Текст книги "Inheritor"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

It was from his brother. From Toby. Dated two days ago.

Mother’s been in the hospital. I’ve asked her to come and stay with me. If you can bring any influence to bear, it might help. She says her doctor’s there and she won’t leave the city. I’ll write you a longer letter later. Don’t worry about it, but I think we need to bring some pressure to bear to get her to move. I want your backing in this.

Damn, he thought. Justwhat their mother needed. Pressure.

Damn, again.

He supposed he’d stopped quite still, when in standard procedure he ought to have left the foyer and let his staff get to work on his behalf. They were all standing there. The door was shut. There came a rap from outside.

“That will be the luggage, nadi,” Tano said, and took a look outside to be absolutely sure before he opened the door.

Bren pocketed the message. Write you a letter later. Hell and double hell. He didn’t think Toby had anything pleasant to say in his next message. Toby never had made the obvious complaint to him: Give me some help, get home, brother, do something to reason with the government—it’s not fair what you’re doing to us. It’s not fair what you’re doing to Mother.

He couldn’t go home and fix things for his younger brother. There wasn’t a way in hell.

And their mother had been headed for this crisis for some time. Maybe her doctors would finally sit on her this time and make her take her medication and watch her diet.

Phone calls at three in the morning didn’t help. Knowing her grandchildren were being followed on their way to school didn’t help. He wasn’t sure it would be better for her to move to the north shore, where the police and the phone company seemed to ignore Toby’s complaints for what hefeared were political reasons.

Damn, damn, damn, and damn. He’d been in a good mood until he met that, which wasn’t the first time their mother’s health had been a concern. It wasn’t even an acute crisis with their mother’s health. It was just an ongoing situation. It was the first time for her checking into the hospital, but the doctor had been saying all along if their mother didn’t get some rest and mend her ways, she’d have to go in, and it was probably good news in its way. They needed to get her to slow down, calm down, stop yelling at the fools that called at three in the morning: it only inspired them.

And for God’s sake, she needed to stop arguing with the newscasters. Toby had already reported she’d called a national program and accused the head of the Human Heritage Association of harassing her with obscene phone calls.

Then she’d said, also on the air, that she didn’t like her son living on the mainland with a lot of godless aliens.

He didn’t know what to do about that. He really didn’t. He’d written her letters. He’d gotten one furious letter back. She’d said he was ruining his brother’s life.

The servants had opened the doors: the rest of the luggage had made it in, a considerable pile which they’d apparently waited to accumulate outside until it was all there before the security personnel handling it asked that the apartment door be opened. Maids valiantly seized cases and carried them off to deal with laundry and unpacking. His security was getting and giving information via their own pocket communications and the larger array in the security station just off the foyer, where several black-uniformed Guild members clustered.

Madam Saidin, chief of domestic staff, was still waiting.

He expected one other person to have come out to meet him, and stood, a little dazed and battered, looking toward that vacant hall that led to the private rooms.

“Where’s Jason?” he asked Saidin. Jase was shy, still struggling with fluency, and for that reason generally avoided mass gatherings of servants, but he’d have expected Jase to be standing in that hallway by now, at least. The hauling about of a large amount of luggage had to advise Jason he was home early.

“Dressing, I believe, nand’ paidhi.”

Dressing? Dressing, at this hour. That was very odd for Jason, who kept a meticulous schedule and always bathed precisely at the same time every morning, and wanted breakfast precisely at the same hour every morning.

More, there’d been just a little hesitation on Saidin’s answer. Has he been ill? he almost asked her. Perhaps he’d been studying late?

If he asked that question, he might get an answer.

Before his shower.

Before dinner.

Hell, no, he didn’t ask. They had a deal. The day started on Jase’s schedule, like clockwork. The day ended on his, when he managed to find time to eat. Jase would show up for supper. Whatever was going on to have thrown Jase off his meticulous schedule, he was bound to hear the details. He had faith in Jase that if the foyer looked intact and the servants were still alive, it wasn’t catastrophic. He had faith in Saidin that if it were outrageous or against the dignity of the Atageini, he would have heard it implied much more strongly than that.

