Precursor

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Nandi.” Narani bowed deeply.

  “Smile doing so, Rani-ji.” He did so himself, instantly, and provoked anxious laughter from the staff. “Even you, Banichi-ji.”

  Banichi turned from his examination of the television, gave him a dour look, a dire smile, and all the staff laughed, including Jago, including Tano and even Algini.

  “So,” Bren said with a small ironic expression, “we await the baggage, we await the betterment of our quarters, and we prepare to deal with whatever comes. Nadiin-ji. My machine, please.”

  Jago gave him his computer, and with it he settled in the smaller of the chairs and set to work finding files. Yes, the ship records were available. And Jase’s notes, on particulars of every member of the Pilots’ Guild, every acquaintance he had, every officer, every piece of history.

  Trust that information?

  Yes. He did. He discovered even his scruples were useful to Tabini, that his human nerves remained sensitive to human concepts of betrayal… that served the aiji. The penalty was a live and touchy conscience about what he did, but intellectually, yes, he knew Jason had hedged the truth and then, in later years, amended it, quietly, just changing a detail or two.

  Now he did believe the record, as he believed Jason. His file regarded more than a hundred of the crew.

  Senior Captain Ramirez was seventy-one as the ship counted time.

  Senior captain, a son, a daughter, both privileged into command training: command within the Guild had descended down very narrow lines, all but hereditary unless the offspring failed the academic tests.

  A wife of fifty-some years, deceased. Marriage on Mospheira was often transitory, sometimes lacking entirely. Marriage on Phoenix was lasting, rank-linked, alliances of power that just didn’t break, not without dire consequences.

  He’d asked Jase whether to believe Ramirez. Jase had written: Ramirez picked me and Yolanda to go down. In a sense, if I have a father… he is. He signed the papers, at least, that drew the samples out of storage. He wanted us born because it was a new age. He didn’t expect what happened.

  Jase had written it in Ragi. They’d been talking late that evening, in the sitting room in the Atageini apartment, inhaling a wind laden with djossi flowers.

  He still could all but smell the flowers and the fire when he thought of that conversation… when Jase had repeated in Ragi, “We have no man’chi, except to the ship. And our mothers. We have ordinary mothers. But Ramirez sent me. He’s looked out for me all my life. Encouraged what I studied. I suppose that’s having a father.”

  “I couldn’t tell you, either,” he’d said to Jase.

  No man’chi, except to the ship.

  Jase had pursued the old knowledge for its own sake, because Stani Ramirez had had the notion of returning to the world they’d left behind to set up a trade route, a stellar empire. Things had gone monstrously wrong, then, within Jase’s lifetime.

  Jase said… and they had cast everything on believing Jase… the Pilots’ Guild was here to set up a defense of the world. The station they’d left at that other star hadn’t stood a chance.

  “I saw the pictures,” Jase had said, that night that Bren had found himself absolutely believing the alien threat. “Only a few of us actually went aboard the station. There was a meeting then, when we’d pulled away. Some of the crew said we ought to try to find the aliens and settle accounts; some said we should just run elsewhere and not risk an enemy tracking us home. But there were all the records on the station. There were the charts. Some thought the station crew might have destroyed them; but most thought they didn’t have the chance. We voted to come here, hoping they’ll wait to digest what they took.”

  In due time there came a great deal of thumping and bumping in the hall.

  “Shall one investigate?” Jago asked.

  “Let them proceed in their own way,” Bren said, much as his security chafed to be of use, and to know what was going on. Moving out, he thought, probably crew quite, quite annoyed with the guests from the planet.

  The thumping went on.

  Banichi settled to reading, Jago, Tano, and Algini played a game of chance. The servants were similarly engaged, casting dice, darting glances at the door.

  In time the light by the door flashed once, twice, and the door opened.

  A man in uniform said, “Mr. Cameron?” as if he couldn’t tell which was which. “The area is yours.”

