He also requests me to come visit him there, if this is possible. I am delighted to do this and believe I can do so without adversely affecting my schedule.
It also occurs to me that the young aiji would greatly enjoy a very brief—
A knock came at the door. Narani came in, bowed, and, without the bowl, handed him a second steel message cylinder.
This one did not have the Mospheiran color. It was plain.
Toby being in worse trouble was his first fear—but a message from his estate manager, Ramaso, should have the blue Najida band. He opened the cylinder, extracted the message, again one of those coded prints.
And not in Ragi.
Jason Graham, Captain, starship Phoenix.
Bren Cameron, paidhi-aiji, the Bujavid.
Unicorn sighted. ETA fifteen days. Operation here as discussed.
Reply requested.
His thought—if it was so coherent as a thought—was, Oh—my—God.
He read it twice. Looked up at Narani and didn’t trouble to keep the distress off his face.
“Rani-ji, the kyo are here—fifteen days out from the space station. All plans—my entire schedule—everything has to be suspended.”
It was more than a question of operations suspended.
All manner of operations had to be gotten underway—many of them not confined to the Earth.
And a very dangerous set of strangers they had met at Reunion was arriving to be entangled with the problems he and Jase had been negotiating.
Tillington. And the Reunioners.
The Reunioners were going to panic when they heard. The Mospheirans might well.
He couldn’t wait for another shuttle rotation. If he and his aishid had to ride up in the cockpit with the crew, he had to get up there.
He glanced at the calendar, in its nook on his desk. The current shuttle was launching day after tomorrow.
Narani was still waiting.
“I need to phone the Port Director, immediately, Rani-ji. I have to delay the shuttle launch, if at all possible. Call her, and let me tell her as much as she must know personally. I also need my aishid to report in, whoever is on the premises.”
“Nandi.” Narani left, and almost immediately after he had closed the door, footsteps went both directions down the hall. Narani was bound for his office to look up the spaceport code, likely—it was not one they routinely used; and Jeladi was likely headed deeper into the apartment, to advise his bodyguard they had a serious problem.
Fifteen days.
No trip to Najida. That was out.
Silly thought. The whole world was in danger. And he spared a thought for his brother, in dock at Najida, waiting for him, with no idea what had just shown up in the heavens.
The dowager needed to get back to Shejidan. She was involved in this.
He and Ilisidi likewise had a codeword for the kyo—but passing through Assassins’ Guild communications what was clearly a codeword that the Guild was not permitted to understand, at a time when they were trying to establish trust—
He had to play those politics carefully. Everything involving the guilds was new and no little touchy.
He had intended the Guild observers to go up to the station with him. He had to take them now, or have them arrive later, uninformed, in the middle of a situation, to try to figure out what they had done. That, or put them off indefinitely.
Tabini needed to know what was going on, immediately.
It was a nightmare. A damned nightmare, unplanned, unstoppable.
Jase and Sabin would have to handle everything on the station until he got there. Ogun, the senior captain, had no experience with the kyo. He might be in charge of the station, he might be senior captain and giving orders—but he was an unknown quantity to the kyo, and he fairly well was an unknown where it came to working with the atevi.
Sabin and the kyo had parted amicably at the last, if one dared use the word amicable. At least the kyo had agreed to let them evacuate the station before they removed the human construction from space they claimed.
In that meeting, the kyo had warned them they’d come calling, eventually, since, as best one could understand abstract thought across the language barrier—the kyo held that all things once joined were joined, or however that philosophy worked out in the minds of a species who didn’t share a planet or a history with them, had never dealt peaceably with another intelligent species—and didn’t want any strangers in their space.
Forever-joined could mean alliance.
It could mean some other type of relationship—not all of them happy thoughts.
But arguing abstract philosophy in a language where they lacked definite vocabulary posed dangers. Big ones.
So they’d promised a further contact. He’d known the time could be short—and everything he’d started to do since he’d come home was to try to fix what had broken while he was gone and set things in order. He’d worked, hoping the contact would come later. Even a lot later. That perhaps the kyo would have to digest what they’d learned, and maybe postpone it for decades, after a lot of scientific wrangling and debate.
Not—this soon.
He flexed his fingers, his hands gone cold with uncommon chill.
They had to be damned careful how they responded to these visitors, when they had so very little language to help them.
They had to hope, first of all, that it really was the kyo, and the same kyo that they expected, and that these kyo were in a peaceful frame of mind—because Phoenix had very little in the way of armament, while the kyo ship they had dealt with had at least enough firepower to blow Reunion into scrap metal.
They really hadn’t wanted to let the kyo know that their entire presence in space was one unarmed ship, posing no threat and having no defense. They hadn’t been able to protest the notion of the kyo coming to visit them—they’d had no finesse of communication to make discussion possible, or safe.
The kyo knew that humans knew where they lived. It was fairly reasonable, in human terms, that they wanted humans to know they knew where humans lived, and that they could get here.
Tit for tat.
But then it got complicated. Kyo had seemed to be amazed by the concept that humans and atevi, though different, got along. They’d seemed both interested and strangely upset by the notion. That was what he picked up—or what he thought he understood.
But understanding anything in an interspecies contact was like wandering around a strange building with one’s eyes shut, trying to imagine what was in the building and what its purpose could possibly be.
Interspecies contact was what the paidhiin were trained to do, however. It was the way he had been trained to think, the judgments he had been trained to make. He personally had the accumulated notes and observations of every paidhi since Romano. Studying that body of information, learning to decipher concepts that might run totally counter to all human expectation—that was how he’d begun. His original job had been a matter of a word at a time, making the dictionary larger, step by tiny step—assisting two very different peoples to understand each other and to keep their hands away from weapons, until—on his watch—the knowledge base had reached critical mass and events from the heavens had poured down on them.