“Dare you say so?” Jago was not daunted. And towered over the boy. “ Dare you say so? Did you build this ship? Did you place those panels? Do you command those who can?”
Clearly the answer was no. Cajeiri didn’t command anything about the ship.
“So?” Jago said. “Do you fancy going to Sabin-aiji and asking someone to repair it?”
Set of the jaw. “I would go to Sabin-aiji.”
“That would hardly be as wise as an aiji needs to be,” Bani-chi said in his deep voice. “Do you know why?”
Clearly that answer was no, too. But the boy was not a complete fool, and lowered the level of aggression.
“I was seeing how hard it would hit,” Cajeiri said.
“And did not intend to dent the ship?”
“I beg pardon, nadiin.”
“Wrap the points,” Jago said shortly, “aiji-ma. Be wiser.”
“Yes, Jago-nadi.” The young wretch set the offending instrument of war butt-down on the deck, its heel in his instep, and unstrung it. He took the arrow from Jago. And bowed to authority, attempting charm. “Good morning, Bren-nandi. Is Jase-aiji coming down?”
“Little pitchers with big ears,” Bren translated the human proverb, which Cajeiri understood and thought funny. “I have had my meeting with Jase. It was very nice, thank you.”
“Grandmother wants you to come to breakfast,” Cajeiri said. “But the hour is past breakfast.”
One could imagine she wanted to hear from him.
“She has not yet invited me, nadi.”
“I told Narani. I brought the message.”
“Staff does these things quite efficiently on their own,” Banichi said dryly. “If you can shoot at lord Bren, you can manage beyond the children’s language, am I correct?”
“No,” Cajeiri said defensively. He was only seven. Consequently he spoke Ragi without the architecture of courtesies and rank and elaborate numerology of his seniors. He had liberties appropriate to his age—and was bored beyond bearing, being the only seven-year-old aboard. Ship’s crew had left their minor children, considering it was not a safe voyage.
But the aiji in Shejidan had sent his son on a voyage that should teach him more than bad behavior and dangerous familiarity.
“I shall see the aiji-dowager,” Bren said. “Go beg Narani-nadi to arrange some graceful hanging on this wall, to save the servants asking each other who could have damaged our residence.”
“Yes, Bren-aiji.”
“And regard security’s advice. Aijiin do not defend themselves with bows and arrows—”
“With guns, Bren-nadi!”
“Not even with guns, Cajeiri-nadi. Their staffs defend them. The very humblest servant who locks a bedroom window at night defends them. Not to mention the Assassins’ Guild, who do carry guns, and whose reactions are very quick, and not to be trifled with. Please live to grow up, young aiji. Your father and mother would be very disappointed otherwise. So even would your great-grandmother.”
Cajeiri’s eyes… they looked at one another eye to eye… grew very large.
“And by no means forget,” Bren said, ”that I am several times your age. So your father would remind you.”
“Yes, Bren-aiji.”
He liked the boy. And like was for salads. Love was for flavors of fruit drink. It wasn’t an emotion one could even translate for a species that operated by hierarchies and grouping and emotionally charged associations.
“You are within my man’chi,” was as close as he could come. “No matter you behave like this. But be careful. The ship is going to move soon. We’re going into a place of considerable danger.”
“Are we?” Eagerness. The boy was seven. “Is it the lost station?”
“It may be. Meanwhile—wrap the arrowheads. Don’t shoot my staff. And see me later. I’m sure we can find some new videos for the trip.”
“Some human ones!”
“Some human ones, too.” They had a store of them. A large store. In consideration where they were going and the risks they ran, they’d dumped a great deal of the human Archive from the ship, entrusting it to the planet and the station of their origin. But they’d kept a few useful bits. “Now apologize, and then off with you to tell Narani.”
“One is very sorry,” the scoundrel said, with all his father’s winning ways, and bowed to him and to Jago and Banichi. “One is doubly sorry, nadiin-ji. And begs to be excused.”
“Go,” Banichi said, and the boy escaped.
Galley staff had watched all this from the open door.
