“Mine’s the first room,” Jason said to the incomers, indicating the first of the twenty rooms in circular arrangement around the common room: no head, no seniormost: King Arthur’s revolutionary arrangement. It set atevi teeth on edge. To atevi eyes, it was social chaos. War. “Plenty of room, this trip. We have space for more.”
All cheerfulness… which certainly hadn’t been Jase’s mood when he’d gotten the order to fly, and was not what he expected from Jase, not with that haircut.
Bren waited, offered polite, required courtesies. Considered the coat, the performance, because performance it surely was… and God alone knew how Jase had gotten out the door past their major domo wearing that; God knew how he’d saved it from the servants.
But the jacket was a map of explorations. There was an abrasion on the elbow, where Jase had tried to fall in the ocean. Jase had begged, pleaded, and demanded his visit to the ocean—for ulterior motives, as it had turned out. But Jase had fallen in love with the sea.
And what did it say, that, going home, Jase chose that ratty, salt-weakened jacket and a shirt he knew had seen three years of wear? What had Jase been thinking, and what must the servants have thought, when Jase took something to his hair.
“Where’s the shuttle?” Tom Lund was forward enough to ask.
Jason didn’t give them the expected, verbal answer. He walked over to the wall and pushed the button that motored the blinds aside.
The gleaming white, bent-nosed bird out on the tarmac seemed about to lift from the ground of its own volition. It looked small… until the eye realized those service vehicles that attended it were trucks.
“God.” Ben was the only one with a voice. “My God.”
And Kate: “It’s big.”
When ten men set their hands to a rope and pulled in unison, amazing amounts of weight slid.
When an entire civilization worked in concert to accomplish materials and training for a tested design, three years produced—this shining, beautiful creature.
“ Shai-shan,” Bren said, standing behind the group, finding a voice. “ Favorable Wind.” He’d seen Shai-shanfrom framework to molds to first flight, and now Jason’s life, Jason’s departure from the world, rode on these same wings. He’d translated every line of her. He’d all but given birth when she lifted off for her maiden flight, a curious emotion for a maker of dictionaries, a parser of words and meanings.
“Marvelous, marvelous thing,” Kate managed to say, and the group stayed and stared.
Jason had a sense of the dramatic, and of diversion. Bren caught Jason’s eye once for all as the group, Kate last, with a lingering glance at the shuttle, began to disperse, subdued, to make their choice of accommodations.
For a moment Jase gazed back at it, too, then looked at him with a subtle shift of the eyes that indicated the dining recess.
He went, Jason went. Banichi and Jago walked as far as the arch and stopped.
There would not be intrusion.
“So they want you up there,” was Bren’s opener.
“The aiji’s order,” Jason said with a brittle edge. “Packed in an hour. Hurry and wait.”
“I’m sure I’ll learn why” Bren said faintly.
“I’m sure Iwill,” Jase said.
“Damn it.”
“Damn it,” Jase said. That much was Mosphei’, and then, in Ragi: “Sit a moment. The tea’s not bad.”
“Shouldn’t be,” Bren said. “We ordered it.”
So the parting they’d both dreaded came down to a cup of tea from a dispenser, and all Bren could hope for was a quiet, guarded conversation in the dining section. The Mospheirans wandered about. Banichi and Jago were forbidding gatekeepers, not moving a muscle.
“Wish I had answers for you,” Bren said. “I wish I had anyanswers. You don’t know?”
“Just… word came: get up there; and word came from the aiji. Go. Not a choice in the world. I suppose the aiji wanted me here to look over our guests, make sure they didn’t steal the silverware.”
Atevi joke.
“I don’t know,” Bren said. “I swear I don’t know. Didn’t know. Didn’t have any more warning than you did.”
“I believe you.”
There were signs they used for truth, I swearwas one of them. They never lied when they said that to each other, though lying was part of their separate jobs… or had been, and might be again.
“Might still be a weather delay,” Bren said.
“What about the Mospheirans? Did the Guild want them, too?”
“Hell if I know,” Bren said. “Not a clue. They asked to go. Tabini said go now.”
They looked at one another. No sum of the parts made total sense.
“I’ve still not a clue,” Jason said.
“Unless they’re going to spite the Guild,” Bren said, and warmed chilled fingers around a plastic cup. “Tabini might do that.”
“Going to miss you.”
“Get back down here if you can.”
“I’ll try,” Jase said. “Get up there, if you can.”
“I’ll try that, too” Bren said. “If I can find out anything and get a message back to you, when I get to the Bu-javid, I will.”
“Do we everget word?” Jason asked, rhetorical question. He looked badly used, with the uneven haircut, wisps sticking out at angles. God knew what reason… maybe just a fit of anger at an unreasonable order. Jason wasn’t immune to fits of temper.
Neither of them were that.
“Look, tell them that second shuttle won’t make schedule if you’re not down here,” Bren said. “It’s not entirely a lie.”
“I know,” Jason said. “Damn all Ican do. Maybe… maybethere’s a way back. I can’t guarantee it.”
“Ramirez?”
That was the senior captain in the Guild, Jase’s sometime guardian, sometime chief grievance. Ramirez had his good moments and his bad ones.
“I imagine it is. Him, I can talk to.”
“Talk and get back here.”
“I want to.”
“You’re going to have to grow that damn braid again.”
Jase gave a rueful laugh, shook his head, and for the better part of an hour they drank tea and reminisced, mostly about Toby and his boat… nothing about Barb, not a word about Barb, just… “How’s your mother? How’s Toby and all?”
“Oh, fine,” he said.
Remarkable how little now they found to say to each other, when before this they’d had all the time and talked and talked about details, plans, intentions—time shortened on them, three years to recall, no time ahead of them, just a little rehearsing of the schedule for the two shuttles under construction.
“I’ll write tonight,” Bren said, damned well knowing the barriers of administrations, governments, and just plain available space in the message flow up from the big dish that was most of their communications.
Jason was quiet then, subdued, next to distraught. “Tell Tano and Algini I’ll miss them,” the word was. “Tell the secretaries, all the staff.” It achieved a sense of utter desperation. “Banichi. Jago.” He cast a look at them.
“Nadi-ji,” Banichi said.