Текст книги "Inheritor"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

Now Mogari-nai faced a periodic barrage of electronic interference launched from Mospheira, and that opposing shore was lined with radar installations.

Ask about that interference in a protest to the Mospheiran government, and naturally the problem immediately spread to the phone lines.

“ Will one wish another pass, nandiin?” That was the co-pilot. “ We have the sky to ourselves.”

“No, thank him, nadi,” Bren said, and Tano, standing near the intercom, relayed that information.

“ We will land, then, nandiin. Please seat yourselves comfortably and safely.”

Bren sat down and belted in. Jase fastened the belt and drew a long breath.

“Routine landing,” Bren said, and talked Jase a second time through the process of landing, and whyplanes stayed in the air and how they got onto the ground.

Jase seemed very much more relaxed, just three deep breaths as they were approaching touch-down, and a grin as they did so exactly when Bren predicted.

“A lot better than parachutes, nadi,” Jase said. They’d begun with a scared, withdrawn passenger and ended with one smiling and joking—one who’d been able to look out his window even during a steep bank, only occasionally clinging to the seats.

This was a good idea, Bren thought, this trip was a very good idea.

The plane taxied to the terminal of what was, for defense and seasonal tourist reasons, a fair-sized airport. The transport vans were waiting.

“We’re here, nadiin-ji!” Bren said cheerfully, and was not quite first on his feet, but close.

Vacation, he was thinking. It wasn’t quite the hoped-for chase after yellowtail, but Banichi was right: Geigi’s estate, just on the south shore of Onondisi Bay, was peninsular, and going there at this precise moment might send some unwanted signal and interfere with the aiji’s politics with that region.

Taiben, the aiji’s summer retreat, the other possibility—that was in the Padi Valley, and that was, again, politically sensitive right now, as well as dangerous, being in lady Direiso’s own front yard.

There’d been Malguri, which he’d most wished, but that was three hours by air into a set of provinces seething with intrigue.

So the aiji’s lands, meaning the public defense zone near Mogari-nai and the Historic Site near Saduri Township, that became the fallback. They couldn’t use the public resorts. The good one got out of being an atevi lord was mostly limited to a lot of ancestral knick-knacks you didn’t own, by his own observation; and the bad one got was that the more politically active you were and the more resolutely you did your job for the people you represented, the more true it became that you couldn’t ride regular airlines or go into pretty public resorts like Onondisi or go into the tourist restaurants he’d dearly love to go to—if he weren’t the paidhi-aiji, and a human to boot.

But, well, rank had other privileges. Supper tonight with Ilisidi could make up for the restaurants.

They didn’t have to gather up baggage. That was another good part of being lords. They let their security handle it and the moment the ladder was in place and the moment Banichi had been down to make direct contact with Ilisidi’s people, who were in charge of ground security, they could go.

“I’m fine!” Jase announced as they went out into the brisk, sea-charged wind. Bren went down first, to meet Banichi at the bottom and to catch Jase if he tripped. But he felt the ladder shake and looked back to find Jase had seized the safety rail in his accustomed death grip and watched Jase enthusiastically and adventurously come after him without waiting for the ladder to stop rocking.

Not to push the point by lingering in the open air, Bren went to the nearest van of the three as the driver, who was not commercial hire, but one of Ilisidi’s ‘young men,’ as she called them, opened the door. Bren ushered Jase in, got in ahead of Banichi, and Jago brought up the rear and shut the door as she hit the seat.

The van started up immediately and whipped around a tire-squealing one-eighty turn toward the gate.

Like a van ride he’d taken once before to visit the dowager. He started to protest the driver’s recklessness, but—they were in Ilisidi’s territory now, and it was what he’d bargained for. The driver wouldn’t kill them; he knew that now—having been through far worse; and Jase looked startled and apprehensive, but looked at him, too, for reassurance. So he grinned and Jase tried to mirror the expression.

Roads across the countryside weren’t approved tech, except on a local basis. There was definitely rail service to Saduri Township, he’d checked that out, but it didn’t serve the old fortress, as such service didn’t serve, specifically, twoof the aiji’s estates, he’d learned; one of those two was Malguri, and the other was Saduri. No rail went up to the big dish at Mogari-nai; and it didn’t go to the Saduri Historical Site, either.

So he’d understood there’d be a drive to get there; and he could have expected the driver would do what this driver was doing.

