“The kids would like that,” Jase said. “I would.”
Came a burst of laughter from the front of the car, where the youngsters gathered, laughter far louder than usual, and not involving Cajeiri’s bodyguard.
Nervous laughter. Desperate laughter. The kids were trying their best to compress everything good into a last few hours.
It was like that with him and Jase—tense. Keenly aware of imminent parting. They’d had weeks to say everything they could think of. They’d cleaned up the loose ends last night.
But they would be seeing each other in the immediate future, in a much more serious context—and he didn’t know how he was going to exclude Cajeiri from that trip, on the one hand.
Or get permission from his parents, on the other.
It would be an excuse for Cajeiri to get access to the kids.
But did he want the boy to become a presence in station politics?
The Red Train gave a little jolt as they shunted onto the northern route, bound for the spaceport.
4
It would have been a lot smoother, at the spaceport train station, just to say their good-byes at the door of the Red Car, let their guests cross the rustic wooden platform to the waiting bus, and let the train continue on to Shejidan with no more delay.
But that just wasn’t going to be satisfactory for the kids, and Bren didn’t even suggest it. The Red Train could safely sit where it was for an hour: the spaceport spur, off the main north-south line, didn’t have anything incoming or outgoing for at least two hours.
So they all—excepting Tano and Algini, who stayed with the train for security—walked out onto the platform, where uniformed spaceport personnel were offloading the few pieces of carry-on baggage from the baggage car—Boji’s shrieks of protest about that process were loud and frequent.
The spaceport bus was waiting alongside the baggage truck—but this time the kids delayed crossing the platform, gazing at the horizons all about them, sweeping from the high metal fence of the spaceport, to the rolling hills and grasslands that surrounded the train station in the other directions.
Trees. Grass. Everything had been a miracle to them. Artur was taking home his little collection of pebbles, little brown and gray rocks from every place he’d visited. A spaceborn child from a metal and plastics world, he’d never handled bare rock before.
Never seen a sky cloud up and rain.
None of them had.
The kids needed to move on and board the bus now. And Cajeiri wasn’t urging them and he wasn’t watching the scenery, either. He was watching them, utterly ignoring Boji’s muffled shrieks from the baggage car. Bren gave them all a minute more, in the relative security of the place.
“Got to move, kids,” Jase said then. “Sorry. Have to go.”
They did move, not without looks back. They dutifully boarded the bus and went all the way to the seats in the back—where they immediately took peeks under the drawn window shades.
Bren, standing in the aisle, said to Jago, “Tell them they may raise the shades, Jago-ji.”
It was more of a risk here, but it was still a very small risk, now, counting an area with security all about. And if raising the shades made the youngsters feel less confined and compelled in their leaving—he judged it worth it.
So they all settled, leaving their hand luggage to the spaceport crew, all of it set aboard the bus, down in baggage.
The bus door sealed. As the bus startled to roll, the youngsters scrambled to raise the window shades on both sides of the bus, seeking a panoramic view. The driver turned the bus about on the broad graveled parking area, then took the gravel road along the security fence at a brisk clip.
Bren tried to think of any last moment thing he needed to say to Jase, something he might have forgotten.
Likely Jase was thinking just as desperately, going down a mental checklist. They’d reached their agreements. They’d planned their course. Matters belonging to the world were rapidly leaving Jase’s interest.
Matters on the space station, Bren thought, were invading Jase’s agenda hand over fist.
Jase’s security team, Kaplan and Polano, were talking idly behind them, saying they’d be glad to get back to friends in the crew, and wondering if there would ever be an atevi restaurant on the human side of the station.
The kids—there was noise back there. There was nervous laughter. There were periods of heavy silence.
Leave the boy behind, when he made his own promised trip up to the station?
That wasn’t going to be easy.
But there was the matter of domestic peace, too—and the boy had new ties to Earth. A new baby had arrived in the aiji’s household, and Cajeiri needed to bond with his new sister, and needed to firm up the bonds with his parents.
That bond mattered, to the atevi psyche. It mattered desperately. And they’d disrupted that, in the boy’s life. Two years of separation at a young and vulnerable age. And Cajeiri was just getting over it, finding his parents again, with his emotions all fragile with being parted from his associations on the ship and being forced to find what he had lost on the planet.
No. Not a good idea, a trip up to the station right now, with hard politics potentially at issue up there.
But how on earth did one tell the boy no?
The final turn. They pulled up at the guarded gate, and port security let them right on through, the armored doors yawning open on another, more modern world.
In the front windows now, the shuttle—it happened to be Shai-shan—rested sleek and white, looking like a visitor from the world’s future in a gathering of mundane trucks and tankers of this present age, the whole area blinking with red warning lights and blue perimeter flashers.
Closer sat the administrative and storage buildings. The freight warehouse and preparation area loomed on the right, and, low and inconspicuous in the heart of the complex, sat the passenger terminal—a modest two-story building, of which shuttle passengers generally saw no more than the sparsely furnished lounge.
But they didn’t go to the terminal. The bus drove past the blue flashers, straight for the edge of the runway, and there the bus stopped.
They would board directly: Jase’s prerogative. That was the word from the port. A starship captain could waive customs for himself and his companions, where it came to personal items. And Jase had done it.
· · ·
There was no more time. Cajeiri got up, and his bodyguard did, and his guests did. He looked at them all—he looked hard, trying to remember every detail of their faces, their relative height—that was going to change. By their next visit, and forever after, he would very likely be the tallest of them, and the tallest by quite a lot, once they were all grown.
The bus doors opened, and it was time.
They had to behave now. They had to follow all the regulations. Most of all things in the world, they had to keep nand’ Bren and Jase-aiji firmly on their side.
Cajeiri had only one immediately chancy intention, however: to go just as far as he could with his guests, and not to have to say good-bye at the bus door. He led the way up the aisle, up to the door, as Jase-aiji’s bodyguards were going out, and as Jase-aiji was taking his own leave of nand’ Bren. If he got onto the steps, he had to go down them to let his guests out, and his bodyguard had to go out, and he would be outside with them.
But Jase-aiji and nand’ Bren went on out ahead of him. So he was able to go outside with his guests, just behind Kaplan and Polano, and stand with them under the open sky. They were so close to the runway they could hear the address system from trucks attending the shuttle, voices talking about numbers, and technical things.