“You’re sure. You swear.”
“In formal Ragi, there are, I swear to you, three hundred forty-six key words. Learn those, and most everything that rhymes with them follows their paradigm.”
“You said there were a hundred and twelve!”
“I’m speaking of the court language. You’re getting far beyond the children’s forms.”
“Not very damn fast, I’m not.”
“It does go faster from here. Trust me.”
“That’s what you said when I landed.”
The conversation had gone to banter. To high spirits. “What couldI say? I couldn’t discourage you.”
But Jase didn’t take up the conversation. Jase ducked his head and had a piece of fish, no longer engaging with him, and the mood crashed.
He looked down the length of a table set with dishes not native even to him, knowing he couldn’t imaginethe mind of a man who’d never seen a horizon with a negative curve, who’d never seen a blue sky, never seen the rain clouds he mistakenly invoked. Jase had never even met a stranger until he’d fallen down from the sky and met a world full of strangers and unguessable customs. Jase’s world had consisted of the crew of his ship— hisship, not theship.
Jase had somehow acquired curiosity about things outside his steel world. That adventurousness, the ship’s captain had declared, was why he’d sent Jase, who was (he and Jase had worked it out on the computer) two planetary years younger than his twenty-seven-almost-eight; and it was why they’d sent Yolanda Mercheson, who was a little older, a little steadier, perhaps. He’d never gotten a chance to know her when she landed with Jase—they’d rapidly packed her off to her job on the island—but he thought she might be a match for some of the harder heads on Mospheira. In his brief experience of her, Yolanda Mercheson would watch anything, no matter how odd, completely deadpan and without reaction—and remark it was certainly different than they did things on the ship.
Considering Jase’s volatility, Jase’s uneasiness at strange things, and his tendency to let his expressions slip his control, Bren asked himself if the ship-folk hadn’t mistaken their envoys. Atevi would have accepted Yolanda’s dry and deadpan humor, though mistakenly; it was tooatevi without being atevi. But Jase didn’t keep himself in the kind of shell his own predecessor, Wilson-paidhi, had built around himself. Say that for him: he was willing to risk everything, was willing to risk emotional and psychological hurt, getting close to the atevi.
Jase had come armed with curiosity and a history of the atevi-human conflict that not-well-disposed humans on Mospheira had fired at the ship; and, coming from a steel-walled ship-culture which he’d hinted had distinctions of rank but not of diversity, he’d gone into the business more blind and more ignorant as to what he was getting into than a native of the world could possibly imagine.
The personal recklessness it had taken for both Jase and Yolanda to come down here would have washed both of them out of the Foreign Studies program. Jase had been willing, intelligent, and had no essential duties aboard the ship, a computer tech, but in cold, blunt terms, the ship could risk him: low-level and ignorant. Exactly what Mospheira’s government had thought itwas sending into the field when it sent one Bren Cameron.
But paidhiin had a tendency to mutate on duty. It remained to be seen what the job would do to Jase, but the ship wouldn’t get back the bright-eyed and curious young man it had sent down to the world, if that man had ever really existed. Hehadn’t seen that side of Jase, the Jase that had existed in the voice transmissions from the ship, not since the capsule had landed; and he was, he admitted it, disappointed in the transaction. Stress and communication problems and the need for one of them who knew all the answers to tell the other when to hold that frustration in and how long to hold it all took their toll. It had certainly undermined the relationship they might have had.
“So are there any messages in?” he asked Jase, meaning messages from the ship, via the big dish at Mogari-nai.
“The regular call from Yolanda.”
“So how is she, nadi?”
“Fine.”
They spoke the atevi language in the exchange. Madam Saidin dropped by to put a note beside his plate.
Join me after breakfast, it said. It bore Tabini’s signature, was entirely in Tabini’s hand, a rarity. Unless there’s urgency about your report. I shall expect you at the usual time.
“No,” he said with a glance up to Saidin. “Thank you, nadi. I can leave matters at that. I don’t need to reply. This is a confirmation only.”
“News, nadi?” Jase asked.
“An appointment tomorrow, with the aiji. Routine matters.—Although nothing’s routine at the moment.” He saw expression on Jase’s face. Or had seen it. “Jase?”
“No,” Jase said. And drew a breath. “Glad to see a human face.”
Meaning hehad an appointment and was bound out of the apartment and Jase was alone. Again.
“The mirror gets old,” he said to Jase with all sympathy, “doesn’t it?”
“You said I’d get past it. I frankly don’t see how you’ve stood it alone.”
It wasn’t the time to lecture Jase again about reliance on one’s native tongue. Like it or not, one had to give up one’s native tongue at least for a while if one wished to make that mental jump to full fluency. Jase couldn’t give it up, because Jase was their source of technical words: Jase had to stay connected to the human language because Jase’s jobwas to take concepts in shipboard engineering terms and teach himenough engineering and enough of the ship’s slightly skewed-from-Mosphei’ way of speaking to get it translated accurately enough for atevi engineers. Hewas having to deal far more in the human language than he ordinarily ever would on this side of the strait, and the back-and-forth was keeping him off his stride, too.
But tonight everything he was picking up from Jase said that something major was wrong with that situation—or with some situation. Jase wasn’t talking after that last glum statement. Jase took a sip of guaranteed-safe tea and dipped bits of seasonally appropriate meat into sauce one after another with studied mannerliness, not engaging with him on the issues.
Damn, he was so tired. It wasn’t just today. It was all the sequence of days before. It was the months before.
It was Saigimi. It was the meeting tomorrow. He knewJase had reasons. He knewJase had been through his own kind of hell in isolation, and he felt sorry for his situation, he truly did, but he was suffering his own post-travel adrenaline drop, and had no mental agility left. He wasn’t going to come across as sympathetic, humane, or even human, if Jase wanted to push him, and he didn’t know whether he could postpone their business until the morning without offending Jase, but that was what he should do.
Next course, the last course: Jase asked one servant for two bowls, baffling the young woman considerably.
“ Assoshi madihiin-sa,” Bren said quietly. “ Mai, nadi.”
“ Mai, nadi, saijuri.” Jase echoed him and made a courteous patch on the utterance, with good grace. Maybe, Bren thought, Jase was working through his mood and getting a grip on his emotions: he chose to encourage it.
“Difficult forms,” Bren said in Ragi. The conditional request and the irregular courtesy plurals, six of them, were to create felicitous and infelicitous numbers in the sentence. “You were never infelicitous.”
“One is pleased to hear so.” The courteous answer. The flatly correct answer.
The courtesy plurals weren’t the easiest aspect of the language. Jase had tottered along thus far using the ath-mai’in, commonly, the children’s forms, which advised any hearer that here was an impaired speaker and no one should take offense at his language. Damn some influential person to hell in Mosphei’ and it was, situationally at least, polite conversation. Speak to an atevi of like degree in an infelicitous mode and you’d ill-wished him in far stronger, far more offensive terms and might find yourself filed on with the Guild unless someone could patch the situation.