Текст книги "Precursor"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

And the time… he wasn’t sure of the time. It was well after dark now, east of Mospheira. If his mother and Barb had gone to the mall directly after leaving Toby at the airport, it couldn’t have been that late when the accident happened, and she’d only now gotten through the phone system?

He was behind a security curtain. God knew how she’d made the entire worldnet and the aijiin and captains understand she had a real emergency, and now she came unglued. She was sobbing on the phone.

“Mother. Mother, you fell down. Has anyone looked at you?”He was honestly, deeply worried. “Are you sure you weren’t hit?”

“Something hit me. I’m not sure.” With the intonation that said it wasn’t important, it didn’t matter to her pain.

“Have the doctors looked at you?”

“They did.” Dismissively. “Bren, Bren, you can get a plane. Tell the aiji. You have to.”

“Have you called Toby?”

“She doesn’t need Toby, dammit! She needs you!”

“ Youneed Toby, Mother. I want you to call him.”

“You listen to me, Bren Cameron! You damned well listen to me! The woman you were going to marry is lying in intensive care in there, and you don’t tell me you don’t care! You don’t tell me you’re carrying on an affair over there and you don’t care. You straighten yourself out and you get back here!”

She did know. She guessed. On one of her visits, somehow someone had slipped… the tightest security in the world, and she knew.

“I can’t. I can’t, Mother.” Barb’s kiss in the hangar, Barb running, whole and healthy, across the concrete, and a bus, for God’s sake… there was a sense of dark, malign comedy about it, a grotesque sense of the impossible, and he didn’t catch half the awful details his mother spilled to him, except that there were fractures, a punctured lung, internal bleeding.

And knowing Barb… knowing Barb who’d been his on-island lover and sometime contact point for relaying dangerous messages from before their breakup… it was entirely possible Barb had shoved his mother for that curb and thatwas how Barb had gotten hit, and thatwas what drove his mother’s grief.

Barb would. Grant all their failure to be a couple, Barb would. “What are her chances?” he asked, dreading to know. “What’s the damage?”

“They’re going to do a bone replacement and a brain scan.” His mother drew a breath and grew calmer in a list of specifics. “She’s conscious. When the ambulance was coming, she said, ‘Tell Bren this really wasn’t a scheme to get him back here.’ And when they were putting her in the ambulance, she said, ‘I need him.’ Bren, she does. She really needs you. I had a feeling you shouldn’t fly back today.”

She hadn’t seen the damned bus coming, but that wouldn’t convince his mother she didn’t have premonitions.

He’d done all he could. The personal phone wouldn’t have helped her at all, once he’d gone through the security curtain that surrounded Tabini’s intentions. Hours of trying to reach him.

And what did he say, after she’d worked a miracle to reach him?

“Mother, I absolutely can’t come.”

“Bren, don’t you tell me that! Bren, you have to come, that’s all there is! You’re so damned important to Tabini, you get him to get you a plane, right now. I want you here!”

He had the receiver against his ear for privacy—thank God. “Mother, I’m involved in something I can’t leave. I can’t tell you. But this is important. I’m sorry. Tell Barb I’m terribly sorry.—Don’t you dare tell her I love her. Don’t you do that, Mother.”

“You listen to me, Bren. You listen. This job is killing you. It’s killing the son I knew. It’s killing any happiness you’re going to have. You don’t decide when you’re sixty that you ought to have gotten married, you don’t wait till the end of your life to regret you didn’t have children…”

“Mother…”

“You listen to me, Bren Cameron! I know what’s going on with you and that atevi woman! It’s not right!”

“Mother, where are you?” He was appalled that she knew, but more appalled to think she might be in a hallway, at a public phone. “Don’t say that out loud. Don’t raise your voice.”

“Are you ashamed? Does it worry you?”

“It worries me when my mother might be saying things in a public corridor. It worries me for her safety if the extremists get themselves stirred up again because some damned rumor gets started—talk like that won’t help Durant, either. Hush! Be still. Listen to me…”

“You really don’t want to hear it, do you? You know Barb always loved you. She married that fool Paul because you broke her heart. You hurt her, Bren, and she was sorry, and oh, no, you were too self-righteous, too damned important with your fancy estate to take her back.”

“I never promised to marry her. I don’t love her, Mother! I’m sorry to say it under these circumstances, but I don’t love her. I never loved her, she didn’t love me; we slept together. That was the end of it. I tried to have something else, and she was the one who wanted something different.”

