“I’ve learned that,” she said. “What’s the other?”
“Tell him the truth.” That she pursued the numbers—at least on a small scale—was encouraging. “Third point, fortunate three: listen carefully to what he advises. There’s no one on the planet more dangerous than Tabini. Or smarter. Witness he’s survived all the assassins aimed at him—partly by being so good and so steady in office that even his detractors find a use in his being there. That’shis real success. I learn tactics from him—constantly. I hope you will. Quite honestly—” He made another real try at mending the interface he’d messed up, much as the effort seemed a forlorn hope. “Quite honestly I’m jealous as hell of your being where you are, and a little upset—well, a lot upset—at not being advised of what you were doing.”
“His order,” she said in a low voice.
“Tabini’s? Or Ramirez’s?”
“Both.”
“But who initiated?” What she said tweaked something sensitive, something to which she might be oblivious. “Who contacted whom—first requiring your services?”
Maybe she’d hoped to get out of here without discussing that matter. Maybe it was something she’d been both stalking for an opening and dreading all along. But she answered seriously, meticulously. “I honestly don’t know who did. Ramirez called me in. I don’t know whether Tabini-aiji had called him directly or he’d called the aiji.”
“It would be very useful to know that. But notto remark on, understand. I mention it for your safety. Always know details like that.”
“There was no way to know.”
Her perpetual defensiveness set him off. And he refused to let it do that, this time. There wasn’t the leisure any longer to reform Yolanda. Only to use her services. “Some things it’s necessary to know. Some things it’s unexpectedly critical to know. I’m not faulting you, understand. I’m advising you to the best of my own experience in this situation. In the interest of everybody on the planet down there, I desperately want you to succeed. I want you to do better than I ever did at reading the aiji. I want you to so far eclipse me that you’ll never get caught unprepared. Which means you’ll never get anybody killed. And I’m not sure I can claim that.” Yolanda didn’t understand him or his motives any more than she understood the minds of Mospheiran shop owners… and far less than she understood Tabini, to his long-term observation. She was a spacefarer and if an event or an attitude hadn’t any precedent on the ship—Yolanda didn’t see it. She flatly didn’t see it.
“The aiji scares hell out of me,” she admitted then, the most encouraging statement he’d ever heard out of Yolanda Mercheson. “And I’m not you, and I can’t deal with him the way you do.”
“Be afraid of him. But don’t show it. Stand up to him, and show deference at the same time. Balance the two. And you have my good wishes.” God help us, he thought to himself. She didn’t show fear because she didn’t always know when she wasin danger. But she wasn’t the only one with blind spots. He’d come in that blind. He’d spent a night in Ilisidi’s basement learning that lesson. He’d had his arm broken, learning that lesson. “All right. That’s your province. You have to learn. You will learn. Turnabout, advise me—what am I up against on the ship? How do Imake headway?”
She hadn’t seen that question coming, either. She drew a deep, deep breath. “You mean with Sabin?”
“ Andthe crew.”
“Crew is easy. They know who you are. They approve. More than that, ‘Sidi-ji is their darling and you’re with her. Truth is, everybody detestsSabin. Granted they’re both cold as deep space rock, the dowager and Sabin both—‘Sidi-ji smiles at them. That makes all the difference.”
“You know that smile’s not necessarily a good sign.”
“I know, but they don’t know it, and they worship her. Besides, I think she likes it. Well, likeisn’t it, is it?”
“Like’s fine with things. Not people. There’s your difference. She likes their approval. She doesn’t likethem, because they’re not in her association. Think in Ragi when you think about atevi.”
“She favors their applause.”
“She drinks it like good brandy. If they’d only worship Sabin, Sabinwould warm up, don’t you think?”
He saw the body language, disengagement from the very concept. “Not likely. Not ever likely.—But Sabin gets the ship through. We don’t have to like her. If the ship itself’s in trouble, I’ll promise you, you want Sabin on deck.”
“Next question. Do you want her in negotiations?”
Another long breath and a deeply sober thought. “Only if you plan to nuke the other side.”
“Major question. Is she for us, or is she for the authority that sent you here? Does she likewhat we’re doing here? Or is she against it?”
That brought another moment’s thought. “Honestly, I don’t know for sure. I don’t think Ramirez knew… she doesn’t like atevi, she doesn’t like Mospheirans, and I’m not sure she likes the crew, for that matter. The best thing is, she won’t be here, making decisions. Don’t ever say I said that.”
“Encouraging,” he said. So he’d asked the questions. He’d had his answers, all he knew to ask for. Except one. “Did Ramirez tip Tabini off, that he was dying?”
The question scared her. She was far too readable. Far too readable, still, for safety in court.
“ Face,” he snapped, as he’d used to say to Jase, as he’d said to Yolanda more than once. And expression vanished from her face, well, at least that one vanished—quickly replaced with a frown.
“I thought I could be honest with you,” she said.
“You can be. You’d better be, for about five more minutes. Then give expression up for the duration, except inside this apartment, with this staff. Damned uncomfortable pillow, the secrets on this job. Did he tell Tabini?”
“He told him. Therapy wasn’t taking. He was having mental lapses—that’s the truth, Bren. It scared hell out of him, more than the heart condition, because he was forgetting things. And he told me to tell Tabini to get ready, that there wasthe alien threat, that the world had to get ready, that the ship had to be ready, constantly…”
“On three day’s notice?”
“On three minutes’ notice,” Yolanda said. “We’ve been able to pull out of here at any moment, for the last three months—with whatever crew could get aboard. But we haven’t done that. We told Tabini the truth about the aliens and about the situation back on the station, and we asked for fuel so if some armed ship showed up we had some fighting chance against it. And, ultimately, so we could go back and settle what has to be settled back there.”
“Meaning.”
“Meaning to get that station shut down. Make the gesture. Aishimaran to thema.”
Almost untranslatable: sweeping the boundary. Clearing troublesome disputed areas from an associational edge. Atevi neighbors would exchange property to achieve border peace, in a world with neither boundaries nor borders as humans understood the term—a process arcane and fraught with hazard.
“Tabini’s word?”
“His word.”
“Probably describes it very well. But that program in itself has an assumption—that the gesture will be read the way humans oratevi would read it.”