“As a father to him. A stern father.” It didn’t mean quite what it did to a human, but it meant man’chi.
“This business of being one of Taylor’s Children.”
“Just so.”
The servants took away the egg dish and replaced it with the seasonal meat, a large, fan-spined fish. It sat atop the platter staring at them from a bed of blue-green weed, but its body was a sculpted white pate dotted with small green fruits.
The rule was generally to avoid blue foods and mildly suspect the white, but he trusted the dowager, and took a serving without question. A servant set a cruet of herb-flavored vinegar beside his hand, and he applied it.
“Excellent.” A friend of the household could never take for granted the sacrifice of a life, however spiny, or the artistic efforts of a cook preparing the dish. “Truly excellent, nandi. My thanks and my admiration.”
“Duly accepted, paidhi-ji.” Warmly said. “Now. Tell me this tale, not as you told it when we were ignorant of stars and shuttle ships. Tell me the tale as if this time I shall understand destinations. What is this business of Taylor’s Children?”
“Taylor was the pilot, the first pilot. Phoenixset out centuries ago from the earth of humans to a station construction site, going to a star within sight of the earth of humans. But the ship suddenly flew askew, and turned up instead at a deadly dangerous star, out of fuel, or nearly so.”
“Sabotage?”
“It’s given it was an accident of subspace, one of those mathematical questions the Astronomer Emeritus—”
The imperious wave of an elderly black hand. “So. Continue. The birth of the children.”
“Proximity to the star would mean the early death of those who went outside the ship; but they had to acquire fuel. They used the construction craft intended for station construction, craft with little protection. Heroic persons went out, knowing the exposure would surely kill them. Indelicate as it is to say—they left their personal legacy in frozen storage, not out of vanity, but because if they were so lost, they wished to have a community of sufficient variety for a healthy community. They knew they were in trouble. They died in great numbers.”
“And they gathered fuel to move the ship to safety.”
“Even so.”
“Here. And this Taylor-captainguided the ship safely to this harbor before he died.”
“Yes.”
Jason had been her guest yesterday, and he’d wager anything that Jason had told her the same tale in carefully compared detail. He stayed close to the canon.
“So,” Ilisidi said, and had a bite of fish. “All those born of this legacyare named the sons and daughters of Taylor. And they had come to the earth of the atevi. Taylor died. The pilots wished to stay in space and search for home; the ordinary folk instead chose to land and become a problem to us.”
“The Pilots’ Guild respected the rights of atevi not to be bothered or contacted. They wanted to move off to the red star, leaving no station about this planet beyond what they needed for a very small base. But the colonists didn’t agree. They saw a green planet much like their own. Certain ones leaped off on the petal sails and fell into the world.”
“To a welcome, after initial difficulties,” Ilisidi interjected, more expert than he in this phase of atevi history. “We were entranced with change and your technology. We became addicted to these offerings.”
“While the ship left on its search, leaving some persons on the planet, others running the station. But as conditions grew harder on the station, and as the atevi did welcome the Landing, more and more humans came down.”
“Increasing our good fortune,” the dowager interjected wryly.
“So many left the station couldn’t function. They could shut it down and prepare it to wait, in which case it would take less damage, but shutting it down seemed to necessitate leaving. When the ship came back, after elapsed centuries… all the surviving humans were down here, and everything had changed.”
“Yet the ship had had children. They populated the ship with this legacy.”
“They rarely access it. When they do, they treat those children as special, outside the regular lines of descent. They don’t tell whose child they were, so as not to create any sense of preference in their history. They call them all Taylor’s Children.”
“So Jase is a special person, of consequence within their association.”
“A person they’re disposed to view as lacking associations. Not as an aiji lacks them, but born for a specific purpose. Captain Ramirez authorized the birth of a number of them… with ordinary mothers… for the return journey to this earth. They hadn’t known about the aliens yet. They were supposed to prepare themselves to contact the station; that purpose stayed. That’s why Jase studied languages. He said it was a hobby, but he wasn’t quite truthful at the start… not in that, not in a lot of things he later told me. He and the others… there were ten of them… they were purposed for something a lot happier than what Ramirez found when they received a distress call from the second station they’d built out there.”
“Languages,” Ilisidi echoed, and from her deliberate tone, he knew she’d seen the flaw in the reasoning. “To greet their own descendants. Does the human language change so rapidly, then?”
He had no answer to that. He and Jase had discussed the same question, had looked at Jase’s existence in ways Jase had never considered. Jase had said, There are factions aboard ship… and Jase had acknowledged some of those did not gracefully accept the current negotiations with the atevi.
Ramirez had authorized the birth of the children, had had them encouraged into those very skills that would enhance their ability to negotiate… that Ramirez had planned the children to negotiate with the atevi from the start, that Ramirez had had the vision to see beyond human arrogance to welcome aid from any source available… that had been well within Jase’s understanding of his captain-father, and well within the needs of peace aboard ship that Ramirez would keep such a purpose to himself.
But he couldn’t say that to Ilisidi. That was speculation of a nature he hadn’t even factual-basis enough to pass on to Tabini. But that Ilisidi, a veteran of subterfuge, had made the logical leap on her own… that he could well believe.
“So. Well,” Ilisidi, her point made, continued. “With these strangely trained children in tow, they went to this other station which had called and which had suffered great damage in their absence.”
“Exactly so. Ramirez questioned the station-folk there, and determined to come here, fall back to this base, thinking he’d find a large population and a thriving station. The ship was not happy in what it did find.”
Not happy, yes, but that Ramirez had been surprised… that, he and Jase had decided, was highly unlikely.
“One does imagine so.” Ilisidi silently finished a massive portion of the fish, and accepted a dish of spiced vegetables. “These are from the south. I’ve taken quite a fancy to them.”
“A very wonderful presentation.”
“—Does Mospheira continue to distrust the motives of the Pilots’ Guild? Or have they taken alarm at the idea of foreigners chasing the Guild here?”
“Mercheson-paidhi tried to persuade them to cooperate fully. And to trust the Guild’s modern leaders. Especially Ramirez.”
“Did she succeed in this persuasion?”
“Not wholly.” He made up his mind to give Ilisidi a little information, information that might reassure her, and that Tabini wouldn’t mind her knowing. “The delegation that’s going is suspicious. The Guild will have to work to convince them. They didn’t expect to go this early.”