The van left the maintenance road and whipped off on a gravel spur that led around a grassy hill, and around another, and generally up, at a ferocious pace.

Jase looked less reassured at the sound of gravel under the wheels and at the feel of the van skidding slightly on the turns. He grabbed at the handles and the window-frame.

“Is this dangerous?” Jase asked. “Is someone after us?”

“Oh—” Bren began to say lightly, and settled for the truth with Jase. “This driver is having a good time. Relax.”

Banichi grinned broadly. “He’s not lost a van this spring.”

Jase did know when he was being made fun of. He gave a sickly grin to that challenge to his composure and clung white-fingered to the handholds.

“I’d have thought someone from up there,” Bren finally said over the noise of the van, “would be used to motion.”

“I am!” Jase retorted. And freed a hand to gesture an erratic crooked course. “Not—this motion.”

It did make sense. Jase’s body didn’t know what to expect and Jase’s stomach kept trying to prepare for it, to no avail.

It was for the same reason, he supposed, that the subway made him anxious. And that the plane did. He watched Jase’s facial reactions, the twitch as a swing of the road brought light onto his face and immediately after as a stand of young trees brought a ripple of shadow and a series of flinches and blinks, all exaggerated.

So what wouldit be like, Bren asked himself, to live in a building all his life, and have all the light controlled, the flow of air controlled, the temperature controlled, the humidity controlled, every person you metcontrolled; and the whole day scheduled, the horizons curving up and movement entirely imperceptible? He had as much to learn about Jase as Jase did about the world; Jase was the book he had to read to gain knowledge about the ship—which he needed to know, and his professional instincts had turned on in that regard, to such an extent he told himself he should abandon curiosity and track on his other job, to reassure Jase.

But Jase had reacted uncertainly to change in the apartment; he added up that maddening insistence on rising at exactly the same moment, on breakfast at the same time every morning, and reckoned that change, as an event, was notsomething Jase was used to meeting. He’d dealt with Jase and Yolanda both on their last exposure to the world when they were still in a state of shock from landing and when their passage under open sky to the safety of Taiben lodge had been brief, ending in the safe confines of the Bu-javid—at least Jase’s had ended there.

And now, right before his eyes, that twitchiness was back: that extreme reaction to stimuli of all sorts, even when Jase was trying to joke about it. Randomness of light and sound had become a battering series of events to senses completely unused to interpreting the nuances.

He rated himself tolerably good at figuring out what went on in atevi, and he could make a guess, that the way a baby overreacted once it had started being startled, it must seem to Jase as if there wereno order and no recognizable logic in the sensations that came at him. Jase had that look in his eyes and that grip on the edge of his seat that said here was a man waiting now for the whole world to dissolve under his feet.

But the logic inside the man said it wouldn’t, so Jase clung to his seat and kept his eyes wide open and tried with an adult and reasoning brain to make sense of it.

And an infant’s brain, not yet reasoning, might have an advantage in programming. A grown man who from infancy had never had light flashed in his face, never had a floor go bump, never been slung about from one side to the other—what was he to do? Jase came from a steady, scheduled world, one without large spaces. If he’d lived in the equivalent of a set of small rooms, God, even texturesmust be new.

What had Jase said to him? The tastes, the smells, were all overwhelming to him?

It was possible he’d never seen bright color or different pattern. The ship Jase had come from began to seem a frighteningly samekind of place.

The beach, the waves, the rocks and hills, these things should, if Jase could meet them, be a very good cure for what ailed him. And if he could tolerate the environment, get a look at the natural processes that underlay the randomness of storm and weather that reached the capital at Shejidan, he would have far fewer fears. Jase was scared of thunder, and knew better than most now what it was, but still jumped when it thundered, and was embarrassed when the servants laughed. Theythought it made him like them. He thought it made him foolish.

Let Jase see the historic origins of the atevi, let him experience the same sort of things that had opened the atevi world to hisimagination. Thatwas the plan.

It was, though he hadn’t thought so then, the best thing that had ever happened to him in terms of his understanding of the world he lived in, a textured, full of smells and colors world that could fill up his senses and appeal to him on such a basic level that something in his human heart responded to this atevi place and taught him what the species had in common.

