Firelight went up to the red figures of an ancient frescoed vault, smoke-hazed from the braziers on either side of the black stone tomb. In the dark congregation, watchful eyes now and again caught the firelight and reflected it, gold fire brighter than the sheen of light off opulent brocade.
It was an atevi place—and solemn tribute to a decades-dead aiji. Decades in the past, Valasi might be, but the association he had created had only grown wider at his death. It spanned the continent now. It reached around the world. It shared the heavens with strangers.
An atevi place, an atevi ceremony, an atevi congregation… but one human, one pale, blond, very small and conspicuous human stood in a crowd of towering atevi lords, some of whom had often and fairly recently entertained the idea of killing him. Under the court attire, the frock coat and the lace and the brocades, Bren Cameron wore ten pounds of composite that would stop most bullets, if any of these very adept gentlemen and ladies ventured an assassination without proper Filing of Intent.
The Assassins’ Guild, on the living aiji’s order, would not allow that to happen. The tall atevi on either side of him, Bani-chi and Jago, in the black and silver of that Guild—they knew the odds, they knew all the agreements and contracts currently in force—knew the likelihood of illegal risks as well. And while assuring him there was no contract Filed, and that no Guild actions but surveillance could be taken for days on any side of this gathering—they still insisted on the armor.
So Bren complied, uncomplaining, with not too many questions, and kept his head generally down, evading any too-direct stare that might draw attention.
Deference, respect, solemnity… in a place where humans least of all belonged.
Tabini-aiji had decreed this honor to his father’s tomb, so the invitation declared, for a memorial and a reminder of the origins of the Western Association—well and good. Humans and atevi alike honored their dead, and they held memorials, particularly at points of change or challenge.
But what was changing? Or where was the challenge?
But predictably enough—they could hardly ignore the call to venerate the aiji’s father—the loyal lords of the western aishidi’tat had come in with no trouble. Those from the south shore and from the farthest eastern reaches of the Association arrived in far more uneasy duty, surely with questions of their own. They had been Valasi’s allies, most of them—and saying so had been unfashionable in the west for decades.
The aiji-dowager, too, had flown in from the east for this solemn event. If she hadn’t, rumors would have flown.
Ilisidi, aiji-dowager, Valasi’s mother.
Tabini’s grandmother.
And the whole world knew that one of the two, Tabini or Ilisidi, had almost certainly assassinated Valasi.
Well, grant she came: no mere opinion of men perturbed her. If one was an atevi lord—and she was among the highest of atevi lords—one rigidly observed the proprieties and courtesies that supported all lords, whatever the circumstances. One consistently did the right thing.
And if one were the human paidhi-aiji, the official translator, the point of contact between two species, one also did the right thing, and came when called, and kept clearly in mind the fact that this was not human society. A paltry assassination by no means broke the bonds of an atevi association, no more than it necessarily fractured man’chi—that emotional cement that held all atevi society together. A judicious, well-planned in-house assassination only made the association more comfortable for all the rest—eased, rather than broke, the web of association and common consent—in this case, the family bond on which the stability of the world depended.
A well-chosen assassination might make unity easier, once the dust settled, and a species that did not, biologically speaking, feel friendship… still felt something warm, and good when its surrounding association settled into harmony.
Were they here to meditate on that fact?
To renew the bond?
A human couldn’t possibly feel it. Wasn’t hard-wired to feel it. Tabini had called him down from the orbiting station for this service, which he’d taken as a simple excuse covering a desire to have some essential conference, some secret personal meeting which would make thorough sense.
But thus far—there was no meeting. There was going to be a special session of the legislature—and that had made sense, until it was clear he was dismissed, and would not attend. There’d been one intimate audience with Tabini on that first day, in which Tabini had entertained him in his study, a great honor, talked about hunting—one of Tabini’s favorite occupations, which he never actually had time to do—and asked in some detail about the welfare of associates on the space station. They’d had several drinks, become quite cheerful, shared an hour with Lady Damiri, the aiji-consort, and discussed the weather, their son’s education, and the economy, none of which he would have called critical—nor ever discussed with that much brandy in him if he’d thought it would become critical.
