Precursor

by C. J. Cherryh

  It was about to move faster.

  “You must take care,” Damiri-daja said.

  “Daja-ma, I will.”

  “Safeguard yourself,” Tabini said with unaccustomed fierceness. “Your bodyguard need not return to me if any mishap takes you.”

  Then Banichi and Jago were going with him.

  But no one would have asked them their opinion, either, and what had been sacrificed in cargo to add three more passengers with baggage… God, the baggage!… he had no idea. Everything… all the scientific packages, all the materials tests…

  Where did those stand?

  What were they taking?

  What in hell was he supposed to do to make this miracle happen?.

  “I’ll work with Jase,” he said to Tabini.

  “If they prove intractable, leave.”

  “Yes, aiji-ma.”

  “I insist on it,” Tabini said, and rose. Damiri-daja rose, and Bren rose.

  Together, while he bowed, they left him.

  He stood there a moment then, in the middle of the ornate carpet, next to the historic chairs. All the warmth had gone out of him.

  He’d built it. He was going to ride it. He was going with Jase, who’d just been coopted back under the captains’ authority. If Jase chose to have that happen… and probably he should; probably the captains shouldn’t notice that humans who dealt with atevi tended to grow very strange.

  So, well, he said to himself, drew a deep breath and went out, then, not forgetting to pay courteous notice to Eidi, as composed as if he hadn’t just learned he was riding a plane into orbit, to filch change out of the Pilots’ Guild’s pockets.

  An agency his compatriots on Mospheira thought of as the devil incarnate.

  Had he somehow, somewhere failed to relay that to Tabini?

  And Tabini had talked to Shawn?

  He walked casually toward the foyer, where he regained his escort.

  “Nadiin,” he said simply, taking his leave of Tabini’s security. “Nadiin-ji,” he added, the warmer address to men he knew, and walked outside the heavy doors in his own security’s company.

  They, he suspected, had known something was going on from before they picked him up at the airport. They might not have known where he was going, but they’d known they were going with him, and were bound by the aiji’s orders to let him go through this long evening of dinners and conversations—

  While his personal belongings were doubtless packed, moved, attended to…

  They walked down a hallway resplendent with antiquity and scrutinized by a hundred hidden watchers, electronics, spying devices, all of the panoply of the iron-handed ruler of a world civilization… who didn’t damned much move anywhere without his knowing it.

  “Well,” he said to Banichi and Jago, not accusingly, only to assure himself the needful things were done, “not surprised, were you.”

  “Nandi,” Jago said quietly. “To be sent up to the station? We were surprised by the destination, not by the fact that we would move.”

  “Nand’ Jase doesn’t know.”

  He considered that, as they approached the lift. “He’s going to be shocked.” As hell, he thought.

  “I think he will be,” Banichi said.

  They stood at the lift. He suddenly realized he had no notion which button to push, whether to go to his apartment, or down to the train. “The staff has packed?”

  “While you were at supper,” Banichi said.

  “Tano and Algini are going,” Jago said, and punched in for the lowest level. It was the train. “Likewise Narani, Sabiso, Kandana and Bindanda.”

  “Bindanda.” One of Tatiseigi’s. His mind went flying off on a suspicious tangent, involving Ilisidi’s long association with Tatiseigi, Tatiseigi’s occasional opposition to Tabini, and the likelihood more than one element of the Association had been brought in on this before he had.

  Bindanda, a quiet, polite spy.

  Four security, around a fifth point. Himself. Nine, with the servants. A very fortunate number: ’counters had devised it, in harmony with the space center and shuttle.

  One wondered how those numbers fit in with the station and the Guild.

  “Narani’s quite old for this excitement,” he said as the car arrived.

  “He avows his health will withstand it. He’s left Tagi in charge of your apartments, moved Edoro into Tagi’s place in your coastal estate, nandi, with your approval.”

  The warmth hadn’t yet come back to his hands. He stepped into the lift.

  He hadn’t his most comfortable clothing; he had only what he stood in.

