“You take care,” he said, hearing the vast, cold silence. “Thanks, Toby. Hope we get that fishing trip one of these months.”
He hung up.
No, he couldn’t come back. And he couldn’t let out, even on a shielded line, that he was going up to the station, not before launch. The aiji would announce it when the aiji chose.
The paidhi’s personal crises didn’t figure in the plans. He thought he should call Shawn… but if the other delegation had, or should, call the island, there were issues… a lot of issues.
A hand rested lightly on his shoulder, Jago’s, calling him back to rational thought, reminding him he wasn’t, after all, alone.
“Barb just stepped in front of a bus,” he said. He felt distant from that information, as if it were some line in an entirely unpleasant, grotesque joke. But it wasn’t. He didn’t want to think what kind of damage she’d taken, “Possibly she moved to protect my mother. Likely it was my mother’s inattention to traffic. It’s quite heavy, where they were.”
“One only asks,” Banichi said, who, like Jago, had likely understood a great deal of it… more, because they both knew his mother and knew Toby. “Did you not advise your mother to go home and did you not say to Toby call the hospital?”
“My mother won’t go home,” Bren said. “Nothing we can do, any of us, from here. I have to trust Shawn will do something. That Toby will.”
There were frowns, confusion on their part as to what the proprieties were. As for him, he could scarcely think.
“Nadi,” Jago said, not nandi— my lord—but the common sir. She wanted him to leave the matter. She wanted to take him out of the security station, away from the questions.
She was right; he rose, but he cast a look at Banichi, who’d be in charge, who wasin charge of whatever came through these communication and surveillance boards, and who took his safety and his family’s safety very seriously.
“It was an accident,” Bren said. “It couldn’t be otherwise. The buses are public. They move quickly, even recklessly. It’s notorious.”
“Sometimes there are accidents” Banichi said.
“Sometimes there are,” he said.
He left the security center then, walked back in the halls, to the bedroom that was his, in a place quiet now. The servants had retreated to their own rooms, likely, hoping for sleep; or still working.
Jago followed him, stood a moment while he stared at the wall.
“Stay,” he roused himself to say.
She shut the door behind her. He slid off the robe and went to bed, and Jago put out the main lights.
She came and eased into bed beside him, around him, not a word said.
I don’t love Barb, he wished to say to her, but there wasn’t a word for love, and it didn’t matter to Jago; from her view, since he insisted Barb was still with his mother, Barb was still within his association, marginalized somewhat, but still there.
But if lovewasn’t in the atevi hard-wiring, sexual jealousy wasn’t, he suspected, quite that remote. He couldn’t trust his own human feelings to interpret hers, further than that, and his thinking wasn’t outstandingly clear; neither was his feeling, his emotion… his heart, whatever one wanted to call it.
Was it that way for Jago, too?
He didn’t relax. Couldn’t.
“Shall I turn on the television?” Jago asked him.
“It might be good,” he said. He didn’t want sleeping pills. Couldn’t bring himself to make love on news like that. They put a machimi on… a part of the culture close to religious, but not, having everything to do with the atevi heart, and nothing at all to do with gods.
In the play before them, he guessed the woman would learn her lord had interests conflicting with her sexual partner’s. The uninitiated human, seeing the drama, might expect quite the opposite as would happen, but atevi had no doubt. One only waited for disaster.
He’d send Toby the funds. He had that. He always had that, and Toby knew it. In his absence from crises he could always contribute money for the airfare.
“We have boarding before dawn,” Jago said against his ear. “Do you think of that, nadi-ji?”
“I do now,” he said, realizing he’d slept, and that his arm was numb, and Jago’s might be. “What time is it?”
“The depth of the night. Rest, nadi.”
He sighed, and Jago, with the remote, without moving him, shut the television off.
Chapter 8
Remarkable as it was to be going up to space, it was only a matter of walking out into the hall that had led them here. That hall led to double doors, and those doors let them into the departure lounge. Jase was there, Tano and Algini; Bren was so used to seeing them he hardly knew the sight was uncommon, except Banichi and his team had exchanged their habitual leather and metal for more form-fitting operational black, mission-black, the sort they’d hitherto worn only in clandestine work, and rarely with him. That was one thing different.
The other, patently, was Lund and Kroger and company, pale-skinned, reflecting in the glass. “Good morning,” Kroger said frostily. “Good morning” Lund echoed, in slightly more friendly fashion.
“Good morning,” he gave them back as if nothing at all had happened.
But what commanded his attention, what utterly seized his attention, beyond that wall of dark windows was a floodlit view of the shuttle, white as winter, long, sleek and elegant.
Shai-shan.
We’re going, his mind chanted over and over, halfway numb and operating on far too little sleep, while the body manufactured a false, expensive strength. We’re going. We’re going.
Attendants of the space center had ushered them here, and now, time ticking away, opened the outer doors of the departure lounge, so smoothly on the edge of his arrival that he was sure he and his party had been on the edge of late.
“Well,” Shugart said with a deep breath, and started off. Bren started walking without half thinking, fell in with Jason… then, willing to make peace, waited for the Mospheirans, not to outpace them.
They walked, far as it was. There’d been consideration of a mobile lounge, but the shuttle itself took precedence, every element of the budget concentrated on that and on its sister ship, still under construction. It sat farther away than any ordinary walk to a waiting airplane, slowly looming larger and larger, deceptive in its graceful shape.
Meanwhile the lingering night chill set into human bones, and uneasy stomachs had a long, long time to contemplate the fact that the engines were different, the wings were mere extensions of the hull. Shai-shandidn’t look human or atevi. She looked alien, out of time and place… a design not state of the art when Phoenixhad launched from the earth of humans, no, but one that might have served that age.
They arrived within the circle painted on the concrete. The embarkation lift sat in down position in front of them, a cargo lift with a grid platform, a railing, a boarding bridge up against the hatch, no more exotic an arrangement than that. They walked aboard, the four Mospheirans, Jase, Bren with his security, and after them Narani and the three other servants, carrying the hand luggage, bags that would have taxed strong humans. There was room on the sizable platform, but only a little.