Then, ominous, dark and formal in her uniform, Jago arrived in the midst of things, and surveyed the situation without expression.
"Bren-ji," she said, moving up beside him, "one heard, down in Security."
"About the ship? It sounds good so far."
A servant would have given Jago a glass, but she ordered tea; there was still food to be had, and while Jago wouldn't drink, she took down a piece of pizza in short order, and listened to the music, standing by him with a solemn and on-duty stare at the proceedings as dancers, twenty or so of them, this time, wound down the hall.
"It — rather well grew, nadi," Bren said, feeling foolish and completely responsible. "I hate to tell them no, but I fear we're disturbing the peace."
"No," Jago said in her somber way. "Though Cenedi, downstairs, made inquiry for the dowager's sake."
"Oh, damn."
"And Banichi and Tano demand a share saved for them." Jago's tea arrived, with suitable deference, and Jago stood and sipped tea. "They'll be in later. Cook is going to be beset for the recipe. Pieces made their way down to Security, over to Tabini, and down to the dowager. One hopes this contravenes no ceremonial propriety."
"No," he said solemnly. "By no means. God, is nothing safe?"
"The recipe?" Jago said.
"The information. Everything I do —"
"We do watch, Bren-ji. But don't rely on it too far. Banichi says get to bed in good season, don't proposition the servants, and don't break the ancestral porcelains."
"Where ishe?"
Jago cast a glance aside, then said, "He's got your plane arranged."
"Plane."
"To the observatory," Jago said, as if, of course, he should have known.
Which he should. The paidhi wasn't tracking as well as he ought. Probably it was the third glass. He was relatively sure it was the third.
"Day after tomorrow," Jago said, and sipped her tea. And hadn't, he realized a moment later, answered his question about Banichi's whereabouts at all.
Dammit, he thought. He got more information out of Cenedi and Tano than he did out of either of the two security personnel he counted closer to him.
But it wasn't the time or the place to insist. Banichi would turn up, probably as Jago disappeared somewhere, as they'd been doing. Jago'd mentioned a security station, and somehow Jago and Tabini andBanichi knew every move he made and every breath he took, which might indicate the nature of the security station they were occupying and the fact that the porcelains might be listening.
Which might indicate that, with a country at risk, or what passed for one in atevi reckoning, Tabini might not find it within his conscience to take him totally on his word.
Or dared not, with the amount of controversy he'd generated, and apparently a major crisis in the Assassins' Guild, leave him unwatched for a second.
Celebration might be in order. But solutions didn't fall into your hands, strangers didn't agree with you for no reason of advantage to themselves, and aijiin, presidents, and likely ship captains as well, when they had constituents at issue, didn't just do the logical, straightforward, economical — or trusting — thing. Not that he'd ever observed.
CHAPTER 13
" I've got a very little of a few languages," Graham said, on the phone patch-through. " I'm as close as we could come. I'm a history hobbyist. That's how I'm elected to the atevi side of this— I've got a background in history. The other of us, going to the human population— she's got all the technical background you want, but no study in languages at all. Nobody has, much. We don't have different languages. I just got into it because I was interested in history, and I got curious. And I teach, too. It was something I thought I ought to know."
"You're a teacher?" Bren asked, and poured a cup of tea from the pot on the office desk, with growing visions of a gentle, professorial young man, politically naive, dropping into political hell.
"Well, computers most of the time, but somebody's got to write the lessons for the kids. I gave them language study. I thought it was good for them. But not too many were interested."
"Know a noun from a verb?"
" Yes, sir. Conjugations, declensions, participles—"
" That'sgoing to be useful. I've prepped another data-load for you this morning, atevi-Mosphei' grammar notes with at least the basics — you're not going to understand half of it. A handful of phrases in the remote case you have to communicate with somebody other than me. We're not dealing with a human grammatical structure, as you'll find out. Good in math?"
"Up to a point, sir. Why?"
"Because you have to do some calculation constantly. The number of persons in a polite sentence isn't by head count, it's by calculations of rank plus real number, and there are forms you use to avoid jinxing somebody when you haveto use an infelicitous number of persons. You'll love it. I'm soglad to have somebody from the ship who's going to understand that this isn't a straightforward matter of word-for-word translation. I've been trying for years to make my department heads understand that answers one time aren't the answers the next time. If I haven't scared you by now, you may do."
"I'm at least daunted."
"Good judgment. Atevi and humans have deep but solvable conceptual differences, moderately significant psychological differences, and I'll tell you, we were just on the verge of important breakthroughs including space missions when you turned up in the sky scaring hell out of the children. Any background in negotiation? Politics?"
" History. Just— history."
He had an academic on his hands. God help them. Or a dilettante.
"Good vocabulary?"
"A pretty good one. Better than some."
"I've asked your captain to give you real authority to negotiate. And stand behind you. Will he?"
" I've heard what you said. He told me just— call if I had a question and I'm supposed to get a thorough briefing before I go down, on what we're going to need, on the lift vehicle and after. I'll need regular communications with the ship. I can get the technical details in download. "
Either the captain was naive — a possibility — or the captain was sending them somebody who didn't know enough to spill anything under,interrogation.
But Jason Graham wasn't stupid. A man who made a hobby out of history and languages wasn't stupid.
A fool, maybe. That was a different matter.
"You have any concept of politics, Graham? How do you make critical decisions up there? What's your procedure?"
"Guild vote, sir. The captains lay out what's to be done, or sometimes the technicians do, and then we all lay out what our choices are— it's not like a whole country, sir, it's a lot more like we've got information, and we've got what we don't know, and we've got to figure."
"How did you decide to come back, for example?"