Inheritor

by C. J. Cherryh

  It was a short walk to the subway car, in a larger space than Jase had been in since he'd come into the Bu-javid by this same route.

  "All right?" he asked Jase, seeing that little hesitation, that intake of breath.

  "Fine," Jase said, and walked steadily beside him, Banichi and Jago in front, Tano and Algini behind, down past the train engine to the two cars which were waiting with the requisite House Guard and a Guild pair from the aiji's staff — Bren's eye picked them out.

  "Nadi?" Banichi took up his post just inside, and they boarded, Tano and Algini going to the baggage car with junior security, Banichi and Jago staying with them.

  "Rear seat's the most comfortable," he said to Jase — he recalled saying that the day he'd escorted Jase to the hill, in the same car, on his way to the confinement in which Jase had lived. They took their seats. Jago, on pocket com, standing by the door, talked to someone, probably intermediate to the Bu-javid station that governed use of the tracks, clearing their departure.

  The door shut and the car got underway.

  Jase sat with nervous anticipation evident as the shuttered private subway car rumbled and thumped along its course down the hill and across a city Jase had never seen except from the windows of the Bu-javid and once from the air.

  "Nervous, nadi?"

  "No, nadi." Jase was quick to say so. And sat, hands on knees, braced against the slightest movement of the car.

  But a lot of strangeness, Bren could only guess, was surely impacting Jase's senses right now, from the shaking of the car, the smells, the noise.

  Evidently some of them were alarming sensations from a spaceman's point of view, as were large open spaces: the echoes disoriented him, maybe. Maybe just the size did. Bren had no idea, but to reassure Jase he adopted an easy pose, legs extended, ankles crossed, and kept talk to a minimum while Jase's eyes darted frantically to every different rattle of the wheels on the switching-points, the least change in sound as they exited the tunnel and went in open air.

  "We're on the surface again," Bren explained. "We've been in a tunnel."

  Jase didn't look reassured. And probably Jase knew he was overreacting, even suspected he looked foolish in his anxiety, but they had one more rule in effect, and Jase had agreed to it as Jase had agreed to every other condition: no matter what, Jase wasn't to speak anything but Ragi on this trip. If the car wrecked, he'd made the point with Jase, scream in Ragi. He might not be able to hold to it throughout, but if that was the ideal, maybe, Bren thought, it would encourage Jase to shift his thoughts into the language totally, the way Jase had existed while he was gone on the tour. If it didn't do everything he'd hoped, in terms of forcing Jase into Ragi, it might at least force Jase back into that mindset so that he had a chance of arguing with him.

  Meanwhile the car thumped and rumbled its way toward the airport.

  A happy family, on its way to the beach, Bren thought, surveying his complement of catatonic, well-dressed roommate and heavily armed security in black leather and silver studs, themselves in high spirits and having a good time.

  "We were due a vacation," Banichi remarked cheerfully. They were not quite so vacation-bound that he or any of his fellow Guild members took advantage of the stocked breakfast juice bar in the aiji's own, red velvet-appointed subway car, but Banichi did sit down at his ease, stretch out his huge body and heave a sigh. And doubtless it was far better than a rooftop in the peninsula. "We're due rain, of course, but it's spring — what can one hope?"

  "It should still be fine," Jago said from her vantage by the door, one hand loosely on a hanging strap. "The sea, the sand —"

  "The cold fogs."

  "Nadiin," Bren said, and roused himself to the same level of enthusiasm as his security, "we are safe, we are away, lord Tatiseigi is visiting his own apartment tonight, we are not there, and I believe they have gotten the illicit television downstairs."

  "The Guard is guarding it, nand' paidhi," Banichi said, "with its usual zeal, of course."

  There were grins. Probably Jase didn't follow the joke. But security was in a high good mood and the car rocked and thundered on, swayed around the turn that meant the airport station was coming up. Junior security, who had their baggage under close watch, would get it all aboard the vans.

  The subway train stopped, security rose to take routine positions as the doors opened and security went out first.

