“I anticipate a quiet flight and a quiet ten days, nadi,” Bren said to the pilot and co-pilot, “and I hope you and your associate have ample time for a little fishing yourselves. I’ve expressed the wish the staff could lodge you at some place that would allow it for however long you have at leisure.”
“Nand’ paidhi, they have done so, and we thank you, nand’ Jase as well.” This with a nod toward the seating where Jase had belted in.
“Nadi,” Bren said in ending the conversation, and went back to sit beside Jase. He didfeel better now that things were underway. His blood was moving faster with their stirring about, and the slight headache was diminishing: possibly the sleeping pill had worn off.
“It’s excellent weather for flying. A smooth flight, nadi. Sun shining. Calm air.”
“Yes,” Jase said. It was a word. It was a response. Then: “Too close to the planet,” Jase muttered, then grinned; and Bren obligingly laughed, in the understanding both that it was an uneasy joke and that Jase had, finally, just been able to get a few words assembled into an almost-sentence of Ragi this morning. After twenty-odd hours of intermittent wordless moments and frustration, losing all confidence in his ability to speak the Ragi language, Jase was showing signs of pulling out of it—phase two of his mental break, a tendency to suspect all his word choices and to blow his grammar—which, coupled with fears of insulting the atevi staff, wasn’t improving his confidence. But it was textbook psychological reaction. Jase had been vastly embarrassed, humiliated, terrified of very real diplomatic consequences at the same moment he was put on national television—at his worst moment of personal crisis. It wasn’t just the illusion of helplessness language students went through, it had been real helplessness, and real danger, and thank God, Bren thought, they’d had the dowager there, and an understanding security, and Damiri. Also thank God, Tatiseigi was no fool.
And meanwhile Jase, being around staff who’d forgive him his mistakes, was trying again, understanding again, and regaining a little shaky confidence in himself.
“ Please belt in, nadiin,” the co-pilot said over the intercom. The engines roared into action.
And as the plane began to taxi toward the runway, with security taking their seats and belting in around them, Jase’s knuckles were white on the armrests.
Couldn’t fault that reaction. He’d explained to Jase andYolanda the physics by which planes stayed in the air during their initial flight to Shejidan, but there was so much new then and since that he wasn’t sure how much had stayed with him. They’d come from a rough landing on the Taiben preserve, an overnight at Taiben only sufficient to catch their breaths, then a rail trip ending in a hasty boarding of the aiji’s plane to fly them all to the international airport at Shejidan.
After they’d landed at Shejidan, there’d been no hesitation: the aiji’s guards had packed Yolanda and Deana Hanks both onto a second, atevi-piloted commercial plane bound for Mospheira, and hastened him and Jase onto the van and then into the subway station on a fast trip to the Bu-javid, to enter the aiji’s very careful security arrangements, all to assure—in a world seething with change and disturbance at that moment—that nothing befell the two paidhiin.
It hadn’t afforded Jase much time to learn about the world. And Jase had been disoriented and more focused on the fact that he and Yolanda weren’t going to find communication free or easy. Possibly they hadn’t known it would be that way.
Possibly Deana Hanks, sitting near them on the plane, saying that he’d be a prisoner in Shejidan and that they’d deceive him, had set Jase up for far too much suspicion. He’d toldJase that Deana was a liar. But Jase might not have believed him that day.
And as he explained the full extent of what Deana had done and why, Jase’s comment had been, Neither one of us will have it easy, either, will we?
Half a year ago.
Just about half a year ago. Yolanda had gone away in a van along with Deana, bound for a plane nearby; Jase had gone with him and Banichi and Jago in another one, bound for the subway, and that had been it, last contact, except the phone calls.
Jase had been so scared in those first days, so very scared—of the staff, of security, of the devices that guarded the doorway. Of the simple fact they found it necessary to lock the doors of the apartment.
Of the simpler fact of thunder crashing above the roof. He remembered.
The plane rushed down the runway, lifted, and a moment later Jase was trying to improve the plane’s angle by leaning as it banked for the west.
Bren kept himself deadpan and didn’t say a word about what was probably an instinctive reaction. One would think a man from weightless space would have overcome such tendencies. But Jase said his ship made itself gravity the same way the station did, so Bren supposed Jase wasn’t used to being without it.
The plane retracted the trailing edge flaps. Jase was still white-knuckled and had looked askance thus far at every noise of the hydraulics working, from the wheels coming up to the slats coming back. This was the man who’d boarded a capsule and let a crew shove him into space in free fall toward a parachute drop into the planetary atmosphere.
On the other hand… Jase said very little about that trip down. Jase had waked now and again with nightmares, startling the staff, and he had once remarked that the parachute drop had perturbed him. He hoped the trip back into space once they had the ship, Jase had said to him very early on, would be a good deal more like the airplane ride to Shejidan.
“You know,” he remarked to Jase, who, after ten minutes at least and almost up to cruising altitude, hadn’t let go the seat arm, “planes don’t often fall out of the sky. They tend to stay up. Airfoil. Remember?”
Jase took several deep breaths. “I’m fine,” he said, in the manner of someone who’d just survived hell. “I’m fine.”
Jase stared straight ahead. There was a lovely view of clouds out the window, but he didn’t look, evidently not trusting the plane would stay level without his encouragement. Jase didn’t look at him, either, and didn’t seem inclined to think about anything but the plane.
Well, there was work he could do while Jase was helping the pilot.
He could unpack the computer. Or he could sit and worry about the situation on Mospheira with the State Department and its windows.
Or the situation in the capital, where shockwaves of the peninsular affair and Tatiseigi’s apparent realignment were still ringing through the court and lords marginally aligned with Direiso were reconsidering their positions—disturbing thought, to have a continent-spanning war going on, and thus far the casualties amounting to one man, a lightbulb, a piece of glassware, and Badissuni of the Hagrani in the hospital for a stomach condition—so that one wondered wasit stress that had sent him there, or had Jago been near his drink?
The ship and probably the man beside him were completely unaware of the struggle except insofar as Jase had had to deal with Tatiseigi.
Well, the island wouldbecome aware of it. With the illegal radio traffic going on, bet that Deana Hanks would become aware of it.
If she could translate assassinationwithout mistaking it for pregnant calendar.
Banichi and Jago were meanwhile taking great care to have him apprised of what was going on, after, presumably, some shaking at high levels had gone on in the Messengers’ Guild. The information delivered with their supper last evening had been an intercepted radio message on the north coast, up by Wiigin, where they were notgoing, a message which—laughably under less grim circumstances—purported to be between atevi, when clearly only one side was atevi even by the timbre of the voice, let alone the vocabulary and syntax errors.
The fluent side of the transmission had discussed at great length the situation with the assassination of lord Saigimi. It had claimed lord Tatiseigi had made the television interview under extreme threat and it claimed that only fear that the Atageini would be taken over by the aiji had weakened Tatiseigi’s former—the message called it— strong stand for traditional values.