That was what Bren had started out to be—a maker of dictionaries, a court functionary who sat on the steps of the aiji’s dais, when court was in session, and who spoke only rarely, on direct request. The utmost ambition of Bren’s life in the first year had been to avoid a second War of the Landing on his watch. He could not, in the beginning, even edit a document. He could only say: excuse me, sir, please, take no offense, but that word has a connotation . . .
But he’d had to deal with Tabini-aiji, who wanted to talk to him, and wanted verbal answers. Fast.
He’d slipped over into actively speaking the language the first week. Tabini had pushed that situation.
Pushed him until he’d begun to operate outside the rules—begun to speak the language. Now he primarily thought in it.
Tabini-aiji wanted more technology. Under Tabini, planes became jets, radio became television, and industry proliferated. Atevi took to computers and improved what they were handed, finding their own path, making their own discoveries.
Then Phoenix turned up, back from centuries of absence, bringing a wealth of old history, old human quarrels, and a single question: which government on Earth had the industrial power they needed? Cultural kinship linked the ship, for good or ill, to Mospheira. Need linked them to Tabini-aiji.
The job of the paidhi-aiji instantly changed. More, the ship appointed its own paidhi—Jase, who’d parachuted down the way the colonists had—to build a relationship with the continent, which had the range of earthly resources a space program needed. It had meant Jase learning Ragi. It had meant atevi building a space program while Mospheirans argued about it. And ultimately it had meant getting atevi and Mospheirans to cooperate—because control of half the orbiting station had been the price of Tabini-aiji’s cooperation.
Everything had changed, like so many snowballs headed downhill. Atevi were in space now, equal partners with Mospheirans on the station in a fifty-fifty arrangement which had two command centers and two stationmasters, cooperating together in a three-way arrangement with the four Phoenix captains—of whom Jase was now third-senior.
And Bren Cameron had ceased to represent Mospheira at all, in any regular way. His personal loyalty—his man’chi, in the atevi way of putting it—rested on the atevi side of the straits, and not just because that was the job he could do best. He represented Tabini-aiji’s interests not only to humans on Earth and aloft, but to atevi lords on the continent, and he held a district lord’s rank in order to do it.
So he’d come a long, long way from Mospheira, mentally speaking—a long way from human allegiances and human politics. He’d not visited the island in nearly four years—two of which he’d spent in deep space, remote from the world, one of which he’d spent down here, trying to patch the damage the push to space had done to the balance of power on Earth.
Of human contacts he still kept active, there was his brother Toby. There was Barb, who had been his lover, and now was Toby’s partner.
And there was Jase, now third-senior of the starship’s four captains—but still technically ship-paidhi, too. Jase knew atevi customs and he spoke Ragi, the principle atevi language, passably well.
And being ship-folk, a stranger to any planet, Jase’s mindset was not Mospheiran. Jase’s instincts might biologically match Mospheiran instincts, but his native accent was ship-folk, and he had never set foot on Mospheira, nor cared to go there.
Well, that was all right, in Bren’s thinking. There was still no one he had rather see in a position of influence among the ship-folk. Jase wanted the survival of Mospheira and the safety of the ship and the station aloft, and he wanted the survival of the atevi. They shared the same set of priorities.
And if there was one person on the planet who truly understood what he was and how he thought—it was Jase.
· · ·
That was why, in Jase’s company, at the rail of a moving boat, Bren could draw breath right now with an ease he didn’t feel with others, even the atevi lords whose survival he fought to ensure, or the Mospheiran president he tried to keep generally abreast of whatever atevi were doing—or, for that matter, with the aiji he served. They shared a job. They shared the same worries. They served the same interests.
So perhaps it was a little selfish of him to wish his area of the world could float along in the lazy way it had been going for a few more days, just one or two days more, before he had to go back to what Jase called his duty-book.
By tomorrow evening he’d be back in that highly securitied apartment in the privileged third floor of the Bujavid, the great fortress and legislative center above the capital city. There’d be no duty-book, no computer files waiting for him on his return, but there would certainly be a message bowl sitting in his apartment foyer, a bowl overflowing with cylinders from people wanting a slice of his attention—lords and department heads with agendas that had been suspended for the last few weeks while the Assassins’ Guild had a meltdown and the aiji’s son celebrated his fortunate ninth birthday.
Missing from that bowl, to be sure, would be the unwritten problems—a determined handful of people who wouldn’t write to the paidhi-aiji politely and officially advising him they wanted him dead, and who wouldn’t be Filing Intent with the Assassins’ Guild. Oh, no: a legal Filing would never pass muster with the Guild, let alone Tabini-aiji, and his enemies couldn’t gain any partisan following to demand it. So they couldn’t succeed above-board. That meant anything that might come at him would not follow the rules.
That problem went with the title, the estate, the boat. He’d gotten back to the world a year ago from a two-year voyage into deep space—to find the aishidi’tat in chaos and Mospheira bracing for war.
He and the aiji-dowager and the will of the people had set Tabini-aiji back in power, a movement carried on the shock of their arrival and the revelation that neither Tabini nor his young heir was dead.
Well, things were better. He’d actually been able to take a vacation—give or take a few stitches in his scalp, and Banichi’s need for rehab on that shoulder.
And now . . .
Now Jaishan had put her stern to the setting sun and her bow toward the end of the bay. Her sail had filled with a golden sunset, and the west wind was carrying her home with the hum of the rigging and the rush of water under her white hull.
And that was all he needed think of for the better part of an hour.
“Want to take the helm for a while?” he asked Jase.
Jase laughed. “They never let captains take the controls up there, you know. Helm won’t have it.”
“Well, there’s that island over there to port. That’s the only thing in this part of the bay you have to miss. Want to do it?”
“Love to,” Jase said, and they left the rail and crossed the deck. Tano was perfectly content to turn over the wheel and instruct a novice how to handle it. Easy job, with a perfect wind carrying them and not much to do but keep Jaishan’s bow headed for home.
She nodded a bit as Tano demonstrated how she was handling. Then she cut through the water with a steady rush, fast under sail, beautiful in her spread of canvas. And Jase had the helm now, delighted.
Perfect day. Perfect finish.
“You can feel the speed pick up,” Jase said. “Amazing how it feels in your hands.”
No readouts, no numbers here, no helmsman nor navigator, nothing like a starship’s bridge at all, just the wind aloft and salt water running under her keel. The sounds and vibrations all around them were like nothing else in the world, readout without a dial or a blinking light. Bren would have taken Jaishan in himself—he got few chances to enjoy it. But Jase should have this run, something to think back on when he got back to his own reality, up in space.