Precursor (18 page)

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
was
in 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
love
wasn’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.

«
^
»

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-shan
didn’t look human or atevi. She looked alien, out of time and place… a design not state of the art when
Phoenix
had 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
felt
fortunate, 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, hyperfo-cused 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…