“Damned nonsense.” From Sabin it was a moderate response.
“My personal gratitude,” Bren said. “Eighteen hundred hours, at our section: staff will meet you there. The aiji-dowager’s good will and good wishes in fortunate number, ma’am.”
He turned. He managed to include Jase in the sweep of his arm toward the exit, but Jase declined the refuge and drifted there slightly askew from them.
One trusted at least there wouldn’t be bloodshed on the bridge. Sabin might have plenty yet to vent, but if appearances were an indication, Sabin was in control, and if she was thinking, she wouldn’t let fly until the two of them were in an office with the door shut.
Under those circumstances he trusted Jase could hold his own and keep his head.
“Mr. Kaplan,” Jase said calmly, “see them below.”
“Yes, sir.” Kaplan opened the door which had self-shut.
“And where is Jase-paidhi?” Ilisidi demanded.
“Preparing to account to Sabin-aiji for bringing us here, aiji-ma,” Bren said, “which I trust he can do.”
“He will suffer no detriment!” Ilisidi said, and turned and addressed Jase. “Assure us this is the case!”
“Aiji-ma, without a doubt.”
“Well!” Ilisidi said, and by now the door had shut itself again. Kaplan scrambled to open it, and they left under Kaplan’s guidance.
It wasn’t that easy, and Sabin would have words of her own, but Ilisidi expected her below, and Sabin had accepted that.
Amazing, Bren thought. Astonishing.
He could imagine several scenarios to follow, in several of which Sabin decided not to come after all, and precipitated an atevi war. Jase, if he could make the point, would faithfully inform her there wasn’t any change of plans possible, not at this point—not without the attendant war, at least.
He’d been steady enough during the exchange. Now, in the stomach-wrenching reverse of the lift action, he found his knees weak. If there’d been a floor to stand on, he thought he’d have felt them going. As it was, he simply tried not to twitch against his escort, and not to shiver as Jago cushioned their arrival on deck five. That brought a little moment of contact with the deck, and if not for Jago, he thought he would have stumbled, if nothing else, from the welter of confusing directions.
Not the dowager. The lift door opened and she emerged with Cenedi, perfectly in command.
“We shall see you at supper,” she said, “paidhi-ji.”
“Honored, nand’ dowager.”
What elsewas there to say? He didn’t plan to eat. His mind was off into a dozen more scenarios, frantic in its application. War or peace was a hell of a dessert choice, and somehow in his management of affairs, his nudges this way and that, his quest after a piece of tape had ended up in a confrontation between aijiin.
Well to have it now, if it was going to happen, while they were still at dock and had options. The thought of Ilisidi pent up in a ship with a captain whose murder she fondly wished—a captain who was the onlycaptain capable of running the ship’s operations—was unthinkable.
God, he wanted to stay on the ground. He wanted to go back down to the planet and go back to his estate with his staff and wait there for it all to be over… but that wasn’t a choice he’d given himself.
He had to get the authorities through this set of formalities, and he had to ask himself if Ilisidi thought she was going to askfor the ship’s log or if his search for the records had become a complete side-channel to the dowager’s intentions of running matters wherever she was. Certainly no one had informed Sabin she was second to the aiji-dowager on her own deck.
If anyone did have to convey that information, he knew all too well who the translator had to be.
They arrived into a scene of managed chaos, the midst of null-g preparations for the invitation… preparation which their constant communications net had already set into motion.
Bundles were everywhere in the paidhi’s quarters, soft bundles, in general, which floated where they were not jammed tightly in, bundles that should give forth their contents and then fold down inconspicuously and with little mass.
Bundles were lodged up near the ceiling and a few were tucked into the narrow passage between bed and bath, rather like the egg-cases of an infestation of insects; and the bed itself—fortunately extendable—had a transparent half lid of sorts, which had not come down, and behind which a few smaller parcels were tucked as if for ready reference. Bundles were secured in the bath, bundles were stored in the shower stall, besides one that seemed to have exploded, strewing far more wardrobe into the zero-g of the premises than it could reasonably have contained.
Amid it all, Banichi and Jago had cases of electronics yet to set up, two of which they immediately emptied, donating them to Narani’s urgent demand for a flat surface. They were still searching for the pressing-iron, and exactly how they proposed to use that in null-g remained to be seen.
“Press cloth in these circumstances, Rani-ji?” Bren objected. “The second-best shirt will do. I’m sure it will do.”
“Paidhi-ma,” Narani objected, “I beg you allow us to try. For our pride’s sake, nandi. The coat has gotten rumpled, among other calamities. And the captains are invited.”
Staff continued their unpacking, cursing the insistence of ship security on inspecting certain of the items in an entirely unacceptable fashion, and at the last moment, of stowing the contents of the baggage cart in a haphazard hurry. Things had gone askew from plan, and it wasn’t in any way the atevi-ordered arrangement of rooms that let the staff do their duty in an orderly way. The staff was entirely distressed.
Meanwhile there was the scale of things. Banichi and Jago had quarters adjacent to his, and communicating by a door between as well as their own corridor access. A suite of rooms, the charts called the arrangement, each with clear floor about four strides long and two strides wide, which turned out to be, when occupied by atevi, human strides, if they were able to stride at the moment—and entirely too small. Niggling minor problem—storage for atevi-scale clothing was impossible in the tiny lockers provided for the original colonists. Greater problem: low human-scale ceilings made it very scant clearance for tall atevi such as Banichi even to stand up, once they were standing, and made a room in which four or five atevi were drifting askew a very small-seeming room indeed.
Those were situations for which they had been moderately prepared—at least in planning, before they tried to maneuver past one another. The closet and the food-storage closets were both what the ship called suites, and those were full, at the moment, Bren was told, of floating bags. The unpacked clothing would ultimately fit on lines to contain and order the wardrobes, once there was gravity, which now there was not. The unpacked security equipment had clamps and braces which did not mate to the room, rather to more gear that itself had to be fixed in place under these conditions, and which had to stay in place once there wasgravity.
More, the galley stores and the security equipment included heavy items, and in the grand scale of things, even the dowager’s invitation took second place to the need to get the heavy equipment and bundles sorted to the bottom and secured before undocking—before the simulated gravity sent the heavy things crashing down on the light ones. And on that score, there had been argument. Crew had advised them in a written communiqué not to take things into quarters, to leave them in cargo until after undock, and he had said no, they would take them in nevertheless. So doubtless crew who had shoved things into the cabins were quite smug about it all. So a jaundiced suspicion could guess.