Where did humans have an analog—except a funeral among passionately feuding relatives?
And how to describe what it most feltlike—
What it most feltlike was the moment in a machimi-play when the holder of secrets divulged them, and set the fox among the chickens—so to speak—and sent things into freefall, all points of reference revised, usually with weapons involved.
And what did it mean, now, when conservative Ilisidi happened to be the highest-ranking ateva who had ever gone to space—and her pro-space, pro-foreigner grandson assembled the leaders of the nation to lecture them on anti-foreigner traditional values in herown words, while she was conspicuous in the audience and in new and conspicuous guardianship of the aiji’s butter-fingered heir?
It could mean, on the one hand, trouble—that grandmother Ilisidi, newly custodian of herally Tatiseigi’s grandnephew, simultaneously Tabini’s heir—was being outflanked by a maneuver that far outdid the previous dangerous push-pull maneuvers of that private relationship. If that was the case, it could more than get someone killed… it could remotely mean Tabini was about to shove Lady Damiri out the door.
Or, conversely, that Damiri and Tabini together had decided to push young Cajeiri out the door, effectively to disinherit him—
Was riding a mechieta through a formal garden thatunforgivable an error?
He couldn’t think it of Tabini or Damiri, or of Ilisidi, but even this far along in his association with the atevi, he couldn’t imagine he understood what the familial relationships were, or what atevi felt.
They didn’t feel friendship, among first points. They didn’t know love. They obeyed a different set of emotions. They herded. They flocked. They rushed to a leader in time of distress, and that leader was distinguished primarily by qualities a human regarded with suspicion: an atevi leader led because he hadno higher emotional attachments, and flocked to no one.
A leader took care of his own. A leader preserved those he led. A leader became passionately distressed at a threat to what was his.
But the high leaders, the aijiin, didn’t bring up their own children. They passed them around, fostered them out to high-level relatives and trusted associates to be tutored, taught manners—and to form associations with those same relatives on whom the whole structure depended. Cajeiri had been with his great-uncle Tatiseigi. Now he was with Ilisidi. He might not be with his parents again until he was nearly adult.
The boy would never, perhaps, forget this assembly in the tomb of his grandfather. That speech from his father would brand itself on a boy’s memory. Even given species differences, that was likely true.
But how did a human understand the situation that might logically relegate a child elsewhere? Or even dispose of him? It happened in the machimi, in the hard, brutal feudal age. One didn’thear of it happening in modern times.
And there were some things he had always been a little hesitant to ask even the atevi he trusted with his life. But the questions nagged him.
“Nadiin-ji,” he said, as the rails clicked beneath the wheels, as the car took a turn he well knew, “Mospheiran humans regard their children very highly, protect them at all costs, and Mospheirans generally don’t hand off their children to raise—” He supposed in that understanding his own father was not quite respectable, but he tried to simplify the case. And tried not to insult the people he lived with. “So I remain perplexed about Cajeiri’s situation, to put it very delicately. Is there satisfaction with him? Is he in any way the focus of this ceremony? Why did Tabini ask me here, and why is Cajeiri suddenly with Ilisidi, when I thought he was with Tatiseigi, and has thatanything to do with this event?”
They were mildly amused, and perhaps a little puzzled.
“Regarding the invitation,” Banichi said—Banichi had had thatquestion a dozen times in the last few days, “one still fails to understand the reason. We have kept a careful ear to the Guild, Bren-ji, and no one has given us a clue. Regarding the heir, Tatiseigi has appealedto the dowager to take the boy in charge: the dowager has received Tatiseigi, and the boy packed his bags last night.”
“The dowager’s plane has entered the hangar,” Jago said. “Her crew has taken quarters in the Bu-javid.”
Thatwas interesting: Ilisidi was not, then, returning to Malguri immediately. She was staying in the Bu-javid with the boy in tow, and staying at least long enough to warrant a hangar for her private jet.
“One fears for the porcelains,” Banichi said.
“His own parents would not—forgive me for a distasteful question—harm him?”
“No,” Jago said quickly. “No, nadi-ji.”
What do they feel?was the question he tried to ask, and wondered whether he ought just to blurt it out and trust his long relationship—but Banichi and Jago themselves were father and daughter: he had had a parent-child relationship right in front of him for years, and stillcouldn’t quite decipher what they thought, or felt, except a strong loyalty—no, they existed within the same man’chi, and that was different: they’d served the aiji before they attached to him, still within that man’chi, and that told him nothing about their own ties to each other.
“I remain bewildered,” he said to them.
“So are we all, Bren-ji,” Banichi said. “So are the lords in the Bu-javid. So are the newsservices.”
“That’s at least informative,” he said. “They did broadcast it.”
“To the whole aishidi’tat,” Jago said.
“And the station, I’ll imagine.”
“One believes so,” Banichi said.
“Curious. Troubling, nadiin-ji.”
“Your staff is troubled, too,” Jago said. “But we detected nothing aimed at you, nandi.”
“Rather I’m aimed at someone else, perhaps.”
“Yet we don’t detect that, either,” Banichi said. “And we gather nothing from usual sources. It’s all very curious.”
“What is the relationship of a child to parent?”
He amused them. Jago laughed softly. “It depends on the parent.”
“It depends on the child,” Banichi said.
“ Thischild, nadiin-ji. I know I could never explain either of you.”
“Cajeiri is bright, precocious, and the porcelains are in danger. If one could advise the aiji, best foster him to ourGuild, to teach him where to put his elbows.”
“Everyone has something to teach, is that it?”
“To the aiji’s heir?” Banichi asked. “Very many have something to teach.”
“Yet he has no security to speak of. When no one else draws a breath without security.”
“He has a great deal of security,” Banichi said, “in the man’chi of those in charge of him. He learns to rely on them. And they learn what he will do.”
The train reached another curve. The protected windows obscured everything outside, but he had a vision of where they were, a brief stretch of wild land before the airport.
“Do you suppose this transfer of the boy to Ilisidi’s hands, coupled with my presence, coupled with this honor to Valasi, and her attendance, and mine—all sums up to a declaration of peace in the household? Ilisidi supporting the aiji’s push to space?”