“What’s he like?”
Bren shrugged. “Senior to Graham and Mercheson. Probably higher rank. Sicker than seasick, looking at a horizon. Hard to get to know a man when he’s heaving his guts up and drugged half-sensible.”
“I hope it doesn’t work the other way,” Lund said.
He’d opted to travel with Cope, having shepherded Jase through his initiation to planetary phenomena. He’d not known then that Jase would get a recall order; not a clue of it. He hadn’t emotionally reckoned with that hard hit, which he’d only found out about this morning.
He didn’t want to think of it, just wanted to get back to his own apartment in the capital, where he and Jase could have a day… at least a day before the scheduled launch… to sort out what they did think. He was in an informational blackout, trying to get back to deal with Jase… and Tabini-aiji’s orders packed him in with the Mospheiran delegation who was part and parcel of the same crossed signals.
“The atevi report a little nausea,” he said. It was only atevi pilots who’d been in space, testing the shuttle. Docking. There was a scary operation. “I won’t bias you toward it, I hope.”
“I hope not,” Lund said.
Kroger had fallen silent. Thinking, perhaps. Or keeping her own counsel. The two juniors were very quiet.
Then Kroger asked: “What kind of report do you think Yolanda Mercheson’s given?”
Mercheson had fled to the mainland, lived in his household for half a year of her tenure here; but once the government looked stable on Mospheira, she’d gone back. She’d spent most of her time afterward on Mospheira, alone in the culture, miserably unhappy: he knew that. She didn’t love Jase passionately, but they’d made love; they weren’t working partners, but they were friends of a desperate sort, just the only available recourse for a woman otherwise on the ragged edge of tolerating her exile. Mercheson’s early recall to the ship had seemed a solution, not a problem. What she and Jase had had… he wanted no part of, but understood.
That part wasn’t the Mospheirans’ business.
“A fair report,” he said. “She was homesick for the ship. But she bore no ill will to Mospheira, none at all.”
“But she will have given a report to the Guild,” Lund said.
“Definitely. As Jase will of us.”
“A good report?”
“I think so. I think both of them will. There’s no percentage in creating any rift… any negative report, whatever. They’ve sent Cope down, as I trust we’ll get someone for Jase’s spot on the next flight down.” He wasn’t looking forward to it, not at all. Losing Jase still hit him hard… harder than he’d ever anticipated. It might be why he’d reacted as he had to Barb; it might be why he’d gone into this conversation armed and angry. “I don’t have to say this to the two from the FO; but listen to your two advisors. You speak the Guild’s language; but don’t assume that the words mean the same things after two hundred years’ separation. Most of the differences will be stupid, small things; a few could be really significant.” He glanced at Feldman and Shugart. “They know.”
“We trust they know,” Kroger cautioned.
“I know these two,” Bren said. “They’re good.” The blushes were irrelevant to him. He meant what he said. “We’ve only the length of this flight for me to brief you on what we know about the Guild, as I gather the aiji would intend. Expect the aiji to support the agreement between our associations… and to oppose any independent agreements with the Pilots’ Guild. The aiji won’t undermine you. You work with him, I’ll work with you, and that’s far, far better assurance than you’ll ever have out of the Pilots’ Guild, even if they hand you the keys to the starship. We both know the history, better than the aiji does. We know it in the gut.”
“We do,” Kroger said. “And that’s exactly right. A look-see into the workings of the Guild. Anything you know is welcome.”
“I trust Mercheson’s motives; but given the Guild’s history, yes, I’m cautious. They’ll want speed. We want a minimum of funerals. But we do take seriously the fear that sent them running back here. Jase Graham believes it. I’d stake my life on it being true. And if it is, either a band of angry aliens offended by the Guild’s choice of real estate will come here to press their quarrel, or they won’t. And if we equip that ship to fly again… we equip the Guildto deal with the situation that’s going to affect the whole planet for good or for ill. We on the mainland aren’t sure about the goodpart of it. We want to find out what the Guild knows, bottom line, and then apply our own experience to it, for what good that can do. If we have to fight, and if whatever’s out there is that advanced, we’ve got a problem in dealing with the Guild that’s far beyond Mospheira’s old quarrels with them. A very mutual problem. Neither of our species wants to provide labor for fools, and neither of our species wants to take for granted that a Guild war is our war.”
“We’re in agreement on that,” Lund said.
The mood improved. The steward came by and wondered what they would drink with their brunch.
It was small talk then, on recent history, Jase’s two-parachute landing, the aiji’s relations with the island, the building of a second and third shuttle… the governments were no longer at odds, both of them looking anxiously at the sky.
Atevi mutating everything they’d learned about computers and playing games with mathematics… he didn’t mention that—didn’t understand it, for one thing. The ateva who was working on the most abstruse part of it was likely a genius… a mathematical genius, in a species that did math as naturally as they breathed; damned right he didn’t understand it, but he suspected a truth he couldn’t prove, that atevi had sailed right past the University on Mospheira and maybe past anything in the lost library, the one they’d lost in the War… no way to prove it. But the Astronomer Emeritus scribbled away, and wise atevi heads nodded; his students thought him brilliant, and the occasional number counters and philosophical fanatics who traditionally made aijiin nervous had focused their energies on the Astronomer’s ongoing work, too stunned, apparently, or too outclassed to take their sectarian battles onto hischalkboard.
A lovable, slightly otherworldly fellow… there was the devil in the design, sweetly philosophical, thinking away, building a cosmos theory that didn’t battle the traditional atevi philosophies, just lapped away at the sand beneath them.
The two from the Foreign Office, queried by the steward regarding refills, shot over curiously shy glances, as if they feared to open their mouths even to order drinks: advisors in private, no rank. Bren figured that… terrified of the possibilities, because they were the ones who really knew how dangerous the atevi-human interface was… how explosive and how treacherous.
Lund jovially ordered another martini, Kroger the same. The two translators wanted beers, and Bren asked for vodka and fruit juice.
The steward went about his business.
Lund said, when the man was out of hearing in the general roar of the engines, “How long do you figure this new man will stay down here?”
Cope: deposited on atevi soil some four weeks ago, a man tamely landed via the shuttle instead of flung at the planet the way his predecessors had had to come down… a clerical-looking fellow who’d moved by night and avoided the open sky. They’d learned with Jason. He’d been too sick to go on duty for several weeks… lodged in the space center, since atevi security, sensing irregularity and possibly espionage in his refusal to budge to go to the island, had not let him out of the facility. Jase had gone there for meetings; Cope remained sickened by everything, the smells, the irregularity of lights, the flickering of fluorescent.