Laldasa (22 page)

“I see. Is your next question whether I consider that claim to be justified?”

“Is it?”

Namun leaned back in his chair and studied the fruit arrayed on his plate. “We developed the Star Trim stabilization system because of inherent inefficiencies in the older designs. The AGIM ships are less fuel-efficient than ships with Star Trim—much less—but that doesn't mean they're necessarily less stable.”

“Then the KNC claims are false?”

“Let us say, they are highly exaggerated. Yes, a less efficient keel is potentially more prone to magnetic fluctuation, which can be a problem during rotation. But I think the accident records should speak to that; surprisingly few ships experience major problems during lift-off.”

Jaya nodded. “Thank you. The Council is having experts look over the presentations, but I ... ” He shrugged. “I seem to be impatient.”

 
“You weren't afraid I'd be partial to the KNC? After all, they are easily Vedda Technologies' best customer.”

“You're a scientist and a visionary, Namun, not a businessman. If I asked you how much money the Consortium spent at V-Tech last year, I'd be willing to wager you couldn't tell me.”

Namun laughed. “You have me there. No, I couldn't tell you. But I could tell you the exact thickness of the magnetic plating necessary to generate a smooth mag-field for a 100,000 ton freighter.”

Jaya raised his hands. “Don't, please. I have all the information I need about mag-keels. I would like to ask your opinion on another aspect of this, if I might.”

Namun shrugged. “Of course. If you think my opinion is worth anything.”

“What's your sense of the Consortium claim that a free-market Avasa and a truly independent Miner's Guild would be disastrous to the KNC and our economy?”

“I honestly don't know. I have a suspicion they might be right about their own fortunes, if only for the reason that, given the choice, many of those who have been forced to deal with the Consortium in the past will no longer do so. And that, Jaya, speaks less of market imperatives than it does of Karma.” He patted a napkin to his lips, his eyes unfocused.

The look was familiar to Jaya; he had seen it on his father's face often enough.

After a moment of thought, Namun continued. “There are very few people and organizations outside its immediate family of companies that Kasi-Nawhar has not stepped on or aggrieved in some way. I believe there are those who would sooner pay more for needful services than do business with the KNC. I can't say I blame them.”

“You do business with the KNC,” Jaya observed.

“They need me—or at least, they need V-Tech. Because they need V-Tech, they have always been generous and above board with me. Better, they leave me alone and do not meddle in or steer my research. Which is not to say they don't try to take the tiller now and again. But then, I simply remind them of their need. Take the Star Trim system, for example. With a fleet as large as theirs the efficiencies it buys them result in significant savings.”

“Can AGIM hurt them?”

“As I said, they've hurt themselves. If they were bigger men, more honest men, in a word—more spiritual men—they would be afraid of neither AGIM's defection nor it's power.”

“Afraid?” The words seemed absurd applied to Ranjan Vrksa or Nigudha Bhrasta.

Namun smiled, perhaps a bit wickedly, and said, “Yes, even men in that position of power count fear among their possessions. It is not quite like being a mahesa of the House Sarojin.”

Jaya considered that. “I believe my father proved that even a mahesa of the House Sarojin has reason to own fear. No one can live without fear, excepting perhaps a saint.”

Namun had sobered at the oblique mention of his late friend's fate, and the smile that now played about his lips was rueful. “Ah, but a saint fears earning his God's disapproval, does he not?”

In the silence that followed that observation, Jaya imagined he heard Ana's voice: “You terrify me.” If Ana was not a saint, she was at least a pretender to sainthood—or perhaps a saint-in-training, he thought, more charitably. And, as the attraction between them was inarguably mutual, he represented a potential fall from the high Rohin path. If Namun was right about the fears of saints, Ana had every reason to be afraid.

An emotion not unlike pride fluttered momentarily in Jaya's breast. He smothered it in incredulity. Had he really, in that self-infatuated instant, seen Anala Nadim's ethics as a target to be hit or a barrier to be breached?

“You seem troubled, Jaya,” observed his Uncle Namun, quietly. “Are you taking this thing with AGIM that much to heart?”

An upward glance showed that both Namun Vedda and Ravi were regarding him with solemn concern. “I know ... some people to whom the freedom of Avasa is somewhat more than an abstract legal issue. Recently I ... discovered that the Saroj has some offshoots on our sister world. They are not directly affected by the Guild's concerns, but ... ”

“Anything that affects the mining industry on Avasa cannot help but affect all Avasans,” finished Namun. “Excepting, perhaps, a handful whose livelihood derives from purely Mehtaran interests.”

Jaya managed a weak smile. He had not lied to his Uncle Namun since he was a small boy, and all of his childhood and adolescent lies put together paled before the one he had just uttered. “Funny,” he said, “that's what Ana said just last night.”

“Ana?”

“One of my Avasan cousins—Ana Sadira.” He chanted a litany of falsehoods, then, about Ana's timber magnate father, and her vacation from a school where she studied forestry.

“She wouldn't happen to be a tall, rather striking young woman with deep auburn hair, would she?” asked Namun.

“Yes. Have you—?”

“We nearly met the other day, I think. She was Jivinta Mina's luncheon companion at this very table. I thought perhaps your very stubborn grandmother had taken my advice and hired a young woman to accompany her on her junkets.”

Jaya pushed his jal frazie around on his plate. “Yes, well, Ana is rather fond of junkets herself. Unfortunately, she's also prone to be stubborn, independent, and risk-taking. She has a particular predilection for junketing about in the Warrows and the Nahar.”

Namun Vedda's eyes crinkled with silent laughter. “Ah, the Sarojin women! She sounds quite remarkable.”

