Inheritor

“Yes,” Jase said in a shuddery voice.

“Good.” He didn’t chatter. He didn’t offer Jase big words at the moment. He just gestured, got Jase on his feet and to the door and out into the hall.

“Are they set up down there?” he asked Jago.

“Yes,” Jago said, having her pocket com in evidence, and going with them. “As soon as they remove lord Badissuni. The man’s taken ill.”

He was startled. Dismayed. “ Ishe ill?” he asked.

“Quite honestly, nadi.” There were tones Jago took that told him it was the real and reliable truth. “It seems to be stress. They’re taking him to the hospital for the night.”

Amazing what bedfellows politics had made. It made a sensible man careful of making any rash statements about anyone, sharp-edged words being so hard to digest.

Tatiseigi stood in the lights, reporting the absolutely ridiculous and totally true fact of a security alert downstairs, which had turned out to be explained, and somehow never mentioning that the culprit was a young boy from the islands.

Then Tatiseigi wended his way into a report that security had been on edge, and that all threats had been dealt with.

Tabini, who had used the newfangled airwaves quite shamelessly to justify his positions, could take notes from this performance. Tatiseigi, who publicly decried the deleterious effects of the national obsession with television and machimi actors, by what the paidhi had heard, who had spoken against extending television into new licenses, certainly knew the value of it.

“I will tell you,” he began, traditional opening of a topic, and launched into the matter of his restorations, his programs, the history of the Atageini. It was an unprecedented chance for one of the houses. Tatiseigi went on into historic marriages, about the relations of the Atageini to the founders of the capital at Shejidan—and then, with Damiri standing beside him, as Jase also did, he talked about the Atageini “venturing into a future of great promise and adventurous prospect.”

My God, Bren thought, listening to it, looking at the picture it presented to a watching world. It was almost a declaration of support for the space program.

It was damned near a declaration forTabini and againstDireiso and the Kadigidi and all their plots.

Certainly, long and soporific as the history had been, it had snapped to a sharp and dangerous point, right there, in three carefully chosen words: future, adventurous, and prospect, meaning the hitherto changeless and conservative Atageini were shifting into motion; and the so-named prospectwas going to refer in some minds, with Damiri visible before them, to heirs and marriage and the final merger of two Padi Valley families of vast power, a merger that might firm up the political picture very suddenly.

Very frighteningly so for some interests, Direiso chief among them.

Not mentioning Ilisidi with her ties to the distant and often rebel East.

The old tyrant had intended this when he’d headed for that room and the lightbulb blew. He’d been wound up for the bitter necessity of peace with Tabini, consoled by the chance for public glory, and then embarrassed by a human.

Thank Godhe’d gotten this chance, this bit of theater. He could only imagine with what fervor the man hadn’twanted his niece andthe aforesaid human on stage with him.

Bet that a speech of this magnitude had been set in the man’s mind before he came up here and that the alternative was not to give it, and to keep balancing peace and war with Tabini and dancing a slow dance with Tabini’s enemies. He’d suggested a change from the infelicitous venue down at the small dining room, for this area, and no matter how irreverent an ateva grew, there was still that cultural and public reluctance to accept a place or a set-up for an event if that place had been tainted by ill fortune.

Hence this set-up in the state dining room, still within the apartment, proving that humanswere not the infelicitous item, with a human, emblematic of change, right there beside the conservative lord. And with Damiri, the tie to Tabini who might wish to supplant him, standing right there by him, the old man got to the fore of the rebellion in his own house and did it with style—on national television.

He didn’t know whether he’d helped at all or whether Tabini had come to rescue a rash human or to propose exactly the same things; but Tabini would at least be glad hehadn’t had to get into a verbal brawl with the old man.

Who might well wish the paidhi’s head on the ancestral battlements. Twopaidhiin, infelicitous two, might urge that as a solution.

He kept smiling. He kept smiling as he rescued Jase, who was practically wordless after the event, but who’d responded appropriately during it. He fed Jase a stiff shot of alcohol before putting him in the hands of his security, which gained himthe silence and the window of opportunity to reach Ilisidi.

“Aiji-ma,” he said with a deep bow to her and her chief of security, Cenedi, “aiji-ma, I have an urgent request, a very extravagant request, which I must make of you foremost of all; and also of your grandson. If I have anyfavors unclaimed, hear me at least. I know I am too extravagant. But I have no other resource—as your grandson, having no other resource, came to you under very similar circumstances.”

Ilisidi’s eyes were a record of years lived and intrigues survived. And her mouth quirked in amusement. “You’ve just murdered the lord of the Atageini in his own dining room and wish asylum?”

“Almost,” he said. “Very close, aiji-ma.”

15

Nand’ paidhi,” the Bu-javid operator said. “I can’t establish the co

“Thank you, nadi. One believes the same.” He set the receiver back in the cradle and heard distantly in the house the noise of steps on the stone floors of the foyer. Their household was gathering for their departure, unaware of the phone call he couldn’t resist attempting and which he foreknew wouldn’t get through, no more than the rest had.

Baji-naji, chance and fortune, the devils in the design: symbolically they existed somewhere in every atevi building as they did in every design for action. The random numbers of creativity, serendipity or destruction lurked within the rigid system of numbers, and once a design gave them leeway to work, the building tumbled down, a situation acquired additional possibilities, or the world tumbled into a new order of things.

He couldn’t raise the island, let alone get a call through to Toby or his mother’s house.

And that was no equipment failure. That was politics keepinghim from making that call, and like a fool he’d hung up on Toby in their last conversation. Toby had been able to call him, but he couldn’t get past the blockade in the other direction.

Or Toby couldn’t reach him, either.

He’d resorted to sleeping pills since the conversation with the dowager, medications from the island, carefully hoarded since the repair to his shoulder. There’d been, after his brief talk with Ilisidi, a flurry of phone calling and rescheduling legislative meetings, which consumed an entire day.

But, good part of the operation, Jase grew more cheerful—as if the promise he’d been able to keep had gotten him past the depression and the despair. Jase was going to the ocean. He would see the sea. They’d talked last night of fishing, not from Geigi’s port but from a more protected, governmentally owned site on the reserve across the same bay.

“Maybe we’ll have a chance at the yellowtail,” he’d said to Jase, although he was by no means certain the run of those fish would carry within the bay. Among the myriad other things he did keep up with, marine fish weren’t within his field. Toby would have known.