The workers beckoned them on. Ilisidi didn’t question, rather proceeded down the handline in the only direction possible.
“One can’t sail off here, aiji-ma,” Cajeiri observed. “Are those the captains?”
“A sensible person wouldn’t try to sail at all,” Ilisidi retorted. “And those are workers. Don’t gawk. Don’t chatter. It burns the lungs.”
Burn, it did. Breath seemed very short. Or the paidhi was breathing very rapidly.
“A small load of baggage was ahead of us,” he said to the workers as they met. “It all should go to fifth deck, my possession.”
“Yes, sir,” the worker said. No argument, no delay, no fuss. “The tag was all in order. It’s well ahead of you. Go right along. Sir. Ma’am.”
Things went with frightening finality.
This is real, a small voice said to him, but for the most he felt numb—not as much fear of the trip itself as reason said was logical, rather more a sense of danger to the things he was leaving: fear of what might change while he was gone, family he might lose, people who might carry on their lives without him, and get to places and situations to which he was irrelevant.
I’ll come back, he said in his heart. I’ll make it back.
But that part wasn’t wholly in his hands any longer.
Now the unwinding of the yellow serpentine showed them an open hatch, and it swallowed them up, a large hatch, that had no trouble taking in all their party at once, with room left over for one of the workers, who punched appropriate buttons and threw switches. And bet that atevi security, his and the dowager’s, recorded those movements, and the accompanying confirmation of lights.
The outer door shut. Then the smaller of the inner doors opened, and their chill gusted out with them into a corridor as bare, as purely functional as the access tunnels on the station: panels with steady and blinking telltales, gridwork deck, ladders going up and sideways—a puzzle to a ground-dweller until a ground-dweller’s mind registered the obvious fact that he was drifting and didn’t even know which way was up. The air smelled vaguely of paint and plastics and something that could be oil, or solvent. Fans roared.
It was a tubular corridor—ending in a pressure door, again, like the station accesses.
“A grim place,” Ilisidi pronounced it, but alert to everything around her.
“This way, if you please,” their guide said: his clip-on badge, on a close look, was ship security. “Captain Graham’s compliments, I’ll be your escort to your quarters. Mr. Cameron, if you’d please advise everyone watch the doors as we go.”
“He presents felicitous greetings from Jase-aiji.”
“Who is not here!” Ilisidi said, displeased.
“Who is managing the ship to keep it safe, aiji-ma, and sends security to direct us past hazardous equipment. I’m very sure it’s proper.”
“We demand Jase.”
“Aiji-ma,” Bren said, “it’s by no means certain that Jase is physically on the ship.”
“Are we to believe that planning is so slipshod, as not to include any inquiry from us? Are we to believe that this is the degree of care which attends our voyage on this chancy vessel? We do not budge from this corridor until we have assurances.”
This very cold corridor, this corridor the cold of which had, after the deep chill of the dock, penetrated his coat and his gloves and started into his human-sized body.
But bluffing? No. Not Ilisidi.
“She demands Captain Graham, specifically,” Bren said. “Protocol requires it. So we’ll stay here.”
“You can’t stay here, sir. You’re in a traffic area.”
“I agree. I respectfully suggest this place is very cold, and I personally will be very grateful if Captain Graham is aboard, and makes every effort to get down here, so we can resolve this before we become a traffic problem.”
Their guide had a baffled look, and relayed that fact on his personal electronics: “Gran Sidi’s aboard and wants Captain Graham to take her to quarters immediately.”
There might have been discussion. Or incredulity on the other end.
“They’re in the corridor, sir, and won’t budge.”
“The aiji-dowager has suggested,” Bren added, “that if he fails to appear this would be a major breach of protocol, not auspicious at all for the voyage. Downright unlucky for the ship.”
The worker relayed that, too, as: “The aiji-dowager’s upset, ma’am, and Mr. Cameron’s saying it just has to get done. Something about unlucky for the ship.”
Another silence. And if there was a superstitious streak left among the crew it regarded the ship itself.
“Captain Graham’s in a meeting, sir.”
He could suggest they get Sabin down to the entry corridor if Jase wasn’t at hand; but he didn’t personally want to deal with Sabin, especially Sabin disturbed from her work.
But still—setting a precedent with the dowager demanding Jase, dealing with Jase—it made sense. It was a means of getting hands on Jase at will. So he bit his lip, refused to shiver or to show any discomfort at all. “I’m afraid we’ll stand here until he can find the time.”
The security man relayed that. Meanwhile Cajeiri examined a panel with a mere glance, then an inclination sideways. And received a severe tightening of the dowager’s hand on his arm, if the slight lift of his head was any sign.
“Captain’s on his way,” the man said then, with evident relief. “But he’d like to meet you on fifth level. It’s warmer, Mr. Cameron, if you can persuade her to go on through.”
Nerves twitched. Not polite, that unadorned common pronoun. But it wasn’t time for a lesson in protocols, not here.
“Aiji-ma,” Bren said in a low voice, “there’s a reception arranged in greater warmth on fifth level, and Jase-aiji will meet us there, with your kind consent.”
“Very good,” Ilisidi said. And waved her cane forward. “Let this person lead, paidhi.”
“Lead on,” Bren said to their escort. The language had been clipped, moderate, but still touchy. “She says you may go in front of her.”
Their escort gave a misgiving look at their party in general, at very large dark-skinned, black-uniformed atevi bodyguards, who drank up the available light in the forefront of the party, and who had moved closer: the paler colors of the household staffs were much to the rear at the moment. Their escort might not like it, and wouldn’t at all like the weapons in evidence, and certainly wouldn’t like the intransigence in the entry corridor. But there they were, ordered to fifth deck and their escort glided out, using the ladder for a handhold, into the first intersecting corridor and up to a lift.
The lift opened at a button-push and cast a bright, reasonable light into their shadowed steel passage. They boarded the lift and rode either up or down, a slightly startling set of paths and tracks, to a brighter area facing a seal-door.
Their escort opened it and led the way.
The atevi-repaired station corridors were still lighter than this, brightly lit and of felicitously pleasant tones: but here the green and brown paneling of the original station was indisputable, unhappy prophecy of the decor beyond. No one could invent those muddy shades on purpose: it was, Bren suspected what the extrusion medium tended to do with the dyes they injected to better a natural puce. The same kind of switches for lights and section-seals were ubiquitous, as if the master kit that had built the station had been applied here—or vice versa, and that meant their staffs could manage these panels without much confusion. He was sure Banichi and Jago had taken that in instantly.
One wondered if the service accesses also existed here, that network of tunnels that allowed service inside the station’s workings.
Grim, human-style Malguri, it was, at least on this level, with moderate improvements in the plumbing and far worse to endure in simple inconvenience.
Ilisidi was taking it all in, stoically refusing to be appalled.
The aiji-apparent, however, looked around him as if he expected the walls to spew forth marvels—or to implode from age and decrepitude. Cajeiri hadn’t seen the station at its worst—had lived in baroque splendor, among centuries-old porcelains, on hand-worked carpet, under gilt ceilings. He had seen, in fact, nothing in his young life more primitive than the new sections of the space station. He clung to the ladder rungs along the wall to keep from another ignominious drift, and tried not to jump when section door locks banged and moved, letting them through to another area, another corridor.