“Same here,” Bren said. “I’m very delighted to report. Wife and kids?”
“All fine.”
“That’s great.”
“Congratulations to the aiji and the consort. I trust that’s appropriate.”
“Entirely appropriate. I’ll relay the good wishes.”
“Really good to talk to you.”
That was a sign-off. And it was time to get off the phone, before they stumbled into the wrong territory. Specific topics could trip over things the courier ought to carry. Shawn would get the letter. Then they’d talk again.
“Same,” he said. “Really good. Thanks.”
Shawn broke the connection from his end. Bren hung up and re-read what he had written.
It still said what needed saying and implied everything that needed implying. He put a salutation on it. He put a wax seal on the paper, his own, which made it official. He separately added his notes on the Assassins’ Guild situation—I have no concrete reason to use the word ‘optimistic’ in this case, but I am cautiously inclined to hope—
He finished it. And he called Banichi.
“I’ve asked Shawn for a courier to fly in this afternoon,” he said, and Banichi gave a single nod.
The words Tillington had let fly, if spoken on the mainland, would engage the Guild, no question. There was no way to insert that awareness past the barriers that existed in Mospheiran thinking: right and wrong and personal rights and personal entitlements were in the way.
He wasn’t entirely sure Shawn himself was going to feel in his gut what Tillington’s statement would do, if it ever reached the atevi public. But Tillington had just, no question, made a career-ending mistake.
And for what?
Resentment for the crowding and the rationing and the discomfort? Maybe. But being Mospheiran—one didn’t think another Mospheiran population would have met that kind of anger. No. One could sacrifice comforts. Mospheirans had a tradition of helping their own, doing without, making do. Historically, they’d had hard times, and had always found a way of getting through to a better life.
Besides, granted there had been rationing, it hadn’t been rationing of everything. There were comforts. Atevi and humans alike had done everything possible from the ground to ease the strain, especially regarding foodstuffs.
How that relief had been administered aloft, he was no longer sure.
Disquieting thought.
Tillington distrusted Braddock. That was a given. They had all distrusted Braddock. Unfortunately the move onto the station had not isolated him from the rest of the Reunioners.
But Tillington had, from the outset, not let the Mospheiran and Reunioner populations mix. Security concerns. Rules. Regulations. The Reunioners had never passed screening, had no security clearance. Records were supposedly in the ship’s storage—at least they had been. But either they hadn’t been released to Tillington’s administration—for reasons that might lie in ship politics—or Tillington had them and it didn’t matter. Tillington still would not let the Reunioners merge into the station: they lived in special sections. Didn’t have clearance to enter operational areas . . . and how the station defined operational areas was nebulous. A few Reunioners found employment, but most, he had learned during the children’s visit—waited.
Waited for a general solution to their status. Which was tangled up in a general solution for the entire refugee population.
And Tillington backed moving the Reunioners out to build at the lifeless ball of rock that was Maudit, with all the delays and costs and risks involved.
He himself had thought of setting up a new colony at Maudit as a slow process, a first-in team, a habitat to build a structure, to set things up, a process taking years, while the Reunioners found employment on the original station manufacturing elements of the new station and running their own operation. He hadn’t, he thought with some disquiet, liked the notion of Braddock’s involvement, but it had seemed to be what the Reunioners themselves were pushing . . . a process too preliminary as yet even to talk about the need for the Reunioners coming under the Mospheiran treaty with the aishidi’tat . . . which he was firmly determined they would, for very solid policy reasons.
Not so, apparently, not in the way Tillington was pushing to have all the Reunioners sent out there right now—which was apt to lead to more hardship.
He didn’t readily dislike people. Dislike was not useful in his job, wherein he occasionally had to deal with the difficult, the problematic, and the entirely objectionable. Jase himself had felt out the matter to the last—felt his way through a cultural interface last night that, indeed, did make Mospheirans and ship-folk two different questions: he detected that.
But he did trust Jase to tell him the truth, even if Jase had to go against Sabin. And the awareness that had flickered into Jase’s eyes when he’d expressed the dowager’s position in Ragi: that sealed it. That was truth.
And the sudden recklessness, the fact that Tillington was playing into a known rift in the Captains’ Council . . .
Tillington’s interpretation of the kids’ visit, as all part of a plot . . .
All that came into focus, a complete unwillingness to shade anything in gray, that roused an emotional response of his own regarding Mospheiran politics, and the suspicion of an old, old division. He had detected the reaction in himself when he had to deal with Braddock, even at distance. He’d smothered it. Applied cold logic. Or tried to.
Both Braddock and Tillington were pushing Maudit—with haste. Emotionally.
And ironically they were doing so, in high emotion, with exactly the same aim.
Division. Separating the populations into us and them.
No, he wasn’t feeling charitable toward Tillington.
They’d been through the Heritage Party’s brief accession to power on Mospheira, when people had gotten on television to talk about human entitlements, and ownership of the station, and how nobody should trust the atevi, either. The Heritage Party’s view had been that war was inevitable. And that they should arm themselves, and get to space, and rain fire down on atevi civilization.
Shawn’s administration, succeeding that period of madness, had tried to keep that attitude off the station, when they’d populated it. They’d screened applicants. They’d tried.
But nobody could police thoughts and attitudes if the holder never stood up and said it, never threatened anybody—until a highly pressured situation changed a man in power.
Had Tillington possibly been a Heritage supporter before he’d arrived in office up there? Or had he turned under pressure? There’d been no skilled translator: no paidhi to interpret or explain what Tillington would have found strange and frustrating, and a robotic numbers transaction couldn’t explain intent or reasons. Had things gone that bad between Tillington and Geigi that Tillington’s thinking had just clicked over into old Mospheiran attitudes, focused now on resentment from a human event two centuries in the past, dead, gone, and buried—
Or was it just a habit of being in absolute power over Mospheiran affairs up there, and a frustration at having all the years of work suddenly down to rationing?
It was a good bet Tillington, if he was tending to the Heritage mindset, was not going to favor settling the Reunioners on Mospheira.