Inheritor

Damn, he was so tired. It wasn’t just today. It was all the sequence of days before. It was the months before.

It was Saigimi. It was the meeting tomorrow. He knewJase had reasons. He knewJase had been through his own kind of hell in isolation, and he felt sorry for his situation, he truly did, but he was suffering his own post-travel adrenaline drop, and had no mental agility left. He wasn’t going to come across as sympathetic, humane, or even human, if Jase wanted to push him, and he didn’t know whether he could postpone their business until the morning without offending Jase, but that was what he should do.

Next course, the last course: Jase asked one servant for two bowls, baffling the young woman considerably.

“ Assoshi madihiin-sa,” Bren said quietly. “ Mai, nadi.”

“ Mai, nadi, saijuri.” Jase echoed him and made a courteous patch on the utterance, with good grace. Maybe, Bren thought, Jase was working through his mood and getting a grip on his emotions: he chose to encourage it.

“Difficult forms,” Bren said in Ragi. The conditional request and the irregular courtesy plurals, six of them, were to create felicitous and infelicitous numbers in the sentence. “You were never infelicitous.”

“One is pleased to hear so.” The courteous answer. The flatly correct answer.

The courtesy plurals weren’t the easiest aspect of the language. Jase had tottered along thus far using the ath-mai’in, commonly, the children’s forms, which advised any hearer that here was an impaired speaker and no one should take offense at his language. Damn some influential person to hell in Mosphei’ and it was, situationally at least, polite conversation. Speak to an atevi of like degree in an infelicitous mode and you’d ill-wished him in far stronger, far more offensive terms and might find yourself filed on with the Guild unless someone could patch the situation.

“I just can’t get the distinctions,” Jase said bitterly. “I’m guessing. You understand me?”

“It’s like the captain,” Bren said, drawing his inspiration from sailing-ships and human legend. “Never call the captain mister. Right? And the more important the person, the greater the politeness-number: just err on the side of compliment.”

“I know it’s a melon!” was the approximation of what Jase retorted.

Jase clearly wasn’t in a mood for mild corrections. A servant was fighting laughter.

“You know it’s important,” Bren corrected him, deadpan, deciding on confrontation.

“Damn,” Jase said, and pushed his plate back in the begi

“Jase.” He attempted diplomacy. “This is the rough part. This is really the roughest part. I swear to you. The language comes to you pretty quickly after this. You’ve done a marvelous job. You’ve done in six months what takes much more than that on Mospheira. You’ve done a brilliant job.”

“I don’t see how you do it! I can’t add that fast!”

“It develops.”

“Not for me!”

“It will come. Maybe you’d better let me do the translations for a few days and let me muddle along with the engineering and develop the questions I really need to ask. Going back and forth is confusing. There comes a time you should be totally inside the language. You seem to have reached it.”

Jase looked aside. “Not all I’ve reached.”

“Well, I’m back for a while,” Bren said. “And if you can just get the courtesy forms down, maybe we can go together on the next trip out. Would you rather?”

“I’d rather be on my ship, nadi!”

“It won’t everhappen if you break down, nadi. And you know that.”

“Maybe,” Jase said, with a slump to the shoulders and a sadness he’d not heard. It was defeat. He’d not seen Jase defeated. Jase turned quietly back to the table, drew a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and said: “I apologize, nand’ Bren.”

The servants served the next course, a light fruit ice. Jase had two spoonfuls and wanted a drink to go with it.

“Serve us the liqueur, nadiin-ji,” Bren said quietly, “in the sitting room. We can open the windows and sit and breathe the fine spring air. The workmen are through for the day, are they not? We can tolerate the paint.”

“Indeed, nand’ paidhi,” the response was. “And the paint smell is much abated. One will advise nand’ Saidin, nandiin-ji.”

He rose from table, waited for Jase and walked with him to the formal sitting room where other servants appeared, opening the jalousies and letting the night air waft through.

It was on the verge of cold air that billowed the gauze curtains wide. But their chairs were near a comfortable gas-fired stove, wasteful notion, and the maids gave them lap robes and glasses of a liqueur like brandy.

“Do you want to talk?” Bren asked. “Jasi-ji?”

“I’m having trouble-with-a-neighbor,” Jase said.

“You mean trouble-in-the-house,” he guessed.

They were alone now in the room. “I am a fool,” Jase began. Possibly he meant awkward. The words sounded alike. But Bren forbore to suggest so or to correct him further: he’d beenthrough sessions like that, and had sympathy for someone trying to collect his thoughts in another language. “May we speak Mosphei’, please?”

“If you wish.” He spoke in that language. “What’s the matter?”

There was silence. A long moment of silence in which Jase breathed as if air had gone short in the room. “I’m not likeyou. I don’t know if I can take this.”

“Only two other people on Mospheira are likeme,” Bren said mildly, “and the staff completely sympathizes with your mistakes. They admire your tenacity. They shouldn’t laugh, but it’s very well-intentioned. If they didn’t laugh, you should worry.”

“You mean it’s all right if they think I’m a fool.”

“If you were not a member of the household they wouldn’t laugh. They call you Jasi-ji. They wish to please you. That’s progress. You’ve worked very hard and come a long way. They respect that. Dealing with complete aliens to their way of life is comparatively new for this staff. It’s not something nature or their culture equipped them very well to do. They’ve never met strangers, either.”

“Can I be blunt? Can I be terribly blunt? I don’t care. I don’t want to live here. I want off the planet. I want to go back to my ship. If I have to stay here I’ll die. I don’t likeit. I know I’m not supposed to use that word, but I can’t take it here. I dolike. I dodislike. I’m cold half the time. I’m hot the rest. The light hurts my eyes. The smells bother me. The food upsets my stomach. And I’m sorry if it’s fu

“This morning?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s spring. Flying things do come to the lights. That’s informational, not a criticism. If they laughed, it wasfu

“You say. I made a fool of myself!”

“And I’m sorry to state the obvious, but you have no choice—you have no viable choice but to smile and be pleasant. You knew when you came down here with no return that it wouldn’t be easy. I know the exhaustion that sets in when nothingyou touch or deal with is the same. I know what you’re going through.”

“You can’t know! You were at least born to a planet! I wasn’t! I don’t likethis, and I don’t care that the language can’t accommodate likeand dislike, it’s what I feel!”

“Possibly I can’t imagine.” He thought, and didn’t say, and then did: “But I can’t go home either, Jase, as I’m sure you’ve overheard at some time in your stay here, so be a little easy on me, if you can find it in you. I can’t go home, and if we get this ship flying sometime this next couple of years, you cango back. And you’ll be a hero and I won’t, not among the people that I was born with. So don’t say I don’t know at least something about how you feel.”