She hadn’t seen the damned bus coming, but that wouldn’t convince his mother she didn’t have premonitions.
He’d done all he could. The personal phone wouldn’t have helped her at all, once he’d gone through the security curtain that surrounded Tabini’s intentions. Hours of trying to reach him.
And what did he say, after she’d worked a miracle to reach him?
“Mother, I absolutely can’t come.”
“Bren, don’t you tell me that! Bren, you have to come, that’s all there is! You’re so damned important to Tabini, you get him to get you a plane, right now. I want you here!”
He had the receiver against his ear for privacy—thank God. “Mother, I’m involved in something I can’t leave. I can’t tell you. But this is important. I’m sorry. Tell Barb I’m terribly sorry. —Don’t you dare tell her I love her. Don’t you do that, Mother.”
“You listen to me, Bren. You listen. This job is killing you. It’s killing the son I knew. It’s killing any happiness you’re going to have. You don’t decide when you’re sixty that you ought to have gotten married, you don’t wait till the end of your life to regret you didn’t have children…”
“Mother…”
“You listen to me, Bren Cameron! I know what’s going on with you and that atevi woman! It’s not right!”
“Mother, where are you?” He was appalled that she knew, but more appalled to think she might be in a hallway, at a public phone. “Don’t say that out loud. Don’t raise your voice.”
“Are you ashamed? Does it worry you?”
“It worries me when my mother might be saying things in a public corridor. It worries me for her safety if the extremists get themselves stirred up again because some damned rumor gets started—talk like that won’t help Durant, either. Hush! Be still. Listen to me…”
“You really don’t want to hear it, do you? You know Barb always loved you. She married that fool Paul because you broke her heart. You hurt her, Bren, and she was sorry, and oh, no, you were too self-righteous, too damned important with your fancy estate to take her back.”
“I never promised to marry her. I don’t love her, Mother! I’m sorry to say it under these circumstances, but I don’t love her. I never loved her, she didn’t love me; we slept together. That was the end of it. I tried to have something else, and she was the one who wanted something different.”
“You don’t know what she felt! You weren’t here! You were traipsing about the continent acting as if you were some atevi lord! She decided to marry. To marry, respectably, as sensible people do when they want to have normal lives.”
“I don’t have a normal life.”
“She was scared, Bren, she was scared and she was hurt— personally hurt, by the things you’d done. If you asked her to divorce Paul, she’d be there in a moment.”
Dealing with his mother was like running a course under fire… and he feared his mother would tell Barb there was hope of having him back, wreck Barb’s marriage, drive Paul off when Barb needed him, and hurt Barb more than she’d been. Most of all, he couldn’t hold that out to Barb… because he wouldn’t be back and Barb, all she valued and all she wanted to be, her fashion, her nightclub glamour, all the things she loved… didn’t exist on this side of the sea.
“I can’t marry her. End of statement. It’s not a time to debate it.”
“How can you be like this? You’d come home. You’d show up on a weekend, ask Barb to drop all her plans and go running off to some hotel, with the news people all trying to find you, and then you’d be gone, and then the news people would find where you’d been and Barb would have to duck out and lock herself in her apartment for weeks, Bren, sometimes in fear of her life!”
“I know that.” It was true, Barb had played international intrigue as part of the shining, glittering game, until it turned bloody; and now his mother was working herself back into tears. He tried to get his point through while there was still rational thought to hear it. “But I can’t help that. I can’t help that, Mother; listen to me! The president’s guard does look out for you. If there are spies at the hospital now, they’re official. They probably are at the hospital right now. I want you to call Shawn Tyers. You know how.”
“Don’t you hang up on me!”
“Mother, you know I love you. That’s the way things are. Call Shawn. Call Paul… I know you don’t want to, but do it! Then go home, get some rest.
“Mother, what was between us is still her business and my business. Give me credit that I know Barb, I know her damned well, and I can’t help her by getting involved in her life and ripping that up a second time.”
“Bren, don’t be like this.”
“I’m sorry as hell for what happened. It makes me sick to think of it. But I can’t fix it, and don’t you dare tell her I love her, don’t you dare tell her there’s any hope of my coming now. There isn’t. You’ll just hurt her. Do you hear me, Mother? Go home! I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
“Promise to call Barb.”
“I will not promise to call Barb. I’ve got to go now.”
“Bren, call her.”
“Mother, go home. Good night. I love you.”
He hung up. He was aware of Jago in the doorway of the security station, aware of the fact some words were in her understanding and Banichi’s, at least of his side of the conversation.
“Barb’s had an accident,” he said. “A bus hit her. My mother fell down and hurt herself. Barb’s in the hospital. There’s nothing I can do from here.” They didn’t understand love, they didn’t understand the intricate details of failed human relationships, but they knew attachment persisted. Most of all they knew loyalty, and the urge to go to the scene of trouble. “There’s nothing I can do.”
Banichi said solemnly. “The aiji can request action of the President of Mospheira, and Shawn-nandi. Shall we do that?”
Tabini could do so much; and so damned little. “Not for this. Toby’s not home yet. Patch me through to his house, Banichi-ji. I’ll leave a message.”
Banichi pushed buttons. The communications interface was a great deal easier than it had been, with security codes that automatically engaged when the messages crossed the straits. Even at this hour, the Mospheiran system produced an operator, better than in prior days, and the call went on its way to the north coast, where Toby’s answering system cut in.
Bren was in some part relieved. It was easier to unburden the matter to a machine. He was sure their mother had put one of those nerve-jarring Call me’s on Toby’s system, and he hoped his message might at least advise Toby what the matter was, if their mother fell out of contact before Toby ran off into the night trying to hire a plane.
“Mother seems fine” he began his message, experienced in years of long-distance crises. “Scrapes and bruises, as I gather. Barb’s in the hospital, Mother’s with her. A pretty bad accident with a bus, and Mother saw it, might have been in front of it. She wants some comfort. Toby, I know you just got home, I hate like hell to drop this on you, but I’m behind a security wall at the moment and I absolutely can’t get back there. I don’t think you need to fly back, just give Mother a call at…” Professional coolness wavered. “I don’t know what hospital.” Their mother was probably one of the few people outside the government who didn’t have forwarding on their calls: security precaution. And she was one of the very few, inside or out, who wasn’t completely aware of all the security arrangements that surrounded them. He couldn’t call her security and ask where she was. He hoped to God they knew and that his mother and Barb hadn’t gotten whisked away out of security’s sight. “She didn’t tell me what hospital.” He covered the microphone. “Banichi-ji. Get the origination on that call from my mother.”
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 t
he 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.
* * *
Chapter 8
« ^ »
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 t
axed 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.
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