Good night, Tabini had said then, good fortune, not forgetting there was a memorial service involving, oh, the entire continent, and would he kindly sit among the foremost in attendance?
Not quite news to him. He’d known it would take place— hadn’t quite known, before landing, that it was quite so extravagant, televised, or followed with a special session.
So he was on temporary display at the edge of the aiji’s household, wearing that white ribbon in his braid that reminded all parties he was the paidhi, the translator, the neutral, not an appropriate target.
He represented to those present, among other controversial things, the full-tilt acquisition of technology over which Tabini and Valasi had had their fatal falling-out.
So Valasi died under questionable circumstances, and instead of declaring any decent period of mourning and reconsideration, Tabini had immediately opened the floodgates of change: television, trade with Mospheira… railroads. Valasi’s paidhi, a human whose modest advocacy of airplanes, an expanded rail system and limited television broadcasting had scandalized the traditional-minded among the atevi—had quit, retired, and left the job to him.
Tabini had immediately taken—well, with atevi, a liking to him didn’t translate, but certainly Tabini had sensed that he could work with him. Occasionally he had wondered if Tabini had spotted the world’s greatest fool and thought he could get the sun, the moon and the stars from him…
The stars—considering that not so long afterward Phoenix had shown up in the heavens, the colony ship returned to its lost human colony on someone else’s world.
Things out there, Phoenix reported, hadn’t worked out. Things had involved an alien encounter gone very wrong at a space station that never should have been built. And while the paidhi asked himself how he had ever gotten into this, Tabini’s close cooperation with humans spiraled wider and wider.
It took atevi into space, into a near-unified economy with the human enclave on Mospheira. It took two species and three governments to the very edge of union.
And atevi had never forgotten the hazards of swallowing foreign answers to local problems.
Ilisidi entered the tomb, among the last, just behind Lord Tatiseigi of the Atageini, uncle of the aiji-consort. She walked with a cane, went in the company of Cenedi, her chief of security.
And Cajeiri was with her. Bren noted that—the boy, almost lost in the company of adults, took his place with Ilisidi’s party.
There was a change. The aiji’s heir took his place, not with uncle Tatiseigi, but one place down, still in the front row, with great-grandmother Ilisidi.
Cameras were discreet, but in evidence, and cameramen shifted slightly to get a good view of Ilisidi and the boy. This was going out across the continent: a ceremony of national unity and a memorial in respect for the past, it might be: but it was also a public function in which the alignment of public figures was highly significant.
So the aiji-dowager stood there now before Valasi’s sarcophagus, just visible in the tail of his eye. She was diminutive for an ateva, white-haired with age, leaning on that cane… sharp eyes taking in every nuance of expression and surely conscious of the camera. The boy stood stock still, just visible past Cenedi’s black uniform—Cenedi also being Guild security, oh yes. Guild security was all through the assembly, despite the limited seating.
A war of flowers out there in the corridor: of colors, of position in here—and a sense of progress and opposition in delicate balance, with the Assassins’ Guild to guarantee good behavior.
But far, far better than the alternative.
The aiji’s immediate household filed in. That was Tabini, Lady Damiri, and their attendant security. Tabini-aiji was in black and red, his house colors. Damiri wore gold and green, the Atageini colors, and carried a lily in her hands, strong contrast to her black skin, amid the glitter of emeralds. They took their places, finishing the first row.
All seats were filled. There was a little murmur of expectation.
Then a bell sounded.
Utter silence descended. A camera changed focus. That was the only sound now, lamplight momentarily gilding an imprudent lens.
That stroke of the bell called for meditation.
Next would come a statement from the head of house— Tabini, in this case. Bren had read the program somewhat before he entered a shadow too deep for humans to read.