  He and Jase had made extensive preparations to set up an atevi residency on the station. There were items of baggage. There were pieces of equipment.

  “Are we displacing all the cargo?” he asked.

  “One believes so,” Banichi said.

  He didn’t know what he was going to tell Jase.

  * * *

  Chapter 5

  « ^ »

  It was back on the train… going the other direction, a passage punctuated by the click of the rails and the whisper of the car’s passage against the wide and narrow portions of the tunnels.

  He sat with Banichi and Jago, sure his baggage from the airplane would turn up, at least the needful things. The computer would turn up. He was entirely sure of it.

  “Did the dowager know?” he asked, out of a moment of silence.

  “I believe she made great haste in arranging a flight” Banichi said. “That’s all we know.”

  Bindanda was one of the number. If Tabini had deceived his redoubtable grandmother, that deception would have meant very unhealthy things going on within the Association. Tatiseigi was always an uneasy ally.

  “One is honored” he said of the dowager and her dinner. “I’m glad she came.”

  Jago lifted a brow. “She has no return flight arranged,” Jago said, “that we know.”

  She might well have decided to stay and become a thorn in the side to Tabini, or so Tabini would claim.

  Yet it was remarkable how close that apparently divided house could stand, in crisis… no few of the aiji’s enemies had discovered it.

  Ilisidi had brought herself and her security, for what was bound to be a period full of speculation among the lords: what would the paidhi learn? What would Tabini agree to? What would be the relation with Mospheira?… that was bound to follow his ascent into space.

  God, he didn’t want to think about the flight. He’d survived watching the flights, had nervous fits watching the landing. The switchover in engines was a miracle the technicians swore was flawless, but it always seemed a chancy thing to do, cut off perfectly good engines several miles above the ocean.

  A part of him wanted to go to the one atevi physician who monitored his health and ask for total sedation. He wasn’t sure he could do this; he’d been shot at, shot, and chased down mountains; but engine switchover scared hell out of him.

  So did facing Jason at the end of this train ride with, Oh, well, you know how Tabini can be. He decided to send me with you. I swear I didn’t know. And by the way, we’re taking the station.

  Sorry for the inconvenience, old friend.

  He was still in that psychological dislocation that a trip to Mospheira tended to bring him, that sudden trip among people his height, furniture his size, steps his convenient dimensions, language and food he’d grown up with; and now, leaving Jase in the space center, he’d just definitively cleared the air of the island enclave from his lungs, human language from his head, and human expectations from his emotions.

  Now, in the obliging silence of his security, he tried to jerk all that back into focus. Banichi and Jago, sitting across from him on the red velvet seats, became two stone-faced giants in the black leather and silver of their profession, black of skin, black of hair, gold of eye…

  He knew, the patterns and the battles he understood… he was valuable here, dammit, the world’s leading expert on the atevi-human interface. Some
one else could do this part… maybe a year from now.

  Jase was the logical one. Jase should be in Tabini’s employ and reckon whether Tabini hadn’t tried to get Jase’s loyalty into his hands?

  He knew that answer, suddenly, knew it hadn’t played right from Tabini’s point of view, and Tabini had played the hand he had left.

  And what was the meeting Jase had had with the dowager? Fond farewell? The dowager had been her grandson’s greatest opposition—on certain causes; but at times she was solidly her grandson’s conduit of policy. Had that been a sounding-out?

  And had Jase failed it… or had he never been in the running?

  “Well” Bren said with a sigh, “well.” The deep-welling panic about the shuttle flight took its place in a long queue, somewhere behind having to deal with Jase, and that itself was somewhere behind his knowledge that he himself was Tabini’s… and that civilization rested very heavily on his being faithfully Tabini’s… whatever Jase was or became.

  It wasn’t the situation he wanted to contemplate. Jase was likely to be mad; if he mismanaged the matter, things could get worse.

  “How far in Tabini’s confidence is the dowager in this matter?” he asked his security.