“One is equally sorry, nandi,” the cook said—the dowager’s men, all young, except the cook; and bet that Cenedi, the dowager’s chief of security, had had an immediate report about the dent that had sprung, likely without much warning, from the depths of their premises.
“One very well understands, nadi,” Bren said. Never turn aside an atevi apology: they came when due. “One is informed the dowager has sent for me?”
“You were expected at breakfast, nandi,” the cook said. “The aiji-dowager is now in her study.”
“I’d better go there immediately,” he said to his staff.
“One will inform Narani,” Jago said, and they turned back toward the dowager’s main doors, their own unvisited—well, except by a boy on a life-saving mission. The dowager was not long on patience.
Several doors back, in their relatively compact living arrangement, this linear, human-designed interlock accommodated what should be roughly circular routes, by atevi habit. Atevi ingenuity did manage: the dowager’s household accessed the bone-numbing cold of a service tunnel running behind the cabins’ back walls for brief, discreet trips past the dowager’s front door, where a guest entered.
He rapped softly—a shared custom—rather than use the signal button. The door opened. Cenedi had a small, highly electronic secretary desk in the curtained-off foyer. Cenedi was often at work there, and Cenedi was on the spot at the door, right behind the dowager’s major domo. Expecting them—no miracle, given their ubiquitous communications links.
“Welcome,” Cenedi said. “Welcome, nandi.”
“Indeed, thank you, Cenedi-ji.—I shall keep the coat, nadi.” This for a servant who silently offered to take it. The dowager’s favored temperatures were too cold for comfort—this, the woman who preferred a drafty mountain fortress with minimal plumbing to the luxury of temperate—and political—Shejidan.
He retained his coat, left Banichi and Jago to their ordinary social interface with the dowager’s security, and followed the servant’s polite lead to the service access, a bone-chilling walk three doors down, a duck of the head to get into the comparative heat of the dowager’s underheated study.
They could have gone back into the main corridor. The dowager did otherwise. The staff did otherwise. So her guests, once admitted to her premises, did otherwise.
The dowager occupied a chair in what was, given the carefully restrained objects on the shelves, an office-study cum library—in short, all those functions that in the dowager’s establishment were sanity-saving and civilized.
The dowager, knitted shawl about her, read. And looked up from her book.
Scowling. Darkly scowling.
“You coddle the boy.”
Where was her communications link? He had never spotted it.
“He’s bigger than I am,” Bren said, and it struck the dowager’s humor. She laughed, and laughed, and moved her cane to tap the other chair.
He sat. He didn’t begin a report. He waited about two breaths.
“So,” she said. “And how is Sabin-aiji?”
“Well,” he said.
“Have you broken your fast?”
“No, aiji-ma, but—”
“But. But. But. Will you have breakfast? Or tea?”
“I fear my stomach could by no means deal with a breakfast, aiji-ma, and I have had tea upstairs.”
“And your estimate?”
That was the formal invitation. “Aiji-ma, you know the ship-aijiin lied to the crew.”
Impatient wave of the hand. “Estimate of Sabin-aiji.”
“A difficult book to read, aiji-ma, a palimpsest of several regimes on this ship, and to this hour I cannot know precisely which layer has the truth. But she acts as if she expected Jase-aiji to find that tape. She is aware that it was falsified. And in my own opinion, that deception may have served us all. The crew would have been very difficult for the aijiin to manage over the last decade if they had known from the start that there were survivors back at the original station. They would most surely have diverted all energy toward refueling the ship precisely for this voyage, and subverted all construction toward that end. Neither Mospheirans nor atevi would have agreed with that as a priority, one is sure, and one is convinced Ramirez foresaw that. If there were no particular haste to return, the crew would take any order. Pratap Tamun’s attempt to take power—this is my own guess, aiji-ma—might indicate a certain suspicion within the certain levels of the crew. He may have used his suspicion to blackmail the other ship-aijiin into conceding to his demands—but he lacked proof. His kidnapping of Ramirez instead of killing him suggests he wanted something Ramirez could give. I used to wonder what. Now I strongly suspect it was an admission of information on this tape—or beyond it, from some meeting of Ramirez’s men with station authorities.”