And whatever the aiji had to say, the gathered lords would parse it for every detail. It was important—an address that could, if it went wrong, break the union of lords apart. It always could. Any chance word, gone amiss, could break the Association at any time—and in this context, bets were doubled. Tabini had made deals with human authorities, sent atevi to work on the space station, admitting a flood of new technologies. He’d had to, for a whole host of economic and practical reasons that sliced right across the ordinary order of politics, throwing conservatives into alliance with the most liberal of western powers.
He’d had to reach across traditional lines, across ethnical lines—across associational lines.
And so the agreement with humans widened, policy deliberately blind to the causes of the last world war, dancing across the shards of old resentments, skipping over divides of opinion that had once swum with blood.
Most of all, the crisis in the heavens and the need to secure a voice in that resolution had shoved the whole economy into a hellishly scary rush, a fever pitch run that no one at first had thought would last more than a month.
No longer than three years.
Then no longer than six.
As yet there was no slowdown, no cooldown, no pause for breath—and no meeting of the associated lords—until this.
The silence after that bell was so absolute that breathing itself seemed a disturbance… and in that silence, of all things, someone dropped a program, a crack of parchment on stone that set a twitch—if not a killing reflex—into every hair-triggered, Guild-trained nerve in the chamber.
Every Guild member had to skip a heartbeat. Every lord present—had to make a conscious decision not to dive below the benches.
But it was only the next aiji, their someday ruler, diving almost to the edge of the flower-decked sarcophagus to rescue that wayward, unseemly folio.
In his haste it escaped his fingers on his retreat. Twice.
Bren winced.
Three times.
The boy had it. Scrambled back to his place in the standing line.
Cajeiri, Tabini’s and Damiri’s, the hope of the Association, Tatiseigi’s grand-nephew—was the height and weight of the average human teenager—but not, by any means, average, human, or teenaged. Cajeiri tried—God knew he tried, but somehow his feet found obstacles, his hands lost their grip on perfectly ordinary objects, and when Cajeiri would swear to all gods most fortunate that he was standing still, everyone else called it fidgeting.
Now of all times… in front of the whole assembled Association, the lords of the aishidi’tat, this was no time for boys to be boys, or for a child to be—whatever he might be.
Cajeiri was invisible in the first row again. Silence hung all about him. The dignity of the highest houses settled on his young shoulders. Tabini, Tatiseigi—now Ilisidi, in whose care the young unfortunate attended the ceremony—were all in question in that behavior. Fosterage was the rule of the great houses, once a child of rank left the cradle. Tatiseigi, the maternal uncle, had had a go at applying courtly polish, in the rural, rigid politics of the Atageini stronghold in the central west. Now Ilisidi had him: in her district, modernist meant someone who installed a flush toilet in a thousand-year-old stronghold.
God help the boy.
A second bell. Solemnity recovered. This was the second point, fragile second, unfortunate second: atevi lived by numbers, died by the numbers. Two of anything presumed there would be a third. There must be a third. The very note, echoing in the stone recesses of the place, on this occasion, gathered up the tension in the air and prepared to braid it into a cord… if the third bell, please God, would only ring without unfortunate omen.
Cajeiri held himself absolutely still. Two would ring ominously even in an atevi six-year-old’s brain. Two always meant pay attention: another will follow.
Bren had been to Malguri himself. In a way, he wished he could go back there, have another try of his own at a life a human wasn’t regularly admitted even to see. In a certain measure he so envied the boy that chance.
Ilisidi had her hands full. He did know that. The boy, thus far, with the best intentions, had destroyed two historic porcelains, set off a major security alarm, and ridden a startled mecheita across newly-poured cement in Tatiseigi’s formal garden.
Finally, unbearably, with the least shifting of bodies in anticipation, Tabini, head of house, foremost of the Ragi atevi, aiji of the whole aishidi’tat, moved out of the row to the single lighted lamp that sat before the sarcophagus.
Tabini, tall shadow, took a slender straw, took light from one lamp and lit one of two others.
Two lamps lit.
Jago, armed and informed, nudged Bren’s hand with the back of hers. Pay attention. Be on your guard.
Banichi, on his other side, didn’t move.
