“ Will one wish another pass, nandiin?” That was the co-pilot. “ We have the sky to ourselves.”
“No, thank him, nadi,” Bren said, and Tano, standing near the intercom, relayed that information.
“ We will land, then, nandiin. Please seat yourselves comfortably and safely.”
Bren sat down and belted in. Jase fastened the belt and drew a long breath.
“Routine landing,” Bren said, and talked Jase a second time through the process of landing, and whyplanes stayed in the air and how they got onto the ground.
Jase seemed very much more relaxed, just three deep breaths as they were approaching touch-down, and a grin as they did so exactly when Bren predicted.
“A lot better than parachutes, nadi,” Jase said. They’d begun with a scared, withdrawn passenger and ended with one smiling and joking—one who’d been able to look out his window even during a steep bank, only occasionally clinging to the seats.
This was a good idea, Bren thought, this trip was a very good idea.
The plane taxied to the terminal of what was, for defense and seasonal tourist reasons, a fair-sized airport. The transport vans were waiting.
“We’re here, nadiin-ji!” Bren said cheerfully, and was not quite first on his feet, but close.
Vacation, he was thinking. It wasn’t quite the hoped-for chase after yellowtail, but Banichi was right: Geigi’s estate, just on the south shore of Onondisi Bay, was peninsular, and going there at this precise moment might send some unwanted signal and interfere with the aiji’s politics with that region.
Taiben, the aiji’s summer retreat, the other possibility—that was in the Padi Valley, and that was, again, politically sensitive right now, as well as dangerous, being in lady Direiso’s own front yard.
There’d been Malguri, which he’d most wished, but that was three hours by air into a set of provinces seething with intrigue.
So the aiji’s lands, meaning the public defense zone near Mogari-nai and the Historic Site near Saduri Township, that became the fallback. They couldn’t use the public resorts. The good one got out of being an atevi lord was mostly limited to a lot of ancestral knick-knacks you didn’t own, by his own observation; and the bad one got was that the more politically active you were and the more resolutely you did your job for the people you represented, the more true it became that you couldn’t ride regular airlines or go into pretty public resorts like Onondisi or go into the tourist restaurants he’d dearly love to go to—if he weren’t the paidhi-aiji, and a human to boot.
But, well, rank had other privileges. Supper tonight with Ilisidi could make up for the restaurants.
They didn’t have to gather up baggage. That was another good part of being lords. They let their security handle it and the moment the ladder was in place and the moment Banichi had been down to make direct contact with Ilisidi’s people, who were in charge of ground security, they could go.
“I’m fine!” Jase announced as they went out into the brisk, sea-charged wind. Bren went down first, to meet Banichi at the bottom and to catch Jase if he tripped. But he felt the ladder shake and looked back to find Jase had seized the safety rail in his accustomed death grip and watched Jase enthusiastically and adventurously come after him without waiting for the ladder to stop rocking.
Not to push the point by lingering in the open air, Bren went to the nearest van of the three as the driver, who was not commercial hire, but one of Ilisidi’s ‘young men,’ as she called them, opened the door. Bren ushered Jase in, got in ahead of Banichi, and Jago brought up the rear and shut the door as she hit the seat.
The van started up immediately and whipped around a tire-squealing one-eighty turn toward the gate.
Like a van ride he’d taken once before to visit the dowager. He started to protest the driver’s recklessness, but—they were in Ilisidi’s territory now, and it was what he’d bargained for. The driver wouldn’t kill them; he knew that now—having been through far worse; and Jase looked startled and apprehensive, but looked at him, too, for reassurance. So he grinned and Jase tried to mirror the expression.
Roads across the countryside weren’t approved tech, except on a local basis. There was definitely rail service to Saduri Township, he’d checked that out, but it didn’t serve the old fortress, as such service didn’t serve, specifically, twoof the aiji’s estates, he’d learned; one of those two was Malguri, and the other was Saduri. No rail went up to the big dish at Mogari-nai; and it didn’t go to the Saduri Historical Site, either.
So he’d understood there’d be a drive to get there; and he could have expected the driver would do what this driver was doing.
The van left the maintenance road and whipped off on a gravel spur that led around a grassy hill, and around another, and generally up, at a ferocious pace.
Jase looked less reassured at the sound of gravel under the wheels and at the feel of the van skidding slightly on the turns. He grabbed at the handles and the window-frame.
“Is this dangerous?” Jase asked. “Is someone after us?”
“Oh—” Bren began to say lightly, and settled for the truth with Jase. “This driver is having a good time. Relax.”
Banichi grinned broadly. “He’s not lost a van this spring.”
Jase did know when he was being made fun of. He gave a sickly grin to that challenge to his composure and clung white-fingered to the handholds.
“I’d have thought someone from up there,” Bren finally said over the noise of the van, “would be used to motion.”
“I am!” Jase retorted. And freed a hand to gesture an erratic crooked course. “Not—this motion.”
It did make sense. Jase’s body didn’t know what to expect and Jase’s stomach kept trying to prepare for it, to no avail.
It was for the same reason, he supposed, that the subway made him anxious. And that the plane did. He watched Jase’s facial reactions, the twitch as a swing of the road brought light onto his face and immediately after as a stand of young trees brought a ripple of shadow and a series of flinches and blinks, all exaggerated.
So what wouldit be like, Bren asked himself, to live in a building all his life, and have all the light controlled, the flow of air controlled, the temperature controlled, the humidity controlled, every person you metcontrolled; and the whole day scheduled, the horizons curving up and movement entirely imperceptible? He had as much to learn about Jase as Jase did about the world; Jase was the book he had to read to gain knowledge about the ship—which he needed to know, and his professional instincts had turned on in that regard, to such an extent he told himself he should abandon curiosity and track on his other job, to reassure Jase.
But Jase had reacted uncertainly to change in the apartment; he added up that maddening insistence on rising at exactly the same moment, on breakfast at the same time every morning, and reckoned that change, as an event, was notsomething Jase was used to meeting. He’d dealt with Jase and Yolanda both on their last exposure to the world when they were still in a state of shock from landing and when their passage under open sky to the safety of Taiben lodge had been brief, ending in the safe confines of the Bu-javid—at least Jase’s had ended there.
And now, right before his eyes, that twitchiness was back: that extreme reaction to stimuli of all sorts, even when Jase was trying to joke about it. Randomness of light and sound had become a battering series of events to senses completely unused to interpreting the nuances.
He rated himself tolerably good at figuring out what went on in atevi, and he could make a guess, that the way a baby overreacted once it had started being startled, it must seem to Jase as if there wereno order and no recognizable logic in the sensations that came at him. Jase had that look in his eyes and that grip on the edge of his seat that said here was a man waiting now for the whole world to dissolve under his feet.