Bren Cameron, paidhi-aiji, under the seal of my office.
Cards were more commonly just the signature, the seal, the ribbon. This one, with a personal message, was calculated to be a face-saving note the boy could take to his father in lieu of the impounded airplane. He hinted that he might intercede, and that Tabini, who had the power to release the plane, might consider forgiveness for a parental request. He didn’t know what more he could do. He folded it and stamped it with his seal, and gave it to Jago to pass on.
“Now,” he said to Jase. “The interview.”
“May I speak with you, nadi.”
“Jago-ji, will you maintain position in the hall for a moment?”
“Yes,” Jago said, and went.
Which left the two of them, him seated, Jase standing. There was a chair by the corner of the desk and Jase sank into it, pale and tense.
“Bren,” he began, in Mosphei’, and Bren kept his mouth shut, figuring that confession was imminent. He waited, and Jase waited, and finally Jase took to hard breathing and helpless waves of the hand, wishing him to talk.
He didn’t. He sat there. He let Jase work through his wordless, helpless phase.
Finally Jase was down to wiping his eyes surreptitiously and shaking like a leaf.
“Going to foul up?” Bren asked with conscious bluntness.
“Yes!” Jase said fiercely, and not another word for another few moments of hard breathing.
“Going to panic?” Bren asked, wary of an unwarned punch and the fragile antiques around them. He nipped out the wick on the wax-jack with his bare fingers, ignoring the sting of fire and hot wax.
Jase didn’t answer him. He stood up, put the wax-jack in the cabinet where it belonged, and walked to the other side of the little space, psychologically to give Jase room.
“They worked quite a while to choose me,” Bren said finally. “I warned you. I was picked out of a large population, because I cantake it. Can’t find a word, can you? Totally mute? Can’t understand half I’m saying?”
Silence from Jase, desperate, helpless silence.
Jase had hit the immersion zero-point. Nocommunication. Total mental disorganization, for the first time, not for the last.
“I want you,” he said to Jase in Ragi, “to go to that interview, say, yes, lord Tatiseigi, no lord Tatiseigi, thank you lord Tatiseigi. That’s a very simple thing. Do you understand?”
A faint nod. The very earliest words were coming back into focus, yes, no, thank you. Do you understand?
“I want you to go to that room. I want you to be polite. Do you understand?”
A nod. A second, more certain nod. Fear. Stark fear.
“I,” Jase said very carefully. “Will. But—”
“But—”
For another moment Jase didn’t—couldn’t speak, just froze, wordless.
And thatwasn’t going to do the program, the aiji, or the interview any good. Jase had reached that point, that absolute white-out of communication students of the language tended to reach in which things didn’t make sense to him, in which the brain—he had no other explanation—was undergoing a massive data reorganization and stringing new cable in the mental basement, God only knew.
He reached for a bribe. The best he had.
“I want you,” he said, “to do this, and I swear I’ll get you to the ocean. Trust me. I asked that before. I’m asking it now.”
There was no answer. But it was more than a bribe. It was close to a necessity. He knewthe state Jase was in, and he was going to sweat until he’d gotten Jase off the air.
“Yes,” Jase said in a shuddery voice.
“Good.” He didn’t chatter. He didn’t offer Jase big words at the moment. He just gestured, got Jase on his feet and to the door and out into the hall.
“Are they set up down there?” he asked Jago.
“Yes,” Jago said, having her pocket com in evidence, and going with them. “As soon as they remove lord Badissuni. The man’s taken ill.”
He was startled. Dismayed. “ Ishe ill?” he asked.
“Quite honestly, nadi.” There were tones Jago took that told him it was the real and reliable truth. “It seems to be stress. They’re taking him to the hospital for the night.”
Amazing what bedfellows politics had made. It made a sensible man careful of making any rash statements about anyone, sharp-edged words being so hard to digest.
Tatiseigi stood in the lights, reporting the absolutely ridiculous and totally true fact of a security alert downstairs, which had turned out to be explained, and somehow never mentioning that the culprit was a young boy from the islands.
Then Tatiseigi wended his way into a report that security had been on edge, and that all threats had been dealt with.
Tabini, who had used the newfangled airwaves quite shamelessly to justify his positions, could take notes from this performance. Tatiseigi, who publicly decried the deleterious effects of the national obsession with television and machimi actors, by what the paidhi had heard, who had spoken against extending television into new licenses, certainly knew the value of it.
“I will tell you,” he began, traditional opening of a topic, and launched into the matter of his restorations, his programs, the history of the Atageini. It was an unprecedented chance for one of the houses. Tatiseigi went on into historic marriages, about the relations of the Atageini to the founders of the capital at Shejidan—and then, with Damiri standing beside him, as Jase also did, he talked about the Atageini “venturing into a future of great promise and adventurous prospect.”
My God, Bren thought, listening to it, looking at the picture it presented to a watching world. It was almost a declaration of support for the space program.
It was damned near a declaration forTabini and againstDireiso and the Kadigidi and all their plots.
Certainly, long and soporific as the history had been, it had snapped to a sharp and dangerous point, right there, in three carefully chosen words: future, adventurous, and prospect, meaning the hitherto changeless and conservative Atageini were shifting into motion; and the so-named prospectwas going to refer in some minds, with Damiri visible before them, to heirs and marriage and the final merger of two Padi Valley families of vast power, a merger that might firm up the political picture very suddenly.
Very frighteningly so for some interests, Direiso chief among them.
Not mentioning Ilisidi with her ties to the distant and often rebel East.
The old tyrant had intended this when he’d headed for that room and the lightbulb blew. He’d been wound up for the bitter necessity of peace with Tabini, consoled by the chance for public glory, and then embarrassed by a human.
Thank Godhe’d gotten this chance, this bit of theater. He could only imagine with what fervor the man hadn’twanted his niece andthe aforesaid human on stage with him.
Bet that a speech of this magnitude had been set in the man’s mind before he came up here and that the alternative was not to give it, and to keep balancing peace and war with Tabini and dancing a slow dance with Tabini’s enemies. He’d suggested a change from the infelicitous venue down at the small dining room, for this area, and no matter how irreverent an ateva grew, there was still that cultural and public reluctance to accept a place or a set-up for an event if that place had been tainted by ill fortune.
Hence this set-up in the state dining room, still within the apartment, proving that humanswere not the infelicitous item, with a human, emblematic of change, right there beside the conservative lord. And with Damiri, the tie to Tabini who might wish to supplant him, standing right there by him, the old man got to the fore of the rebellion in his own house and did it with style—on national television.