Precursor (61 page)

“Better not do
that again
,” Tom Lund said. “You don’t know how fast these people could nail you to the wall.”

“There aren’t to be any unauthorized weapons,” Sato declared, but Bren didn’t even bother with translation. More and more vividly the old devil obstinacy reared its head and said Go now, downhill, hellbent, and he saw his course.

“We’ll set up to receive visitors,” he said. “I’m sure one of you hearing me knows exactly where Ramirez is, and the aiji dowager quite reasonably wishes to meet him. The captains are listening to us, at least Tamun is, through Ms. Sato, here, who’s a nice young woman. So from them, I’d like to hear the answer myself, where Ramirez is, and in what condition, and why in hell some member of this ship’s crew tried to kill a man who’s laid down the essential agreements that are going to protect this ship! I know the aiji wants to know! I’d promised it was your business and none of mine, but there’s a lie being told to you, and to us, and there’ve been too many lies. Settle your internal disputes any way you like, but this one’s become damned inconvenient. It’s time you dealt with the truth. This atevi delegation is here to bring about everything you’ve expected in coming here this whole long voyage, and we’re being badly treated!” It was Jase he spoke for, all Jase’s frustrations. “Taylor’s Children, Jase Graham and Yolanda Mercheson, have taken refuge with
us
, with strangers, because their own won’t deal with them.”

“That’s not so!” someone shouted out, and suddenly there was a thump, a movement among the security ranks, two and three humans trying to go at one another, by what it seemed, and then five and ten and twenty, but atevi simply hauled the two sides apart.

“They’ve been lying!” one of the original two yelled, and atevi hands pried guns away from the combatants.

“We should get the dowager to safety,” Banichi said, “very soon.”

“One is quite willing,” Cenedi said. “ ’Sidi-ma. Come. Come and let us establish a safe area.”

“Badly run,” was Ilisidi’s damning judgment of all she saw. She waved her stick forward, and they walked, Jago marching Sato along, and the crowd tailed after them, with shouting and the constant threat of weapons in that crowd, a family fight, Bren said to himself, a factional spat. Ilisidi having stirred the pot, it boiled.

They took a turn. They passed security doors which the crowd behind prevented from closing, and they moved as briskly as they could persuade Ilisidi to walk, toward their own area. Lund was still with them. There was no question of separating. Everything remained volatile.

Another set of doors. They were in the main corridor, headed for their own, and suddenly, from that side passage, an armed presence entered, Tano, and Algini, and then Jase, and Becky Graham, and the Merchesons… they all had come, and had the door open for them.

“Easy,” Bren shouted out in Ragi. “Be calm! We have ’Sidi-ji among us, and a crowd of the curious. No one fire!”

Ilisidi would not hurry. It was the longest few seconds in his life until he reached that refuge and offered that doorway to Ilisidi and Tom and those who had come up with them.

But Ilisidi would not, however, retreat. She turned with no great haste, stood, and regarded the gathered crew with a calm demeanor, until the jostling stopped, and the voices fell silent.

Then she spoke, quietly, deliberately.

“We have welcomed your cousins to the world,” she said in Ragi, “and the aiji of the aishidi’tat will welcome this new star into the heavens.”

Bren rendered it into Mosphei’, in quiet tones, that most basic of his jobs, the one he least often performed.

“We have agreed to accept your technology and to construct things which benefit you. We shall make this station a place fit for children, and for persons of creative and sensitive hearts. We shall make this new star enjoy harmonious sights, and comforts of living things; we shall build a ship, and defend this place as our own. We take up residency among you and look forward to wonders which we have not seen. We shall build in ways which neither of our peoples now know, and teach you as

you teach us. Felicity on this great undertaking, this association in the heavens. Its numbers are three, you, and ourselves, and the Mospheirans. We have done away with the infelicity of two which once plagued us. Three is the number of us, and in that, we have very much to
gain
.”

“The last,” he added on his own, “is the most important change, and atevi know it and the Mospheirans understand. That you don’t, yet, is
what
we have to give one another. The aiji dowager of the Ragi atevi and the aishidi’tat wishes you well.”

“I
still
wish to see Ramirez,” Ilisidi muttered irritably, and turned, and walked away inside, leaving her security to shut the doors.

“She asks for Ramirez,” he said to the crowd, and stepped backward and followed the dowager himself; so with the rest of them, until Cenedi and Banichi shut the doors.

“Nand’ dowager,” Jase had said, and bowed; and so the servants bowed, among the human guests; and Bren leaned his back against the wall and heaved a breath.

“Jago-ji, did we shut Sato-nadi out?”

“She has electronics,” Jago said, “and we did, nadi.”

“Good,” he said, and drew a second and a third breath. “We survived. We’re here.”

“The felicity of these surroundings,” Ilisidi said meanwhile, leaning on her cane and slowly surveying the premises, while the servants held their breath, “is without doubt.
Exquisite
taste. —I am promised supper, and past time!”

The whole staff jumped. Human occupants stood aside, while Banichi said solemnly, “Shall we take the corridor across the hall, Bren-ji?”

“Do that,” he said. He could only imagine the situation he had helped provoke among the crew. The fight Ilisidi’s security had broken up was only the visible manifestation. It was the dogged factionalism that had haunted
Phoenix
from the outset, that had damned some to venture outside without protection, as the robots failed, and others to sit safe, directing it all.

His heritage. He’d always held apart from what he negotiated, never wholly Mospheiran in sympathy, never atevi by birth, but this—this reached him, this thoroughgoing, asinine insistence on the rightness of one’s own cause; and he found himself infected with it—more, suddenly questioning everything he’d just done, everything he’d ever done. He found himself in a state of cultural recognition, at great depth, right down to his family’s spats and feuds and his hellbent inclination to take a situation and decide he was right. God, how could he?