“You don’t knowwhat she felt! You weren’t here! You were traipsing about the continent acting as if you were some atevi lord! She decided to marry. To marry, respectably, as sensible people do when they want to have normal lives.”

“I don’t have a normal life.”

“She was scared, Bren, she was scared and she was hurt—personally hurt, by the things you’d done. If you asked her to divorce Paul, she’d be there in a moment.”

Dealing with his mother was like running a course under fire… and he feared his mother would tell Barb there was hope of having him back, wreck Barb’s marriage, drive Paul off when Barb needed him, and hurt Barb more than she’d been. Most of all, he couldn’t hold that out to Barb… because he wouldn’t beback and Barb, all she valued and all she wanted to be, her fashion, her nightclub glamour, all the things she loved… didn’t exist on this side of the sea.

“I can’t marry her. End of statement. It’s not a time to debate it.”

“How can you be like this? You’d come home. You’d show up on a weekend, ask Barb to drop all her plans and go running off to some hotel, with the news people all trying to find you, and then you’d be gone, and then the news people wouldfind where you’d been and Barb would have to duck out and lock herself in her apartment for weeks, Bren, sometimes in fear of her life!”

“I know that.” It was true, Barb had played international intrigue as part of the shining, glittering game, until it turned bloody; and now his mother was working herself back into tears. He tried to get his point through while there was still rational thought to hear it. “But I can’t help that. I can’t helpthat, Mother; listen to me! The president’s guard does look out for you. If there are spies at the hospital now, they’re official. They probably are at the hospital right now. I want you to call Shawn Tyers. You know how.”

“Don’t you hang up on me!”

“Mother, you know I love you. That’s the way things are. Call Shawn. Call Paul… I know you don’t want to, but do it! Then go home, get some rest.

“Mother, what was between us is still herbusiness and my business. Give me credit that I know Barb, I know her damned well, and I can’t help her by getting involved in her life and ripping that up a second time.”

“Bren, don’t be like this.”

“I’m sorry as hell for what happened. It makes me sick to think of it. But I can’t fix it, and don’t you dare tell her I love her, don’t you dare tell her there’s any hope of my coming now. There isn’t. You’ll just hurt her. Do you hear me, Mother? Go home! I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

“Promise to call Barb.”

“I will notpromise to call Barb. I’ve got to go now.”

“Bren, call her.”

“Mother, go home. Good night. I love you.”

He hung up. He was aware of Jago in the doorway of the security station, aware of the fact some words were in her understanding and Banichi’s, at least of his side of the conversation.

“Barb’s had an accident,” he said. “A bus hit her. My mother fell down and hurt herself. Barb’s in the hospital. There’s nothing I can do from here.” They didn’t understand love, they didn’t understand the intricate details of failed human relationships, but they knew attachment persisted. Most of all they knew loyalty, and the urge to go to the scene of trouble. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Banichi said solemnly. “The aiji can request action of the President of Mospheira, and Shawn-nandi. Shall we do that?”

Tabini could do so much; and so damned little. “Not for this. Toby’s not home yet. Patch me through to his house, Banichi-ji. I’ll leave a message.”

Banichi pushed buttons. The communications interface was a great deal easier than it had been, with security codes that automatically engaged when the messages crossed the straits. Even at this hour, the Mospheiran system produced an operator, better than in prior days, and the call went on its way to the north coast, where Toby’s answering system cut in.

Bren was in some part relieved. It was easier to unburden the matter to a machine. He was sure their mother had put one of those nerve-jarring Call me’son Toby’s system, and he hoped his message might at least advise Toby what the matter was, if their mother fell out of contact before Toby ran off into the night trying to hire a plane.

“Mother seems fine” he began his message, experienced in years of long-distance crises. “Scrapes and bruises, as I gather. Barb’s in the hospital, Mother’s with her. A pretty bad accident with a bus, and Mother saw it, might have been in front of it. She wants some comfort. Toby, I know you just got home, I hate like hell to drop this on you, but I’m behind a security wall at the moment and I absolutely can’t get back there. I don’t think you need to fly back, just give Mother a call at…” Professional coolness wavered. “I don’t know what hospital.” Their mother was probably one of the few people outside the government who didn’t have forwarding on their calls: security precaution. And she was one of the very few, inside or out, who wasn’t completely aware of all the security arrangements that surrounded them. He couldn’t call her security and ask where she was. He hoped to God they knew and that his mother and Barb hadn’t gotten whisked away out of security’s sight. “She didn’t tell me what hospital.” He covered the microphone. “Banichi-ji. Get the origination on that call from my mother.”

