“Jago-ji. I’m not sure. I don’t knowwho’s holding power. Hanks is using a radio transmitter, on an island. Tellme they can’t find her and stop her. They knowwho’s doing it. There isn’tbut one person on Mospheira who can speak fluent Ragi! They aren’t that stupid, Jago-ji! Stupid, but not thatstupid.”
“If I see her I willshoot her, Bren-paidhi. This is a person doing harm to the aiji’s interests and to you.”
What did he say? Yes?
“I regard you highly,” was what he found to say in Ragi. And what else could he say? Something that evaded moral connection to the ateva she was, and the plain truth and good sense she offered? “You were right, Jago-ji. You were right.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I think so.” She rose and towered against the light, and walked to the door. “Banichi says go to bed and sleep.”
“Does he?” He was surprised. Then amused at the source of it. At both sources.
“Good night, nand’ paidhi.”
“Jago-ji.” He almost—almost—asked her to stay. No matter Banichi’s admonition. But she wouldn’t disobey that order, and he shouldn’t pose that conflict to her moral sense.
“I am also,” she added, “right about Barb-daja. The direction of her man’chi is not to you. She sought another place.—Shall I secure the computer?”
He turned it over to her, and walked out with her. But she went to the left, to the security station, and he went to the right, toward his bedroom, where servants converged and helped him to undress.
Jago’s shots were generally on target. Even the man’chi business, which had no human application.
But it wastrue. He and Barb had done each other a lot of damage, the same as he’d done tonight to Sandra.
Barb hadn’t—hadn’t told him about things. Barb had carried all the load until she couldn’t carry it any more. And he loved her for that.
But she’d acted at the last to save herself. Jago saw that part, too. Practical of Barb. Maybe even essential.
But— dammit—she could have just moved in with Paul. She didn’t have to make it legal. Thatsaid something final to the man she’d been illegal with for years.
It said—a lot of what an ateva had just observed. The drift was in a direction other than toward him.
He sat down on the immaculate bed, and turned out the light and pulled the covers over himself.
He was more tired than he’d thought.
Worried about Sandra. Worried about his mother and his brother, but he’d beenworried so long he’d worn out the nerves to worry. Things just were. Somebody had thrown paint on his mother’s building and the landlord was no doubt mad; it was in the news it was so notorious and somehow the atevi of the Messengers’ Guild who monitored such things hadn’t told Tano who consequently hadn’t told him.
But Banichi indicated they hadn’t told Tabini certain things, too, and that heads were about to be, the atevi word, collected.
He couldn’t help matters. He knew that now. He sank into that twilight state in which a hundred assassins could have poured through the windows and he’d have directed them sleepily to the staff quarters.
13
The television was on its way out. One servant dusted the table on which it had rested for more than half a year in the historic premises, another stood by with a gilt and porcelain vase which would replace it, and a third carried the incriminating modernism out to the kitchen where (rather than send the thing through the dissection of security when it had to come back again) it would hide in the rear of a cupboard of utensils that the Atageini lord would surely not inspect.
The cabinet that held the vegetables, especially the locker that held the seasonal meat, Bren would not lay odds on. Cook hadillicit tomato sauce. Cook had by a miracle of persuasion gotten it through Mospheiran customs (let Cooktalk to George Barrulin in the President’s office, Bren thought glumly: Cook might fare better than he had) and now the offending cans of sauce from a human-imported vegetable had to hide somewhere. One simply didn’t want to put anything through security examination if it could possibly be tucked away out of sight. Everything that went out of the apartment was a risk and a nuisance in its coming back in.
“I have the dread of Uncle opening a linen cabinet,” Bren said to Jase as they stood watching, “and being crushed by falling contraband.”
“They’ve even checked under the bed,” Jase said. “Will he?”
“I don’t think he’ll go that far.” He’d explained to Jase the importance, the deadly fragility of relations between Tatiseigi and Tabini, and the fact that on one level there was amusement in it; and on another, it was grimly, desperately serious, not only for the present, but for all the future of atevi and humans and Tabini’s tenure as aiji. “Ready?”
“ Hamatha ta resa Tatiseigi-dathasa.”
“Impeccable.”
It was. Jase had been working on that tongue-twisting Felicitous greetings to your lordship. Which wasn’t easier because the name was Tatiseigi.
“So,” Jase said. “Where isthe tomato sauce?”
“Cook’s bed.”
Jase’s nerves had been on all day, a skittish zigzag between panic and nervous humor. He laughed, and looked drawn thin and desperate. “I can’t do this. Bren, I can’t.”
“You’ll do fine.”
Uncle Tatiseigi had asked to see bothhuman residents, a point that had come to them by message from Damiri-daja this afternoon, and he had pointedly not told Jase that small fact, not wanting to alarm him. But either the old man was curious, or the old man was going to make at least a minor issue of the human presence, possibly to try to create an incident that would give him points against Damiri—or Tabini.
“Just, whatever he says to you, listen carefully and stick to the children’s language. He won’t attack you if you do that.”
“What do you mean attack?”
“Just stay calm. You don’t argue numbers with children or anyone speaking like a child. No matter if you know the adult version, stick to the athmai’in. Believeme and don’t be reckless.”
“I don’t see how you do this.”
“Practice, practice, practice.” There was a commotion at the front door. He went and looked from the hall, Jase tagging him closely, and met an oncoming wall of atevi with cameras, cable, lights, and all the accouterments of television. The television setwent out as not proper, not kabiu, in an observant household, while the television service for the Bu-javid Archives came into record the reception and to (unprecedented) broadcast live pictures of the restored lily frieze, the emblem of the Atageini, which, damned right, Uncle wanted on national television.
Tabini had discovered how very useful television was: the world in a box, Tabini called it. The little box that makes people think the world and the screen are the same thing. Tabini used it, shamelessly, when he wished to create a reality in people’s minds, and now Tatiseigi took to the medium, at least, no laggard to understand or to use thataspect of technology.
So there was an interview area being set up in the hallway near the historic dining room, so that for an evening the Atageini household would, hosting the aiji andthe Atageini lady closely allied to him and possibly intended to bear Tabini’s heir, be linked in the minds of the whole aishidi’tat, the whole Western Association, meaning the majority of the world.
And public interest? The rare chance to see, on live television, the residential floors of the Bu-javid, inside a historic residence, with all the numbers and balance of arrangements about the rich and famous apparent to the eye?