Antaro and Jegari were too polite to ask what had just happened or how the interview with his father had affected their fortunes. So he told them. “I have permission to write a letter to the station. The misfortune is that those two outside have to go with us everywhere, nadiin-ji.” He was bitterly upset and tried not to let it affect his voice or his manner. “They are upset with us and now my father has said they have to be with us. So they will go with us to the library. I think my father has heard another story of where we went today.”
Their faces were duly sympathetic. “These guards outside our door are men who are in your great-uncle’s man’chi, nandi. They do not favor Taibeni.”
“They do not,” he agreed glumly, thinking that if he were clever he might still get out the door alone, but he had better make it worth it. In an otherwise idle portion of his mind, he wondered how Great-grandmother would deal with the situation if he and his staff simply went down to the public train and showed up at the Atageini station.
More to the point, he had to wonder how his father would deal with such a slippery move, and he did not think the outcome would be good.
Tano and Algini were on the next air cargo flight to the coast—Jago was in touch with them, and she would, Bren was sure, tell him if there was any glitch in their plan. Tano and Algini would reach the coast, the local boat would get them to the yacht, and they would go with the party from the household to make absolutely certain they could find Toby out at sea. They had the best of chances. The best of equipment, that was certain.
Bren rested on pins and needles the while.
And in the meanwhile, since a note had arrived from the aiji, he was already scheduled for a special meeting with Tabini before supper—God, there went the schedule. The note did not give the reasons of such a summons, and that meant having all his mental resources in working order. The occasion of the office party had at least gotten the staff together, and now the party-goers were at work restoring order in the premises and cleaning up the last of the crumbs, so that was handledc he had meant to go back, but postponed that.
By tomorrow, the office would be in full swing, and he had set its number one priority as getting communications established and bringing the shuttles—in some measure the paidhi’s particular responsibility from the beginning—up to operation as soon as possible. That had become the paidhi’s responsibility in the first place because building the shuttles had meant coordinating an immense volume of cross-cultural communications, and (which had never been the paidhi’s responsibilty, but which had become so) getting the secretive and jealous Guilds and various legislative departments into communication with each other.
And Mogari-nai was talking. The station was talking to departments again—granted the link stayed up. Tabini might want to get straight what the station had to say.
And for his own agenda, the earthbound Pilots’ Guild had to reestablish its training facilities, the technical branch of the Mechanics had to establish its space operations offices and get credentials in order. All of it, what little he had begun to heave into motion, had been on his shoulders until now. Now he had a thousand hands, a hundred small offices in communication with his staff. And it was not at all excessive for the task.
The whole space services system had to be repaired, from manufacturing and testing upwardc and his staff, who had done the bulk of the translations, now had to get those manuals and the people trained in the professions reunited, not to mention printing copies of the manuals and training and checking out any new personnel they had to hire—and then double-checking to be sure what was agreed upon to do had actually got done. Equipment had to be checked, down to the smallest detail, and materials and spare parts had to be found, a great deal of it unique to the shuttles, which meant a supply reserve of less than ten, down to spare bolts and cover plates, if they were lucky. The inventory system had gone into chaos.
There had to be staff lists, at the companies that manufactured the parts. There had to be copies of the agreements and specifications. All, all this complex business meant finding experts scattered to the windsc and being sure they were loyal, which meant, though reluctantly, engagement of the Assassins’ Guild, with its investigative expertise at finding out man’chi, estimating relationships—he doubted there was a single individual inside the program who had wholeheartedly supported Murini, but that confidence did not extend down into, say, the third marriage of the financially troubled factory worker. That depth of understanding was easily the province of the Assassins, who could gather up that sort of information as readily as asking the local membership.
And it all had to be done. They had a station up there depending on resupply of critical things the planet provided, and they had a space program to get running.
But they could not make the same mistakes as they had made in the past, to so trample on certain regional jealousies as to create uproar and protest. There had to be an oversight committee, someone to investigate the validity of complaints and mediate where mediation would serve.
And it was not precisely the paidhi’s job to suggest to Tabini that he hear regional complaints the paidhi saw fit to bring to his office, but he felt constrained to try, if the opportunity presented itself.
Damned sure few other court functionaries had the gall to broach the topic.
With Tabini, there was quite often no round of tea before talk.
One went into the room and delivered information, answered quick questions, heard the aiji’s instructions and bowed one’s way out.
The aiji’s schedule would have the aiji awash in tea if he were not, to a certain degree, abrupt and untraditional.
Today, however, there was tea offered, setting a genteel pace for such a private meeting. And a cup of tea provided time enough to recall the heir’s invasion of the party, the problems he had presented the aiji’s house, and the various reasons the aiji might have for a summons of the paidhi-aiji which did not involve the paidhi’s agenda with the space program, his office, or the location of his missing brother. One waited for the aiji to declare the subject of the meeting. And waited, until the tea ran out.
“My son,” Tabini began ominously, and then took an unexpected curvec “suggests we link computers together, for ease of communication within the household, and one is not certain how much farther. He believes he can do this if he has certain manuals he declares to exist on the ship.”
Bren drew in a breath, thinking rapidly, and finding himself at the edge of a cliff, and not at all the cliff he had planned. “To do that, aiji-ma, yes, he indeed has the skills do it, given computers with the capacity to connect. The aiji knows we do this in a limited fashion. But to establish that link for personal communications the young gentleman envisions, in the fashion the young gentleman has been accustomed to use on the ship—the changes the space program has brought would be slight, compared to the changes such a system would bring, implemented in full. And I must say, in all good will, aiji-ma, the regions are distraught enough—”
“Name these changes.”