Inheritor

He wanted so much to throw his arms around both of them.

But that would appall Banichi and Jago would be puzzled, and the most wonderful sight in the world to him was as he looked up—considerably—at two atevi in the silver-studded black of the aiji’s personal security.

“One hadn’t meant to alarm the house,” Jago said earnestly.

“Although it would have been better for you to call out an alarm,” Banichi added, “since you were behind the wall—not, one trusts, against the paneled door, paidhi-ji.”

Light had come on in the hall. Servants arrived in nightclothes and robes from the rear halls, along with Algini and a couple of the junior security staff from the other direction in far calmer, knew-about-it attitude. Tano arrived from the same direction as the recently sleeping servants, in a bath towel and carrying his pistol: Tano hadn’tknown.

Jase’s door opened. Jase appeared in his robe, behind the line of servants, looking rumpled and confused.

“It’s quite all right,” Tano said to everyone. “It’s quite all right. No alarm, Jasi-ji. Banichi and Jago are back.”

“Have you had supper, nadiin-ji,” Bren asked, instead of hugging both of them, “or should the staff make up something?”

“We ate on the plane, nadi,” Jago said.

“But being off-duty now,” Banichi said, “and being in the place where we will sleep tonight, one mightsit and talk for a bit over a glass of shibei if the paidhi were so inclined.”

7

Jase had gone back to bed and, one hoped, to sleep. Tano and Algini said they had business to attend to.

Business, at this hour, Bren asked himself; and couldn’t decide whether they were occupied with his request for the message trail on Jase’s business, heating up the phone lines to the earth station at Mogari-nai, or whether it was some new duty Banichi had handed them as he came in, but whatever the case, Tano and Algini kept to the duty station.

That left him Banichi and Jago alone for company, and oh, he was glad to see them. Banichi made him feel safe; and Jago—Jago, so proper and so formal—she was the one who wouldtalk to him with utter disregard of protocols, the one who’d try anything at least once, including intimacy with a human. It hadn’t happened: the time had never been right; but it couldhave happened, that was what he didn’t forget.

Tonight was like picking back up as if they’d never left—and yet he had to realize, truthfully, for all the difference they’d made in his life, they’d been with him just that few weeks of the crisis preceding Jase’s landing. Then they’d been gone again, a reassignment, he’d been told, a fact which had saddened him immensely, and put him in a very hard place with Tano and Algini, who were wonderful people—but who weren’t the two he most—

Loved.

Too valuable to the aiji, he’d said to himself: he’d no right to assume he could keep them in his service. He was damned lucky to have Tano and Algini, whom he also—

Liked very well.

Maybe it was just a visit, maybe just a temporary protection to him during the latest crisis. Maybe they wouldn’t stay. He was halfway afraid to ask them. He wanted to, as he wanted to ask Tabini whether he could have them with him permanently, but he felt as if he would be asking for something the worth of a province, and to which Tabini would have to give a state answer, and think the paidhi had gotten just a little forward in recent months.

They sat, they shared a nightcap in the sitting-room—that, and the warm stove with the window open wide to the spring breezes—the extravagance of the rich and powerful, a waste of fuel with which Bren had never reconciled himself morally, and which in prior and simpler days, he would have reported and protested to the aiji.

But there was so much he had never reconciled with himself—morally.

“Dare I ask,” he began with them, “where you’ve been?”

“One might ask, but we can’t say,” Jago said. “Regretfully, nand’ paidhi.”

He’d come very, very close to going to bed with Jago—well, technically, they’d been init, sort of—a fact that had crossed his mind no few times in the last half year, in the lonely small hours of the winter nights. She’d beenthere, in his imagination, at least.

She’d either be offended—or she’d laugh. He thought she’d laugh, and dared a direct look.

He got nothing back. Atevi reserve, he said to himself. Guild discipline, and just—that she was atevi.

Forget thatfor a starting point and, God, couldn’t one get in a great deal of trouble?

She probably wasn’t even interested any longer. Probably had a new hobby.

“One hears,” Banichi said, “that Jase-paidhi has had unhappy news given him by improper cha

“True,” he said. Banichi had a very incisive way of summing things up. And, summoning up the fragments of his wits at this hour, dismissing the question of Jago’s reactions, and meanwhile trying to be as concise: “I’m concerned for three things, one, his human feelings, two, his isolation, three, the way atevi minds might expect him to act. I asked Tano and Algini what was ordinary reaction for an ateva, and it didn’t seem far off the way humans react.” He let that echo in the back of his mind two seconds, added, recollected, revised, definitely under the influence of the shibei, and said: “Four, sometimes when the difference between ship-humans and Mospheira isn’t that apparent, it surprises me. And, felicitous five, complicating things, Jase is trying to restrain his reactions in front of atevi.”

“How is his fluency lately?” Banichi asked.

“Improved just enough that he can get out of the children’s language and into serious trouble. He’s learned the words that pertain to this apartment and to the space program and engineering. His vocabulary is quite good for ‘where is?’, ‘bring me food’ and ‘open the window,’ and for ‘machining tolerance’ and ‘autoclave.’ Still not much beyond that—but acquiring felicitous nuance.”

“One would be hard pressed to join these items in conversation,” Banichi said dryly. “Even with nuance.”

“One would.” He was amused, and felt the unwinding of something from about his heart. Tano didn’t tend to catch him up on the daily illogics of his trade, but Banichi would jab him, mercilessly. So would Jago. He had to revise the rules of his life and go on his guard all the time, or be the butt of their humor. And he enjoyed it. He fired back. “So what didbefall lord Saigimi?”

“One hears,” Banichi said, “someone simply and uncreatively shot him.”

“So. Doubtless, though, it was professional.”

“Doubtless,” Jago said. “Though late.”

So Tabini didn’t trouble to make it look accidental, was his private thought: more dramatic effect, more fear on the part of those who should be afraid.

“Is it quiet in the south?”

“The south. Oh, much more so. But quiet often goes between storm fronts.”

A warning. A definite warning, from Jago. “Is there anything you wish to tell me, nadiin-ji?”

“Much that I would wishto inform you,” Banichi said, with the contrary-to-fact wish, “but essentially, and until we know the outcome of yesterday’s events, please take no u