Every bodyguard in the whole chamber must be thinking the same, prepared for anything. It was in all the machimi, the history-plays: in the feudal age, in Malguri’s age, the time of bright banners and heraldry, assemblies thus invited had been murdered wholesale, slaughtered by hidden archers. Whole tables of diners had fallen ill at once. Ladies had perished in poisoned baths—name the death: someone had delivered it.
Hearts beat, atevi, and in one case, human, with utter trepidation.
Tabini, damn him, knew it. The third bell had not yet rung. And Tabini turned, in that terrible, unprecedented interval.
“I speak,” Tabini declared, in that resonant, still-young voice, “between the second and the third bell. We live … between the second and the third bell of our associated lives. We live … on the edge of decision and chance. We live… between expectation and fulfillment. Between the second and the third bell of our collective existence, I am Valasi’s son, I am Valasi’s heir… I am Valasi’s successor.”
After the hasdrawad and the tashrid, the bicameral legislature, had determined for the second time that Ilisidi would not be aiji, they had appointed Tabini to head the aishidi’tat.
And the whole assembly, caught between the bells and the lights, heard felicitous, redeeming threes. Every atevi nerve rang as a human could only intellectually comprehend—not feel, gut-deep: felicitous one, then the two strokes of we live. Then I speak, disastrous two—felicitous three of we live. And now no resolution of the first cahi, the first proposal, at all, but the infelicitous two of I am. A human brain could short-circuit keeping up with the bracketing structures, but Bren swore he felt it in his own nerves: and he felt his knees go weak when Tabini gave the assembly that third, redemptive I am. The whole audience held its breath, angry as they must be at this tactic. That, in this audience, didn’t matter. They were caught up, snared, and couldn’t move. Daren’t move. Felt the aishidi’tat threatened—and were drawn, unwillingly, to hope that it, and their lives, continued.
“I speak as your appointed guide into time to come,” Tabini said. And delivered the next third stroke, that painfully woundup, merciful third: “I speak for the unity of the assembly of us all.
“We do not forget,” Tabini continued, as nerve and flesh all but liquified in relief and bodyguards stood down from red alert. Tabini swept on in possession of all attention. Thank God no program dropped. Breathing itself was at a minimum. Tabini’s oratory was all fortunate threes now, rapid, hammering into nerves still resounding to two strokes of the bell, still waiting for the resolution of their universe. “We do not break our strong connections with all that Valasi-aiji built. We do not abrogate our traditions. The more knowledge we acquire, the more we rationally comprehend the universe, the more we control our own destiny—”
Sensitive spot: the number-counters who so powerfully ruled the traditional world had long discounted the numbers of the heavens, meaning they had deliberately, scornfully dismissed the work of astronomers, who had failed to foresee the Landing.
But the modern-day Astronomer Emeritus, a genius of his age, brandished numbers that confounded the number-counters—those mathematicians who claimed to guide the less talented to understand the balance of the universe. The newly respectable Astronomer Emeritus was Tabini’s. And with Tabini’s blessing, the Astronomer Emeritus worked to understand the stars and make reliable paths through the heavens. The numbers flowing down from the heavens now ran a starship and promised to connect atevi to a rational universe that also accounted for humans—
To a universe, what was more, that brought them a second foreign species. That this new species happened to be hostile— well, well, but the soaring optimism of good numbers insisted the difficulties could be overcome, irresistibly so.
Atevi relied on a rational universe.
Humans on the island enclave of Mospheira had faith in miracles.
Humans on the starship over their heads had more faith in a second armed starship and a planetful of allies, in a universe otherwise sparse with life.
But atevi being an independent lot, fiercely so, and hating worse than poison to be handed a fait accompli involving someone else’s numbers, had politely declined to make too strong a point that a human species that had misplaced its own home planet was not infallible. In the main atevi were impressed by what they saw going on in the heavens—what, at least, the dedicated and the suspicious alike, armed with binoculars, could make out as going on in the heavens. It was at least a personal enough contact with the presence up there to make it a national obsession, and binoculars and telescopes enjoyed a vogue at garden parties and secret meetings.