Banichi pushed buttons, wrote on a slip of paper, handed it to him.

“It’s Central City,” he said into the phone. He was relieved. He knew the number by heart. “Look, just give her a call through the hospital system, and if she’s not there, call the apartment. It’s possible Barb pushed Mother out of the way of a bus. She’s really shaken. Barb’s critical. God, I’m sorry, Toby, I’m really sorry. I wish to God I didn’t have to put this on your shoulders.”

Toby, however, wasn’t there to assure him it was all right, or that some disaster hadn’t delayed Toby and his family. There were watchers around Toby, too, all the same. Agents followed the kids to school. It was what the government had to do… what he thanked God they did, because the whole question of atevi/human relations provoked every borderline crazy in existence, on Mospheira and on the mainland. Even someone the random lunatics thought might be connected to him, like his former secretaries, had to have constant protection on the island… it went against Mospheiran law to round up the lunatics until they’d actually done something.

“You take care,” he said, hearing the vast, cold silence. “Thanks, Toby. Hope we get that fishing trip one of these months.”

He hung up.

No, he couldn’t come back. And he couldn’t let out, even on a shielded line, that he was going up to the station, not before launch. The aiji would announce it when the aiji chose.

The paidhi’s personal crises didn’t figure in the plans. He thought he should call Shawn… but if the other delegation had, or should, call the island, there were issues… a lot of issues.

A hand rested lightly on his shoulder, Jago’s, calling him back to rational thought, reminding him he wasn’t, after all, alone.

“Barb just stepped in front of a bus,” he said. He felt distant from that information, as if it were some line in an entirely unpleasant, grotesque joke. But it wasn’t. He didn’t want to think what kind of damage she’d taken, “Possibly she moved to protect my mother. Likely it was my mother’s inattention to traffic. It’s quite heavy, where they were.”

“One only asks,” Banichi said, who, like Jago, had likely understood a great deal of it… more, because they both knew his mother and knew Toby. “Did you not advise your mother to go home and did you not say to Toby call the hospital?”

“My mother won’t go home,” Bren said. “Nothing we can do, any of us, from here. I have to trust Shawn will do something. That Toby will.”

There were frowns, confusion on their part as to what the proprieties were. As for him, he could scarcely think.

“Nadi,” Jago said, not nandi– my lord—but the common sir. She wanted him to leave the matter. She wanted to take him out of the security station, away from the questions.

She was right; he rose, but he cast a look at Banichi, who’d be in charge, who wasin charge of whatever came through these communication and surveillance boards, and who took his safety and his family’s safety very seriously.

“It was an accident,” Bren said. “It couldn’t be otherwise. The buses are public. They move quickly, even recklessly. It’s notorious.”

“Sometimes there are accidents” Banichi said.

“Sometimes there are,” he said.

He left the security center then, walked back in the halls, to the bedroom that was his, in a place quiet now. The servants had retreated to their own rooms, likely, hoping for sleep; or still working.

Jago followed him, stood a moment while he stared at the wall.

“Stay,” he roused himself to say.

She shut the door behind her. He slid off the robe and went to bed, and Jago put out the main lights.

She came and eased into bed beside him, around him, not a word said.

I don’t love Barb, he wished to say to her, but there wasn’t a word for love, and it didn’t matter to Jago; from her view, since he insisted Barb was still with his mother, Barb was still within his association, marginalized somewhat, but still there.

But if lovewasn’t in the atevi hard-wiring, sexual jealousy wasn’t, he suspected, quite that remote. He couldn’t trust his own human feelings to interpret hers, further than that, and his thinking wasn’t outstandingly clear; neither was his feeling, his emotion… his heart, whatever one wanted to call it.

Was it that way for Jago, too?

He didn’t relax. Couldn’t.

“Shall I turn on the television?” Jago asked him.

“It might be good,” he said. He didn’t want sleeping pills. Couldn’t bring himself to make love on news like that. They put a machimi on… a part of the culture close to religious, but not, having everything to do with the atevi heart, and nothing at all to do with gods.

