“I owe you dinner,” he said. “Ma’am. I owe you—”
“The best vat-culture ersatz meatloaf on the station.”
He wrinkled his nose. Laughed, suddenly in high spirits.
They talked about the island, about mutual acquaintances, island politics.
“And,” Ginny said, suddenly, Ginny who never forgot anything.
“And?”
Ginny reached down for a strap and pulled up her personal kit, from which she extracted a plastic sandwich bag full of mangled green leaves and crushed stems.
“And this is… ?”
“Sandra Johnson said just give it to you and you’d know.”
Sandra Johnson. Sandra Johnson. Good God, it had been years. Dark years, terrible times.
Green leaves, stems… plant cuttings in a sealed container.
Sandra named her plants. He couldn’t remember the names. But for some crazed reason, out of the blue, so to speak, she’d sent him a special remembrance. Two kids and a house in the country, but she still thought of him, and sent him mangled greenery to brighten up his living quarters.
“Old flame?” Gin asked. Not a streak of jealousy, no, there never was that between them.
“Secretary. Lifesaver.” Sandra never had become famous the way certain of the participants in the initial fracas had become household words in two cultures. But none of them would be where they were without her. Some of them wouldn’t be alive without her. “Literally a lifesaver.—Where did you run into her?”
“Oh, she used to work in Science. She dropped by the office, enlisted my help to get the plants through customs. The Head of Botany cleared them, personally, said they’re bug-free.”
He saw the packet had the Science Department seal, official as could be, and he wasn’t about to open it until customs.
So a spider-plant and a whatever-it-was emigrated back to their origins, to meet their distant cousins growing outside the captains’ offices.
“Well, thanks.” He put the packet away in his own kit. “Really, thanks. Old friends. Pleasant surprise.”
“No trouble. Well, it wastrouble, but Botany owed me one and I owed Sandra one.”
The steward picked up the sandwich wrappings and trays before they floated. Meanwhile the worker crew behind them let a pen sail too far forward. Banichi captured it and sailed it back. It was the usual games, new workers, zero-g jokes.
And in the long flight after, he and Ginny eventually ran out of gossip, retrieved their computers—Ginny from under the seat and himself from Jago’s keeping—and spread out their own in-flight offices. Ginny had work to keep her occupied, a screenful of numbers.
He had his own. He’d downloaded a considerable mail file, to add to the paper mail that his staff had culled for him physically to take with him—a heavy parcel of it traveling in baggage, paper that, recycled, fed the station’s growing need.
He still got the schoolchildren’s questions. Might the paidhi send a card from space for an honored schoolteacher? Did the Paidhi think that the aliens would come before the ship was built?
He had his answer in file for that one, for parents and children. There was every reason to go on as usual. The hostile aliens had destroyed the station that Phoenixleft out among the stars, along with all its records and maps. Phoenix, returning, had taken one quiet look at the destruction and left without a whisper to go find their long-abandoned population—here, at the atevi planet. It was good odds the aliens had no notion where Phoenixcame from.
Until—so the captains and the president and the aiji in Shejidan admitted to each other in secret councils—the aliens began to listen very intently to the nearby stars, and look for evidence of planets in their vicinity that might be the origin of that ruined outpost.
There were reasons humans and atevi separately reckoned it unlikely there’d be an immediate attack: two species had a better chance of predicting the behavior of a third.
But after all their reasons for confidence, and in spite of what they told worried children—they dared not bet the world on it.
One atevi class had written him to ask, simply: Will we grow up?
That question haunted his nights. The paidhi damned well planned to see that they did, as far as it was in his hands.
While SunDrink and Harbor played financial games.
Lodged in the back of his mind, too, distracting him from rational estimates and international concerns—was the fact that he was one more time upward bound, on a shuttle flight as irretrievable as a bullet from a gun, and for the second time in a year, he hadn’t called his family while he was on the planet.
No was a hell of a lot easier from orbit than from a few hundred miles away. I can’t visit the islandwas more palatable than I physically can, but won’t.
But what could he do? He’d told his brother—he’d tried to tell his mother that he didn’t want to go onto the island for exactlysuch reasons as the SunDrink/Harbor business. He didn’t want another phone call from his mother saying some damned extremist of one stamp or the other had vandalized her apartment building, because his picture had been on the news. He didn’t want his face in the news reports reminding every random lunatic in remote points of Mospheira that the object of a lot of local resentment had a vulnerable human family in their reach.
So he didn’t come. He lied. He dodged.
But this time the news was bound to let them know he could have come. He hadn’t anticipated the television broadcast… and that, this time, was going to be hard.
He switched over to solitaire, pretending to work rather than think. Ginny was doing useful work. The paidhi, who lived by mathematics and pattern arrangements, couldn’t win a single game for the next two hours, not a one.
Chapter 4
The stewards reunited coats and small bags with their owners during the last half-hour of approach.
There was the usual advisement: “The dock will be cold, nadiin.”
Understatement. Bren went aft, accepted his knee-length formal coat, bullet-proof vest and all, and wrestled it on in that slow-motion effort which was the only successful tactic in free-fall. Floating fabric had to be maneuvered just so, and lace cuffs had to be extracted from the sleeves and allowed to float.
He also had to get back forward and belt himself back into his seat without wrinkling the coat-tails. Ginny Kroger, herself in that battered parka, gave a helpful tug on the coat-tail and smoothed it behind him as he drifted down.
“Not the most sensible dress for freefall,” Bren muttered. “Didn’t have time to change.” On principle, he never changed half-and-half, no mixing, for instance, of a more practical casual crew jacket with the formal court trousers; and no mixing of Mospheiran clothing with atevi, either. When he was in court dress he was nand’ Bren, paidhi-aiji. When he was in island mufti and speaking Mosphei’, as he did aboard station from time to time, guesting with Mospheiran station officials, then and only then he was Bren Cameron. Never the two should confuse his often-drifting brain.
On this flight, to and from, he had been stiffly, doggedly nand’ paidhi, and he dressed to exit that way, in the rib-hugging coat… apt to freeze half through on the dock, but socially very proper.