And here they were, everything in their own control, if one could call it control—with a formal dinner unexpectedly at hand and baggage everywhere.
His luggage, however, was bulk rather than mass, and at least posed few breakage hazards.
“Just pad the equipment with mybags,” he told Banichi and Jago, when there was question of bringing Tano and Algini board for a few hours to do the installation while they pursued Ilisidi’s notion of formal entertainment. “We aren’t going to be able to get this installed before we move. My shirts won’t break. And we shouldn’t pull Tano and Algini off internal security. I truly don’t like that notion, Banichi.”
“One can try to secure things,” Banichi said. “Or we can draw personnel from Cenedi, perhaps before launch.”
“I’m sure I have enough clothes. I’m sure I have far too many clothes. Do it, Banichi.”
Meanwhile the domestic staff, which had expected a decent interval to do its necessary arranging, now searched to find, among other necessities of life, old-fashioned vegetable starch, which they intended to boil—one asked—in a sealed bag in the microwave… which also had to be unpacked and secured. One did not want to imagine the zero-g consequences of a burst bag of starch.
They had, however, located the pressing-iron—which fortunately waselectric, not a flatiron as the old arrangement had been.
Plugging it in, however, required a unit and a small, unreasonably mislaid adapter to mediate between its three-pronged plug and the ship’s power clips. That was well enough: they needed the adapters for the microwave, too.
The staff oh so rarely missed a social forecast. Narani had so carefully had his less formal second-best pressed, protected, and ready for what had, to Narani, seemed likely: an informal dinner with the dowager.
They had certainly been sandbagged. Caught out, half-prepared—excusable, under the pressure of their sudden departure; but now there was no margin.
“I could surelymake do with the casual coat, Rani-ji,” Bren reiterated, foreknowing the futility of that protest; and, no, no, even yet, absolutely not. Narani would perish of shame if he sent the paidhi-aiji to a state dinner in his second-best coat and trousers, and he would not admit defeat, yet, no matter the lack of adapters.
Not to mention that Banichi and Jago had to have theirformal uniforms and everything of their individual spit and polish, and the equipment that went with them. That necessity had Asicho in a dither, because those hadn’t been readied, either.
There was at least time to bathe, once Asicho shifted the baggage out of the paidhi’s shower, and Bren simply turned over the clothes he was wearing, trusting no crew would be floating by in the common hall, and took refuge in the anemic fog-shower, which at least was unaffected by lack of gravity.
It was fifteen minutes of comparative peace until the shower beeped a warning, sucked up the moisture and turned itself off.
Asicho waited with a soft, sweet-smelling bathrobe, zero-g and all.
Meanwhile the adapters had turned up, and staff, having microwaved their starch to slimy perfection, prepared his shirt for ironing.
There was something remarkably tranquil about the aroma of fresh ironing. And Banichi and Jago reported one emergency solved and their quarters secured: they had unmade their beds, corralled the fragiles in small bundles of bedding and secured them under the lowered transparent bed-lids.
Bren settled to dry his hair and check last-moment messages.
Of mail, there was none but a parting well-wish from Lord Geigi, which he answered fondly, and with kind thoughts for the one atevi in all the world who probably wanted most to be here:
I shall attempt to secure pictures to show you…
Then, in that momentary pause, somber and thinking of very far places indeed, he composed a letter to his mother, hoping Barb would read it to her.
Aboard now, and thinking of you.
I wish I could be two people, one to do things a son and a brother ought to have done, especially in these last years that I haven’t been in reach.
I think of winter in the mountains, the cabin we used to use. I think of the seashore we visited. I think of the kitchen and sitting in the morning drinking tea, and I want all that to be there when I get back. I have to go, for the safety of all we work for— but I’m coming back, and I want you to bake that really spicy teacake, and I want a few mornings to spend just like that, sopping up tea and teacake and telling you everywhere I’ve been.
Then I want to take a good few days of the vacation I’ve got coming to fly you up to the mountains and see if that cabin’s still there. It’s the good memories that sustain me.
I need you. Take care of yourself. Give my love to Toby.
With all my heart, mum. Take care and be good.
Bren.
He nerved himself and sent, a button push that necessitated a reach after the retreating computer.
He trusted C1 and Mogari-nai at this point. He had to. He had to trust very many people for everything.
He left the computer fairly securely parked against the wall, near his bed, and concentrated on the hair-drying, Asicho being busy with Jago’s uniform, and Banichi’s.
His shirt when it arrived had lace so crisp it rattled, lace inserted through the coat-sleeves beforehe put his arms in, which was the secret by which the court achieved true extravagance of dress. Bindanda snugged up first the shirt and then the frothy, razor-edged collar while Narani supported the coat from behind and kept his hair out of the lace points.
Fashion, fashion, fashion: a little out of current, he knew, but a statement, nonetheless, a declaration, a respect for the dowager and her table.
He took a strange reassurance from the lace and the excess, like some ancient warrior of the archives putting on armor, some sense of atavistic participatory extravagance that declared a class, a club, a secret society to which the dowager and he belonged. Which was in a sense the truth. It meant that she would know him, she would read him accurately, and perhaps, if things went badly, listen to him much more reasonably than if he had arrived, as he had argued to do, in less than his absolute best. Narani was right. Narani’s instincts said find the damned starch and steam the silk coat to rights, for the sake of all of them.
He anchored himself by a handgrip to have his hair dressed: Asicho spread a silk scarf across the brocade coat shoulders, and her skilled, fine fingers rendered the braid with little tugs that tried to pull him loose from his mooring.
She accomplished the ribboning immaculately, he trusted, not taking time to find a mirror: white, for the paidhi’s professional neutrality in a minefield of heraldries, associations and rivalries.
After that, in that coat of silk both fine and thick as armor, he could drift slightly askew from the ceiling and floor, let his computer drift in front of him on voice-command, and gather his thoughts over his notes and charts of ship structure and space allotments. Not a pleasant contemplation, but he had before him an assembly of his accesses, his resources, in the not-inconceivable eventuality of the dowager creating a breach with Ogun and with Sabin.
And a hostile collapse of the entire political structure.
Hadn’t Tabini said from the beginning that he intended to rule the station, that he intended there be an atevi starship?