Inheritor

He stood there as Jase walked away and out the door.

6

Maybe he should have made the try. Maybe, Bren thought, he should go after Jase all the same and make the gesture and try to sort out exactly why and at what he was angry, and why (he detected so, at least) Jase was so deeply angry, too.

But at such a juncture, what he did could intrude on sensibilities and shove the situation beyond all reason. He might instead do something he could bring to Jase as a peace offering. He might take measures to calm the situation. He might try to ease the strain on Jase and then talk to him, once the anger had settled. In both of them.

He saw the servant standing at the door, hands folded, waiting for his order, aware, perhaps that something was wrong.

“Is nand’ Saidin still on duty?”

“I believe she has retired, nand’ paidhi, but I doubt very much she is asleep. Shall I call her?”

“No. Is nadi Tano awake? Or nad’ Algini?”

“Both or either, nand’ paidhi. Shall I call them?”

“Do,” he said; and stood sipping his drink until a quiet step and a shadow in the doorway advised him of presence.

“Nadi?” Tano asked. Both of them had come, and entered the room at his implied invitation.

“Nadiin,” he said, intensely aware how they would blame themselves for a failure in information. “Jase says his father has died. He had this news from Mospheira, he says, four days ago, and complains he was not able to contact his mother on the ship because security couldn’t clear a call to the ship or contact me. Are we able to remedy this?”

“I will make immediate inquiry, nand’ paidhi,” Algini said, ever the proper, to-the-point one; and Tano, equally atop any business he was supposed to monitor: “The record shows the call from Mospheira. The staff has it on tape. It was in Mosphei’. Do you wish to hear it?”

“I do.” It was his business to. Someone had better find out what was going on, and how much else that message had contained, and he was the one who admitted to speaking the language. He was sure that certain atevi did, even that certain atevi close to him were staying up nights increasing their fluency at Jase’s expense, while Jase persisted in resorting to human language, but with what accuracy atevi were understanding the biology behind the vocabulary, he was far from certain. “Did nand’ Jase seem upset?”

“That was not in the report, nadi. He stayed to his room a great deal, that was all. One phone call came to him from Mospheira, late in the evening, four days ago. No others are on the record.”

He didn’t have enough information to cue them to report information they might not know they had.

More, he had to be extremely careful. Everything at the interface of atevi responsibility and human emotions was difficult and subject to error. As long as he’d lived among atevi, he could guess one’s man’chi toward a lord, and he knew the specific man’chi of Tano and Algini and others toward Tabini, but he knew very little of their family ties or how man’chi to a lord fit into man’chi toward a mother or a father. He’d heardTano speak of his own father, and of a desire to have the man’s good opinion, but he also knew that Tano had defied his father’s wishes to pursue a Guild career. He’d had Tano recommend relatives for posts as ‘reliable persons,’ a reliability one could attribute to man’chi, and the fact that it wasn’t biologically likely for treason to operate where man’chi existed.

He knew that Damiri had defied her clan to associate herself romantically and politically (or should that be, politically and romantically) with Tabini, who was close to an ancestral enemy of her clan, a close neighbor in the Padi valley holdings, and certainly persona non grata with uncle Tatiseigi, the head of the Atageini clan. Antipathy on the part of a clan head (toward whom Damiri held man’chi) certainly hadn’t daunted Damiri—but then, few things did.

The one wisdom about atevi family relations that two centuries of paidhiin had gathered was that the bonds of affection that held a human family together were not only not present, they weren’t biologically possible.

Different hardwiring.

Different expectations.

Different familial relationships and different necessities.

One didn’t know, for instance, what an atevi child expected of his parents. Food and shelter up to a certain point, yes. The point of separation seemed to be about seventeen years, maybe twenty. That was all the accumulated experience could say. Anything else was rated speculative, in the textbooks. He himself tentatively theorized that as humans had to mature beyond emotional dependency on their parents, atevi had somehow to get out of man’chi toward their parents or the family unit would never mature. There had to be a psychological break, somewhere, for the culture to function beyond the family.

“If this were an ateva who had heard this news,” he asked the two closest of his companions and guards, persons who, if they were human, he would have called friends, “what would other atevi expect of him? Principally, what would other atevi expect him to feel, or do, under these circumstances?”

“If relations with his father were good,” Tano said, “then one would expect sadness, nand’ paidhi. He would go to his household. He would bury his father. He would confirm man’chi within his house and within his associations.”

Confirm man’chi. Confirmman’chi. With atevi, it was not only an overriding emotion. It was theoverriding emotion. A homing instinct under fire. The place you’d go. The person you’d rescue from a burning building.

“In what ma

“An expression, nand’ paidhi. It’s an expression. One visits the household. One remembers. One assembles the living members of the household, for one thing, to know where their man’chi may lie now that this man’chi is put away. The household has to be rebuilt.”

“The man’chi to the dead man is put away.”

“Into the earth, nand’ paidhi, or into the fire. One can only have man’chi to the living.”

“Never to the dead?” He watched a lot of machimi plays, in the standard of which man’chi and its nuances was the pivot-point of treachery and action, double-crosses and last-moment decisions. “In the plays, nadi, this seems possible.”

“If one believes in ghosts.”

“Ah.” It was a belief some atevi held.

And more had believed in them, as a matter of course, in the ancient world of the machimi plays. Such a belief in the supernatural didn’t include the two men present with him, he was quite sure. But belief in ghosts of course would tie directly into whether or not the dead could still claim loyalty.

“Also,” Algini said in his quiet way, “the living will exact a penalty from living persons who might have been responsible. This does notrequire a belief in ghosts. But in the old days, one might equally well exact a penalty of the dead.”

He was curious. It went some distance toward explaining certain machimi, in which there seemed to be some actions of venerating or despising monuments and bones, heaving them into rivers and the like.

But it wasn’ta solution for the problem he had. “Jase is upset,” Bren said, “because he can’t reach his home or assure himself his mother is well.” One didn’t phrase a question in the negative: atevi, if cued that one expected a negative, would helpfully agree it wasn’t likely. “Would security be concerned for an ateva’s actions under such a circumstance?”

“If this death was due to another person,” Algini said, “one would expect to watch him carefully.”

“Or if this death dissolved essential man’chi,” Tano said, “A wife, for instance. Her clan would be free to act. A set of cousins ambitious to transfer man’chi to theirline. The family could break apart.”