There was a long pause. Several breaths. Jase never varied his position otherwise. “Old seals on the station. Dangerous place. That’s all. Hard vacuum. My father”—several more breaths, eyes fixed on the ceiling—“was blown out into space. That’s all. He was working, and the seal went.”
“It was fast.”
“Yeah. It was.”
“So how’s your mother taking it?”
“Oh—all right.—I mean, she’s upset, what do you expect? And I can’t do anything.”
“I can understand that well enough.”
Jase still lay with his hands under his head, looking at the ceiling.
“So—is your mother off work, nadi, or working, or what?”
“Working.”
“No trouble your reaching her this time? I hope there was no trouble.”
“I had no trouble.” Jase moved his arms, slowly got to his feet. The hair he professed drove him to distraction fell around his face. He shook it out of his way and raked it back. It fell around his ears, on its way to respectable atevi length, but not there yet. “Stupid accident, that’s all. You can’t stop something like that. Can’t plan.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s true.”
“Can you arrange—for me to visit the sea, nadi?”
He didn’t want to point it out, but Jase had had trouble walking when he’d first landed. Jase had had trouble with orientation, particularly with peripheral vision. He wouldn’t see an atevi doctor. He said the world had no edges.
And described, later, a world of only corridors, and small rooms.
“I know a place,” Bren said, thinking that lord Geigi would be surprised to have two guests.
But he didn’t think Jase was ready for a boat. Not quite.
“When? Soon?”
“Soon.” But the world came crashing in. In all its complexity. “Yes.—But there’s something first. Something we have to do. Something you have to do for me. Please.”
“What?”
“There’s a visitor coming. A very important visitor—to see the apartment.”
“Why?” Jase asked. “What?”
“One night. He’ll look at the place. And go. He’s very strict. Very kabiu. The lord who owns this place, understand? It’s important we impress him as proper people.”
“And you want me not to make a mistake.”
“Simply put, yes.”
“Do I get my ocean?”
“If you do that, I’m pretty sure about the ocean.”
“I’ll do it. For that.”
Maybe, Bren thought, it was just something he’d said to himself up in the heavens that he wanted to see. Maybe it was something his father had said he’d like to see. Jase gave him no clue at all.
But Jase was being reasonable, at cost, he could see that. Jase’s color wasn’t good. Jase’s hands shook when he went to the bureau and tried to put his own hair in order.
“Shall I call for tea,” Bren said, “and we can sit and talk and I can explain about the visitor, and the situation?”
“Yes.” Jase transited back to Ragi, and secured his hair, as best it could be without elaborate effort, braiding it from high up and fastening it in a simple clip. “Please do, nadi.”
Impeccable manners. Impeccable, almost, accent. Jase had been practicing.
Bren went to the hall, found madam Saidin andTano not far away, and said, “Tea, please, nadiin-ji,” trusting it would arrive quickly.
The conversation went amazingly easily—at least, Jase listened soberly, objected to nothing, questioned for understanding, and called nothing unreasonable.
In some measure it was sad to see Jase attempting to follow all of it, knowing the load he was under, and knowing how his tendency was to look for absolute orders. In some measure, Bren thought without saying so, he did provide a framework for Jase’s expectations: how to dress, what to say.
But now it had to be dealing with an atevi lord and a lady who was that lord’s chief rival; and how to deal in public and formally with the aiji of Shejidan, whom Jase had met in far less formality, among the first people on earth he had met, with a wildfire burning across the horizon, water pouring into his descent capsule, and the whole world in upheaval.
But Jase brightened when he turned the talk then toward lord Geigi’s balcony—seemed a little taken aback by the description of battling a fish and then eating it; and of a fish big enough to chase lord Geigi’s boat crew across the deck.
But Jase said then he wanted to look at the map in the office, and they walked back to that room, at the rear of the apartment and next to the steel security barrier, to see where they were, and where the sea was, and Mospheira, and where the South Range of Taiben was: the South Range, one of the vast hunting reserves, was where his capsule had come down, and Jase was able to point out that spot on the wall map. He could find that.
Then he wanted books on the sea. Bren took him to the lady Damiri’s library.
“How is he?” Banichi asked him at one point when he was outside and Jase was in the library pulling down books and going through references. “What is he looking for?”
Bren drew a deep breath, having understood, somewhat, this redirection of emotions, but finding it difficult to render into Ragi, particularly for Banichi, who tended to shoot down air castles, even as atevi defined them.
“It’s a human reaction,” he said to Banichi quietly. “He’s suffered a great blow. His emotions are unreliable. Possibly he’s looking for something to distract his thoughts toward something without emotional context, perhaps something approved by the deceased person, perhaps only a personal ambition.”
“To view the ocean.”
“From space, the ocean-land boundaries and the polar caps would be the only easily visible features. I suppose he might have wondered about it.”
“And clouds,” Banichi said. Space photography had made its way into atevi hands even before the War of the Landing. All sorts of space photography had come out of the files prior to the release of the first rocket technology, preparing, the paidhiin had said, the expectation of space travel, never the concept of the rockets in war, directing the psychology of a species toward the sky, not toward armament. It had been a narrow thing for the human race, historically, so the records said; and atevi so readily converted technology to self-defense.
“Many clouds,” Bren agreed.
“So he wishes to go to visit lord Geigi?”
“Something like,” Bren said. “I think he might be ready to make such a venture.”
“He became ill from looking at the sky, Bren-ji. Will it not afflict him again once he goes into the open?”
“I think it’s important to him to prove to himself he won’t be ill.”
“Ah,” Banichi said.
“I’m not sure I understand, myself, Banichi. Please don’t believe I have a perfect idea what’s passing through his mind. But it might mark a place of new beginnings for him, new resolve to do his job.—And it might be time for him to try something difficult. If he’s to be a paidhi in fact, and interpret atevi to the ship-folk, I think it important for him to understand the way atevi look at the world. If security can accommodate it. I promisedhim, Banichi. I assumedsecurity could accommodate it.”
“Certainly a consideration. But there are places of safety, well within perimeters we can guarantee. I think one could find such safety. But Geigi—I am less sure.”
“Would you find that out, nadi-ji, what might be safe?”