The hot water in the Atageini residence was, to Bren’s experience, inexhaustible. The force of the spray, set at atevi height, could drown a man of human stature, and after traipsing about all day up and down steep atevi-scale steps and after having been spattered with sticky fruit juice at 5000 meters Bren was oh, so willing to melt against the shower wall and stand there unmoving in one of the few places of utter, total privacy available to him. He breathed a froth of water and air and let the spray hammer a knot of muscles in the back of his neck he’d forgotten to unclench.

He trustedTano and Algini. He’d had no hesitation at all to put himself in their hands during the trip.

But he grew just a little anxious when unscheduled planes veered into his path. It probably was exactly as security said, an island pilot not used to the concept of air traffic, let alone control. The son of the lord of Dur was not a likely sophisticate, much less a plotter in high places.

He shut his eyes and was thereagain, in the same plane seat where he’d spent so many hours this last, long, meandering trip. He could all but feel the cool surface of the juice glass in his fingers, a contrast to the heat of the water that pounded down on him.

He could if he thought about it look again out that aircraft window onto the vast mineral-blessed south, Talidi province just off the wingtip, misty blue-green hills, grass with that slightly younger green of springtime, well advanced in the south, and all that pollen, hazy clouds of it.

Talidi province and the Tasigin Marid.

He couldn’t say he blamed atevi for asking themselves at least now and again what the paidhi-aiji ortheir esteemed aiji had in mind for the nation, in moving the paidhi into such prominence and now having twopaidhiin in residence under the same roof, when the very essence of the Treaty was emphatically onepaidhi. Some lords of the Western Association had indeed been more than a little suspicious of human motives even before the ship had shown up.

While a handful of truly devout conspiracy-theorists believed Tabini had known the ship was coming back and that he’d been in collusion with the human president on Mospheira from the day of his accession: a more unlikely combination one couldn’t imagine.

But since the events of today, everythingin that equation had to be re-reckoned.

Not that one expected immediate capitulation in the fall of a major player in the opposition to Tabini today: atevi lords weren’t so graceless or quick to desert former allies. But they might sidle gracefully and as unobtrusively as possible closer to center, and closer to Geigi, who would thus undergo the most dangerous period of his rise in importance, because the neighbors would try him, now. They would test Geigi’s cleverness, his finesse, his business acumen and his personal dignity. It was almost a sure bet that no less than Direiso would, directly or indirectly, test Geigi’s security.

But no one had to tell an atevi lord that.

And since, with the lord of the Tasigin Marid dead, Talidi province, in which the villages of the Marid lay, now found its best customer for industrial supplies in lord Geigi’s province, thatwould surely give the pro-Tabini dissidents and the worker associations within Talidi province the encouragement to turn toward Tabini and the central authority, not toward the coalition that had been trying to form in the Marid.

It was typical of Tabini’s politics. A river would be flowing in one direction, and Tabini would place a charge to divert it so suddenly into another channel the fish swimming in it had no warning.

As Direiso up in the Padi Valley (she was not a peninsular lord) had to be doubling her security this evening, perhaps not even yet believing the degree of danger she was in if she didn’t change course fast: she was clever and quick—she was alive because of that. But she was self-confident, meaning she hadno man’chi, meaning she feltno man’chi, as aijiin of highest rank had and felt none, and was not a follower of anyone, but attracted man’chi: thatmeant she was dangerous in a way other atevi weren’t psychologically armed to be.

Her followers were scattered, and wouldact after her death, breaking up into smaller associations difficult to track and possibly attracting others due to the different chemistry of the sub-associations. That was the protection high lords always had against assassination: kill them and you had not one large problem but twenty smaller ones, harder to track.

But so did Tabini have that defense. More so. Direiso only thoughtshe could ride the waves Tabini’s fall would generate. It was a time when atevi, threatened from the skies, could least afford to be indecisive, and most of the lords of the Western Association knew that Tabini was the only leader saving them from civil chaos.

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

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

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

Let the conservatives on Mospheira get out of hand?

Same result.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fine,” he said, persisting in Ragi and in cheerfulness. Jase wasn’tsupposed to speak the human language. Jase had agreed to follow the regimen by which he’dlearned: no Mosphei’ at all. “How have you been, nadi-ji?”

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

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

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

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

A hesitation. And in the human language: “Welcome home.”

Welcome home.

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

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

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

“No.”

