As the shuttles had good numbers?
Hell with that. He’d gotten more timid about airplanes, since flying the shuttle.
He’d begun to hold onto the armrests of airplanes, trying to pull the plane into the sky. Stupid behavior. Anxious, animal behavior. He told himself again and again what made airplanes stay in the sky… the way he’d used to tell Jase, who trulydidn’t like zipping along near a planet’s surface… and didn’t starships work on perfectly rational principles he just didn’t happen to understand as well as he understood airfoils?
In the station’s informational system, Banichi now reported, the ship had reached a mysterious 99% and holding.
“The dowager has decided to accompany us in boarding,” Banichi said further. “Her party will overtake us at the lift.”
So. So. A deep breath. Time to wait for protocols. He stalled his small party at the lift door.
In due time, at the dowager’s pace, with her staff and with Lord Geigi and his men for escort, Ilisidi and Cajeiri arrived and joined them at the personnel lift. The dowager was of course immaculate and fashionable in a red fur-cuffed coat, and the heir-apparent, neatly pig-tailed in the black and red ribbons of his house, wore a modest black leather coat, red leather gloves, and a quiet demeanor vastly different than his arrival.
Terrified, Bren thought with sympathy for the boy.
Sent from Tatiseigi’s ungentle care to Ilisidi’s and Cenedi’s, and now exiled to travel to the ends of creation in a human-run ship. Was ever a boy faced with more upheaval in his few years?
He was very glad Lord Geigi had come to see them off… considerable inconvenience, all the bundling-up for the cold core, a disturbance in the schedule of a man who got only a little more sleep than he had, Bren was very sure. Still, the man’chi was very tight, very sure, and it would have been sad had Geigi not stirred himself out to walk with them.
Hug Geigi? Not quite.
“Paidhi-ji,” Ilisidi said with a polite nod, the intimate address, acknowledging her traveling companion.
“Aiji-ma.” He bowed at the honor. “Nandi.” For Geigi, with human affection.
Banichi had called the lift, at the dowager’s approach. It arrived at precisely the grand moment.
“Young man.” Ilisidi offered her arm to her great-grandson, and the boy took it ceremoniously, escorting his great-grandmother with the grace of the lord he was born to be. They boarded. Cenedi and his men, and the dowager’s servants—small distinction between the two duties—held back. Geigi made a subtle wave of his hand, cuing himto move: thatwas the way it was, a difficult matter of protocols, and Bren moved, heart racing, thoughts suddenly a jumble of remembrance that, no, he was not demoted, and that Geigi, to whom he was accustomed to defer, gave place to him in the personnel lift—
As if he were higher rank.
Because he was leaving, perhaps, and numbered in the dowager’s party, not, silly thought, that the paidhi-aiji, if he even retained the title, in any way outranked the lord of the station. Empty honors, Tabini had paid him. The paidhi wasn’t any lord of the heavens, and hadn’t any claim to Geigi’s man’chi.
God, no. He didn’t want Geigi or the dowager to change the way they dealt with him. He didn’t want a paper title. He supposed it augmented his rank in dealing with Sabin… no matter it was meaningless, but he suspected Geigi was, if charitable, amused. He hoped Geigi wasn’t offended. He hoped the dowager wasn’t about to make some issue of it all.
He didn’t want any more. He wantedto retire to his estate on the coast for at least a month and look at the stars from the deck of a boat—Toby’s boat, at that.
Instead, the lift arrived, and they all fitted in, the same procedures they used when taking the shuttle down to the planet. He hoped that workers would communicate and the baggage wouldn’t stall in their path, and that it would all happen magically, so that the newly appointed lord of the heavens didn’t end up in interstellar space without shirts or Bindanda’s cooking supplies.
So much had to be a miracle. So much just sailed past his numb senses; and meanwhile he had to muster intelligent small-talk, in a station where the weather wasn’t a possible topic.
“So much done so quickly,” he said to the dowager as the lift rose.
“Did you hear from my grandson?”
“I did hear, aiji-ma.” He feared he blushed. And it wasn’t a topic he wanted to discuss, his elevation to mythical lordship. “One was very gratified by his letter.”
“Ha,” Ilisidi said, one of those ambiguous utterances. “Politics.”
And Geigi: “My staff is in communication with your quarters, nandi-ji.” Oh, he was glad to hear warmth in Geigi’s tones. “Does Mercheson-paidhi favor fish, do you think?”
“She will be greatly honored by your attention, nandi.” Fish was almost always safe. And he did remember. “She does favor melon preserves, extremely. All varieties of fruit.”
“Ah.” Geigi was pleased to have a personal knowledge. And his ability to get foodstuffs off the planet was scandalous. “One will manage.”
The apartment might be awash in melon preserves. “I’ll be in your debt if you can show my successor the refinements, nandi. One wishes she might have had the benefits of the dowager’s estate, as I did.”
“Ha,” Ilisidi said again. “Benefits, is it?”
“I found it so, dowager-ji. It taught me a very great deal.”
“The paidhi listened,” Ilisidi said, and tightened her grip on the boy’s arm. Gravity was at the moment only a function of the car’s movement. “As some should! Do you agree, boy?”
“Yes, mani-ma.”
“ Grandmotherwill do,” Ilisidi said sharply. “ Aijiwill do better. You have official rank here, if I say so, and we’ll see whether those shoulders are strong enough, yet. So I say, today. Who knows for tomorrow?”
“Yes, aiji-ma,” This quietly uttered, a young soul sharply keyed to the dowager’s voice—
Mechieti racing wildly on a hillside, breakneck after the dominant. Reason had nothing to do with it. Bren didn’t know why he flashed on that, of all moments when he’d nearly died. But it was the fact of native wildlife. It was the fact of atevi instinct: it was the nature of man’chi…
He witnessed it, he thought. He didn’t feel it. But he intellectually understood the boy had learned to twitch in certain ways to instincts that were life to his species, and held tightly to his grandmother’s hand.
That was reassuring to everyone concerned.
They braked. The door opened in a waft of cold pressure-change that frosted metal surfaces.
This time, however, it was not the old familiar sights—not the shuttle dock, with the hatch leading to whatever shuttle sat in dock.
It was dock 1, and a long snake of yellow tubing, which led, he understood, to another, grapple-reinforced tube, where Phoenixrode.
Baggage must have cleared. He didn’t see it.
“Well, well,” Geigi said, “it seems this is the place.”
“So one assumes,” Ilisidi said. Suited workers now appeared in the tube, out of the bend inside it. “One assumes we have an escort. Go, go back to reasonable places before you freeze, Geigi-ji.”
“Safe voyage,” Geigi wished them. “Safe travel, safe return, aiji-ma, Bren-ji.”
There were bows, such as one could manage, reaching out for safety lines strung along the wall.
Then Geigi and his men were inside the lift, they were outside, and the door shut at their backs with appalling finality.
Phoenixwas surely at the other end—intellectual knowledge, but with no view of the dock, only the tube leading to the hatch, it felt rather like being swallowed by some giant of the fairy tales.