Adaran, Adaran was the name, whence it went to larger markets, even to Shejidan itself. If people in the district went visiting, they would walk generally, or take the local bus, which provided social connection for the little association, and that bus might run only twice a day, life proceeding at a slower pace out in the villages. And outside of such buses and one or two trucks such as this one for the whole village, that was the whole need for roads. Such interdistrict roads as existed would parallel the railroad right-of-way, village-to-market roads that were, generally, informally maintained, and persisting so far along the rail as frequent need kept wearing down the weeds.
He knew. He’d once had the job of surveying the rail systems, advising the aiji where expansion would or would not better serve the area… in those ages-ago and innocent days, so it seemed, when rail and a nascent air service was the whole story of atevi and Mospheiran transport. The office of the paidhi had read the histories of waste and pollution, and wanted to avoid the excesses of old Earth, wisely so, considering how passionately atevi felt about spoiling the landscape. The paidhiin of a prior day had advised the aijiin in Shejidan to go on as they had been going before the Landing, to link their provinces by rail, not road, to make orderly, minimal corridors for village-to-town transport that very little disturbed the environment, that kept the little associations as inward-focused as they had begun, above all not sprawling along transportation lines in ways that would absolutely destroy the atevi pattern of life, and with it, atevi social structure. Wise, wise decisions that gave them this little truck, this little-used road.
Circles. Interlocking circles. And no one went far by truck or bus. If they took their little truck out of district, it would look increasingly out of place, the farther it went from its origin. It could by no means serve them all the way to Shejidan. The train was where they were going. And how they were going to get aboard that without a fuss…
“Will we ride the train?” Cajeiri asked, as they bounced painfully about in potholes and what might be ruts, or simply an abundance of rocks amid the gravel. “Are we going to drive all the way to Shejidan?”
“We will take the train, young sir,” Cenedi’s voice said in the darkness. And because there was an obvious next question, for which Cajeiri could be heard drawing breath: “As far as Taiben.”
Taiben, it was. The aiji’s estate. If there was one place they might find trouble, nearly as efficiently as at Shejidan, Taiben was a likely place.
But it was a sprawling estate, almost a province unto itself, a maze of hunting paths and woods in which they might even lose this truck—if they could get fuel enough to get them there. He wished they could do without the train.
“Listen to me,” Ilisidi said, sternly, “listen, great-grandson, and remember a name. Desari. Remember this name, and be in debt to this village. Lord Geigi once rescued this man Desari and his daughter at sea when their boat engine failed, and when they had drifted for days, likely to die. Geigi recommended Desari of Desigien as a name to rely on, since every year that he could, on the anniversary of the rescue, this Desari has sent Lord Geigi a gift, so I have it from Geigi. So the debt remains, until Geigi might call on him. This will discharge the debt to Geigi, and place it on us in his place.”
“On the Ragi.”
“On all the Ragi,” Ilisidi said. “And you must remember it, boy, for another generation, a debt to him, and his whole association. The risk we have asked of them is considerable.”
“Our enemies could see the name on the truck.”
“Exactly so, if we make a mistake, and they will be in grave danger. What is the name, boy?”
“Desari,” Cajeiri said. “Desari. From this coast. From Desigien. But, mani-ma, will this Desari come with us on the train?”
“No,” Cenedi said. “He would be little help.”
“But,” said Cajeiri.
“Give us rest, great-grandson. An honest truck does not jabber as it proceeds along the road. We should be an ordinary truck, full of fish. Who knows who might hear, along the road?”
“Who would be listening, mani-ma?”
“Hush, I say!”
There was silence, then, none of them brooking the dowager’s exhausted annoyance for a very long, bumpy ride. Bren felt himself bruised, his own baggage having gone to cushion Ilisidi, and protected his computer in his arms, which somewhat kept him stable.
There was a whole world of things which, he thought suddenly, no, the boy didn’t automatically know, simply by being born atevi. He’d been very young when he’d been shunted off to Taiben, and then again sent off to his great-great-uncle Tatiseigi’s estate at age five, scarcely informed about the world at large, scarcely philosophical when, scarcely six, he’d gotten a little freedom of the grounds and learned to ride.
That had been a disaster, involving wet concrete and a very large patio, and uncle Tatiseigi’s great indignation.
Then the lad had been whisked off to space to get an education. To get an education, his father had said.
In what? Hacking the ship’s computer? Talking to hostile foreigners? Cajeiri was quite precocious in those regards… but what had they taught him? A fondness for dinosaurs?
They might, if they had been wiser, spent a little more time on the ordinary arts of going unseen, on natural history and most of all on atevi classics, which might have taught him that badgering his great-grandmother was not productive of harmony.
Not to mention the boy’s lack of knowledge about the world itself. How could he know how this truck fit into a village on the coast? How could he know how the roads lay, or how they all went to rail lines?
The boy had, literally, dropped in out of space onto his own planet, naïve regarding the weather, regarding the geography, naïve in many ways regarding Ragi rural society, and, the paidhi supposed, ignorant of the fabric of traditional atevi life which ought to trigger appropriate atevi twitches in young atevi nerves—if those nerves hadn’t been jangled by too much sugar and too many humans and no contact at all with the planet. He’d done his most critical growing in a linear human corridor only partially jury-rigged into a dwelling of atevi pattern. He’d entertained himself with movies and cultivated human children. The atevi world—it had its rhythms, its seasonally proper foods, its rules of etiquette and ethics, all the social graces that appeased volatile tempers and stiff regional pride. The boy had had the dowager to hammer the traditional courtesies and social conventions into his head, but had the nerves ever gotten triggered in the right ways, at the right times, in the very basic sense?
One could have a very deep unease, given what Cajeiri didn’t know, what they’d robbed him of, in taking him to space. The boy had no ingrained concept of how profound the bond had been between Geigi and that fisherman, the situation that allowed this debt to be passed up the lines of man’chi, from Lord Geigi to Geigi’s lords. Up, in the direction of wealth and ability—but never down, onto the shoulders of a poor man, who could discharge his debt by convincing his village to lend a truck.
But obligating the lord forever. And thence never to be discharged. That had been what Ilisidi had been trying to be sure of—that the young lord would know that name, remember the debt in his own generation, if hers failed that man. That was what the paidhi dimly grasped.
But had the boy? Cajeiri had sunk into quiet, and probably, in such silent times—Bren feared—was remembering the ship, not his uncle Tatiseigi’s estate, not the Bu-javid, or Taiben. He was, one very much suspected, thinking about the human company he’d left behind, since he had few enough memories of any other associations.