling in a great medallion; and one could suppose someone had counted the number of repeating reflections from every angle of the mirrors, to be sure nothing in the entry hall was infelicitous.

So were all the motives, all the implications, and all the politics around and above him… atevi. Tabini-aiji, effective ruler of the world, had not, to his observation, sent a welcoming message to him, and he could not approach the aiji without that invitation. He had to count on Banichi and Jago to get something through to Tabini’s staff… and to send a message to Tabini reporting what was surely an invitation from the dowager, Tabini’s grandmother, was exceedingly indelicate. Among atevi, one trusted a great lord knewwhat was going on. In the Bu-javid, messages flowed like groundwater, invisibly… tastefully.

Perhaps a commiseration in the loss of Jase. That would be reasonable to expect. And there was not, not from Tabini.

He opened Ilisidi’s cylinder. Not a word of Jase. The message indeed asked him to supper, with scarcely enough time to bathe and dress in sufficient formality.

He was not surprised at all.

But wary of this invitation, aware of all the threads that ran under various doorways here and across the continent… oh, yes. He was that.

Chapter 3

The dowager’s apartment was very familiar territory, with a luxurious, red, gold, and black decor, the heraldry of the aiji’s line, armed attendants, glorious, though faded, works of tapestry… a hall full of familiar faces that met the paidhi’s visit. Time and events had forged that cordiality, and it warmed a human heart even while a wary official mind remained on the alert.

Check and mate, as far as getting to Tabini. Bren found himself here, instead, going through social motions. His hair was braided with the appropriate braid of rank. He had on the high-collared coat, quietly, houselessly beige—the fichued shirt, with gold cufflinks… no lack of cufflinks, this side of the straits. A little lace, above pale hands as conspicuous as the fair hair. A little scent, appropriately muted, one of the few that both came from an atevi supplier and blended with a human’s natural scent: so Jago informed him, while Banichi wrinkled his nose and said it was decadently floral.

Narani, at least, had sent him out the door with professional satisfaction. Banichi and Jago had very naturally come with him, and met the senior bodyguards of the dowager’s staff with wary cordiality. They’d saved one another’s necks repeatedly, and had as friendly a relationship as their slightly divergent man’chi allowed.

Tano and Algini had brought Jason there, and avowed they had observed nothing untoward. The curious fact remained that Jason hadn’t mentioned the visit… though human interactions were like that; in the hour they’d had, everything but what was human had fallen out of their minds.

Jason to this hour might be thinking, My God, I forgot to tell him…

But that Tano and Algini had not… thatwas more likely because they deferred to Banichi and Jago, and theyknew there was something afoot that the paidhi needed to figure out for himself. They couldn’t, psychologically couldn’t, fight Tabini. He was on his own in that; but they were worried about the footing he was on, trying to guide his steps as accurately as they could through what was shaping up as a maze of intrigue.

“Nand’ paidhi.” The head of the dowager’s security, Cenedi, met him in the dowager’s entry, accompanied him from the foyer to the hall… and from there on into, thankfully, the dining room, not the cold fresh wind of the balcony, where Ilisidi, accustomed to fresh air and disdainful of assassins, had been known to serve meals.

The dowager waited for him instead in the warm heart of her apartment, a woman slight with age—for her species—leaning on her cane, beside a glittering dinner table centered with crystal, flowers, and candles. There was no grand entry, no keeping him waiting. This was the approach afforded intimates.

“Nand’ dowager,” Bren said with honest fondness.

“Well, well, so formal, are we?”

“ ‘Sidi-ji,” he amended that, but only on indication she welcomed it. “I received your invitation and came immediately as I reached my apartment.”

“Sit, sit, flatterer.” Ilisidi advanced a step toward the table, and her bodyguard whisked her chair into position. She sat; the cane went to the bodyguard’s hand with never an interruption of movement, and Bren sat down in a chair as deftly moved and reset by Cenedi’s partner. “I support your vices. I have imported vodkafrom the island.”

“It’s very good of you,” he said. He was pleased. A measure of the times and the current size of his office. A subordinate must have passed it, so that she could actually surprise him with an import. His job had grown far, far beyond stamping import manifests.

“With appropriate fruit juice?”

“Thank you,” he said, as a glass… with unseasonable ice, decadence in the dowager’s opinion… turned up in a servant’s hand, and settled in place in front of him.

Another servant presented a glass of the dowager’s own preference, one of those alkaloid stimulants that could kill a human, or make him wish it had. “So, so, nand’ paidhi, how fares your mother?”

“Well. Very well. Complaining of my desertion on a holiday.”

“The Independence Day.” Ilisidi showed herself amused, and well-informed. “Independence from us. What a curious holiday, under the circumstances.”

“A historic, a traditional occasion.” The inference belatedly dawned on him, that there was in that human ship overhead another threat to Mospheiran independence. “Equally, Mospheirans secured their independence from the Pilots’ Guild all those centuries ago by flinging themselves onto the planet in parachutes. I assure you… there’s certainly no national urge even yet to rush into the arms of the Guild. Even those who wanted to go back to space have their doubts.”