On the other hand, watching Jase flinch from sunlight and shadow, it might not happen to Jase. It at best might be a bit much to meet all in one day. Their spaceman was brave, but growing vastly disoriented just in the sounds and level of perceived threat constantly coming at him; fast-witted, but lost in the dataflow that had begun to wipe out the linkages in his brain and rearrange the priorities.

It wasn’t just the language now that had overwhelmed Jase with its choices. It wasn’tjust the same linguistic shift that overwhelmed every student that came close to fluency—it was the whole physical, natural world that came down on Jase, stripping away all his means not only of expressing himself—that was the language part—but also of interpreting the sensations that came at him. Jase was hanging on to that part of his perceptions with his fingernails.

And that disorientation, coupled with what he guessed Ilisidi might provoke him to, would make it a very good idea to limit the breakable objects in Jase’s reach.

He began to have misgivings. Jase wasn’tplanet-born. There might not be that common ground he hoped to have Jase find with atevi. For the first time he began to fear he’d made a mistake in bringing Jase out here and asking this of him.

It was a lot of input.

But it was fractal, soothing input if Jase’s brain could just figure out it did repeat, and loop, and that it didn’t threaten.

Ilisidi, however, didn’tgive you an inch.

And you had to go farther into atevi territory to meet Ilisidi than she was going to come onto human ground to meet you: that was a given.

“Pretty view,” he said desperately as they rounded a turn, and it was, a glorious view into the distance of the plain. “Taiben is that way—a fair distance, though.”

Jase faced that direction. He gave no indication his eyes even knew where to focus two seconds running or what was pretty or what he was supposed to look at.

Bren thought of asking the driver to stop and let Jase get out and have a steady, stable look and catch his breath; but he thought then that they weren’t within a security perimeter, and that they were going to such a perimeter, within which they could stand and have such a view, presumably. And Jase could calm down.

It was a risk. Their whole lives were a risk. But you limited them where you could. It was different from the catwalk at Dalaigi.

There was no crowd watching them.

The trip went a good distance up and up, among rolling hills of greening grass spangled with wild-flowers in yellow and purple and white, with no structures, no building in sight until, just around a steep turn in the rolling hills, they passed through a gate in a low stone wall and then, in the next turn, caught a brief view of a stone building.

That view steadied in the forward windows after the second turn, a pile of the local rocks with a number of high, solid walls, one slightly tumbled one, and a staff posed crazily on the battlement of a two, in places three and four floored fortification with a bright banner flying, on a staff slightly atilt, from the front arch.

Red and black, the aiji’s colors.

The van pulled up to the door, under a sweep-edged roof, as the door opened and poured out the aiji-dowager’s men, who opened the door of the van.

Jago was first out. Bren climbed down.

Jase stayed seated. Blocking Banichi’s path to the door was never a good idea. Jase, however, was not doing so in panic. Jase was frowning darkly.

“Where’s the beach?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s here,” Bren said. “Come on, Jase.”

Jase stayed put. And belted in. His arms were folded. From that position, he spared a fast, angry gesture around him. “Grass. Rock. High rock. You promised me the beach, nadi.”

Not trusting this, Bren thought. From overload to a final realization they were on a mountain. “Jasi-ji,” he said reasonably, “you’re preventing Banichi getting up.” Not true, if Banichi weren’t being polite. “There is a beach down the hill, where water tends to be and remain, as physics may tell you, and I promise you ample chance to see the ocean. One just doesn’t build these kind of big houses down there. Too many people. And it’s old. And it’s the aiji’s property. It’s all right, Jasi-ji. Get down, if you please, before Banichi moves you.”

Jase moved then, carefully, ducking his head, and stepped down into the shadow of a building, clinging to the van and evading the offered help of the servants. He stood there a moment, then sighted on the door and started walking.

Bren walked with him, looking at the open, iron-bound doors; at the dim interior ahead of them and around them as they walked in.

Malguri was the oldest fortress still functioning, he knew that. This place had a dusty, deserted look as if it hadn’t quite been maintained on the same level as Malguri. Like Mogari-nai, it was supposedly from the Age of Exploration, younger than Malguri: it had supported the fort at Mogari-nai, when atevi had started trading around the Southern Rim, when East and West had made contact, when they’d gotten out on the seas in wooden ships and rival associations had shot at each other with cannon.

But by what he was seeing he understood in a new light what Ilisidi had said to him when she proposed it, that Saduri wasn’t on the regular tour circuit, and was not legally permitted to hikers—a security advantage, she said, which Malguri hadn’t had.

