“But we have to do something.”
“Third assumption,” he said. “You’ve already done something, in staying out of there. Now you think there’s no choice but go back. But that’s out of my territory, too. I can’t claim I know what’s wise to do. Two smart men, on more facts than I have, agreed it was a good idea.—Did Ramirez intendto die?”
“He was having attacks. The fueling being finished—he was talking with Tabini about breaking the news. About timing in telling the truth. Then the robots were ready. And the day he heard that, he had an attack. He worked past it. I knew.” She tried to keep the still, dispassionate face. “Ogun knew he was in trouble. I don’t think Sabin did, but I’m not sure. Then the last attack. And he wanted to talk to Jase, I guess. And he should have left it to me to brief Jase, because it wasn’t secure there in the clinic, but there were probably other things he wanted to say, too.”
“Like?”
“Things he’d say to us. Personal things. Like apologizing for having us born. For putting on us what he’d put on us. Not quite a normal life, is it?”
Bitterness. Deep bitterness. Maybe it wasn’t wise to answer at all. But he did. “Most of us don’t have normal lives,” he said. “Especially in this business.”
“But were you always paidhi-aiji? Didn’t you grow up? Jase and I—we’d have liked to have known our fathers. We’d have liked to have something but a necessary, logical, already made choice. We’d have liked to fail at something without it being a calamity that involved the Captain’s Council.”
“I don’t envy you in that regard. But you came out sane. And decent. And worthwhile. It’s what we do, more than who we are, that makes our personal lives a mess. If we didn’t do what we do for a job, ordinary people might figure out how to get along with us.”
“Jase and I tried to make a relationship. We tried being teammates, we tried being lovers—not having any other candidates. We weren’t good at it. Something about needing to be loved to know how to love, isn’t that the folktale? We’re kind of defective, Jase and I, in that regard. Really confused input, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think.” Atevi society wasn’t a good place for a human with a problem with relationships to work it out. Himself, with a relationship in shambles and his own brother not speaking to him, he knew that. “You’re all right. You’ll beall right. Life’s long. Hold out till we get back. You’ll have a household around you. Mine. While I’m gone, I want you to come here. Live here in my household.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Advice: do it. They’re the best help you can get. And you won’t be alone. Believe me.”
Her lips went thin. He wondered if she knew where his comfort came from, or the situation he had with Jago. He was proof against anyone’s disapproval, outside the household.
And he knew what he was asking of his household, to take her in, but he saw in her the signs that had taken other paidhiin down—the isolation, the sense of alienation, the burden of untranslatable secrets.
“Here is safe,” he said. “For one very practical reason—you may become a target—take my offer. And trust these people. Completely.”
“I don’t trust. I don’t trust people.”
“Learn. With them, learn.”
Deep breath.
“Listen to me,” he said. “You can’t debrief everything in your own language. You needatevi you can trust to talk to. If you’d had someone to ask about Tabini, in Ragi, it would have helped—wouldn’t it?”
That made itself understood. Resistance weakened.
“All right. All right. I’ll see if I can arrange it.”
“You don’t see if you can arrange it, Mercheson-paidhi. You do it. And listen to me. One more question, one more sweeping question: is there anything else I’d better know? Is there anything else you suspect that Ramirez might have told Jase, that you wouldn’t have been able to tell him in a briefing? Anything you’ve suspected, or knew parts of?”
A shake of the head. “No.”
One very last question. “Why in helldidn’t you come to me?”
“ Tabinimight not have liked it. I didn’t know what to do.”
That wasn’t quite the defensive answer he’d expected. It made sense; and that set him a little off balance. “I could have kept your question secret.”
Hesitation. “The Old Man was pretty sure you wouldn’tkeep something from Tabini. That man’chibusiness. And I told him what I thought I ought to do, which was ask you, but he wouldn’t risk it. He said that was why he called mein.” A moment’s silence. “He didn’t ask Jase. I guess he thought Jase would tell you everything. Jase’s attached to the planet. But I live here. He was the Old Man. My Old Man. That’s all the logic I had to go on. I didn’t want to be where I was. I didn’t want to keep the secret. But I didn’t know how to turn it loose or whether things would blow up if I did. And by then I knewwe didn’t have the time we thought we did.”
“I know what you’re saying. I appreciate you made a decision the best you could with what you had to work with. And I appreciate the line you’ve tried to walk, solo, trying to preserve your worth to the situation. But the situation’s vastly changed. That’s why I want you inside the household, so you’re never confronted with an atevi question without advice. You know they could have advised you how to deal with Tabini—if they’d been yours to ask. And in time to come,” he said levelly, “and when we get back, you can even tell me and Jase the truth. We’ll all three sort it out. I think this has all finally become the same side.”
“You trust Jase?”
Shocking question. It shook him.
“You don’t.”
Her doubt might be the aftershock of a relationship between her and Jase that hadn’t worked.
“He loved Ramirez,” Yolanda said. “He was wholly committed to Ramirez. And Ramirez didn’t trust him—because of his relationship with you, I’m reasonably sure that was the whole cause. But Ramirez didn’t trust him, in the end. You’re upset with me, with what you found out was going on. Jase isn’t. Jase is taking Ramirez’s dying just too well. Too sensibly.”
“He learned in Shejidan, maybe.” But he didn’t discount the question.
“But it hurts. It hurts, Bren. And he’s not showing it. And I can’t talk to him.”
“You’ve tried?”
“I leave messages: talk to me. No answers. Jase didn’t like what he heard. He’s mad at me. Really mad at me. I think that I wasworking with Ramirez, and that Ramirez went to me—that stung.”
Jase wasn’t the young man who’d parachuted onto the planet. And that fact, perhaps, had foredoomed Yolanda to find her own way through the thicket he and Jase had made of their association… and foredoomed not to get answers, and to be even further on the outside.
Association, be it noted: aishi. Aishihad that troublesome word, man’chi, nestled right in the midst of it. He and Jase hadn’t dealt with one another like two humans, in Mosphei’, where friendshipexisted, where friendshipmight have swallowed down some of the problems in silence. Instead they’d dealt in Ragi, one of them with a man’chion earth, the other with his captainin the heavens. They’d found a means of working around the friendshippart, thanks to aishi, thanks to the organization of the household, where everyone under the same roof had the same set of motives, the same interests, the same imperatives and acted accordingly, in that clearly foreign matrix.