  Bren collected Jase, left the details to his staff, and sure enough the vans were waiting, with Bu-javid security in charge from beginning to end, in this very highly securitied spur of the regular public subway.

  "Careful," he said, fearing Jase's balance problems, but Jase made a clean step out of the car and onto the concrete.

  Jase had no difficulty there, and none in boarding the waiting van. He flung himself into the seat, however, as if relieved to sit down; his face was a little pale, his eye-blinks grown rapid as they did when he was fighting problems in perspective. Bren sat down more slowly beside him, with Banichi and Jago immediately after while others were loading the luggage into the second van under Tano's supervision.

  The van whisked them to the waiting plane and braked right by the ladder. Immediately, the second van was with them, bringing the luggage, which was not alone their clothes, but the clutter of weaponry and electronics that went with the paidhi wherever he and his security went.

  It was Tabini's jet. And it was needful now, Banichi out first and Jago next, and Bren third, for Jase to climb down from the van into the noise of the jet engines, and walk, on a flat surface and under a sky with a few gray-bottomed clouds, from the roofed van to the ladder and up the ladder into the plane. Jase made the step, didn't look up (which he'd said especially bothered him), and crossed to the ladder, shaking off Jago's offered hand.

  "Wait," Bren said to Banichi and Jago, because the metal ladder shook when that pair climbed it with their usual energy, and he didn't figure that would help Jase at all, whose knuckles were white on the rail as he climbed doggedly toward the boarding platform, his eyes on the steps, never on his surroundings.

  Jase went inside, to be met by the co-pilot. Bren went up next and Jago and Banichi followed him; Tano and Algini stayed below to stand watch over the luggage-loading.

  The computer, alone of their luggage, went in the cabin with them; Jago had it, and tucked it into a storage area, while outside the luggage-loading went so fast that the hatch thumped down while Jase was settling into his seat in the table-chair grouping and while Bren was saying hello to the pilot and co-pilot.

  "One hopes for a quieter flight, nand' paidhi," the pilot said.

  He'd actually forgotten about the boy from Dur during the last twenty hours, during which they'd accomplished the logistics and arrangements, and during which uncle Tatiseigi had lodged in Ilisidi's hospitality.

  They were away and clear. The boy from Dur had his ribboned card which might save him from parental wrath, the apartment was still intact after the state reception, and the television was out of the pantry, entertaining the House Guard for the duration of uncle Tatiseigi's stay, which should about equal their days on the western shore near Saduri.

  "I anticipate a quiet flight and a quiet ten days, nadi," Bren said to the pilot and co-pilot, "and I hope you and your associate have ample time for a little fishing yourselves. I've expressed the wish the staff could lodge you at some place that would allow it for however long you have at leisure."

  "Nand' paidhi, they have done so, and we thank you, nand' Jase as well." This with a nod toward the seating where Jase had belted in.

  "Nadi," Bren said in ending the conversation, and went back to sit beside Jase. He did feel better now that things were underway. His blood was moving faster with their stirring about, and the slight headache was diminishing: possibly the sleeping pill had worn off.

  "It's excellent weather for flying. A smooth flight, nadi. Sun shining. Calm air."

  "Yes," Jase said. It was a word. It was a response. Then: "Too close to the planet
," Jase muttered, then grinned; and Bren obligingly laughed, in the understanding both that it was an uneasy joke and that Jase had, finally, just been able to get a few words assembled into an almost-sentence of Ragi this morning. After twenty-odd hours of intermittent wordless moments and frustration, losing all confidence in his ability to speak the Ragi language, Jase was showing signs of pulling out of it — phase two of his mental break, a tendency to suspect all his word choices and to blow his grammar — which, coupled with fears of insulting the atevi staff, wasn't improving his confidence. But it was textbook psychological reaction. Jase had been vastly embarrassed, humiliated, terrified of very real diplomatic consequences at the same moment he was put on national television — at his worst moment of personal crisis. It wasn't just the illusion of helplessness language students went through, it had been real helplessness, and real danger, and thank God, Bren thought, they'd had the dowager there, and an understanding security, and Damiri. Also thank God, Tatiseigi was no fool.

