Explorer

But the aiji in Shejidan had sent his son on a voyage that should teach him more than bad behavior and dangerous familiarity.

“I shall see the aiji-dowager,” Bren said. “Go beg Narani-nadi to arrange some graceful hanging on this wall, to save the servants asking each other who could have damaged our residence.”

“Yes, Bren-aiji.”

“And regard security’s advice. Aijiin do not defend themselves with bows and arrows—”

“With guns, Bren-nadi!”

“Not even with guns, Cajeiri-nadi. Their staffs defend them. The very humblest servant who locks a bedroom window at night defends them. Not to mention the Assassins’ Guild, who do carry guns, and whose reactions are very quick, and not to be trifled with. Please live to grow up, young aiji. Your father and mother would be very disappointed otherwise. So even would your great-grandmother.”

Cajeiri’s eyes… they looked at one another eye to eye… grew very large.

“And by no means forget,” Bren said, ”that I am several times your age. So your father would remind you.”

“Yes, Bren-aiji.”

He liked the boy. And like was for salads. Love was for flavors of fruit drink. It wasn’t an emotion one could even translate for a species that operated by hierarchies and grouping and emotionally charged associations.

“You are within my man’chi,” was as close as he could come. “No matter you behave like this. But be careful. The ship is going to move soon. We’re going into a place of considerable danger.”

“Are we?” Eagerness. The boy was seven. “Is it the lost station?”

“It may be. Meanwhile—wrap the arrowheads. Don’t shoot my staff. And see me later. I’m sure we can find some new videos for the trip.”

“Some human ones!”

“Some human ones, too.” They had a store of them. A large store. In consideration where they were going and the risks they ran, they’d dumped a great deal of the human Archive from the ship, entrusting it to the planet and the station of their origin. But they’d kept a few useful bits. “Now apologize, and then off with you to tell Narani.”

“One is very sorry,” the scoundrel said, with all his father’s wi

“Go,” Banichi said, and the boy escaped.

Galley staff had watched all this from the open door.

“One is equally sorry, nandi,” the cook said—the dowager’s men, all young, except the cook; and bet that Cenedi, the dowager’s chief of security, had had an immediate report about the dent that had sprung, likely without much warning, from the depths of their premises.

“One very well understands, nadi,” Bren said. Never turn aside an atevi apology: they came when due. “One is informed the dowager has sent for me?”

“You were expected at breakfast, nandi,” the cook said. “The aiji-dowager is now in her study.”

“I’d better go there immediately,” he said to his staff.

“One will inform Narani,” Jago said, and they turned back toward the dowager’s main doors, their own unvisited—well, except by a boy on a life-saving mission. The dowager was not long on patience.

Several doors back, in their relatively compact living arrangement, this linear, human-designed interlock accommodated what should be roughly circular routes, by atevi habit. Atevi ingenuity did manage: the dowager’s household accessed the bone-numbing cold of a service tu

He rapped softly—a shared custom—rather than use the signal button. The door opened. Cenedi had a small, highly electronic secretary desk in the curtained-off foyer. Cenedi was often at work there, and Cenedi was on the spot at the door, right behind the dowager’s major domo. Expecting them—no miracle, given their ubiquitous communications links.

“Welcome,” Cenedi said. “Welcome, nandi.”

“Indeed, thank you, Cenedi-ji.—I shall keep the coat, nadi.” This for a servant who silently offered to take it. The dowager’s favored temperatures were too cold for comfort—this, the woman who preferred a drafty mountain fortress with minimal plumbing to the luxury of temperate—and political—Shejidan.

He retained his coat, left Banichi and Jago to their ordinary social interface with the dowager’s security, and followed the servant’s polite lead to the service access, a bone-chilling walk three doors down, a duck of the head to get into the comparative heat of the dowager’s underheated study.

They could have gone back into the main corridor. The dowager did otherwise. The staff did otherwise. So her guests, once admitted to her premises, did otherwise.

The dowager occupied a chair in what was, given the carefully restrained objects on the shelves, an office-study cum library—in short, all those functions that in the dowager’s establishment were sanity-saving and civilized.

The dowager, knitted shawl about her, read. And looked up from her book.

Scowling. Darkly scowling.

“You coddle the boy.”

Where was her communications link? He had never spotted it.

“He’s bigger than I am,” Bren said, and it struck the dowager’s humor. She laughed, and laughed, and moved her cane to tap the other chair.

He sat. He didn’t begin a report. He waited about two breaths.

“So,” she said. “And how is Sabin-aiji?”

“Well,” he said.

“Have you broken your fast?”

“No, aiji-ma, but—”

“But. But. But. Will you have breakfast? Or tea?”

“I fear my stomach could by no means deal with a breakfast, aiji-ma, and I have had tea upstairs.”

“And your estimate?”

That was the formal invitation. “Aiji-ma, you know the ship-aijiin lied to the crew.”

Impatient wave of the hand. “Estimate of Sabin-aiji.”

“A difficult book to read, aiji-ma, a palimpsest of several regimes on this ship, and to this hour I ca

“And this tape shows?”

“Corridors lacking power or air… in which the search team walks—walks, with the appearance of gravity, which, aiji-ma, ca

“Shall we be surprised at this?”

“No, aiji-ma. In retrospect, one thinks not. But that raises another question: did Ramirez act on his own ! Jase suspects the timing in which he and Yolanda were created, decades before their usefulness in Shejidan. Jase suspects Ramirez had ambitions to create yet another colony, secret from the Guild. But Sabin suggests Ramirez meant to contact foreigners—spacefaring foreigners, and that his intrusion into sensitive foreign territory prompted the attack on Reunion.”