Someone had invaded the grounds last night and that someone was dead on the drive, all his plans cancelled. It hardly seemed reasonable that no one knew what they were.
Tano rang for the other servants, and assured him in a low voice that hot tea was forthcoming. “A bath,” Bren said, “if they can.” He didn’t want to deal with Djinana and Maigi right now, he wanted Tano, he wanted people he knew were Tabini’s—but he was scared to protest that to Tano, as if a question to their plans could turn into a challenge to their conspiracy of silence, a sign that the prisoner had gained the spirit to rebel, a warning that his guards should be more careful—
Another stupid thought. Banichi and Jago were the ones he wanted near him, and Tano had said it, his personal needs could only hinder whatever investigation Banichi was pursuing out there. He didn’t needto know on the same level that Banichi needed to be following that trail in the rain, needed to be asking questions among the staff, like how that person had gotten in or whether he had come with the bus or whether Banichi had somehow made a terrible mistake and it was just some poor, mistaken tourist out on the lawn for a special camera angle.
The people on the bus would miss one of their own number, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t one or the other busloads be asking why a seat was vacant, or who that had been, or had it all been machimi, just an actor, all along, an entertainment for their edification? Wasn’t it historic, and educational, here at Malguri, where fatal accidents happened on the walks?
Djinana and Maigi were quick to answer his summons, and hastened him out of Tano’s care and into the drawing room in front of the fire—peeling him out of his damp coat as they went and asking him how breakfast had gone with the dowager… as if no tourists had come in, as if nothing was going on out there, with any possible relevancy to anyone’s life—
Where was Algini? he suddenly wondered. He hadn’t seen Tano’s partner since yesterday, and someone was dead out there. He hadn’t seenAlgini last night, just shadows passing through his room. He hadn’t seen Algini maybe since the day before… what with the incident with the tea, he’d lost his sense of time since he’d left Shejidan,
Tano hadn’t looked worried. But atevi didn’t always express things with their faces. Didn’t always express whal they felt, if they felt, and you didn’t know…
“Start the heater,” Maigi said to Djinana, and flung a lap-robe about him. “Nadi, please sit down and stay warm. I’ll help you with the boots.”
He eased down into the chair in front of the fire, while Maigi tugged the boots off. His hands were like ice. His feet were chilled, for no good reason at all. “Someone was shot outside,” he said in a sudden reckless mood, challenging Maigi’s silence on the matter. “Do you know that?”
“I’m sure everything’s taken care of.” Maigi knelt on the carpet, warming his right foot with vigorous rubbing. “They’re very good.”
Banichi and Jago, Maigi seemed to mean. Very good. A man was dead. Maybe it was over, and he could go back tomorrow, where his computer would work and his mail would come.
With the electricity still out, and tourists coming and going, and the dowager exposing all of them to danger on a morning ride?
Why hadn’tBanichi interposed some warning, if Banichi had any warning there was someone loose on the grounds, and why hadn’tBanichi’s warning gotten to him about the tourists?
Or hadn’t Jago said something to him, yesterday—something about a tour,—but he hadn’t remembered, dammit, he’d been thinking about the other mess he’d gotten himself into, and it hadn’t stuck in his mind.
So it wasn’t their fault. Somebody had been chasing him, and he had walked in among the tourists, where someone else could have gotten shot—if his guards hadn’t, in the considerations of finesse, somehow protected him by being there.
He felt cold. Maigi tucked him into the chair with the robe and brought in hot tea. He sat with his robe-wrapped feet propped in front of the fire, while the thunder boomed outside the window and the rain whipped at the glass, a level above the walls. The window faced the straight open sweep off the lake. It sounded like gravel pelting the glass. Or hail. Which made him wonder how the windows withstood it: whether they were somehow reinforced—and whether they were, considering the wall out there, and the chance of someone climbing it, also bulletproof.
Jago had wanted him clear of it, last night. Algini had disappeared, since before last night. The power had failed.
He sat there and kept replaying the morning in his head, the breakfast, the ride, Ilisidi and Cenedi, and the tourists and Tano, most of all the happy faces and the hands waving at him from the windows of the buses, as if everything was television, everything was machimi. He’d made a slight inroad into the country, met people he’d convinced not to be afraid of him, like the kids, like the old couple, and someone got shot right in front of them.
He’d fired a gun, he’d learned he wouldshoot to kill, for fear, for—he was discovering—for a terrible, terrible anger he had, an anger that was still shaking him—an anger he hadn’t known he had, didn’t know where it had started, or what it wanted to do, or whether it was directed at himself, or atevi, or any specific situation.
It hadn’t been a false alarm last night—or it was, Barb would say, one hell of a coincidence. Maybe Banichi had thought last night he was safe, and whoever it was had simply gotten that far within Banichi’s guard. Maybe they’d been tracking the assassin all along, and let him go off with Ilisidi this morning in the hope he’d draw the assassin out of cover.
Too much television, Banichi had said, that night with the smell of gunpowder in his room, and rain on the terrace. Too many machimi plays.
Too much fear in children’s faces. Too many pointing fingers.
He wanted his mail, dammit, he wanted just the catalogs, the pictures to look at. But they weren’t going to bring it.
Hanks might have missed him by now, tried to call his office and not gotten through.
On vacation with Tabini, they’d say. Hanks might know better. They monitored atevi transmissions. But they wouldn’t challenge the Bu-javid on the point. They’d go on monitoring, once they were alert to trouble, trying to find him—and blame him for not doing his job. Hanks would start packing to assume his post. Hanks always had resented his winning it over her.
And Tabini would detest Hanks. He could tell the Commission that, if they didn’t think it self-serving, and part of the feud between him and Hanks.
But if he was so damned good at predicting Tabini—or reading situations—he couldn’t prove it from where he sat now. He hadn’t made the vital call, he hadn’t put Mospheira alert to the situation—
God, that was stupid. He had the willies over some misguided lunatic and now he saw the Treaty collapsing, as if atevi had been waiting all these centuries only to resume the War, hiding a missile program they’d built on their own, launching warheads at Mospheira.
It was as stupid as atevi with their planet-skimming satellites shooting death rays. Relations between Mospheira and Shejidan hadbad periods. Tabini’s administration was the least secretive, the easiest to deal with of all the administrations they’d ever dealt with.
“Death rays,” Tabini would say, and laugh, invite him to supper and a private drink of the vice humans and atevi held in common. Laugh, Tabini would say. Bren, there are fools on Mospheira and fools in the Bu-javid. Don’t take them seriously.
Steady hand, Bren-ji, like pointing the finger, there’s no difference.
Good shot, goodshot, Bren…
Rain… pelted the window. Washed evidence away. Buses rolled away down the road, the tourists laughed, amazed and amused by their encounter.
They hadn’t hated him. They’d wanted photographs to prove his existence to their neighbors…
“Nadi,” Djinana said, from the doorway. “Your bathwater’s ready.”