  “Thank you,” Bren said, keying a total shutdown.

  He rose, walked unhurriedly into the corridor, and surveyed a pile of baggage, three more humans, two with sidearms, and a space of corridor which he gathered had just become an atevi residence. “Very fine, I’m sure. We appreciate your work, Nadiin.”

  “Captain’s orders,” the man remarked coldly, and walked off, stiff-backed.

  Bren’s nerves twitched, cultural reaction bristled just slightly, but he’d triggered that; he’d done it consciously, and he didn’t answer, just stood and watched as the crew, likely the displaced personnel, stalked out.

  Well,. well, well, he thought, wary of creating lasting anger; or the assumption atevi could be insulted with impunity.

  “Crewman!” he said sharply.

  There was a fast look, a wary look.

  “One regrets the inconvenience. Those dislodged will receive compensation, if they will make me aware of their names.”

  “Johnson, sir.” The jaw was set. “Johnson, Andresson, Pressman, Polano.”

  “Three names known on Mospheira,” he said, disobeying his own instructions to his staff, to smile. Possibly they were doing that. “One I don’t know. Interesting. We will import goods once cargo delivery begins; let us know what you think fair return. Jase Graham may recommend certain items.”

  The stance was less hostile, though uneasy. The foremost crewman returned a sketch of a salute. “Yes, sir. Where do we turn that in, sir?”

  “There will be a desk here. Tomorrow if you wish. It may take a while, but we have a long memory.”

  “Yes, sir.” The man wavered into a move backward, and all four left, to talk, perhaps to officers, not unlikely to other lower-ranking crew. Likely bribery and compensation broke a good many rules.

  The door shut.

  Banichi arrived beside him. “Shall one inspect for bugs?” Banichi asked. “Or leave them?”

  “Search. Let the staff unpack. One shouldn’t, however, remove their bugs… or destroy the communications panels. Yet.”

  “Yes” Banichi said, satisfied.

  The search they would make was technical, beyond his competency. He did trust Banichi wouldn’t short out the sta-tion’s power systems or ring a fire control alarm.

  And there the cargo stood, a mountain of black canvas and white packing crates, the galley, kitchen supplies, Banichi’s own gear, clothing… weapons, if the Guild had kept its word and stayed out of their baggage. Their electronics surely weren’t as sophisticated as the equipment they passed through, but there was, to be sure, the quality of the persons using it. He thought of a shipful of technologically sophisticated spacefar-ers spying and eluding one another for centuries; and he couldn’t quite imagine how adroit competition could make them, whether worse, or better… but knowing the aiji’s court as he did, Bren rather bet on his own allies.

  * * *

  Chapter 10

  « ^ »

  The servants would not possibly permit the paidhi to enter the apartment they had chosen for him until they had, of all improbable things, produced from the baggage and arranged three small scroll paintings by the doorway.

  Farther, in the main corridor they spread out a mat with auspicious and harmonizing symbols, a unification of one in a hallway otherwise appallingly blank.

  It all depended on numbers of items with which they had to deal, which they could not possibly have judged without seeing the place, and Bren had to wonder what other adornments they had brought that rested unused. Narani’s sense of felicitous design was undisputed. His ingenuity was ex
treme.

  More—Bren had tried to ignore the racket, and not to ask— they had shifted furnishings, taken other chairs from tracks, traded between rooms, hung small, portable artworks, and set up a kitchen, all in four hard-working hours that by now had entered the mid of the night down in Shejidan.

  “Nadi-ji,” Bren said to his major domo, standing in the central hall to view it, “you’ve worked a wonder.” He walked farther, considered the positioning of a desk in the center of the room they proposed for his, and how, within the outside corridor, and by tools and options they had likely found in security’s kit, they had removed and taped a small table to the corridor wall, managed a vase containing dried grasses with three small stones meticulously arranged, and a dish for message scrolls, should any miraculously appear.

  Loose furniture might horrify station authorities. But he was vastly touched.