The latter—since a last die-hard cadre of the traditionalists wanted their world back the way Tabini had inherited it, sans telescopes, sans autographed roof tiles—sans the frantic push of atevi interests skyward. But the majority even of the conservatives had dropped the traditionalist fight over the very concept of Air Traffic Control: they’d lost that argument, long since, and scrambled to get aerospace industry in their own districts.
Yet did the builders of such facilities properly consider the numbers? They derived them from new-fangled computers, to the contempt of the die-hard traditionalists and the dedicated ’counters. Dared one trust them?
“The more numbers we gain,” Tabini was saying to the assembled lords, “the more I myself appreciate Valasi’s work. Not,” Tabini added, before certain die-hard conservatives burst a blood vessel, “that I would argue less with my father, but certainly that I would listen more. His time was too soon to know everything: but in his wisdom he laid a foundation for the aishidi’tat that would assure a strong leadership… and now I know that he saw change coming. Now I know that he prepared for it. Now I know that my father was a wise man.”
Oh, that was clever: generational authority was a tenet of the conservatives… while the aiji’s increasing power over their lives as a central authority was a continual sore point. Now Tabini equated one with the other, wound the cord of their own argument around a strong young fist, and yanked.
Count your fingers when dealing with Tabini. His enemies and his allies both said that.
“My father warned me,” Tabini said. “He saw us growing reliant on advances that we would never have the chance to make for ourselves. But because these inventions, like all real things, come of true numbers, he saw that they use the natural universe, he saw that they were good, he saw that if we did invent them they would be much the same. He had, however, every intent of shaping what came to us into our own design, he had every intent of maintaining sovereignty—” Another sore point. “And because it follows from every previous invention—he clearly had every intent of going into space.” The cadence dragged them right into it… and marched on, leaving the fiercest opponents to mull over a very strong point: if not that aim, what aim? “In the new numbers, our economy runs white-hot. We have no hunger, we have no feuds, we have no want of employment for the clans. We mine, we build, we distribute, and we have no scarcity anywhere. Thanks to our vantage from orbit we rescue a forest from blight. We warn a village on the coast to put up the storm shutters. We cure diseases we once thought hopeless. In the new numbers we send and speak and travel from one end to the other of every association, without wires or roads that blight the world. In the new numbers, we draw power from the sun’s free light without smoke to obscure the sky.
“Never let us forget what is kabiu, or break the rhythm of the seasons, or of the wild things, or of our own bodies. Let us never forget how to build a fire, light a candle, or use our hands to spin thread. Let no single village forget how to weave cloth, shape a pot, or hunt its own food. If a machine made a pot, it serves for a while. But if hands made it, it is kabiu, and fit to pass to our children. This was the true understanding I learned from Valasi. This is what I now give to my son. This is what he will in his day give to his son. This observance of true value is what keeps kabiu. This is the source of things unseen. This quality, this fitness remains so long as we have the keen sense of what is real. And in a hundred thousand pots, one is kabiu.
“We can heal the sick, warn against weather, and supply common pots to every village in the world. But let us teach our children to make what is kabiu, and to recognize what is kabiu, and to value what is kabiu.
“This is the unity of one. This is the aishidi’tat. This is our heritage.”
A bell rang. Tabini lit the third lamp in utter stillness.
The whole universe seemed to start again. A camera changed focus. Feet shifted. Breath came in and out.
Tabini turned, faced the assembly and lifted his arms. “Go. Observe silence for this one day on the matters under debate. Meet with me tomorrow.”
Silence on matters under debate. Tabini had just put all the burning issues in that category. He’d destined the whole damned basket of snakes for debate tomorrow—when the paidhi, who’d worked on all these issues, had to be at the shuttle site within the hour.
Tabini having put every issue under legislative seal—no one could talk. The doors at the rear opened, admitting the brighter light of the corridor outside, rendering all of them, human and atevi, old and young, easterner and westerner, as shadows.
