“Number one, and not negotiable: this is the aiji’splanet—which he’s chosen to share with humans on a lasting basis. So the ship can talk all it likes about theiroptions, theirchoices and theirproblem, but they’re doing it on the aiji’s tolerance and inside the aiji’s consent, and endangering the aiji’s interests in this quarrel they’ve picked out there far remote from us.”
“A year or so remote,” Jase muttered, and Bren inserted that in the record without a flutter.
“The problem doesn’t go away,” Jase said. “You can’t wish it away. You have to deal with it. We have to deal with it. Ramirez lied to us, but it turns out he didn’tlie to the leaders of the planet. So it wasn’t that he didn’t care about the planet’s future. But the ship is fueled, and we’re supposed to go bring Reunion under our collective authority—”
“And disrupt our lives, our futures,” Paulson said.
Bren stopped typing. Lost the thread. Found his argument, Mospheiran to Mospheiran. “Is it only our lives? It may not be our trouble now, but when their trouble spills onto our doorstep, won’t the people you represent be very much in favor of having a say—and the power to speak for their own futures? I’m not that surprised to be left in the dark: the aiji has that power, and he’s used it. But it’s much harder to maintain secrecy on the island, Mr. Paulson, as you know—still the President managed it. Hard to keep a secret on a ship, I’ll imagine, too. And Ramirez did. We were all hit. But you know what? In the last ten years, we very different people have developed the same interests, and we’ve come to work together, and thanks to that secrecy and not knowing any better, we’ve spent ten years together building resources we now have to use.”
Paulson, by his expression, wished he were rather on the North Shore, fishing, at the moment. Paulson was essentially a labor administrator, a financial officer with a background in town planning, who honestly imagined if he did go to the North Shore and went fishing someone else would solve the alien problem. It was Ginny Kroger, the non-official, that he was talking to and hoping for.
And Ginny, rock-solid Ginny, God save her, simply nodded, thin-lipped and resolute—probably thinking of the politics of getting a phone call through channels to the President, past Paulson’s legitimate right to do it first and officially.
Trust Mospheira to have trammeled up their lines of action. Nevertrust putting anyone in office who’d act rapidly, and never approve anyone who’d ever let responsibility for a mistake sit an hour on his doorstep. That was the wisdom of the Mospheiran senate, as long as there’d been a senate. They wanted a stainless manager who wouldn’t do anything startling or sudden. They put in Paulson.
Ginny’s job, in Science, wasn’t a senate-approved post, which was how shesurvived. Why she’d come…
He suddenly had a bone-chilling surmise that Ginny was Shawn Tyers’catspaw, Ginny andher robots—not briefed on all of it, likely, but not as deeply shocked as he was.
“We will inform the aiji,” Geigi concurred. That was, give or take a phone system that worked, a one-step process, and an atevi lord who didn’ttake quick responsibility for a situation would find Tabini calling him.
And what would either of them say? We now understand, aiji-ma?
No. He didn’t. He didn’t understand at all.
Chapter 9
“Has any message come?” Bren asked of Narani, safely in the foyer of their own residence. Banichi and Jago ordinarily found business of their own to attend on a homecoming, usually in the security station, but not at the moment. After the funeral, after the unprecedented meeting they’d just attended, they lingered. Tano and Algini, who’d heard both the meeting and the funeral, had come out into the foyer.
“One regrets, no,” Narani said to him.
Nothing from the aiji.
Well, but it reasonably took a certain amount of time for Tabini to ponder the situation, and Tabini was likely still in the information-absorbing stage and hadn’t an answer for him yet. Tabini would have gotten his message by now—he didn’t doubt Eidi would use his considerable resourcefulness, and very unorthodox channels, if he had to, right down to the several guards that stood between Tabini and a bullet, guards who were linked to Tabini’s staff by electronics as constantly as Banichi and Jago were in contact with their own local system. And if everything else on the planet went wrong, it was reasonable to think Eidi might call him back on his own initiative.
“Banichi-ji. Both of you. Tano. Algini.”
“Bren-ji.”
The five of them went into the security station, and Bren found the accustomed seat by the door while Banichi and Jago disposed themselves next to Tano and Algini. In the background the boards carried on quiet blips and flickers, which his staff understood. He never pretended to know, and he assumed if any of them did involve the answers he wanted, they would tell him.
“It was a satisfactory meeting,” Bren said first, for Tano and Algini, in case they entertained any remaining doubts. “It was an extraordinary meeting. But it left us needing answers we can’t get, except from the aiji.”
“Is there any threat you perceive, Bren-ji?” Almost without precedent that Jago had to ask him that. But they were in a thicket of human motives and deceptions, and on the station, hewas the best map they had.
“What likelihood, for instance,” Banichi asked, “that the ship-aijiin will take action against Jase-paidhi, or Kaplan? One hardly understood everything he said in the ceremony, and less of what others may have thought, but words, indeed, came through.”
“Kaplan has qualities,” Bren said. “I’m frankly surprised he was the one to stand up and speak.”
“Might he have spoken for Jase?”
There was a thought. “I doubt Jase would have asked him to do it—risking Kaplan’s personal reputation, if nothing else, though I can understand Kaplan taking the order if Jase asked. I can’t explain what they feel; I’m not sure I understand it myself, but ship crew and ship officers are a family association, far closer to atevi in that regard than they are to Mospheirans: I just can’t envision what you might call a filing of Intent inside the crew. Tamun—” He saw the question in their eyes. “Tamun was a rogue. He drew people apartfrom the crew. He struck at authority. And some went with him. Some weren’t certain of the authority, whether it had integrity, or whether it protected their interests—and by all we’ve learned there may have been reason for crew to have that perception. There is a division of interests between command and crew—they’re full blown sub-associations, so to speak, and that’s how the schism could develop at all. Kaplan spoke very eloquently about that schism today. He spoke as common crew. He spoke as common crew who felt the aijiin hadn’t seen to their interests and hadn’t trusted them as they might have expected their own aijiin to trust them.”