“When you first landed, atevi thought you’d fallen from the moon. Now the sun’s a star and the morning star a planet. What a strange world we’ve made! Try the relish. It’s from the garden at Malguri. I did inquire of its safety.”

“A fond memory.” He did help himself. Relish and other pickles were exceptions to the rule of propriety, of kabiu: nothing but what grew or was customarily hunted during the season was kabiu. What was preserved as a condition of its recipe and served during a subsequent season was acceptable: such were liquors and other products of time and fermentation, which had no season but readiness. Likewise smoked or pickled meats.

And the dowager would not be wrong about the alkaloid content. If she flatly meant to poison him, she would never, on a point of honor, assure him of its safety beforehand.

The relish was, if peppery, quite good with the egg, that standard of atevi appetizers.

“The sun is a star,” the dowager reprised, serving herself another two eggs and a dollop of relish, “and the Pilots’ Guild so mistrusted by the Mospheirans has now offended another species. So they say.” Old, old news; but in that statement the dowager set the topic of the encounter. She knew about the human mission; she was well-briefed. He formed the hypothesis she’d come across the continent to have supper with Jase; and now with him; and that Tabini couldn’t prevent her three-hour flight or her interference, but might not be pleased with it.

“We don’t know that it was an offense the Guild committed, nand’ dowager. This strange species may have attacked the Guild for its own reasons.”

“Ha. Simply ill-natured, do we believe? Humans launch out from their own star, lose their way, and come here—such is our great good fortune. They fall on our heads. Now they go out looking for their own misplaced planet and manage to offend unidentified neighbors. Given their record, I doubt it was simple bad luck.”

“The Mospheiran government, frankly, shares that opinion. Though logically, one can’t exclude bad luck.”

“They have no sense of felicitous design. Baji-naji.” That was to say, chance and fortune could overset the pattern, however good or bad. “And this frantic exchange of paidhiin? Acceptable to you?”

“I’d like to hold Jason.” They were on diplomatic and personal thin ice. Tabini hadn’t asked yet. ‘Sidi-ji asked, for her own reasons, which she had not divulged. He tried to deflect closer questioning on the exception he was about to advance with Tabini… if he could find a way through Tabini’s door. The dowager might be a resource, or fuel on a fire. “I’ll mourn his departure. I need his help down here.”

“They don’t present us a successor. Just this fellow Cope, who’s made a nuisance of himself. Will they?”

“I don’t know what they intend. One may come down with the next launch.” It was what they’d done with Mercheson.

“They’ll debrief our Jason before they send the next one.”

“I think that’s their intention.”

“Understandable in them. Dare we take that motive for what it seems?—More to the point, do you take it that these ship-folk have interests in accordance with yours? I shall never expect they accord perfectly with ours.”

“My interests don’t diverge far at all from those of the associations, and I don’t know, nand’ dowager, in all truth. Mospheira doesn’t know, either. No one does, not me, not Jase, no one but the officers of the Pilots’ Guild… and possibly even not all of those.”

“Hereditary officers. Lords of their association. Ramirez?”

“As a father to him. A stern father.” It didn’t mean quite what it did to a human, but it meant man’chi.

“This business of being one of Taylor’s Children.”

“Just so.”

The servants took away the egg dish and replaced it with the seasonal meat, a large, fan-spined fish. It sat atop the platter staring at them from a bed of blue-green weed, but its body was a sculpted white pate dotted with small green fruits.

The rule was generally to avoid blue foods and mildly suspect the white, but he trusted the dowager, and took a serving without question. A servant set a cruet of herb-flavored vinegar beside his hand, and he applied it.

“Excellent.” A friend of the household could never take for granted the sacrifice of a life, however spiny, or the artistic efforts of a cook preparing the dish. “Truly excellent, nandi. My thanks and my admiration.”

“Duly accepted, paidhi-ji.” Warmly said. “Now. Tell me this tale, not as you told it when we were ignorant of stars and shuttle ships. Tell me the tale as if this time I shall understand destinations. What is this business of Taylor’s Children?”

“Taylor was the pilot, the first pilot. Phoenixset out centuries ago from the earth of humans to a station construction site, going to a star within sight of the earth of humans. But the ship suddenly flew askew, and turned up instead at a deadly dangerous star, out of fuel, or nearly so.”

“Sabotage?”

“It’s given it was an accident of subspace, one of those mathematical questions the Astronomer Emeritus—”

The imperious wave of an elderly black hand. “So. Continue. The birth of the children.”

“Proximity to the star would mean the early death of those who went outside the ship; but they had to acquire fuel. They used the construction craft intended for station construction, craft with little protection. Heroic persons went out, knowing the exposure would surely kill them. Indelicate as it is to say—they left their personal legacy in frozen storage, not out of vanity, but because if they were so lost, they wished to have a community of sufficient variety for a healthy community. They knew they were in trouble. They died in great numbers.”