This fortress might not be as old as Malguri, but he wouldn’t lay odds on the plumbing. That banner on the roof, too, said something about the way things were put together. No regular bracket for the staff. No regular provision for such a thing—he could imagine one of the dowager’s ‘young men’ climbing up there to do it, out of the reckless enthusiasm and the loyalty they showed for Ilisidi.

And for the sheer hell of it.

Malguri’s hall had been lively and full of interesting banners. This one—

–had one of the ceiling beams lying crashed onto the floor at the rear of the hall. Workmen’s scaffolding occupied that end, which, with no interior lighting and with only the light from the door, was brown with dust.

Even Banichi and Jago stopped in some dismay.

Where is the beach, indeed? Bren asked himself.

What have I let us in for?

“Nadi Bren.” One of the dowager’s servants came from a side hall, and said, with the usual calm of the dowager’s servants, “Nadiin. One will guide you to your rooms.”

16

Down a long hall to the side, dust everywhere—but the dust on the stone floor showed a clear track of feet having passed this way recently. Like bread crumbs in the wilderness, Bren thought to himself as he and Jase, behind Ilisidi’s man, climbed a short flight of stairs where Banichi, following them, surely had to duck his head.

Jago had stayed behind in the downstairs, having something to do with Tano and Algini and the baggage in the second van, Bren thought.

The stone of the stair treads was bowed, worn by the use of atevi feet—old. Older than the use of cannon, perhaps. He wasn’t sure how long it took to wear away stone. The floor above was stone, which he had learned from Malguri meant a barrel vault beneath, in this age predating structural steel.

The hall above had no windows, no light but what came from a lamp at the side of the stairs and what filtered up from the open door below. It was increasingly shadowy at the top of the stairs, pitch black down the hall, and the servant—if such he was: he looked very fit—opened the second door of a small row of doors, and showed them into a hole of a room, into which the thin stream of white daylight from a glassless window-slit showed the outlines of a bed and a table. The draft from that window was cool spring air. It moved languidly past them, doubtless to find the door downstairs.

The servant struck a match and light flared in a golden glow on an atevi face, atevi hands, a candle on a rough (but recently dusted) table. A small vase stood next the candle with three prickly-looking flowers that looked to be from the hillside. The wick took fire, and illumined a rubble stone wall, a deeply shadowed but smallish room, bare timbers helping the masonry hold up a doubtless weary roof.

“There are more candles,” the servant said, and indicated a small wicker basket at the end of the same table. “And matches, nandiin. The dowager requests one have a caution of fire.” The man presented him a small bundle of matches, neatly tied with ribbon. “One regrets that the inner halls are under restoration and not pleasant. Ordinarily, guests would be lodged there, but there are plenty of blankets. The accommodation is at the end of the hall and it does function. Please follow me.”

The paidhi sensed intense unhappiness in Jase’s silence and chose not to touch it off with a question. “Down the hall, then,” he said, as cheerfully as he could. Banichi was waiting in the doorway, and one wondered whether hehad had any warning.

Possibly Banichi was thinking, You fool, Bren-ji. But Banichi gave no hint at all in his mildly pleasant expression. It might be more comfortable than a rooftop in the much warmer peninsula. Might be. Marginally.

And thiswas the vacation spot he’d chosen.

The putative servant took several candles from the basket and lit the first from the lighted candle on the table, then carried it outside and lit another, which, as they all stood watching, doubtless with separate thoughts of the situation, the servant set in a wall-sconce.

“Nand’ Banichi, your room, and nand’ Jago’s,” the servant said, lit a candle and set it by thatdoor to relieve the darkness of this tunnel; and so they went; the room for Tano and Algini was next.

On the other side of this hall, although there were doors, as best the paidhi could judge the geometry of the building he’d seen from outside there were no windows: the rooms they were not using must be little more than stone coffins with no source of light but the candle, rooms dependent on mortar imperfections or God knew what for ventilation. He supposed, since he had challenged Ilisidi to challenge Jase, they were lucky not to be lodged on that side of the hall.

And the euphemistically named accommodation? The servant opened the door on a room with cold spring daylight showing through a hole in the stone floor. With the stack of towels. And a dipper and bucket.