  The chairs within his room numbered three, the bed had a piece of tapestry draped across it catty-angled, and he had to imagine how much better his staff felt. He felt the tightness and the devotion in their arrangement… in human terms, felt warmed and comforted in senses that had learned to count flowers and colors of flowers in a vase almost as naturally as atevi brains registered that kind of information. They had made it far warmer, far more welcoming, a brave atevi gesture in a world otherwise steel and plastic.

  “Thank you, nand’ paidhi. At what hour will you have breakfast?”

  Minds were more comfortable with understandable decor, and bodies were happier with things on schedule.

  “Nadi-ji, a small breakfast, on schedule as Shejidan judges it, if you please. I may nap, but wake me.”

  They were happy in the praise, and went off to perform their miracles in whatever they had arranged as the official kitchen, likely as well their own quarters, where the servants’ hall would develop its customary jokes and pranks and irreverence, free of the lord’s affairs.

  “Much, much better,” Jago said. “But tiny doorways. Poor Sabiso.”

  The lump on her head had not gone down.

  “Even on Mospheira doors are taller,” Bren remarked, one of those small windows of information which once in his career had been restricted. “We must have compromised, when we built houses together, before the War. Beware of ladders and stairs, Nadiin. Either they saved materials and heating and cooling as best they could when they built this place, or this is actually the scale of the remote ancestors.”

  “Never considering felicity,” Algini said quietly. “Does one think so? Perhaps we’ll adjust those numbers, nandi, and this time the station will be fortunate.”

  As if the lack of flower vases explained all the calamities that had befallen this station and the other… not that any of the staff attached to Tabini’s court believed the numerology with the fervor of the religious.

  “One might say,” Bren replied, “never considering harmony among the residents; and that is infelicitous in the extreme. Let’s hope we can set things in much better order, baji-naji.” Given the workings of chance, the devil in the design.

  The message tray set outside was so hopeful, so gently expectant of proper behavior.

  And considering that, he truly felt he had a base from which to work, a base from which any other delegation from the aiji could work.

  He entered his room, sat down at the desk, and opened up his computer.

  “The clock says rest,” Jago admonished him.

  “One small task,” he said. He looked at his watch and performed a calculation. “It’s a number of hours until my meeting with the captain. The Mospheirans are surely first on the agenda. They don’t get to rest. And they have to eat the local food. Jasi-ji didn’t recommend it. I, on the other hand, look forward to a fine breakfast.”

  “Nandi,” Jago said, amused, and withdrew.

  There was no question of pursuing what they had pursued in the apartment in Shejidan, under Tabini’s roof. Some questions simply were not to be asked, and Jago reverted to grand formality, left, probably to have no more sleep herself. Banichi and Tano and Algini were doing setup within the room they had appropriated, however quietly. The security module, like the very carefully negotiated galley, was meticulously thought out, very portable, piecemeal. Crates and baggage had disappeared in the general transformation. His security was happy.

  He ticked down the list of crew, with a mind accustomed to numbers, in a language that utilized calculation in every simple statement… a skill at memorization acquired over years of study and experience in the very dangerous years of Tabini’s court. He reviewed names, everything Jase had told him about persons he might meet, their relationships, their spouses. Monogamy was the rule, occasionally serial. Offspring of high-ranking crew tended to be preferred into slots, but had to be capable of the rigid, computer-mediated training courses. Families had been split in the colonization. There’d been a lot of fatalities before the ship had returned, over a thousand lost with the station, and many still-extant families had lost members… it wasn’t considered polite to talk about the fact. In a society where everyone knew everything, discussions about such things were shorthand, and interpersonal understandings were intense and fraught with assumption. There was no one to tell. People swallowed their grief and just went on. The mere notion of people Jase regarded as essential to his welfare vanishing over a horizon had disturbed him, but more to the point, Jase had taken two years even to mention how it troubled him, or even to figure out why he paced the floor and grew furiously angry in their separations.