“She is,” said Ravi, unexpectedly entering the conversation. He glanced at Jaya. “Quite remarkable. It is a shame, Jaya Rai, that you do not get on better with each other.”

Namun laughed. “Do I detect an undercurrent? What's the matter, Jaya—are you uncomfortable with a woman you can't intimidate?”

“I'm not uncomfortable with Jivinta Mina.”

“Jivinta Mina is your grandmother, not a potential liaison.”

Jaya suffered a moment of epiphany. He actually stopped to ponder the suggestion, which provoked his godfather into further laughter.

“You are your father's son, Jaya.”

“What? How so?”

“You have his ... habit of introspection and self-analysis. I know few men who would even allow themselves to ponder a question with such humbling implications.” He cocked his head. “I am seized by the conviction that you would have answered, had I not interrupted you.”

“Yes. I would have. And, no, I'm not uncomfortable with Ana, merely ... at a loss to know how to deal with her. Until now, the only women of my acquaintance who haven't been intimidated by me—or by what I represent—are my grandmother, the Deva Radha and Helidasa.”

There was a wonderful irony in that, which Jaya did not explore at that moment, except to note wryly that when he said Helidasa ran his household, the truth of the statement far transcended the domestic realm.

He did not wonder at Hadas's surprise at him that morning—he knew very few members of his caste who allowed their das to hold beliefs, convictions, or opinions that were uniquely their own, let alone act on them. Helidasa, he had no doubt, viewed herself as being the essence of servitude, and unimpeachably loyal to her House. He had few doubts, as well, that she thought of the Saroj in just those terms—her House—as if she, too, were a Sarojin. In a sense, he supposed, she was. There was also the very real possibility that among her predecessors there were those who had entered into sexual relationships with their Taj masters. It had intrigued him as a youth to speculate that he and Ravi might share a physical as well as emotional and intellectual kinship.

The convoluted loop of thought brought him back around again to Anala Nadim and the irony of their relationship. She was, legally, at once a member and possession of his household. She was, in a reality that transcended law, a free woman who both attracted him immensely and was attracted to him. He had no doubt a sexual liaison would be passionate and satisfying for both of them. If only she were not a dasa. If only she were not Rohin. If only she were not so stubborn. Were she what she pretended to be ...

The thought hung. Were she a Rani, he would never contemplate her, his hand on her door latch, while she slept, trusting in an abstract. Honor. He knew what that was. If he had learned nothing else from his father, he had surely learned that.

He knew and despised men who used their hold on their das to force them to the humiliating performance of acts they would never have done willingly or freely. He felt the depth of his loathing and was surprised at it. Before, he might have said, if asked, “I argue no one's right to own personal das; it is simply not for me.” It seemed his feelings had not only intensified, but crystallized.

No surprise, he supposed. His grandmother had never owned any das of her own; the Saroj household das had come to her through marriage. She had raised her son to view the owning of other human beings as a questionable practice, even as her husband had taught him to assume it as his right. Jaya knew it was something Bhaktasu Sarojin had battled with internally his entire adult life. But Bhaktasu Sarojin had been a man who toiled with things that disturbed him; Jaya tended to ignore them, to abide with them held uneasily at bay, or to tell himself there would be a time to deal with such things later.

In that way, he was like his mother, he supposed. It was easy to blot out uneasy thoughts or stirring conscience in day-to-day minutiae. Now, nothing in Jaya's life was day-to-day; the minutiae was gone, leaving his conscience naked. He squirmed in the discomfort of nakedness. Perhaps he was his father's son after all.

“Do I detect,” Uncle Namun was saying, “a note of pleasure in that peculiar observation?”

Jaya shook himself. “I wouldn't call it pleasure. I suppose it is gratifying to know someone—a woman, specifically—that I can trust to be honest. Brutally honest, at times. Ana does not try to score points with me. On the other hand, some situations would be easier and more pleasant if she were just a little in awe of me.”

“Pleasant?” echoed Namun. “Or pleasurable?” His eyes sparkled—now green, now gray. “From the glance of her I got, I would have to call her a most attractive woman. Perhaps you can work out an arrangement whereby you can be equally in awe of each other. The carriage of passion does not draw smoothly behind a mismatched team.”

“Like my mother and father?” Jaya surprised even himself.

His Uncle Namun's brows twitched upward. “What makes you say that?”

“They seem so different. Father was a man of depth. A man of ... piety and compassion. A man of ... faith, I suppose you could say.”

“Yes. And your mother was a woman of faith. She had faith in him and in his causes.”

Jaya made a wry face. He had not intended to, and tried to snatch it back, but Namun had caught it.

“I know. You're thinking that was only pretence, else she could not have become the woman you now know. I can tell you, having known Melantha Sarojin a bit longer than you have, that it was not pretence. She has changed. I don't suppose you noted the genesis of those changes, wrapped up as you were in your own grief. That you two drew apart instead of together after Bhaktasu's death seems a great tragedy to me—more tragic, in its way than his death, itself.”

He paused and searched Jaya's face as if looking for something that would determine what he should say next. What he said was, “When you judge your mother in the light of your father's virtue, do try to remember that, in your mother's estimation, it was his virtue that killed him.”

“You mean because he died a crusader?”

Namun nodded. “Is it any wonder Melantha no longer treasures his causes?”

Jaya felt another epiphany coming on. He shook his head. “No surprise. I suppose that's why she made light of them to me. Beyond that, she would never discuss my father's convictions—political or spiritual. I think Jivinta Mina has given me more of my father than mother has. Do you know much about what crusade he was pursuing when he died?”

Namun frowned. “Not as much as I would have expected. He was unusually reserved about it. I don't think he even shared much of it with Melantha, or so she has indicated to me.”