Which meant Yes, in that leaden tone of voice.

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

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

“Can it wait until after dinner, nadi?”

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

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

“All right,” Jase said in that same dead tone.

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

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

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

“So what is it?” Bren said.

“Just—” Jase lapsed into his own dialect. “Dammit, you could have phoned, that’s all.”

“For what?”

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

Tano and Algini outranked the security he’d left guarding Jase, that was why. But it was petty business. Notthe real issue. Jase began arguments by diversion—he’d learned that, and all right, Bren thought, he could chase diversion, if that was where Jase wanted to take this conversation at the moment; and they’d pretend to talk, and pretend to reach a conclusion and have the real issue for dessert.

In the meanwhile, and inRagi:

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

“For ‘Hello, I’m fine, how are you?’ Thanks!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll discuss it.” He hatedhimself when he agreed to suffer.

“We have cook waiting. I don’t want to stand between you and supper.”

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

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

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

Jase had been locked in this apartment for six months trying to learn the language, and there’d been moments of frustration at which the monolingual staff, without the experience Jase was going through, could only stare in confusion. There were moments lately when not only the right word wouldn’t come, noword would come, in any language. There were moments when, helpless as an infant’s brain, the adult mind lost all organization of images and association of words simultaneously, and the mental process became less than three years of age. Deep fluency started by spurts and moments.

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

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

“Yes,” Jase said, in Ragi, and seemed calmer. “Let’s go to dinner.”

5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Common verb. Defective verb?”

“Defective verb?”

“Old verb. Lot of use. They break.”

Jase gave him an odd look.

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

“It’s a difficult verb.”

“It certainly is. But your accent’s vastly improved. Very good.—Listen: master getand you’ve got the irregular indivisibles of shikira, makkiura, and shis’urna. Any three quarters of any verb in the -ireiclass: they rhyme with the -raplurals, at least in the past tenses.”

“You’re sure. You swear.”

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

“You said there were a hundred and twelve!”

“I’m speaking of the court language. You’re getting far beyond the children’s forms.”

“Not very damn fast, I’m not.”

“It does go faster from here. Trust me.”

“That’s what you said when I landed.”

The conversation had gone to banter. To high spirits. “What couldI say? I couldn’t discourage you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So are there any messages in?” he asked Jase, meaning messages from the ship, via the big dish at Mogari-nai.

“The regular call from Yolanda.”

“So how is she, nadi?”

“Fine.”

They spoke the atevi language in the exchange. Madam Saidin dropped by to put a note beside his plate.

Join me after breakfast, it said. It bore Tabini’s signature, was entirely in Tabini’s hand, a rarity. Unless there’s urgency about your report. I shall expect you at the usual time.

“No,” he said with a glance up to Saidin. “Thank you, nadi. I can leave matters at that. I don’t need to reply. This is a confirmation only.”

“News, nadi?” Jase asked.

“An appointment tomorrow, with the aiji. Routine matters.—Although nothing’s routine at the moment.” He saw expression on Jase’s face. Or had seen it. “Jase?”

“No,” Jase said. And drew a breath. “Glad to see a human face.”

Meaning hehad an appointment and was bound out of the apartment and Jase was alone. Again.

“The mirror gets old,” he said to Jase with all sympathy, “doesn’t it?”

“You said I’d get past it. I frankly don’t see how you’ve stood it alone.”

It wasn’t the time to lecture Jase again about reliance on one’s native tongue. Like it or not, one had to give up one’s native tongue at least for a while if one wished to make that mental jump to full fluency. Jase couldn’t give it up, because Jase was their source of technical words: Jase had to stay connected to the human language because Jase’s jobwas to take concepts in shipboard engineering terms and teach himenough engineering and enough of the ship’s slightly skewed-from-Mosphei’ way of speaking to get it translated accurately enough for atevi engineers. Hewas having to deal far more in the human language than he ordinarily ever would on this side of the strait, and the back-and-forth was keeping him off his stride, too.

But tonight everything he was picking up from Jase said that something major was wrong with that situation—or with some situation. Jase wasn’t talking after that last glum statement. Jase took a sip of guaranteed-safe tea and dipped bits of seasonally appropriate meat into sauce one after another with studied mannerliness, not engaging with him on the issues.