The servant explained, for Jase’s benefit. The paidhi well understood. He wasn’t sure Jase quite believed it was the toilet.

The one at Malguri had had indoor heat. This didn’t. It had an updraft.

Malguri had had glass windows. Fireplaces in palatial suites, however old the plumbing. The distinction between Historical Site and Oldest Continuously Occupied Site began to come through to him with a great deal more clarity.

Jase hadn’t said a word. He was probably in shock, and walked along tamely as they all retraced their steps, the supposed servant in the lead, back down the candlelit hall toward their room—their—singular room.

Their—singular—room, which to his memory had one—singular—and not very wide—bed.

It was not polite for a guest to complain of accommodations. It was just not done. One assumed one’s host knew exactly what her guests were being put into, and one smiled and made no complaint.

He’d said trustingly to Ilisidi, in a private meeting in her luxurious study, in the Bu-javid apartment she maintained, “Aiji-ma, Jase doesn’t understand atevi. You taught me. And I daren’t go so far from the capital as Malguri. Might I impose on you, aiji-ma, to linger a little at Taiben this season? Perhaps to go over to the seashore and show Jase-paidhi the land as it was? I’ve promised him the sea. I’ve undertaken to provide him that—and your help would be best of all, aiji-ma.”

There’d been one of those silences.

“What happened to ’Sidi-ji?’ ” Ilisidi had asked with a quirk of her age-seamed lips and a lift of a brow, meaning why didn’t he use that familiar, intimate address he’d a number of times dared with her.

“I think,” he’d said, knowing he was fencing with a very dangerous opponent, at a very unsettled time in the aiji’s court, “I thought I should show some decency of address in such an outrageous request of your time, nand’ dowager.”

And Ilisidi had said, after an apparent moment of thought, one thin knuckle under a still-firm though wrinkled chin: “I think—I think that if you want the seashore, nadi, why, we should goto the seashore. Why not Saduri?”

He hadn’t thoughtit was a site open to the public. He’d foolishly said so.

And: “ Weare not the public,” Ilisidi had said, in that aristocratic mode that could move mountains.

So here they were. Tano, Jago, and Algini, with a number of putative servants, came up the steps at the end of the hall with a fairly light load of baggage.

“The rest of the baggage is going to be stored downstairs,” Jago said cheerfully.

Bren didn’t feelcheerful. Tano looked bewildered, and Bren didn’t dare look at Jase, just depressed the iron latch on his door to let their personal luggage in.

“Is there a key for this door, nadi?” he asked Ilisidi’s servant.

“No, nand’ paidhi. That room has no lock. But one assures you, the entire perimeter of this site is very closely guarded, so one may be confident all the same.”

Bren rather expected Banichi or Jago to say something caustic about that situation. But by that example, and their silence, he wondered whether theirrooms had locks.

One servant took his and Jase’s baggage in. Jago handed him his computer, which was notgoing to find a recharge socket in this building, but which he on no account allowed to remain outside his immediate guard, especially in a premises occupied by uncle Tatiseigi. That servant left. He walked in, Jase walked in, and he shut the door, leaving them in the white daylight from the window and the golden glow from the candle, which had by a whisper of a flame survived that gust from the closing door.

“Nadi,” Jase began with, he thought, remarkable restraint, “what are they doing? Why are we here?”

“Well,” he said, and tried to think of words Jase knew.

“I,” Jase began again, this time in his own language. He was clearly now fighting for breath—and probably falling down that interlinguistic interface again.

Bren said sharply, “I’m sorry.”

“Where is the ocean, nadi?”

“Clearly not here. Let me explain.”

“In my language! Please!”

He’d said that in Ragi. Which said Jase was at least getting the reflexes under control.

“Five fast minutes, then, inMosphei’. You remember how dangerous I said Tatiseigi was?—Well, the aiji-dowager is the focusof every anti-Tabini dissident in the country. Shehas the legitimacy Tatiseigi doesn’t. Except for the legislature voting the other way after her husband died, she could have been aiji. Except for them voting for her grandson after her son died, she could have been aiji. She could step in tomorrow without the country falling apart, and she’s the onlyone who’d avoid an unthinkable bloodbath, but she’s also—” One was neversure a room lacked bugs. And was always playing for an audience. “She’s also fair and honorable. She’s been exceedingly moral in all her dealings with the welfare of the Association. It would have been a loteasier for her to have raised a civil war against her grandson. But she didn’t, and I’m alive to say so. So keep objections to a minimum. And for God’s sake don’t make any objections to her. I asked her to show you atevi life as it was before humans came!”

