Inheritor

“Bath and di

“Nand’ Saidin, very correctly.”

He was hungry, and in no mood to deal with the message bowl which sat on the small ornate table by the entryway, but he could see there a number of waiting cylinders. The only such that reached his apartment nowadays were messages his clerical staff couldn’t handle without advice. And there was a fair collection of them, about twenty, most in metal message cases; but one—one was a caseless vellum scroll characteristic of a telegram from the wire service. It could be from some department across the country, some place he’d visited. The rest could wait. He picked that one up, cracked the seal with his thumbnail, sca

It was from his brother. From Toby. Dated two days ago.

Mother’s been in the hospital. I’ve asked her to come and stay with me. If you can bring any influence to bear, it might help. She says her doctor’s there and she won’t leave the city. I’ll write you a longer letter later. Don’t worry about it, but I think we need to bring some pressure to bear to get her to move. I want your backing in this.

Damn, he thought. Justwhat their mother needed. Pressure.

Damn, again.

He supposed he’d stopped quite still, when in standard procedure he ought to have left the foyer and let his staff get to work on his behalf. They were all standing there. The door was shut. There came a rap from outside.

“That will be the luggage, nadi,” Tano said, and took a look outside to be absolutely sure before he opened the door.

Bren pocketed the message. Write you a letter later. Hell and double hell. He didn’t think Toby had anything pleasant to say in his next message. Toby never had made the obvious complaint to him: Give me some help, get home, brother, do something to reason with the government—it’s not fair what you’re doing to us. It’s not fair what you’re doing to Mother.

He couldn’t go home and fix things for his younger brother. There wasn’t a way in hell.

And their mother had been headed for this crisis for some time. Maybe her doctors would finally sit on her this time and make her take her medication and watch her diet.

Phone calls at three in the morning didn’t help. Knowing her grandchildren were being followed on their way to school didn’t help. He wasn’t sure it would be better for her to move to the north shore, where the police and the phone company seemed to ignore Toby’s complaints for what hefeared were political reasons.

Damn, damn, damn, and damn. He’d been in a good mood until he met that, which wasn’t the first time their mother’s health had been a concern. It wasn’t even an acute crisis with their mother’s health. It was just an ongoing situation. It was the first time for her checking into the hospital, but the doctor had been saying all along if their mother didn’t get some rest and mend her ways, she’d have to go in, and it was probably good news in its way. They needed to get her to slow down, calm down, stop yelling at the fools that called at three in the morning: it only inspired them.

And for God’s sake, she needed to stop arguing with the newscasters. Toby had already reported she’d called a national program and accused the head of the Human Heritage Association of harassing her with obscene phone calls.

Then she’d said, also on the air, that she didn’t like her son living on the mainland with a lot of godless aliens.

He didn’t know what to do about that. He really didn’t. He’d written her letters. He’d gotten one furious letter back. She’d said he was ruining his brother’s life.

The servants had opened the doors: the rest of the luggage had made it in, a considerable pile which they’d apparently waited to accumulate outside until it was all there before the security perso

Madam Saidin, chief of domestic staff, was still waiting.

He expected one other person to have come out to meet him, and stood, a little dazed and battered, looking toward that vacant hall that led to the private rooms.

“Where’s Jason?” he asked Saidin. Jase was shy, still struggling with fluency, and for that reason generally avoided mass gatherings of servants, but he’d have expected Jase to be standing in that hallway by now, at least. The hauling about of a large amount of luggage had to advise Jason he was home early.

“Dressing, I believe, nand’ paidhi.”

Dressing? Dressing, at this hour. That was very odd for Jason, who kept a meticulous schedule and always bathed precisely at the same time every morning, and wanted breakfast precisely at the same hour every morning.

More, there’d been just a little hesitation on Saidin’s answer. Has he been ill? he almost asked her. Perhaps he’d been studying late?

If he asked that question, he might get an answer.

Before his shower.

Before di

Hell, no, he didn’t ask. They had a deal. The day started on Jase’s schedule, like clockwork. The day ended on his, when he managed to find time to eat. Jase would show up for supper. Whatever was going on to have thrown Jase off his meticulous schedule, he was bound to hear the details. He had faith in Jase that if the foyer looked intact and the servants were still alive, it wasn’t catastrophic. He had faith in Saidin that if it were outrageous or against the dignity of the Atageini, he would have heard it implied much more strongly than that.

The hot water in the Atageini residence was, to Bren’s experience, inexhaustible. The force of the spray, set at atevi height, could drown a man of human stature, and after traipsing about all day up and down steep atevi-scale steps and after having been spattered with sticky fruit juice at 5000 meters Bren was oh, so willing to melt against the shower wall and stand there unmoving in one of the few places of utter, total privacy available to him. He breathed a froth of water and air and let the spray hammer a knot of muscles in the back of his neck he’d forgotten to unclench.

He trustedTano and Algini. He’d had no hesitation at all to put himself in their hands during the trip.

But he grew just a little anxious when unscheduled planes veered into his path. It probably was exactly as security said, an island pilot not used to the concept of air traffic, let alone control. The son of the lord of Dur was not a likely sophisticate, much less a plotter in high places.

He shut his eyes and was thereagain, in the same plane seat where he’d spent so many hours this last, long, meandering trip. He could all but feel the cool surface of the juice glass in his fingers, a contrast to the heat of the water that pounded down on him.

He could if he thought about it look again out that aircraft window onto the vast mineral-blessed south, Talidi province just off the wingtip, misty blue-green hills, grass with that slightly younger green of springtime, well advanced in the south, and all that pollen, hazy clouds of it.

Talidi province and the Tasigin Marid.

He couldn’t say he blamed atevi for asking themselves at least now and again what the paidhi-aiji ortheir esteemed aiji had in mind for the nation, in moving the paidhi into such prominence and now having twopaidhiin in residence under the same roof, when the very essence of the Treaty was emphatically onepaidhi. Some lords of the Western Association had indeed been more than a little suspicious of human motives even before the ship had shown up.