  Jase had gotten better about it. Jase hadn’t mentioned it in their parting with the world, but it was implicit in Jase’s regret for leaving, his wish to have the freedom to come back… there was not a whole damned lot Mospheiran or easygoing about Jase Graham, and he called himself normal and sane.

  He had assembled that kind of data on Jase into a profile that might fit the captains: quick explosions, a tendency to compromise their way through conflicts on the one hand and yet to store up points for future explosions, all grievances carefully inventoried. No one on the ship could get away from anyone else. Resolutions had to happen, sooner or later, and bare hands fights happened, weapons anathema in a family dispute. But the captains enforced absolute order, and isolation was a heavy, dreaded punishment among people who were never, ever, separated from each other.

  Jase had volunteered to drop onto a planet among strangers and aliens. Jase had learned to speak a language of the earth of humans, that no one else spoke, because Jase, born of a father dead for centuries, had been destined to be different. He’d been born to make contact with the former colonists, no matter how they’d changed.

  Jase… and Yolanda Mercheson.

  This… from two of the Phoenix crew: separate by job, separate by choice, in their own strange way competitive and jealous of their relationship with Ramirez… it was likely foredoomed not to lead to friendship, even if it had led to love-making.

  And both of them were different from Mospheirans—how different he hadn’t quite figured until he entered a verbal shoving match with Ogun, and saw the responses that had unnerved him in Jase ticking into action, one after the other.

  He took notes for a paper he meant to write, notes in Ragi for a paper in Mosphei’. He’d been a maker of dictionaries, once upon a time, and still could find common ground with scholars like Ben Feldman and Kate Shugart, on Lund and Kroger’s team.

  But in the contents of that paper, an explanation of foreign ways, he found himself possibly unique, possibly the only one but Jase who could see in what particulars they were strange to one another… possibly the only one but Jase who could spot the shoals and rocks onto which the Mospheirans might well steer; or the crew of Phoenix, since there was no right or wrong in it. Foremost of Mospheiran hazards, the Human Heritage Party had not the least idea how strange humans could get, on a world, on an island; on a ship, locked in close contact, communicating only on things everyone already knew. They thought “original humans” were their salvati
on; and there were no longer any “original humans.” Both sides had changed.

  His staff came and went in the corridor… easy to know the servants’ soft footsteps and his security’s heavier booted ones. He found himself surrounded by sounds far more homelike, despite the prospect of the encounter tomorrow.

  Then, unintended, he thought about the island, the city where he’d been only a day prior, Barb running across the gray, stained concrete of that hangar, dignity thrown to the winds…

  Flinched, inside.

  A damn bus.

  He wondered whether Barb was improving… or wasn’t; wondered what lasting damage there might be. With the faults she did have, if their places were reversed, Barb would have moved heaven, earth, and the national borders at least to communicate with him.

  Not to reach him, not to live with him in a world where she didn’t want to be; but at least to call him, to say, “Bren, are you all right?”

  Barb didn’t deserve to be hurt. His mother didn’t deserve to be pacing the hall of a hospital all night, scared out of her wits. They fought, they disagreed on everything, and still cared, that was the crazed sum of it all, one he’d begun to accept and one he wasn’t sure Barb yet realized.

  He wondered whether his brother Toby had gotten a flight and gotten to their mother, and whether Toby and Jill were doing all right… Jill had happened into a life she’d never contracted for, watched over by security agents, national security haunting her street, following the kids. Toby’s marriage had had its rocky moments, and now Toby’s kids were getting old enough to understand how their freedom was circumscribed by their uncle’s unique job, and how their lives were complicated by a dozen random lunatics who under Mospheiran law couldn’t be arrested.

  The whole family was kept balanced on edge, waiting for his visits, as if somehow he kept defining and redefining things, as if he was the one keeping them from living their lives. The fact was, they were bound together, hurt one another: Jill, involved by marriage, didn’t put her foot down hard, and should.