In the play before them, he guessed the woman would learn her lord had interests conflicting with her sexual partner’s. The uninitiated human, seeing the drama, might expect quite the opposite as would happen, but atevi had no doubt. One only waited for disaster.

He’d send Toby the funds. He had that. He always had that, and Toby knew it. In his absence from crises he could always contribute money for the airfare.

“We have boarding before dawn,” Jago said against his ear. “Do you think of that, nadi-ji?”

“I do now,” he said, realizing he’d slept, and that his arm was numb, and Jago’s might be. “What time is it?”

“The depth of the night. Rest, nadi.”

He sighed, and Jago, with the remote, without moving him, shut the television off.

Chapter 8

Remarkable as it was to be going up to space, it was only a matter of walking out into the hall that had led them here. That hall led to double doors, and those doors let them into the departure lounge. Jase was there, Tano and Algini; Bren was so used to seeing them he hardly knew the sight was uncommon, except Banichi and his team had exchanged their habitual leather and metal for more form-fitting operational black, mission-black, the sort they’d hitherto worn only in clandestine work, and rarely with him. That was one thing different.

The other, patently, was Lund and Kroger and company, pale-skinned, reflecting in the glass. “Good morning,” Kroger said frostily. “Good morning” Lund echoed, in slightly more friendly fashion.

“Good morning,” he gave them back as if nothing at all had happened.

But what commanded his attention, what utterly seized his attention, beyond that wall of dark windows was a floodlit view of the shuttle, white as winter, long, sleek and elegant.

Shai-shan.

We’re going, his mind chanted over and over, halfway numb and operating on far too little sleep, while the body manufactured a false, expensive strength. We’re going. We’re going.

Attendants of the space center had ushered them here, and now, time ticking away, opened the outer doors of the departure lounge, so smoothly on the edge of his arrival that he was sure he and his party had been on the edge of late.

“Well,” Shugart said with a deep breath, and started off. Bren started walking without half thinking, fell in with Jason… then, willing to make peace, waited for the Mospheirans, not to outpace them.

They walked, far as it was. There’d been consideration of a mobile lounge, but the shuttle itself took precedence, every element of the budget concentrated on that and on its sister ship, still under construction. It sat farther away than any ordinary walk to a waiting airplane, slowly looming larger and larger, deceptive in its graceful shape.

Meanwhile the lingering night chill set into human bones, and uneasy stomachs had a long, long time to contemplate the fact that the engines were different, the wings were mere extensions of the hull. Shai-shandidn’t look human or atevi. She looked alien, out of time and place… a design not state of the art when Phoenixhad launched from the earth of humans, no, but one that might have served that age.

They arrived within the circle painted on the concrete. The embarkation lift sat in down position in front of them, a cargo lift with a grid platform, a railing, a boarding bridge up against the hatch, no more exotic an arrangement than that. They walked aboard, the four Mospheirans, Jase, Bren with his security, and after them Narani and the three other servants, carrying the hand luggage, bags that would have taxed strong humans. There was room on the sizable platform, but only a little.

The lift clanked, jolting them all, and rose up and up to level with the boarding platform that sat mated to the open hatch.

From it, Kroger pushing violently to the lead, they filed past a dismayed atevi steward.

Let her, Bren thought. She passed the steward because he had no orders to lay violent hands on a human guest, and had had no suspicion of the move in time to make himself a wall. He had no doubt Banichi and his team took their cues from his failure to object… and that Kroger hadn’t scored points with the atevi.

She and her team, moving ahead, were under-scale in a cabin sized and configured for atevi… beautifully simple, completely fortunate in its numbers. Bren knew it intimately, and the harmony of the sight soothed away his annoyance at Kroger, showed him how little she did matter to the atevi’s ability to launch this vessel. It might have been one of the mainland’s best passenger jets, simple rows of seats, carrying a hundred atevi at most; the buff-colored panels were insets, not windows; that was one difference. And in every point the craft feltfortunate, and well-designed, and solid, an environment completely carried around the passenger, surrounding and comforting.

Screens occupied the forward bulkhead, high, large, visible from all the seats.

Stewards waited for them, showed Lund and Kroger into the foremost seats, not quarreling with the precedence; Ben and Kate looked troubled by the proceedings, uncertain in the disposition of their small handbags, and sat with their group.