“And they gathered fuel to move the ship to safety.”

“Even so.”

“Here. And this Taylor-captainguided the ship safely to this harbor before he died.”

“Yes.”

Jason had been her guest yesterday, and he’d wager anything that Jason had told her the same tale in carefully compared detail. He stayed close to the canon.

“So,” Ilisidi said, and had a bite of fish. “All those born of this legacyare named the sons and daughters of Taylor. And they had come to the earth of the atevi. Taylor died. The pilots wished to stay in space and search for home; the ordinary folk instead chose to land and become a problem to us.”

“The Pilots’ Guild respected the rights of atevi not to be bothered or contacted. They wanted to move off to the red star, leaving no station about this planet beyond what they needed for a very small base. But the colonists didn’t agree. They saw a green planet much like their own. Certain ones leaped off on the petal sails and fell into the world.”

“To a welcome, after initial difficulties,” Ilisidi interjected, more expert than he in this phase of atevi history. “We were entranced with change and your technology. We became addicted to these offerings.”

“While the ship left on its search, leaving some persons on the planet, others running the station. But as conditions grew harder on the station, and as the atevi did welcome the Landing, more and more humans came down.”

“Increasing our good fortune,” the dowager interjected wryly.

“So many left the station couldn’t function. They could shut it down and prepare it to wait, in which case it would take less damage, but shutting it down seemed to necessitate leaving. When the ship came back, after elapsed centuries… all the surviving humans were down here, and everything had changed.”

“Yet the ship had had children. They populated the ship with this legacy.”

“They rarely access it. When they do, they treat those children as special, outside the regular lines of descent. They don’t tell whose child they were, so as not to create any sense of preference in their history. They call them all Taylor’s Children.”

“So Jase is a special person, of consequence within their association.”

“A person they’re disposed to view as lacking associations. Not as an aiji lacks them, but born for a specific purpose. Captain Ramirez authorized the birth of a number of them… with ordinary mothers… for the return journey to this earth. They hadn’t known about the aliens yet. They were supposed to prepare themselves to contact the station; that purpose stayed. That’s why Jase studied languages. He said it was a hobby, but he wasn’t quite truthful at the start… not in that, not in a lot of things he later told me. He and the others… there were ten of them… they were purposed for something a lot happier than what Ramirez found when they received a distress call from the second station they’d built out there.”

“Languages,” Ilisidi echoed, and from her deliberate tone, he knew she’d seen the flaw in the reasoning. “To greet their own descendants. Does the human language change so rapidly, then?”

He had no answer to that. He and Jase had discussed the same question, had looked at Jase’s existence in ways Jase had never considered. Jase had said, There are factions aboard ship… and Jase had acknowledged some of those did not gracefully accept the current negotiations with the atevi.

Ramirez had authorized the birth of the children, had had them encouraged into those very skills that would enhance their ability to negotiate… that Ramirez had planned the children to negotiate with the atevi from the start, that Ramirez had had the vision to see beyond human arrogance to welcome aid from any source available… that had been well within Jase’s understanding of his captain-father, and well within the needs of peace aboard ship that Ramirez would keep such a purpose to himself.

But he couldn’t say that to Ilisidi. That was speculation of a nature he hadn’t even factual-basis enough to pass on to Tabini. But that Ilisidi, a veteran of subterfuge, had made the logical leap on her own… that he could well believe.

“So. Well,” Ilisidi, her point made, continued. “With these strangely trained children in tow, they went to this other station which had called and which had suffered great damage in their absence.”

“Exactly so. Ramirez questioned the station-folk there, and determined to come here, fall back to this base, thinking he’d find a large population and a thriving station. The ship was not happy in what it did find.”

Not happy, yes, but that Ramirez had been surprised… that, he and Jase had decided, was highly unlikely.

“One does imagine so.” Ilisidi silently finished a massive portion of the fish, and accepted a dish of spiced vegetables. “These are from the south. I’ve taken quite a fancy to them.”

“A very wonderful presentation.”

“—Does Mospheira continue to distrust the motives of the Pilots’ Guild? Or have they taken alarm at the idea of foreigners chasing the Guild here?”

“Mercheson-paidhi tried to persuade them to cooperate fully. And to trust the Guild’s modern leaders. Especially Ramirez.”

“Did she succeed in this persuasion?”

“Not wholly.” He made up his mind to give Ilisidi a little information, information that might reassure her, and that Tabini wouldn’t mind her knowing. “The delegation that’s going is suspicious. The Guild will have to work to convince them. They didn’t expect to go this early.”

“And now Trent Cope will attempt the same quick reconnaissance?”

“I don’t know if you can call it that.”

“And they take Jase.”

“Just so. If I can’t find a way to persuade Tabini to rescind the order.”

Ilisidi gave a laugh, a very rude laugh. It said her opinion of how likely Tabini was to backtrack.