“This is it, then, this falling-down ruin?”

“You listen to me, Jase.”

Jase shoved him, hard, and he grabbed Jase’s coat to prevent a swing at him.

“I’ve beenlistening to you,” Jase said, trying to free himself, and shoved again.

“You’re being stupid, stupidis what you’re being! Stand still!”

Jase clawed at his hand and he let go. And they stood and stared at each other, Jase panting for breath, himself very much on the verge of hitting him, someone, anyone.

“All right,” Jase said. “All right, I’ll go along with this. I’ll play your rules, your game, let’s just keep smiling.”

“Let me explain, before we switch languages again. If you insult this woman, you could have a war. If you insult this woman you could be killed. I am not exaggerating. We are dealing with cultural differences here. We are dealing with people who don’t owe anything to whatever code of ethics lies in our mutual past. So whatever happens, you get a grip on that temper, Mr. Graham. You get a grip on it or I’ll suggest to our staff they feed you some tea that’ll have you throwing up your guts for three days and ship you back to the apartment before you say something to kill several million people! Do I make myself clear?”

“No guts yourself?”

“No brains, Mr. Graham? If I hit you, and I’m tempted, God! I’m tempted; they’ll see the bruises—which I’d rather not, for your reputation and future—”

Jase swung. Bren didn’t even think about doing it—he hit Jase hard. Jase grabbed his coat, Bren blocked a punch with one arm, hit Jase in the gut, and had to block another punch.

They hit the table together, holding on to each other. The candle fell, they both overbalanced and went down, and Bren writhed his way to his knees, blind, angry, and being hit by an idiot he wanted to kill. Before he got a grip on Jase, Jase got a grip on him, and they knelt there on the floor like two total fools, each with a deathgrip on the other’s coat, sleeve, arm, shoulder, whatever.

“Get up,” he said. “We’ve put the damn candle out. Are you trying to burn the building down?”

“Damn you.”

He shook at Jase. Jase was braced. They were that way for several more breaths.

“Are they going to walk in and find us like this?” he asked Jase. “Get up!”

“Let go.”

“No way in hell.”

“Truce. Let go.”

He didn’t let go. He started to get up, Jase started to get up, and they got up leaning on each other, still holding on to each other, managing a slow, mistrustful disengagement.

Fool, he said to himself. He wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t happy, either, as he trusted Jase’s common sense enough to pick up the candles, the extinguished one in the holder and the entire basket of them that had been overset.

He took a match, relit the candle. They’d delivered body blows, at least of those that had landed; and hadn’t done each other visible damage, give or take dust on their clothes. The candle and the wan light from the window showed him Jase with hair flying loose, collar rumpled, a sullen look. He figured it had as well be a mirror of himself at the moment.

“We have to go to dinner tonight.”

“In this wreckage?”

“ Thisis a Historic Monument, Jasi-ji, and I suggest if she declares it’s a palace on the moon you bow and agree that it’s very fine and you’re delighted to be here.”

There was a long silence from the other side.

“Yes, sir,” Jase said.

“I’m not sir.”

“Oh, but I thought you’d taken that back. You are siror you aren’tin this business, so make up your mind!”

“Damn that talk. This is not your ship. You’re supposed to be doing a job, you’re not doing it, you damn near created a rift in the government and I brought you here to patch the holes, the gapingholes, in your knowledge of these people, theircustoms, theirlanguage, and yoursensitivity to a vast, unmapped world of experience to which you’re blind, Mr. Graham. I suggest you say thank you, put yourself back to rights, and don’t expect atevito do the job you volunteered for. They weren’t born to understand you, they’re on theirplanet, enjoying theirlives quite nicely without your input, and I suggest if you approach atevi officials who owe theirprecious scant time to their own people, you do so politely, appreciate their efforts to understand you, they choose to make such efforts, or I’ll see you out of here.”

“Thank you,” Jase said coldly.

“Thank you for waiting to blow up.”

“Don’t push me. Don’tpush me. You need my good will.”

“Do I? You could have an accident. They’d send me another.”

There was a small, shocked silence. Then: “You’re an atevi official. Is that the way you think of yourself?”