  And meanwhile Jase, being around staff who'd forgive him his mistakes, was trying again, understanding again, and regaining a little shaky confidence in himself.

  "Please belt in, nadiin," the co-pilot said over the intercom. The engines roared into action.

  And as the plane began to taxi toward the runway, with security taking their seats and belting in around them, Jase's knuckles were white on the armrests.

  Couldn't fault that reaction. He'd explained to Jase and Yolanda the physics by which planes stayed in the air during their initial flight to Shejidan, but there was so much new then and since that he wasn't sure how much had stayed with him. They'd come from a rough landing on the Taiben preserve, an overnight at Taiben only sufficient to catch their breaths, then a rail trip ending in a hasty boarding of the aiji's plane to fly them all to the international airport at Shejidan.

  After they'd landed at Shejidan, there'd been no hesitation: the aiji's guards had packed Yolanda and Deana Hanks both onto a second, atevi-piloted commercial plane bound for Mospheira, and hastened him and Jase onto the van and then into the subway station on a fast trip to the Bu-javid, to enter the aiji's very careful security arrangements, all to assure — in a world seething with change and disturbance at that moment — that nothing befell the two paidhiin.

  It hadn't afforded Jase much time to learn about the world. And Jase had been disoriented and more focused on the fact that he and Yolanda weren't going to find communication free or easy. Possibly they hadn't known it would be that way.

  Possibly Deana Hanks, sitting near them on the plane, saying that he'd be a prisoner in Shejidan and that they'd deceive him, had set Jase up for far too much suspicion. He'd told Jase that Deana was a liar. But Jase might not have believed him that day.

  And as he explained the full extent of what Deana had done and why, Jase's comment had been, Neither one of us will have it easy, either, will we?

  Half a year ago.

  Just about half a year ago. Yolanda had gone away in a van along with Deana, bound for a plane nearby; Jase had gone with him and Banichi and Jago in another one, bound for the subway, and that had been it, last contact, except the phone calls.

  Jase had been so scared in those first days, so very scared — of the staff, of security, of the devices that guarded the doorway. Of the simple fact they found it necessary to lock the doors of the apartment.

  Of the simpler fact of thunder crashing above the roof. He remembered.

  The plane rushed down the runway, lifted, and a moment later Jase was trying to improve the plane's angle by leaning as it banked for the west.

  Bren kept himself deadpan and didn't say a word about what was probably an instinctive reaction. One would think a man from weightless space would have overcome such tendencies. But Jase said his ship made itself gravity the same way the station did, so Bren supposed Jase wasn't used to being without it.

  The plane retracted the trailing edge flaps. Jase was still white-knuckled and had looked askance thus far at every noise of the hydraulics working, from the wheels coming up to the slats coming back. This was the man who'd boarded a capsule and let a crew shove him into space in free fall toward a parachute drop into the planetary atmosphere.

  On the other hand… Jase said very little about that trip down. Jase had waked now and again with nightmares, startling the staff, and he had once remarked that the parachute drop had perturbed him. He hoped the trip back into space once they had the ship, Jase had said to him very early on, would be a good deal more like the airplane ride to Shejidan.

  "You know," he remarked to Jase, who, after ten minutes at least and almost up to cruising altitude, hadn't let go the seat arm, "planes don't often fall out of the sky. They tend to stay up. Airfoil. Remember?"

  Jase took several deep breaths. "I'm fine," he said, in the manner of someone who'd just survived hell. "I'm fine."

  Jase stared straight ahead. There was a lovely view of clouds out the window, but he didn't look, evidently not trusting the plane would stay level without his encouragement. Jase didn't look at him, either, and didn't seem inclined to think about anything but the plane.

  Well, there was work he could do while Jase was helping the pilot.

  He could unpack the computer. Or he could sit and worry about the situation on Mospheira with the State Department and its windows.

