Inheritor

Then he wanted books on the sea. Bren took him to the lady Damiri’s library.

“How is he?” Banichi asked him at one point when he was outside and Jase was in the library pulling down books and going through references. “What is he looking for?”

Bren drew a deep breath, having understood, somewhat, this redirection of emotions, but finding it difficult to render into Ragi, particularly for Banichi, who tended to shoot down air castles, even as atevi defined them.

“It’s a human reaction,” he said to Banichi quietly. “He’s suffered a great blow. His emotions are unreliable. Possibly he’s looking for something to distract his thoughts toward something without emotional context, perhaps something approved by the deceased person, perhaps only a personal ambition.”

“To view the ocean.”

“From space, the ocean-land boundaries and the polar caps would be the only easily visible features. I suppose he might have wondered about it.”

“And clouds,” Banichi said. Space photography had made its way into atevi hands even before the War of the Landing. All sorts of space photography had come out of the files prior to the release of the first rocket technology, preparing, the paidhiin had said, the expectation of space travel, never the concept of the rockets in war, directing the psychology of a species toward the sky, not toward armament. It had been a narrow thing for the human race, historically, so the records said; and atevi so readily converted technology to self-defense.

“Many clouds,” Bren agreed.

“So he wishes to go to visit lord Geigi?”

“Something like,” Bren said. “I think he might be ready to make such a venture.”

“He became ill from looking at the sky, Bren-ji. Will it not afflict him again once he goes into the open?”

“I think it’s important to him to prove to himself he won’t be ill.”

“Ah,” Banichi said.

“I’m not sure I understand, myself, Banichi. Please don’t believe I have a perfect idea what’s passing through his mind. But it might mark a place of new begi

“Certainly a consideration. But there are places of safety, well within perimeters we can guarantee. I think one could find such safety. But Geigi—I am less sure.”

“Would you find that out, nadi-ji, what might be safe?”

“One will do so.—Meanwhile, the other matter—”

Deana. He’d been so rattled he’d forgotten what he’d asked Banichi to do.

“We are producing a transcript, paidhi-ji, of this woman. Tano wishes you to understand, he had no idea that this was going on.—Nor did Jago, nor I, Bren-ji. Wewere of a level to be informed, once we returned, that was one critical matter. Certain agencies between us and the aiji did notwish to distract us with your staff matters. This is not to dismiss the matter of their failure to inform you. And their failure to inform Tano.”

“I have great confidence in all my staff, Banichi. I donot doubt you.”

Banichi seemed to weigh telling him something. Then: “The aiji, nadi-ji, has detected a slight lack of forwardness among certain Guild members to pass along information to higher levels, both times regarding those who monitor transmissions, which are a Guild unto themselves; and both times regarding a transmission of information from that Guild to the house Guard. The aiji is making clear to both services that my absences, whenever they may be necessary, should not constitute a dead end for information. He is, the paidhi may imagine, making this point very forcefully with the Messengers’ Guild, which is the one at issue at Mogari-nai.”

“I accept that as verydefinitive, nadi,” he said, and did. He would not care to be the Guild officer or the Guard who twice thwarted the aiji, either because of a political view opposed to Tabini or simply due to ruffled protocols—some touchy insistence on rules, and routings of requests that were being run over by the needs of a human office placed by the aiji on the list of persons to whom the Guild traditionally gave information.

Definitely he’d just heard more than his predecessors had known about Guild and Guard conflicts.

And bet on it that, one, Banichi told him what he did with Tabini’s full knowledge, and, two, that it was a very necessary warning to him where gaps in necessary information flow had occurred in the past and might occur in some similar crisis in the future: don’t believe that you’ve heard everything from the ship, was what it boiled down to. Don’t trust that all communications aregetting through: there’s a serious, quirky roadblock.

That was as serious as it could get. A Guild not once but twice now had ill-served the aiji. If that was not a fatal offense in Tabini’s book, he feared it was hedging very close on one, that was one thing, and he didn’t want to see a contest of power inside the administration, or Tabini using the Assassins against the Messengers.

But equally serious, that particular information flow, from the ship through Mogari-nai and on to Shejidan—was usually diagrams, data, and handbooks. There were, however, other kinds of information: Jase’s message. God knew what.

He knew there was somebody, at least one person, that was not the ordinary ateva, and probably at Mogari-nai, sitting there and reading what came down. It struck him like a lightning stroke that it wouldmake sense that that person be one of the Messengers’ Guild, not the Assassins’ Guild that regularly guarded the aiji. It was not in his knowledge to whom the Messengers’ Guild reported.

But having delivered that bit of information, Banichi went off about his business.

And Jase, when he went back to check on him, seemed to have focused himself on the library and was working, so he supposed Jase had reached some point of stability.

12

The paidhi had, however, after trying to deal with Jase, an actual routine working day to begin, it being toward afternoon. He had to deal with the records and reports to his own office that he’d brought back from the plant tour, those that hadn’t gone to Tabini’s staff.

He had letters to write, fulfilling promises he’d made in more cities and townships than he could conveniently recall.

He had a computer full of files with unresolved requests, some of which he could perhaps put into other hands, but first he had to sort those things out, at his classified level, to discover what he couldmove on to other desks.

And he had a stack of raw notes he had tried to keep in a notebook, but which had ended up on small pieces of paper borrowed from various sources, a shaggy affair he would have to turn over to the clericals in his office for what they could do for him, once he had been through it to be sure there was nothing tucked into that notebook that didn’t belong to that level of security. He thought he’d retrieved everything, but regarding that particular notebook, which had followed him closely through various sensitive laboratories, he wasn’t sure.

So. The Jase matter was, thank God, at rest. Not settled. But at rest. He’d done what he could; he humanly wishedhe could do more. He wished in the first place that he’d been able to get personally closer to Jase. Jase wanted to keep his own observations and reports to his superiors clear and objective, he was sure, and Jase always held him at arms’ length—so he didn’t have that kind of closeness that would have let him step in and offer… whatever people offered one another at such a time. He was sad about Jase being sad; he was disturbed about it; it made him think uncomfortable thoughts about mortality and his own scattered family; and he was, considering Jase’s temper, uneasy about Jase’s ability to deal with the isolation and the sense of loss together.