Inheritor by C. J. Cherryh Page B

formal and correct set of manners, the correct utensil, the correct grip, the correct posture, the correct communication with the server: he had left orders, and the staff had mercilessly followed them, even today, when he would as gladly have omitted them.
    Jase was in effect a child, as far as communication went, and in some regards as far as expectations of the planet went. Bren had said that to Saidin, too, and she perhaps put Jase's fits of temper in that basket along with her observation and with his recent declaration that the staff were all rain clouds —
ghidari'sai uchl'sa-ma
— when Jase had wished to tell Saidin he'd possibly offended members of the staff —
jidari'sai uchi'sa-ma
.
    Rain clouds had instantly become the running joke in the household the day before Bren had left. The staff had been accustomed to believe Jase couldn't understand.
    And before he'd left he'd had delicately to explain to Saidin that, yes, Jasi-ji did understand the joke; and yes, Jasi-ji had been embarrassed, and, no, Jasi-ji would not pursue the matter of the staff's laughter to anyone's detriment, so they need not worry, but it was time not to laugh any longer.
    Possibly that was what had blown up while he was gone. Jase might be a child in size to the atevi, and might use the children's language, which didn't have the rigid expectation of correct numbers, but Jase was
not
a child, and Jase had been on edge since before he left on the trip.
    The staff brought in the third round of trays and served the seasonal game.
    "I've been battling the irregular verbs," Jase said conversationally. "The staff has been very helpful. No more rain clouds.
Get
. I've been working on
get
. Indivisible plurals."
    "Common verb. Defective verb?"
    "Defective verb?"
    "Old verb. Lot of use. They break."
    Jase gave him an odd look.
    "True," Bren said. "The common verbs wear out. They lose pieces over the centuries. People patch them. People abuse them. Everyone uses
get
." It was only half facetious, and having led Jase on a small chase that tested his command of unusual forms, he thought it time for explanation: "If only professors use a verb, it remains unchanged forever. Fossils.
Get
isn't such a verb. It's been used by the common man."
    "It's a difficult verb."
    "It certainly is. But your accent's vastly improved. Very good. — Listen: master
get
and you've got the irregular indivisibles of
shikira, makkiura
, and
shis'urna
. Any three quarters of any verb in the
-irei
class: they rhyme with the
-ra
plurals, at least in the past tenses."
    "You're sure. You swear."
    "In formal Ragi, there are, I swear to you, three hundred forty-six key words. Learn those, and most everything that rhymes with them follows their paradigm."
    "You said there were a hundred and twelve!"
    "I'm speaking of the court language. You're getting far beyond the children's forms."
    "Not very damn fast, I'm not."
    "It does go faster from here. Trust me."
    "That's what you said when I landed."
    The conversation had gone to banter. To high spirits. "What
could
I say? I couldn't discourage you."
    But Jase didn't take up the conversation. Jase ducked his head and had a piece of fish, no longer engaging with him, and the mood crashed.
    He looked down the length of a table set with dishes not native even to him, knowing he couldn't
imagine
the mind of a man who'd never seen a horizon with a negative curve, who'd never seen a blue sky, never seen the rain clouds he mistakenly invoked. Jase had never even met a stranger until he'd fallen down from the sky and met a world full of strangers and unguess-able customs. Jase's world had consisted of the crew of his ship —
his
ship, not
the
ship.
    Jase had somehow acquired curiosity about things outside his steel world. That adventurousness, the ship's captain had declared, was why he'd sent Jase, who was (he and Jase had worked it out on the computer) two planetary years younger than his twenty-seven-almost-eight; and it was why they'd sent