  “One has no sure knowledge, nadi” Banichi said. ”We were aware of movements; we did not investigate the aiji’s doings.“

  “I understand that,” Bren said. More exotic and more mundane affairs came flooding into his head. “Mospheira very carefully selected four persons, no staff: and I have—what, eight, with baggage? This will disturb Mospheira, I fear, not to mention the delegation; not to mention the station. We should be alert to that.”

  “The paidhi-aiji will not make his own supper,” Banichi said. “These things were agreed.”

  Know to an exactitude the limitations of mass and cargo? Banichi’s native gift for mathematics exceeded the norm for his species, considerably. In human terms, he would have been a prodigy.

  “How much cargo did we displace?” he asked his staff.

  “Sufficient,” Jago answered, “to assure your safety and comfort.”

  They had their weapons on them; they always did; and he apprehended that the kitchen likely wasn’t the only thing they were bringing along in cargo.

  “They have never advised us our facility is complete,” Bren said.

  “Did not this station once shelter three hundred thousand humans? And do we not reckon the crew of the ship to be two thousand five hundred at largest?”

  “They have the ship,” Banichi said. “They can live there.”

  “We will claim a very fine accommodation,” Jago said firmly, “for a lord of the Association.”

  And the weapons, he wondered?

  “Will they be wise,” asked Banichi, “to attack the paidhi-aiji on his first mission?”

  “They’re as fond of surprises as Uncle Tatiseigi.”

  “The paidhi is a very skilled negotiator,” Banichi said with supreme confidence.

  Get control of the station, for God’s sake. He had to argue fast for that one. Mospheirans might not want a thing, but they didn’t want their rivals to have it.

  Looking at the microfocus, he’d thought of Cope as the principal problem, and assumed Yolanda’s recall was all the Guild was going to ask for a while. He and Jase had assumed that the Pilot’s Guild would take a long while to digest all that Yolanda could tell them. Consequently, he’d been utterly blindsided by this second request, this notion of having Jase back up there.

  So had Tabini. Tabini didn’t like it—but took, not the path of resistance, but the path of equal action in their system of half-formed agreements.

  One wanted to know what atevi were culturally set up to expect? The machimi plays held a repertoire of treachery and double-cross. It was the common trick, in the machimi, to try to move some agents about distractingly and achieve a move not suspected, not even by the all-seeing audience.

  Mercheson hadn’t resisted going. Shall we send Mercheson-paidhi? Tabini had asked. And he and Jase hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t drawn the line. Nor had Mercheson.

  So now the ship captains asked more, and at the last moment. And Tabini reacted.

  He couldn’t claim he himself understood the Pilot’s Guild. They were human, but they damned well didn’t feel like Mospheirans… not the old familiar, frustrating debating and delaying of the Mospheiran policy-making apparatus. The ship’s captains were autocrats. In that, they and Tabini understood one another better than the captains were going to understand what the Mospheirans were doing.

  Across the barrier of gravity and distance, the maneuvering of subordinates was not easy: one couldn’t, say, as in the machimi plays, ask a major player to tea and serve up daggers.

  Now the ship suddenly had Jase, whom they’d asked for, plus a lapful of Mospheirans with their agenda, and worse, an atevi presence at the same time, instead of the test cargo it expected. He could almost see it in historical dress, the blithe guests at the doorway, banners flying: refuse us or accept us. Draw swords or deal.

  If it wanted to turn them around and send them back down unreceived, it still had a two-week delay at minimum to service the shuttle. It still faced the fact it couldn’t leave them all on board the shuttle for two weeks unless it meant to murder them all, because life-support wouldn’t last that long… and it couldn’t just shoot them, either, if it ever wanted to deal reasonably and cheaply for earthbound supplies.

  It said it desperately needed those supplies, and thus far urged the world into a breakneck development of technology and materials.

  The Guild also couldn’t take over the shuttle… couldn’t fly a complex surface-to-orbit craft themselves.

  Let the Guild look across their steel battlements and figure all that out.

