Freely translated, intervene in Ladisiri, aiji-ma, before someone gets killed.
And considering the province was dualistic in philosophy, with no felicitous third, the aiji might threaten to move the research to a rival institution. Thatmight get the attention of the two staffs. Certainly the two senior directors were oblivious to the quarrels, being lost in a probably productive debate on a design that, God save them, might be useful in advanced theory but was not going to fly on this ship.
I also urge, aiji-ma, that the needs of the aeronautical engineers should have precedence over further theoretical research at this time.
I consider this a matter of great delicacy and great urgency, which I shall manage according to your orders or leave to more tactful persons at your discretion.
It was the one truly unmanageable problem they had with the project, give or take a few operational difficulties which were not at that level. This one—the aiji might have to straighten out by calling in the lord of the province and having an urgent discussion with him.
He was, however, finished with letters. He rolled the missive, slipped it into his message cylinder, and sealed it.
And chose to get up and walk the darkened hall to the lighted foyer and security station at the other end of that hall in search of a messenger rather than calling staff to carry it to security. He had no desire to have them disturb Tabini’s evening with it, and he could advise the junior staff to advise Tabini’s staff to that effect. As much as anything, he wanted to see whether the light was showing from under Jase‘’sdoor, to know whether Jase was asleep or awake, and by that—
Well, he didn’t know, entirely, but he wanted to know Jase’s state of mind, whether he was still awake, which might indicate he was still debating matters with himself; and that might indicate he shouldtry to speak to him.
He’d looked in that direction, seeing no light. He looked where he was going and found a towering pair of shadows between himself and the distant foyer light, one very broad-shouldered and notthe willowy silhouette of one of his staff.
He spun and ran for his lighted bedroom and slammed his door. And shot the bolt.
And kept himself from standing in front of the door in doing so. He had a gun. He had it in the bureau drawer. He wasn’t supposed to have it. Surely staff had heard the disturbance. If they were alive.
Came a footstep on the carpet outside. A gentle tap.
“Bren-ji?”
A deep and resonant voice. A familiar voice.
“ Banichi?”
“One is impressed with all your actions, Bren-ji. If you have the gun in hand, kindly put it back in the drawer.”
He had no doubt then it was Banichi. And the other would be Jago.
“Have you been well, nadi?”
“My life has been dull and commonplace.” He said it as a joke, while his heart resumed a normal rate. He thought in the next breath it was true. He was firmly convinced that the day’s events in the peninsula and Banichi’s return weren’t without relationship. And here they were, back with him, and just in shooting the bolt back to let them in he found his hands trembling.
He wanted so much to throw his arms around both of them.
But that would appall Banichi and Jago would be puzzled, and the most wonderful sight in the world to him was as he looked up—considerably—at two atevi in the silver-studded black of the aiji’s personal security.
“One hadn’t meant to alarm the house,” Jago said earnestly.
“Although it would have been better for you to call out an alarm,” Banichi added, “since you were behind the wall—not, one trusts, against the paneled door, paidhi-ji.”
Light had come on in the hall. Servants arrived in nightclothes and robes from the rear halls, along with Algini and a couple of the junior security staff from the other direction in far calmer, knew-about-it attitude. Tano arrived from the same direction as the recently sleeping servants, in a bath towel and carrying his pistoclass="underline" Tano hadn’tknown.
Jase’s door opened. Jase appeared in his robe, behind the line of servants, looking rumpled and confused.
“It’s quite all right,” Tano said to everyone. “It’s quite all right. No alarm, Jasi-ji. Banichi and Jago are back.”
“Have you had supper, nadiin-ji,” Bren asked, instead of hugging both of them, “or should the staff make up something?”
“We ate on the plane, nadi,” Jago said.
“But being off-duty now,” Banichi said, “and being in the place where we will sleep tonight, one mightsit and talk for a bit over a glass of shibei if the paidhi were so inclined.”
7
Jase had gone back to bed and, one hoped, to sleep. Tano and Algini said they had business to attend to.
Business, at this hour, Bren asked himself; and couldn’t decide whether they were occupied with his request for the message trail on Jase’s business, heating up the phone lines to the earth station at Mogari-nai, or whether it was some new duty Banichi had handed them as he came in, but whatever the case, Tano and Algini kept to the duty station.
That left him Banichi and Jago alone for company, and oh, he was glad to see them. Banichi made him feel safe; and Jago—Jago, so proper and so formal—she was the one who wouldtalk to him with utter disregard of protocols, the one who’d try anything at least once, including intimacy with a human. It hadn’t happened: the time had never been right; but it couldhave happened, that was what he didn’t forget.
Tonight was like picking back up as if they’d never left—and yet he had to realize, truthfully, for all the difference they’d made in his life, they’d been with him just that few weeks of the crisis preceding Jase’s landing. Then they’d been gone again, a reassignment, he’d been told, a fact which had saddened him immensely, and put him in a very hard place with Tano and Algini, who were wonderful people—but who weren’t the two he most—
Loved.
Too valuable to the aiji, he’d said to himself: he’d no right to assume he could keep them in his service. He was damned lucky to have Tano and Algini, whom he also—
Liked very well.
Maybe it was just a visit, maybe just a temporary protection to him during the latest crisis. Maybe they wouldn’t stay. He was halfway afraid to ask them. He wanted to, as he wanted to ask Tabini whether he could have them with him permanently, but he felt as if he would be asking for something the worth of a province, and to which Tabini would have to give a state answer, and think the paidhi had gotten just a little forward in recent months.
They sat, they shared a nightcap in the sitting-room—that, and the warm stove with the window open wide to the spring breezes—the extravagance of the rich and powerful, a waste of fuel with which Bren had never reconciled himself morally, and which in prior and simpler days, he would have reported and protested to the aiji.
But there was so much he had never reconciled with himself—morally.
“Dare I ask,” he began with them, “where you’ve been?”
“One might ask, but we can’t say,” Jago said. “Regretfully, nand’ paidhi.”
He’d come very, very close to going to bed with Jago—well, technically, they’d been init, sort of—a fact that had crossed his mind no few times in the last half year, in the lonely small hours of the winter nights. She’d beenthere, in his imagination, at least.