Bren chose his own seat, on the aisle, midway down the row of seats—there were plenty available—and offered Jase his choice.

Jase eased past him and sat down next to the wall, while Banichi and Jago took the pair of seats across the aisle. Tano and Algini took the row just behind them. The servants settled at the rear, in their own society, doubtless commenting very quietly on the unusual man’chi-like manifestation among the humans—had a threat been passed? Had the woman in charge felt attacked? Certainly not by their will.

“Luck to us,” Jason said anxiously, in the last-moment activity of the stewards.

“Baji-naji,” Bren said. That black-and-white symbol was conspicuous on the forward wall, right beneath the monitors: Fortune and Chance, the give and take in the universe that made all the rigid numbers move.

The engines fired, whined, roared into life. The shuttle wasn’t particularly good at maneuvering on the ground. Towed to its berth, it had a straight line to one runway going straight forward as it sat, and as the engines built, it gathered speed away from the space center. The cabin crew, too, presumably had belted in.

The shuttle gathered more and more speed… disconcerting for passengers used to taxiing and maneuvering. They could see nothing; the craft quivered to the thump of tires.

“One hopes the small craft have heard the tower,” Banichi said cheerfully, from the matching aisle seat, over the thunder.

God, Bren thought, and reminded himself all air traffic would be diverted away from Shejidan for the next half hour, sufficient for the shuttle to clear the airport, with the aiji’s planes to enforce it. The shuttle was not as maneuverable as an airliner, in the air, either. One unanticipated fool, and the whole program was in jeopardy; not to mention their lives.

The center screen flicked on, showed a double row of runway lights ahead. A lot of runway yet. The pace still increased. The lack of side windows combined with the black forward view made a center-seat passenger feel like a bullet in a gun.

Not nervous, Bren said to himself, not nervous, not nervous, no, not at all. He locked his sight on those monitors, hyperfocused there to keep his stomach steady, trying to convince his claustrophobia that what he saw was a window. But the aft cameras had come on, retreating perspective of the lights warring with the forward motion. Then a belly camera came into operation, showing a spotlighted forward tire and a blur of dark pavement.

The engines cycled up and up. Thundered. The tires thumped madly. Where’s the end of the runway? Bren thought. Lift! Lift!

The tires suddenly went silent, and the deck slanted up. A hand shoved Bren against the foam of his seat: he felt himself sinking back as the whole craft shook to the engines, found his fingers trying to hold him against that illusion.

Deep breath. He tried to relax, look casual in the moment, but his heart cycled in time with the engines. No easy circling of the city like the aiji’s jet, just a straightforward climb, proverbial bat out of hell.

They climbed and they climbed before the press backward eased.

“Well, it worked again,” Jason said weakly.

“It did,” Bren agreed, convinced himself he dared let go the armrest.

But the tilt of the deck was still extreme; they were still climbing, if under less pressure; and every citizen of Shejidan would have been shaken out of bed, hurried into the open to look up and wonder… the wonder was still new, in Shejidan, and people forgave the handful of falling tiles, and filled out the requests for repair, which they would point to, doubtless, and say to generations to come, see, this crack was in the first days of the space venture: all Shejidan suffered this, and won…

What? The space station? The Foreign Star that had shone in their skies for centuries?

A birthright?

Not every citizen of Shejidan welcomed roof repairs. But the aiji promised a new spaceport, conversion of the space center to an acculturation center, promised work for craftsmen, a great felicity, an ultimate association not with the humans but with the associationsof humans, a method by which they could avert war and ensure the future.

Humans could read the translations of the aiji’s statements and never understand. The aiji had received a deputation from representatives of the Gan, original tenants of Mospheira, heretics, of a sort. A whole bright new world was upon them.

The aft monitor showed a seam of dawn, past the running lights on white edges, the belly camera very little but black. The forward cameras picked up nothing but black. They were on their way.

And of all things, Banichi and Jago turned on their seat lamps and broke out reading material.

Look at the damn monitors! Bren wanted to shout at them. A miracle is happening! Look at the sky, for God’s sake! The people pour into the streets of Shejidan! Are you numb?

They’d taken the technical manuals.

It was very like an airplane. It flew and showed no sign of malfunction. It was proved on several flights before. Should they be other than confident in the pilot and the design the paidhiin had translated?

“Much better than parachutes,” Jase muttered, beside him.