  He drew a quieter breath, gazed at his two companions, at Tano and Algini, too, standing their somewhat more distant station at the end of the rail car, and he thought all these thoughts in a tumbling race while the wheels clicked over the joints of steel rails.

  When he’d first arrived in his job as a very young paidhi replacing an old and retiring one, the paidhi’s office had still been trying to convince atevi that an air traffic control system over large communities was a good idea.

  Atevi had leaped centuries in a decade, unanimity of effort that was only possible because of the Western Association and the power Tabini-aiji could fling into action on a wave of his hand. Mospheira called it autocracy, and that was true on the surface, but only true if one backed far, far away from the workings of the government and the legislature and took a human-tinted view. Atevi had committees.

  God, atevi had committees. Lord Brominandi could put a tree to sleep.

  But the committees didn’t debate what the aiji paid for out of his own pocket… and every subassociation on the continent had wanted a slice of the budget and a connection to the new materials and industries. The download of designs from the ship archive had become a feeding-frenzy of industrial sponsorship, because there was no question that the world was going to change.

  Tabini had fought the requisite small skirmishes in the process, several of them, right to the brink of war, but never over it.

  Take the kitchen? Damned right they would. Take his bodyguard, his servants, his staff—they didn’t go with him to Mospheira, by virtue of the treaty that kept humans and atevi on this world separate and sane. But the station was going to be atevi territory.

  The interface was a lot safer than it had been historically;atevi were a damned sight more sophisticated than they had been. Mospheirans likewise.

  It was a question of what the Pilots’ Guild had become.

  But Tabini hadn’t backed down yet: blood and conniving bone, yes, the atevi lord of lords, the one other atevi regarded as dangerous, simply waited for the moment the Pilots’ Guild blinked.

  Conversation stopped, in the group of Mospheirans gathered in chairs about the low table in the lounge. Bren walked the rest of the way in, scanned the room for J
ase first of all, and didn’t find him, not there with the Mospheirans, not in the dining nook.

  Ginny Kroger got to her feet first, and asked the logical question: “Mr. Cameron. Is there a problem?”

  “No, not as such. What I didn’t know this morning was that the aiji’s just formed a mission of his own. Atevi are going. I’ll accompany you up on this flight.”

  The body language said they’d been struck, one and all, a second blow to their certainties when they’d been rushed into this mission not on their own schedule; and now they’d been finagled. Conned.

  Lund got to his feet, and Feldman and Shugart, less certainly.

  “Quite honestly,” Bren said, “this came as a surprise to me. I suppose it shouldn’t have, but here I am. I’ll be lodging next door, this evening, in the atevi facilities, but I did come by to advise you. To advise Jase Graham, who doesn’t know anything about this, either.”

  “You’re welcome here,” Lund said, as cheerfully as he might invite a known thief into their midst. But it was graciously done, all the same.

  “That’s very kind of you,” Bren said. And at that, Jase did come out of his room, not hopefully. Jase hadn’t seemed to have overheard the details, only the voice, and didn’t look as if he expected miracles, or a reprieve.

  “Bren?”

  “He’s sent me, too.” He was very conscious of the witnesses. “I’m going.”

  “Are you?” Jase asked. It was the question of a man who’d known he was in a rapid river, and now heard the cataract. “The aiji’s orders, is it? His idea?”

  “Very much so,” Bren said. Jase could speak of the aiji in the third person remote. Jase had a welcome in the aiji’s apartment, had the familiarity to speak of him, if Lund didn’t. “I think he figures things are moving, since the Guild asked for you. “Go up and deal with them” he said. So—here I am. Me. Banichi and Jago… four of the staff. With the galley.” When he said that, Jase would know everything: it was the full mission, as they’d planned it. “I hadn’t any notion until he called me in this evening, and then it was turn around, get on the train, go.”

  Lund had the look of a canny businessman. The junior translators were simply dumbfounded; Kroger, from Science, looked as if she had swallowed something unpleasant.“So what does this mean?” Kroger asked. “Are you cooperating with us, or what?”