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“Will it be like taking service in a household?” he asked Jago. “Or will husbands and wives come?”
“Perhaps both,” Jago said. “As husbands and wives make unions in a household.”
Atevi unions, like human ones, could be ephemeral. “Unions within a household last. They seem obliged to last.”
“Or part amicably,” Jago said. “As one can. Or part for children, and come back again.”
That was so. Lovers within a household might get their children elsewhere, by agreement, so as not to bring children into a household that was otherwise childless.
“I would never forbid children,” he said, half wishing there were.
“But the Bu-javid is a bad place for them,” Jago said truthfully.
They were there to talk about the space station; but he looked at Jago, with whom he shared a bed on occasion, on opportunity, and wondered about children, which were not in the cards for them, certainly, biologically; and not for him, personally… he’d never wanted to leave a family of his own on the other side of the straits.
“Up here there might be children. Or not, as people prefer.”
“There were children,” Jago said, “who rode the petal sails.”
Frightening as it was, certain pods had dropped onto the world with children aboard, all those years ago.
“So there were,” he said. “And so there are on the ship itself.” Jase had told him so.
“Like Jasi-ji,” Jago said.
“And those with two parents,” Bren said. “Jase and I talked about it, how the crew knows who’s allied with whom; but outsiders wouldn’t. And they haven’tconfined their children outside the Bu-javid, so to speak. And politics of personal relationship does exist.”
Jago raised a brow. “One sees where there is no choice.”
“No choice indeed. No other place.”
Jago heaved a deep sigh. “And how shall we map these relationships? How does one perceive them?”
“One simply knows who’s in bed with whom.” He laughed. “It’s a saying, in Mosphei’. It changes their man’chi. Or flings them out of it, when the relationship fractures. And it’s common, Jago-ji; the fractures are common. We have social structures… I’m sure within the ship they exist… to make interaction possible. Feud isn’t allowed.”
A second lift of the brow. “That was not a feud that invaded the mainland? One could have mistaken it, Bren-ji.”
It was worth a wry smile. A shrug. “Politics is ideally separate from bloodline,” he said. “Not historically true, but true nowadays. Humans did have ethnicities, once. And family ties, even smaller. But humans here have had no ethnicities, until the ship came back. Now they don’t know what’s happened to them. Now the Mospheirans may learn to think ateviare the more familiar culture.”
“One doesn’t know what the world would be like without humans,” Jago said somberly. “Different. I don’t think many would like to go without television, without the aishidi’tat.”
“I think humans have gotten rather used to fresh fruit, and the knowledge the aiji will stop any armed conflict. It’s a sense of safety. Since the ship came back, that safety is threatened, at the very moment we seemed to have realized we had it.”
“So for us. Just when we realized humans were valuable, we discover they have inconvenient relatives.”
He laughed; he had to. “Our lives are machimi,” he said. “The relatives come over the hill, and want a share of the hunt.”
“And shall they have it?”
He considered what was at issue. “I think there’s room,” he said, “considering all of space, considering they’ve been industrious on their own. We simply have to add another wing to the house.”
“So,” Jago said. “Up here.”
“Up here,” he said, “where it doesn’t spoil the view.—How will it be for atevi to live here? It’s an important question. My household is the first to be able to judge. And you have tojudge.
I can’t know whether what I’m doing, to gain the atevi their place up here, can be tolerable for you, or whether I have to modify everything to allow atevi to come and go continually. Might atevi be born here, and live here? On what you say, Jago-ji, I set great importance. Can you think of such a thing?”
Jago looked up, at the ceiling, at the lights, around at the room, very solemnly, before she looked at him again. “Atevi who live here will have man’chi to whoever leads them,” she said. “And will they be within the aishidi’tat?I can’t foresee. But when there are children, when there are households, they will not be under the captains, Bren-ji. They will never be under the captains.”
“I don’t think the captains worry about that so much as they worry about having no port at all.” He had to amend that, in all knowledge he had of humans. “To teach the captains that they simply have to deal differently… that’s a frightening task, Jago-ji. It does daunt me.”
“It daunts anyone who thinks of it,” Jago said. “They must be very wise, not so kabiuatevi who come here to deal with the ship-humans.”
Not so kabiu. Not so proper. Not so observant of traditions of food and ma
“Not to be kabiumakes for rapid change,” he said. “Perhaps unwise change.”
Jago thought about that a moment. “The paidhi might see very clearly on that point,” she said. “Perhaps we wouldchange very rapidly here. And there would be problems.”
The thought haunted him. He wrote to Tabini:
I have conversed with my staff regarding the attitudes that this place engenders within atevi at the sight of these corridors and this stark sameness and have discussed with my second security perso
Yet the very foreig
I wish that the aiji might give particular thought to deep questions of man’chi for those generations resident here, considering a residence as foreign as a cave strung with lights combined with the difficulty of maintaining close ties with relatives on the planet. The psychological elements are beyond my judgment, yet I continue in my belief that atevi authority here must be represented. Therefore I do not alter my course, and depend on others’ judgment as to my wisdom in doing so.
Meanwhile I expect the Mospheirans to be our guests at supper, and hope that we may achieve agreement among representatives of the planet in the face of what may still be hard and divisive negotiations.
Kaplan brought the Mospheirans, at the appointed hour… lacking only Shugart, a fact Bren noted as Narani opened the door and admitted them to what was, de facto, the reception hall and their central corridor at once.
Shugart, clearly, was the home guard, the defense against tampering in their absence. Kroger continued to be cautious… as they were cautious. Algini had shut the door to their own guard post and had no intention of opening it at any point the guests might be in a position to see into that room.
Just for symmetry, and not to make too much of an issue of one closed door, Bren had likewise shut the door to his own room, leaving only the dining room and the servants’ quarters doors open, across from one another at the end of the hall.
Kroger, Lund, and Feldman, the latter of whom had no status with the other two, clearly, and who stood somewhat to the rear as the hand-shaking and greeting proceeded.
So did Kaplan, a walking listening post who had to be shut out or otherwise occupied.