  Or the situation in the capital, where Shockwaves of the peninsular affair and Tatiseigi's apparent realignment were still ringing through the court and lords marginally aligned with Direiso were reconsidering their positions — disturbing thought, to have a continent-spanning war going on, and thus far the casualties amounting to one man, a lightbulb, a piece of glassware, and Badissuni of the Hagrani in the hospital for a stomach condition — so that one wondered was it stress that had sent him there, or had Jago been near his drink?

  The ship and probably the man beside him were completely unaware of the struggle except insofar as Jase had had to deal with Tatiseigi.

  Well, the island would become aware of it. With the illegal radio traffic going on, bet that Deana Hanks would become aware of it.

  If she could translate assassination without mistaking it for pregnant calendar.

  Banichi and Jago were meanwhile taking great care to have him apprised of what was going on, after, presumably, some shaking at high levels had gone on in the Messengers' Guild. The information delivered with their supper last evening had been an intercepted radio message on the north coast, up by Wiigin, where they were not going, a message which — laughably under less grim circumstances — purported to be between atevi, when clearly only one side was atevi even by the timbre of the voice, let alone the vocabulary and syntax errors.

  The fluent side of the transmission had discussed at great length the situation with the assassination of lord Saigimi. It had claimed lord Tatiseigi had made the television interview under extreme threat and it claimed that only fear that the Atageini would be taken over by the aiji had weakened Tatiseigi's former — the message called it — strong stand for traditional values.

  He knew why Tabini had let that radio traffic, ostensibly between small aircraft flying near the Association-Mospheiran boundary and a tower controller on the atevi mainland, go on without protest: it was deliberate provocation on someone's part on the mainland to be doing what they were doing, bold as brass on the airwaves. That they continued had nothing to do with rights of expression as they defined free speech on Mospheira. By the Treaty no Mospheiran had the right to use a radio to communicate across the strait. By allowing those radio messages to continue, Tabini was simply, in human parlance, giving the perpetrators enough rope to hang themselves and draw in others before he cracked down, definitely on Direiso, possibly on the perpetrators of the messages, and diplomatically on Hanks.

  But the area where that was going on was (he had checked) well north of the area where they were going.

  And, while he would be involved in the crisis those messages were bound to engender when the c
rackdown came, it wasn't his problem now. His job right now was simply making sure that Jase got his chance to relax and reach some sort of internal peace with the land and the people. He had great faith that a little exposure to problems more basic and more natural than living pent up in the pressured Bu-javid environment would help Jase immensely. And he, himself —

  He needed to rest. He finally admitted that. He'd reached the stage when there just wasn't any more reserve. No more nerves, no more sense, no more flexibility of wit.

  He'd had his last real leave — oh, much too long ago.

  He'd stood on a ski slope, on Mt. Allen Thomas, in the very heart of the island, getting sunburn on his nose, coated in snow from a header. (He'd gotten a little slower, a little more cautious in his breakneck skiing.)

  But, oh, the view from up there was glorious, when the sun turned the snow gold and the evergreens black in the evenings.

  When the mists came up off the blue shadows and the wind whispered across the frozen surface in the morning — then he was alive.

  It would have terrified Jase.

  Ah, well, he said to himself, and propped one ankle on the other and asked junior security for a fruit juice.

  "Would you care for one, Jasi-ji?"

  "Yes, nadi, please," Jase said.

  Definitely better.

  The fruit juice arrived. "Pretty clouds," Bren remarked, and Jase looked and agreed with relative calm that they were that.

  Vacation would do them all good, he said to himself.

  Because… he had a sip of fruit juice and stared at the empty seat across from him, the one Jago usually occupied… he was definitely reaching the fracture point himself, and seeing conspiracy under every porcelain lily petal.

  Conspiracy that linked the various shattered major pieces of the last several days, from whatever had necessitated the assassination of Saigimi, to whatever Hanks had pursued, to Direiso, to a couple of radio operators up by Wiigin, and even to the paint flung at his mother's apartment building.