Some optimist among the crew or the techs had arranged flowers in a well-secured vase on a well-secured shelf below that emblem—life and welcome, that arrangement meant; but one blossom came askew during undock, leaving good fortune momentarily adrift.
And in that extremity, young Cajeiri undertook a zero-g mission, on permission from his great-grandmother to chase it and restore it to its proper and fortunate place in the arrangement. It gave a too-well-behaved young lad at the bitter end of his patience a chance to be up and moving, now that the shuttle was out and away. He succeeded quickly, a triumph, then took his time returning to relative safety in the seats, to everyone’s relief. Cajeiri’s spirits had risen, at least enough for him to become a modest worry to his elders.
The steward then began to serve tea, a fussy, acrobatic operation, unusually early service insofar as anything in the shuttle passenger program had had time to become usual. And once they had had their tea, up front in the cockpit, the pilots greatly yearned, one was coyly informed by said steward, to hear any information they were willing to give them about their voyage to the stars.
“There were foreigners!” Cajeiri exclaimed immediately, brightening, by no means a report designed to settle the crew’s curiosity, and breaching security at a stroke. Baji-naji, from order to potential chaos, in the person of a young boy. “They were nearly as tall as we are! And huge around!”
The steward was, of course, entranced, and at once had a thousand questions more—information for the pilots, of course.
So Ilisidi’s second-senior bodyguard went forward to the shuttle cockpit to regale the whole crew with the details, by the dowager’s personal dispensation, all with, of course, personal cautions against spreading the gossip. In this elite and security-conscious crew it was even foreseeable that the information would stay contained—and Ilisidi’s young man remained up there for some time, doubtless questioned and requestioned until he was hoarse, and very likely enjoying his hero’s status, the shuttle crew with their yearning for information on their voyage and everything that was out there, and the young Assassin just as anxious to understand the shuttle’s workings and to find out in some detail how the space program had survived the troubles on the planet…
And whether they had allies still in any position of authority—such, at least, were the questions Bren himself was sure he would ask, and might yet ask, if the young man didn’t come back with the answers. Certainly information flowed both ways up there, and meanwhile Banichi and Jago, with their own electronics, became very quiet, staring straight ahead of them, of course following all of it from their seats, and absorbing everything.
The details of the shuttle’s operation, however, were not among the things Bren needed to ask anyone. Having translated the shuttle plans and most of the flight operations manual, with the assistance of his staff, and having trained the translators who had mediated the finer details of the actual operations, he knew the facts down to the length of the Jackson runway; he knew that it was 20 feet shorter than the original plan, he knew the names of the grafting bastards responsible, and he really had not rather think about that old issue right now.
He decided to divert himself with his computer, with, eventually, a nap, at least as well as a sane man could sleep on a vessel hurtling deeper and deeper into the gravitational grip of a very unforgiving planet toward a runway that wasn’t quite what they’d designed.
A shuttle with all its fail-safes was still better than parachutes, he reminded himself. He had, at least, never landed the way Jase had, and the way his ancestors had landed on Mospheira in the first place—by parachute, in a little tin-can capsule. For their ancestors it had been a one-way trip, when they’d rebelled against the iron rule of the old Pilots’ Guild and decided to commit themselves to an inhabited planet, since by then it had been well-established the ship was not going to find its way back home at all. Phoenix, the same ship on which they had just voyaged, had dropped into some anomaly of space-time, or suffered some never-revealed malfunction, and popped a station-building expedition out first of all at a deadly white star. They’d gotten away from that by the skin of their teeth, only to be told, by the ship’s masters, that they had to refuel and commit to more voyages, after which, they began to comprehend, their use was to refuel the ship again and again—living a graceless, gray existence under the rule of a band of men who’d, yes, somehow survived the previous disasters, men who’d somehow not volunteered to sacrifice a thing when the better elements of the crew had given their very lives to get them free and out to this lovely green world and safer sun.
The colonists, finding there was an alternative where they’d arrived, had desperately flung themselves onto an innocent planet whose steam-age civilization naïvely assumed they’d arrived from their moon… had assumed, assumed, assumed, until they went to war with each other and every human still alive ended up in an isolated enclave on the island of Mospheira.
Hence his job, when he wasn’t being Lord of the Heavens. Hence the paidhiin came into being, the translators appointed to interpret not only words, but psychology—to prevent two species who’d originally thought it was easy to understand one another from pouring their technology and their concepts into each other’s heads until the system fractured.
One of a long line of paidhiin who’d served the system, trickling humanity’s advanced technology into atevi hands at a sane pace, trying to make humans live lightly on the planet and not offend atevi beliefs and traditions—he’d tried, at least, to keep the faith.
But had he?
Therein lay the guilt… guilt that in recent hours burrowed itself a wider and wider residency under his heart, laying its foundations the moment he’d heard Tabini had gone down, and growing to a whole suite of rooms when he’d heard Geigi lay out the reasons for Tabini’s downfall. Too much tech and too much change too fast had brought—not war with humans, this time—but an internal calamity to atevi, the fall of the aiji who’d pushed, lifelong, for more tech, more tech, more tech… and made too-quick changes in the atevi way of life to take advantage of it. At some point the paidhi was supposed to have said no, and not to have been so accommodating. That had been his job, for God’s sake. It was why all prior paidhiin had not been so snuggly-close with the atevi leadership. Tabini had had the notion of making his people the technological equals of humans in their island enclave—a technological equality they’d all conceptualized as a good rail system, air traffic crossing the continent, maybe even a computer revolution, in his lifetime.
But then long-lost Phoenix had shown up from deep space, and ownership of the abandoned space station had become an issue. Tabini had been determined to secure it for his own people, entirely understandable, and he had been convinced that if humans got it up and running first they’d never relinquish it to atevi, no matter the justice of their claims. He’d had to move fast to take over leadership not only of the space station… but of the crisis humans confessed they’d precipitated out in deep space.
Step by step, Tabini had waded into hotter and hotter water, all for the sake of protecting his people from the changes humans brought, and the paidhi, who should have said no, wait—stop—
To this hour the paidhi just couldn’t figure what else he could have done.
Average atevi, who, like Banichi, had only just figured out the earth went around the sun, or why they should care, had suddenly become critical to the planetary effort to get back into space. The mainland had the mineral resources and the manufacturing resources to do what the ship could not: supply raw materials and workers to get the space station operating again… and, most critically, the planet had the pilots to fly in atmosphere, an art the spacefarers had flatly forgotten and had no time to relearn.