He had nothing like Jago’s strength, let alone Banichi’s, but he’d certainly worked off all the rich desserts and sedentary evenings of the last ten years during this voyage. He no longer rated himself sharp enough to downhill Mt. Adams, but he figured if he fell in the attempt, he’d at least bounce several times before he broke something.
And, like the transcript-translation and the two letters which had now become individual volumes, exercise filled the hours, mindless and cathartic. Unlike the transcript and the letter-writing, it didn’t force him to think of dire possibilities or to fret about records on which he could spend useful time, if he could only get them.
He resurrected old card games out of the Archive and translated those for his staff, with cards made of document folders. Whist became a favorite.
Cajeiri, deserted to his own young devices, built paper planes and flew them in the long main corridor, where they took unpredictible courses. Cajeiri said the strangeness of the journey made them fly in unpredictible ways. It seemed a fair experiment and a curious notion, so Bren made a few of his own, and greatly amused the dowager’s staff.
Their designs were dubious in the flow of air from the vents. The properties of airplanes in hyperspace remained an elusive question. They were at least soft-landing, and the walls were safe.
And there was the human Archive for entertainment, such of it as they still carried aboard. The servant staff assembled with simple refreshments and held group viewings in the servants’ domain, occasionally of solemn atevi machimi, but often enough of old movies from the human Archive. Horses had long since become a sensation, in whatever era. Elephants and tigers were particularly popular, and evoked wonder. The Jungle Book re-ran multiple times on its premiere evening. “Play it again,” the staff requested Bindanda, who ran the machine, and on subsequent evenings, if the other selections seemed less favorable, they ran and reran the favorite.
On a particular evening of the watch, Bren passed the dining hall to hear loud cheers go up. He wondered whether there was a new sensation to surpass even The Jungle Book .
He looked in. The assembled audience was, indeed, not just the servant staff. Banichi and Jago attended. He saw Cenedi and the dowager’s staff, and Cajeiri, his young face transfigured by the silver light of the screen—of course, Cajeiri had inveigled his way in.
A black and white, the offering was—odd, in itself. Color was usually the preference. As he stood in the doorway, a scaled monster stepped on the ruin of a building. Humans darted this way and that in patterns that atevi would search in vain for signs of association.
Men in antique uniforms fired large guns at the beast, which slogged on, to atevi cheers and laughter.
Hamlet , atevi had appreciated and applauded, when he’d brought a modern tape to the mainland… appreciated it, but felt cheated by ambiguities in the ending. They’d been puzzled by Romeo and Juliet , but were both horrified and gratified by Oedipus , which they conceded had a fine ending, once he explained it.
Now…
A building went flat.
The great Archive. The unseen dramas, manifestation of the collected human wisdom, the possibility of every digital blip the storage had carried on its way to build an outpost of human civilization. And this fuzzy black and white delighted the audience.
Laughter. A light young voice among the rest, the future aiji.
He couldn’t begin to explain this story. He considered going in, tucking himself in among the rest, trying to figure the nature of the tape—but he’d likely disturb the staff, who were obviously understanding the story quite well without him—or at least finding amusement in it. He drifted on to his own quarters and ran through the Archive indices for himself, looking for entertainment, for diversion, for edification—and finding absolutely nothing in the entire body of work of the human species that appealed to him this evening.
Which somehow told him it wasn’t really a tape he wanted.
What he wanted was to be absorbed and equal in the company out there, watching a mythical beast flatten buildings.
What he most wanted was to sit surrounded by congeniality and supplied with something munchable and something potable, having a good time—but the staff, even including Banichi and Jago, could only do that when they thought they had a moment off, and if he showed up, it could only make them ask themselves who was minding the things that had to be minded.
And they would get up and go see if there was anything he needed.
He was feeling human this evening. He was feeling human, strange, and somewhat melancholy.
So let them relax, he said to himself. Staff worked hard enough to assure his relaxation: let them have their own enjoyment without his crises of identity and visions of an uncertain outcome.
And if Cenedi included the aiji’s heir in the security staff’s dubious amusements, Cenedi judged it was probably good for the boy. He himself sat at his desk solo, and played computer solitaire, in complete confidence that if he should ask, tea would arrive. But he chose, again, not to disturb staff. He was human. He was Mospheiran. He could very easily go to the galley and make his own tea. He thought he could find a pan and the tea-caddy… but he hadn’t the energy or the will to attend his own needs. He felt sorry for himself in the numb, dull-as-a-rock way the transition let anybody feel anything.
And he kept losing the games, which in itself was a good barometer of his mood and his muddle-headedness with the basic numbers of his situation.
Nearing the end of this long voyage, and no information, when he blackly suspected Sabin had by now seen it, formed a conclusion, and denied it to him.
He was nearing the point at which his ideas had to work—if he had any; which he wouldn’t, until he got a view of the situation at their exit.
God, he hated improvisation. The older he got, the more he distrusted gut instinct and initial impressions—and he used his instincts, or he had used them, and they’d worked, but they’d worked with people he knew, and often on blind luck— baji-naji , atevi would insist: actions in good awareness of the transitory numbers of a situation flowed with a situation, and luck and chance themselves flowed along discernable channels. One only had to understand the numbers to ride the current and improve one’s luck in moments of change.
But one had to know the numbers. And he didn’t. The ship-folk were more alien to planet-bound humans than atevi were—while ship-folk had queasily found atevi easier to deal with than they found Mospheirans. And nobody, not even Jase, understood the Pilots’ Guild—or the senior captain.
He wanted Jase to rush down to five-deck right about now with a handful of log records assuring him there was a quick, even brilliant answer to what Ramirez had agreed to with the Guild, and it was all fine, but that scenario wasn’t going to happen. By now, he understood the dowager locking herself in her cabin and refusing to come out.
Fragile, that was what he was feeling. Fragile and entirely in the dark.
Stupidity might help. The simple disinclination to ask what came next.
As it was, his mirror and his computer and his steadily lengthening letters home asked him that question, every morning and every evening of their arbitrary, diversion-filled days.
On a certain morning Bren opened his door, bound for breakfast, and a motorized car whizzed noisily past his foot, destination right, origin left.
He looked left, at the future lord of a planet on his knees, control unit in both hands, looking entirely sheepish.
“I’m testing new wheels,” Cajeiri explained, and added in frustration: “They aren’t working right. But one thinks it’s the ship moving.”
“It may well be,” Bren said numbly. “Or not.”