That view persisted. Bren didn’t even consult his memory of technicalities, just watched the monitors, time stretched to a long impossible moment.

The stewards rose, sheer atevi obstinacy, Bren thought, viewing procedures with dismay, procedures he would have disapproved if any ateva had asked him.

“Nadiin,” one of the stewards said, walking up the steep incline of the deck, “fruit juice is provided, should you wish. Please avoid excess. Breakfast will be easier to provide now, rather than during free fall.” The attendant repeated the same message in Mosphei’, not too badly pronounced.

There was laughter from the front.

“Have I spoken badly?” the dismayed crewman asked Bren.

“Not at all,” Bren said. “They hadn’t expected service aboard.” Impossible to explain near-hysteria, and the relief of humor. “They’re in very good spirits, and if they were atevi, they would say thank you.—Ms. Kroger, Mr. Lund? Do you want breakfast, up there?”

Kroger said nothing. Lund leaned from his seat, a face at the high end of the aisle.

“What’s available?” Lund asked.

“He is courteously inquiring,” Bren said, “the nature of the offering, and means no offense.”

“Nand’ paidhi.” The crewman offered a respectful bow, and proceeded forward to take the orders from the Mospheirans with a written list as the other steward came to take their orders. “Nadiin-ji?”

“I’ll have just fruit juice, if you please.”

“ Paiinaifor me,” Jason said. “My last chance for a long time. Juice. Toast.”

“Nandiin,” the crewman said, and walked back the precarious route to the rear.

“You all right?” Jase asked.

“Fine,” Bren said shakily. “Supposed to be like an airliner, isn’t it?” The breakfast call still amazed him. “It’s a bit wilder on the takeoff.”

“No problems.”

Don’t say that, he wanted to say, at his most superstitious; and Banichi and Jago, having ordered a large breakfast, continued their manual-reading, probably because they hadn’t had a chance in all else that had been going on. Tano and Algini were behind them, likewise possessed of an appetite.

The fruit juice arrived, in spillproof containers. Lund thought they might like another juice on the way to orbit, and the cabin crew stayed busy.

Bren confined himself to one glass of juice. Jase ate with good appetite.

No further calls from the island. That thought flashed through his mind as it hadn’t since waking, since sleepwalking through dressing and last-moment details.

He supposed Toby had dealt with matters.

He supposed their mother had finally gotten home, and that none of his family had any idea the shuttle creating a sonic boom over the straits carried a Cameron back into space.

Back to a space station he’d dreamed of seeing… dreamed of seeing, like the surface of the moon; a station where all Mospheirans’ political dreads were born, for its history, up there with the starship that was the ark in their ancestral stories, the beginning of all human life on the world.

At a certain point the engines grew quiet; and quieter. Ginny Kroger’s laugh carried farther than she intended, doubtless so, but he was glad to hear it. Fear might have been a part of Kroger’s anger, something Kroger herself might not have known; and now they were past the worst danger… technically the worst. That was what the reports tried to assure them.

The crew collected the plastic trays and cups, passed to the rear. Bren looked at his watch, knowing the flight profiles, knowing them as having crossed his desk, knowing them as having sweated through the launches.

Now he was where minutiae counted, degrees of the schedule that had seemed long on the ground, but that seemed both too short and too long, up here.

“Stand by for changeover,” came from the cockpit, and the cabin crew translated to Mosphei’: “Sirs, now the engines will switch over. Secure all objects immediately. There will be a moment of free fall. Place all loose objects securely in confinement, however small. They may fly back and strike a fellow passenger.”

Oh, God, Bren thought. This was the point he dreaded. This was the point where they shut down the engines he knew worked, and the others were supposed to start.

The cabin crew went aft.

The sky in the forward monitor had almost brightened to color, but now quite suddenly a hole opened in it… not night, but the threshold of space.

There was a moment of uncanny silence. A stomach-dropping moment of no-thrust. We’re falling, apprehensions cried.

Suddenly the shuttle stood on its tail. That, at least, was the illusion. The whole world reoriented. There was a yelp from forward, cries from the servant staff in the back seats.

And a muffled yelp from the paidhi-aiji, Bren realized to his embarrassment.

Yet upwas the direction of the central monitor, and that was black. Belly-cam showed nothing. Aft-cams showed the running-lights.

Banichi and Jago, damn them, hadn’t done more than calmly comply with the safety instruction.