The woman just stared and backed away a step, and a second, and ran. Jago had a gun out, but Kaplan put himself in the way, wide-eyed and horrified.
“Cousin,” Kaplan said, as if that explained everything.
“How many cousins do you have?” Bren asked, and himself restrained Jago with a signal.
“Never counted” Kaplan said, and tugged at his sleeve, taking them in the opposite direction, and then into a doorway they hadn’t used before.
It led to another corridor, another route. The feeling was coming back to Bren’s hands, and they burned. His face burned from the recent cold, and his lungs felt seared. He’d never breathed such air, not even on Mt. Adams’ snowy slopes, and he heaved a dry cough, trying to smother it.
The next section door and two more had them turned about again, and the fourth set them out in a transverse corridor.
“That’s it,” Kaplan said, “that’s yours, got to go.”
“You wait a second,” Bren said, and caught him by the sleeve. “Is that our door, Jago?”
“Yes,” she said, and in a moment more it opened, their own team having spotted them by some means he had no knowledge of. He let Kaplan go, gave him a pat on the shoulder, and Kaplan hurried back the way they’d come.
The door sealed them in, safe, and Jago a damned lot happier.
“We survived,” Bren said, the images of the whole chaotic trip jostling each other in his mind. It was incredible that that dark cold interior existed, but they had been there, and now were here, and Ramirez was alive and the word was spreading.
It wasn’t the candies that kept Kaplan on their side, he strongly suspected that. It wasn’t only the candies that might seduce the likes of Johnson and his friends. He wasn’t sure, in a human way, whether Kaplan and Johnson and the rest wanted to follow the logic of what they were doing all the way: he’d had Jase’s word for the mind-set of the ship-folk, that rebellion wasn’t in their vocabulary. But rebellion by indirection, rebellion by doing uncooperative things, a passive rebellion against the powers that literally regulated their breath and sustenance… there might be a will to do slightly illicit things against a slightly illicit authority.
Damned right.
No alarm had rung when that crewwoman had reached her destination. She hadn’t reported her cousin. Humans on the ship did understand a sort of man’chi not unlike that on the island.
It was the first time he’d truly warmed to these folk. It was the first window of understanding he’d had.
“What’s in the adjacent rooms?” he asked Jago that evening.
“These have been vacated,” Jago said, “so we believe, when Johnson-nadi and the others left. They set up a bug next door. Banichi removed it, among his first actions. No one else has come there.”
A buffer zone, then. He sat down with his computer and called up the map, and tried to figure for himself what area they might take for themselves if they pulled Kroger and her team in.
“There are a good many of Jase’s associates we have never heard from,” he said to his security team later. “And Mercheson-paidhi. I believe that the Ramirez matter is spreading through the crew quietly. We haven’t ever heard from Jase’s mother or from Mercheson or her mother or any relatives. One can’t predict among humans, but the man’chi is strong in such associations, and this silence in itself indicates trouble.”
“Restraint, nadi Bren?” Tano asked.
“Kaplan-nadi has many cousins. We met one such in the corridor, whom you wisely did not shoot, Jago-ji. I think these are all potential allies. The captains who attacked Ramirez must surely hesitate to harm all these people. They cannot simply go shooting every crew member who opposes them. Man’chi binds the crew to obey the captains, for one thing because they have no technical knowledge how to manage the systems without the high officers, and have no productive choice but to let the officers settle their disputes and pretend not to see them. The crew dares not look to us for a solution. But Jase said they had a custom of ignoring high command disputes.”
“Man’chi, and practicality?” Algini asked.
“Deep practicality. Common sense around an environment that has no compromises and takes no votes. I believe I’m beginning to understand Kaplan, even his fondness for sweets. I think he’s allowing us to buy him; I think Johnson outright coming and telling us they’re security is another bid for our attention, and our purchase. They don’t know how to approach us, without some excuse. And I think they plan to plead naive stupidity if caught.”
His atevi hearers were both amused and aghast. “Truly, nand’ paidhi?” Nojana asked diffidently.
“I do think it. I think they have to have an excuse. More, I think they have to have an excuse in order to persuade themselves they’re not doing something bad.”
“They wish to be bribed?”
“I think they do. I think I understand. They want, individually, to see us, to assess our behavior, our patience, our tolerance of them… in short, they’ve never seen atevi up close, they’re scared, but they’re letting themselves grow familiar. At any given wrong move, they could turn on us and draw weapons, but right now I think they’re edging toward believing we’re not that scary, that they might deal with us. In a certain way I think they’re trying to figure out whether Ramirez is, after all, right about dealing with us, and one must respect their courage and common sense in trying to make that assessment. I’m not sure they’vethought it all out. But I think there’s a real curiosity about the candy… about the planetary resources… and about us. In a certain sense, food is a very basic, very instinctive gift of goodwill. And they’re taking it. They’re approaching us. They’re supporting Ramirez.”
His security looked at him as if he and his entire species had run mad in the streets.
“They test whether they maintain man’chi to Ramirez?” Jago asked, always the cleverest of his staff at seeing through human behavior. “They test feelings?”
“Something very close to that” Bren said. “In this case there’s less intellectual about it than usual. This is far more instinctive… far more simple, in many regards. These people have been left no way to choose their leaders, but they arechoosing, I’m relatively sure of it. And every one of them is taking a chance.”
“Of harm?”
“Of harm to the entire ship. The power structure isn’t instinctive, not wholly; it’s pragmatic. And it’s functioned against their will. I believe a good many of the crew hope Ramirez will survive, but they have no confidence in his state of health; they act as if it’s a doomed cause, but not one they’ve utterly given up. Banichi didn’t say, but I think some of them are sheltering him, and I would not in the least be surprised to learn that Jase and Mercheson and various others related to them by kinship are in on it. Subterfuge and indirection, it well may be mediated by kinship. The captaincyseems to pass down by kinship instead of merit.”
“Who are Ramirez’ kin?” Jago asked, straight to the point. “Is it not Jase? Do I not recall Ramirez has no descendants?”
“Jase. Jase and Yolanda. Ramirez’s wife died long ago. Her network remains attached to him, one gathers. Jase tried to lay out the relationships for me. Until Kaplan and his cousins, I confess I didn’t understand all he might have been saying.”
Jase and his family chart, he began to think, might be more important to them than their map of the station and its workings.
“The crew has no weapons,” Algini said.
“None.” They had been over that with Jase, and as far as he had ever learned, it was the truth. The crew had no access to hand weapons. Those existed, but the officers had the keys, and the resistance to shooting one’s cousins and officers, one could only guess. “But wehave Ramirez, if we can keep him alive. I think there’s good reason not to bring him here. The crew has to believe he still has authority, not our authority: hisauthority. If he dies, any hope they have of a captain of his disposition dies with him. And the fourth captain, the one we’ve not met or dealt with, thatcaptain is our problem.”