His hands were shaking. He wiped sweat off his face and confronted Jase, who looked as shocked.

“Did you know the dowager was coming?” It was a question spoiling for a fight, damned mad, and not quite over the edge yet.

“No, I didn’t know! This is her style of dealing; this is how she’s damned well survived a century of goings-on like this, while the rest of us have heart attacks.”

“There’s a stack of messages,” Jase said. “Almost since you left.”

“I’ll damn well bet there are. Jase, do you know where Ramirez is? Can you remotely guess, that might be worth going after?”

“Isn’t that what they want us to do?”

“I know it is. But knowing
where
he is might be the best thing, right now.”

“I know they’d have moved him.”

“And
where?
”

“I don’t know. I swear I don’t.”

There was a slight commotion at the end of the corridor, where a handful of lingering humans attempted to protest the annexation of the matching section across the hall, and made no headway against thirty or so armed and determined atevi.

“This is the best we can do,” Bren said anxiously. “We can’t house
her
in what contents us. We have to establish an exterior guard, if we can’t secure that intersection… which I presume they have to use.”

Jase shook his head. “They can work around. They’ll reroute. Take it. This is
not
the fanciest accommodation they could have managed.”

“Captains get that, do they?”

“Captains and techs. Bren, we’ve got a potential problem…” Jase gave a nervous laugh, as if he’d only then heard himself. “A rather major problem. If they pull the ship off station… it’s armed. And they can stand us off.”

“No, they can’t” Bren said, just as madly, just as irrationally as he’d argued the rest of his case, and he knew it. “They
need
us, remember?”

“Tamun’s crazy. He’s stark raving crazy.”

“Well, thus far, he has company in that affliction, doesn’t he? Dresh, Sabin, Ogun? They’ve all lost their minds.”

“I’ll still bet on Ogun,” Jase said on a breath. “Bren, get to him. Get to
him
.”

“We’re not getting to anyone until after supper. The dowager wants dinner, didn’t you hear her? And I’ve got that stack of messages. I trust some of them came with ’Sidi-ji. At least one of them. I
need
to hear from Tabini… I need that most of all.”

«
^
»

Mattresses were going to be an issue: Bren very much feared so.

He very much feared they weren’t the only issue.

“I fear they’re rather put out with us,” he said to Ilisidi, who awaited supper in what had been his room, the best they had, the warmest, and the most comfortable. Even she, however, had to rely on Jago’s mattress, which Jago had gladly contributed, while Sabiso, assigned to the dowager’s fearsome demands, had explained the workings of the shower. “I can by no means foretell what may happen to the cargo before we can free it.”

“Our cargo,” Ilisidi said, seated, hands bare now, both clasped on the head of her cane, “our most valuable
cargo
is still aboard the ship. Another fifty of the Guild, serving Lord Geigi.”

He was not seated. He had a sudden impulse to sit down, and had no available chair. “Aiji-ma, are they
in
the shuttle? They’ll surely freeze! They may have frozen already.”

“Not so readily.” Ilisidi waggled fingers atop the head of the cane, as if to say that was quite a negligible risk. “They’re prepared. But so we must have rapid resolution of this matter, or there will be far harsher action than these ship-folk will like. I have a message from my rapscallion grandson. He says,
Bren-ji
… he did say
Bren-ji
, I distinctly recall it: these modern manners!”

“I am overwhelmed.”

“He said, To
Ramirez we cede rights to come and go at the station, which we regard as within our association, and to anyone Ramirez deems fit, so long as the aishidi’tat, in lesser association and cooperation with the government of Mospheira, holds the earth of atevi and all that come within its grip.

“These are our reasonable conditions, as you have stated, so we state; as you have promised, so we promise; as you declare, so we declare, to which the hasdrawad and the tashrid set their approval…”
The usual sort of thing,“ Ilisidi concluded with another waggle of her fingers. ” So! Paidhi. Associate of my rascal grandson, that thief, that brigand, my grandson. What do you propose we do to find Ramirez?”

“I’ve asked the crew to find him,” he said, “which I believe certain ones well know how to do. Jase and his mother have contacts.”

“Allow four hours,” Ilisidi said.

“Four hours.”

Ilisidi reached to her coat, a far lighter one for the anticipated dinner, and drew out a watch, an old-fashioned sort of elaborate design. The multiple cylinders were of gold, beyond any doubt, and set with pale stones. “We certainly have that long to unload before we need do anything unpleasant. My grandson has extraordinary confidence in your powers of negotiation, Bren-ji, but allow me to say, if these unpleasant people do not rise to a civilized level of welcome very soon, we are prepared to take what we justly demand. I have not come on this extraordinary journey to sit in a windowless room and dine in haste. I am too old to sit on unreasonable furniture and to see my essential baggage delayed by bureaucrats with absolutely nothing to gain but inconvenience. I
detest
pointless obstruction. Do you not, Bren-ji?”

“
I
do detest it myself, nand’ dowager, but there are numerous innocent parties whose very air and warmth might be adversely affected…”

Another waggle of the fingers. “If I have cast myself among utter fools, then let us wait no longer. But I rather think that the paidhi who has served us so well is not the only human with powers of reasoning. Use your ingenuity, paidhi-aiji. In the meanwhile, send me Cenedi, and let us see how to use the devices and the records and the maps your security has so elegantly established.”

He knew when he was being pushed to the wall. He knew how and when to push back, and he went to his small parcel of belongings by the door and returned with a small mag storage.

“More than the maps they have made, nand’ dowager. These are the charts the
makers
made. Here is every conduit and switch and component of the entire foreign star, if the dowager will accept this modest offering.”

Ilisidi’s aged lips twitched in restrained mirth. She reached for it with a flourish. “So! Am I ever mistaken?”