News cameras. One didn'tdamn the aiji to hell with the servants listening, no matter how one wanted to.
"Where's Banichi?" he asked. He was slipping toward combat-mode. He wanted everything that was his nailed down, accounted for, tallied and named. He knewTabini in his slipperiest mode. He wanted Banichi on his side of the fence, not Tabini's. He wanted to know what orders Banichi had, and from whom.
"I don't know, nadi," Jago said. "I only know I'm to escort you, nadi, when you're ready."
There was body armor and a weapon under that black leather coat, he was well sure. With feelings and suspicions understandably running high, it was entirely reasonable. And if Banichi wasn't with him, Banichi was up to something that left his junior partner in charge — possibly serving as Tabini's security, which Banichi also was. He had no way to know.
And no choice but the duty in front of him.
He gathered himself out of the chair and let Tano and the servants help him into the many-buttoned formal coat — which occasioned a little fuss with the discreetly placed fastenings that made the sleeve look relatively intact, and in order for the all-important ribbon-distinguished braid to lie outside the high collar. There were tweaks, there were adjustments, there were sly, curious and solemn looks.
He stood, to the ebon, godlike ladies around him, about the size of a nine-year-old. He felt entirely overwhelmed and fragile, and hoped, God, hoped he retained the things he needed in his head, and wouldn't — God help him — say or imply something disastrous tonight.
"Jago-ji, if you'd bring the computer — I don't think I'll need it, but something might come up."
"Yes," Jago said. "Are we ready, nand' paidhi?"
"I hope so," he said, and was surprised and even moved when Saidin bowed deeply, with: "All the staff wishes you success, nand' paidhi. Please do well for us."
"Nadi. nadiin." He bowed to the servants, who bowed with more than perfunctory courtesy. "You've made my work possible. Thank you ever so much for your courtesy and care."
"Nand' paidhi," the general murmur was. And a second all-round bow, on the tail of which Jago took him in charge, picked up the computer and headed him toward the outer chambers and the door. Tano, wearing a uniform identical to Jago's, overtook them just before the foyer.
Then it was out into the hall of porcelain flowers and down to the general security lift, which all the residents of the top two levels used, down the three floors to the broadest, most televised corridor in the Bu-javid, the entrance to the tashrid.
He was accustomed to the territory. His own office wasn't that far removed. But the halls were lighted from scaffolds supporting television cameras and crews, echoing with the goings and comings of staff and aides. If he'd felt overwhelmed by the servants, he was far more so here, in the entry to the hall itself, where the tall, elegant lords of the Association gathered and talked — more so, as silence fell where he and his escort walked, and became a quiet murmur at his back.
There was a lesser corridor, for the privileged not wishing to be accosted in the aisles, a way into the tashrid, the house of lords, down the division between that and the much larger chamber of the hasdrawad, the commons. The screen which divided the two chambers was folded back, affording direct access to the joined chambers, where he could walk past the stares and the murmurous gossip of the members, down the slant of the figured carpet to that small set of ornately carved benches set aside for dignitaries and invited witnesses and petitioners.
There on the front row of the dignitaries' gallery he could sit alone with his single note card, with the reassurance of Jago and Tano hovering in the standing area near him.
The lords of the Association and the elected representatives of the provinces were drifting in rapidly now. He directed his attention to the card he had yet to memorize, a handful of words that could convey what he wanted to convey without unwanted connotations, a handful of atevi-language definitions he'd devised. FTL was an absolute ticking bomb. He didn'twant to handle it tonight. He hoped to steer away from technicalities.
From a third of the seats filled there was a sudden abundance of legislators in the aisles, moving with some purpose, and he was not at all surprised, once that influx had found seats, that Tabini-aiji arrived by the same entry he'd used — but Tabini walked to the fore of the chamber. The gallery was jammed with observers, and while Jago and Tano stood steadfastly on guard near Bren, Tabini walked to the podium.
"Nand' paidhi," Tabini said, the speakers echoing out over both halls.
He got up, picked up the computer Jago had set near him, and began his trek down the aisle while Tabini received the standing, silent courtesy of the joint houses, and then declared that the paidhi would, for the first time in this administration, address the houses of government and the provinces conjointly, "to provide expert information on the event in the heavens."
He came up to the secondary microphone with no other fanfare, bowed to Tabini, bowed to the tashrid, to the hasdrawad, and set the computer down.
"Ladies and gentlemen of the Association," was the correct address, and, "Nand' paidhi," he heard back, as the members bowed to him in turn, then sat down.
He drew an insufficient breath, and found a convenient place to lean a supporting arm on the lower rails of a speaker's platform far too tall for him.
A sea of dark, listening, variously expectant faces confronted him.
"A long time ago," he began, "Nadiin, a ship set out from a distant world, intending to build a space station at a place they thought they were going to live. But some accident sent the ship out of sight of all the stars the navigators knew, into a place so heavy with radiation it was deadly to anyone working outside the hull. Very many of the crew died gathering the resources they had to have to take the ship to safety. The workers who were only passengers on this mission had no skills to save the ship: they voted the ship's crew extraordinary privilege and power so long as it was ship's crew who went outside the hull."
Atevi audiences didn't emote in a formal presentation. They sat. They kept impassive faces and absolute, respectful silence. They didn't cue a speaker what way they were thinking, or whether they were understanding, or whether they wanted to shoot the speaker. Atevi audiences just listened, disconcertingly so.
But the reason for the granting of rank and privilege was absolutely important to atevi thinking. And while privilege could arise from ancestral merit, it had to have constant merit, or it was suspect: thatwas the groundwork he was laying. Deliberately.
"Nadiin," he said, and fought for breath over the constriction of the tape around his ribs, damnably unforgiving of the fact the wearer was scared, needed to project his voice, and needed more air. "Brave people mined the fuel they needed to fly the ship to a more favorable and healthful place, which they had to choose on very little data. This world —" One avoided more precise cosmology. It had to come soon. Just, please God, not tonight. "This world was promising. But once they entered orbit here, they were vastly upset to learn it was an inhabited planet. They'd spent all their fuel. They'd lost so many lives they were growing fragile as a community. The ship crew wanted to withdraw to the fourth planet from the sun and build a station in orbit, thinking it then might be a long time before atevi discovered human presence — but after such a dangerous journey —"
Another pause for air, and he still had no reaction at all, good or bad, to what was mostly old information, with insights that weren't in the previous canon. "After such a terrible journey, nadiin, and so many lives lost, people were afraid of travel and harsh, unknown environments. They reasoned if they built their home in orbit around a life-bearing world, and if something went wrong in space, there was the planet below as a last resort. They saw that atevi were civilized and advanced — their telescopes told them so. They felt much safer where they were, and they voted against the ship's crew."