He didn’t know whether he’d helped at all or whether Tabini had come to rescue a rash human or to propose exactly the same things; but Tabini would at least be glad hehadn’t had to get into a verbal brawl with the old man.
Who might well wish the paidhi’s head on the ancestral battlements. Twopaidhiin, infelicitous two, might urge that as a solution.
He kept smiling. He kept smiling as he rescued Jase, who was practically wordless after the event, but who’d responded appropriately during it. He fed Jase a stiff shot of alcohol before putting him in the hands of his security, which gained himthe silence and the window of opportunity to reach Ilisidi.
“Aiji-ma,” he said with a deep bow to her and her chief of security, Cenedi, “aiji-ma, I have an urgent request, a very extravagant request, which I must make of you foremost of all; and also of your grandson. If I have anyfavors unclaimed, hear me at least. I know I am too extravagant. But I have no other resource—as your grandson, having no other resource, came to you under very similar circumstances.”
Ilisidi’s eyes were a record of years lived and intrigues survived. And her mouth quirked in amusement. “You’ve just murdered the lord of the Atageini in his own dining room and wish asylum?”
“Almost,” he said. “Very close, aiji-ma.”
15
Nand’ paidhi,” the Bu-javid operator said. “I can’t establish the connection. One fears—there is some reason beyond a failure of equipment.”
“Thank you, nadi. One believes the same.” He set the receiver back in the cradle and heard distantly in the house the noise of steps on the stone floors of the foyer. Their household was gathering for their departure, unaware of the phone call he couldn’t resist attempting and which he foreknew wouldn’t get through, no more than the rest had.
Baji-naji, chance and fortune, the devils in the design: symbolically they existed somewhere in every atevi building as they did in every design for action. The random numbers of creativity, serendipity or destruction lurked within the rigid system of numbers, and once a design gave them leeway to work, the building tumbled down, a situation acquired additional possibilities, or the world tumbled into a new order of things.
He couldn’t raise the island, let alone get a call through to Toby or his mother’s house.
And that was no equipment failure. That was politics keepinghim from making that call, and like a fool he’d hung up on Toby in their last conversation. Toby had been able to call him, but he couldn’t get past the blockade in the other direction.
Or Toby couldn’t reach him, either.
He’d resorted to sleeping pills since the conversation with the dowager, medications from the island, carefully hoarded since the repair to his shoulder. There’d been, after his brief talk with Ilisidi, a flurry of phone calling and rescheduling legislative meetings, which consumed an entire day.
But, good part of the operation, Jase grew more cheerful—as if the promise he’d been able to keep had gotten him past the depression and the despair. Jase was going to the ocean. He would see the sea. They’d talked last night of fishing, not from Geigi’s port but from a more protected, governmentally owned site on the reserve across the same bay.
“Maybe we’ll have a chance at the yellowtail,” he’d said to Jase, although he was by no means certain the run of those fish would carry within the bay. Among the myriad other things he did keep up with, marine fish weren’t within his field. Toby would have known.
But he couldn’t ask the first question he’d had in years that Toby would have delighted in answering.
So with the appropriate baggage, just as a second dawn was breaking, they were gathering in the foyer for the promised trip—Banichi and Jago, Tano and Algini.
And himself with Jase.
“The baggage has gone, Bren-ji,” Jago said. “The car is waiting.”
Subway car, that was. His security was in a good mood: it lifted his spirits—shifted the world back into perspective. It was an emergency at home, yes; but, dammit, Toby could handle it—Toby was in the city, Toby was at their mother’s apartment. Toby could deal with their mother and Toby didn’t have to call him up and rage at him, when it was the first damn time Tobyhad showed up to handle one of their mother’s crises, be it the divorce from their father, be it the lawsuit over the sale of the mountain cabin, be it aunt Gloria’s husband’s funeral, be it—God knew what. Thistime Toby was on duty and Toby could take care of their mother and the two of them could do the talking they should have done when Toby’d married to get away from the family and run off to live on the north shore having kids and making money hand over fist. Toby was the one she’d held up to him as the model son—well-married, stable, somebody to go visit.
Mother’d held Toby and Toby’s familial situation up to him as the way heought to be, but she’d damned sure phoned the University every time there was a crisis to get Brenacross town. That was understandable, since it was in the same city; but even after he’d gone into the field and the strait had separated them, she’d not phoned the north shore for Toby to disturb his family, come home, and hire a lawyer for her. No, Toby’d had a familyto consider, so she’d phoned the mainland and wanted Bren-dearto drop the governmental crisis and come home and fix things, which sometimes he could and sometimes he hadn’t been able to. For a string of years every time he’d come home on vacation she’d had a crisis specifically designed to get him involved the second he stepped off the plane, to the point where he’d begun to think of marriage to Barb as an insulation.
It had gotten so his nerves were strung tight every time he knew his mother needed something, because needhad gotten to be the relationship between them, and he’d already puzzled out that fact.
It had gotten to be the relationship between him and Barb, too, starting with hisincreasing need for her to meet that plane and shield him from his inability to say no. Someday he’d have married her so he’d have a wife to take precedence over what his mother needed. He’d puzzled that out, too.
Grim thought. Sobering thought. He could get aggravatedwith Barb, but the fact was that his cheerfulness once he’d arranged for Barb to meet the plane, the alternative being his mother arriving with a list of grievances and plans for his time, told him maybe—just maybe—his relationship to Barb breaking down in crisis wasn’t just a case of Barb rushing to Paul Saarinson’s soft life. Barb, being a healthy individual, had perhaps realized she wasn’t up to being a support for a man who got off the plane every few months needingto be reassured and needingto be made happy and not to have troubles poured into his ears during his vacation.
The paidhi’s home life and the paidhi’s love life were neither one damn good and never had been, was the truth. The I-need-youbusiness was no way for any two adults to have a relationship, not mother-son, not man-wife.
Not even brothers.
And it was about time their mother learned to call on Toby, because Toby was the one of her two sons she was going to have in reach; and it was about time Toby learned to define that relationship in a way he could live with. That was the plain truth. And they were all going to have to get used to it. She couldn’t get Bren-dear home again.
Maybe duty to his family said he should resign his professional life, come home and live with it and do all those familial, loyal things, including suffer through a marital relationship that wouldn’t work and a relationship with his mother that wasn’t going to improve, and maybe it would improve his moral character to do that.
But it wasn’t his job. It wasn’t what other, equally important individuals relied on him doing for reasons a lot more important to the world than his personal problems. And he rather thought, as much trouble as it might make for the family, he should tip Toby off to the need-youbusiness and the fact he was entitled to put his foot down and define his relationship with mama otherwise—early—before it ate Toby alive.