With the opening of those doors the smell of flowers overwhelmed the slight petroleum scent of atevi bodies. The hush now was overwhelming. The outward movement, beginning at the back, proceeded, and row after row, kept going, participants likely wondering what they dared say—or think.
Dared he stop for a word with Tabini? It seemed chancy to Bren even to turn his head and look toward the aiji’s household. He had a side view of Ilisidi and uncle Tatiseigi waiting in starched silence.
The outward movement reached the next to last row, the outflow proceeding with dispatch. At least there’d been no gunshots outside.
Their own row took its turn and moved out.
Bren followed Jago out, and Banichi followed him, the three of them, felicitous three, a unity differently destined than the crowd outside. The sarcophagus, the arcane secrets of death and the atevi’s dealing with it, was at his back. Light was in the hall. The recessional suddenly felt to him like an escape toward life, toward a wholly different world, fleeing questions of eternity and mortality and Tabini’s motives down here…
Tabini didn’t consult him, didn’t invite him to the most important legislative session in a decade—well and good. There was no call for hurt feelings. He had urgent jobs he had to do, up in orbit, and Tabini was in regional contentions.
He and his bodyguard went out those guarded doors among the flowers, into the outward flow of the elite and the powerful of the aishidi’tat, everyone on their way to the two lifts. There was talk, now, and there were guarded looks, brooding looks, satisfied looks—one could practically know the province by the expression.
He still didn’t know what he thought. He didn’t know whether what he’d been dragged down here to do had simply evaporated, and Tabini wasn’t talking—or whether his mere appearance in the ceremony was enough to accomplish some purpose, and Tabini wasn’t talking.
He could damned well bet there’d be conferences among allies who had been here. There’d be frantic opinion-seeking among the news services. He desperately wanted to avoid the news people, and they’d be swarming thick in the halls above.
He was due to be off the planet inside an hour now, and that, at the moment, seemed a very good idea.
They reached the lift, waited, in the murmurous silence of the hall. “Did you see the offering from Keishan?” one lord asked another indignantly.
Bren personally had not, nor wished to look, in this hazardous precinct where looks said it all. He had no idea which among the cloyingly perfumed flowers belonged to Keishan, but Keishan’s neighbors clearly did, and were somehow disturbed by the placement, or the size, or the color, or a hundred other declarations someone could find improper.
“This way, Bren-ji.” Banichi rarely pulled court rank to do his job, but they were late, as was, and with an out-thrust arm and a judicious eye, Banichi shunted him ahead of village nobility. Jago quickly blocked the lift door for him, and to Bren’s dismay and relief, gave them the entire lift car to themselves.
Rude, to the lesser lords. Justifiable, but rude. Bren didn’t know what to say—but when Assassins’ Guild security indicated their charge should move, a wise man moved, and heaved a shaken little sigh of deep appreciation in the little time they rode by themselves.
“Is there a problem?” he asked them. But immediately as he said it the door opened onto another wall of flowers on the main floor—flowers, and lenses, and news service reporters who spotted a high source and meant to have it at any cost.
“What does the paidhi’s office have to say, nand’ paidhi?” was the loudest question, along with, “Is there a crisis, nandi?”
“I am apprized of none,” he answered, his only safe answer. “I’m bound back to the station on the scheduled flight.” He was relieved to let his security whisk him along to another bank of lifts.
The door shut.
“No particular difficulty,” Banichi answered the prior question.
The lift rose up, let them out. They walked down a short hall in the restricted residency of the Bujavid and took yet one more lift, this one securitied and keyed, down again.
Down and down to the rocky core of this hill which was the Bujavid, the governmental nerve center, the seat of legislative authority, the state venues and the residence of the aiji and the highest lords… and the place of tombs.
“It should be a quiet ride, nadi-ji,” Jago said on the way down.
He very much hoped so.
“Tabini never did tell me why I’m here,” he said.
“It’s a puzzle,” Banichi said. And what puzzled Banichi decidedly puzzled most people. And gave him no better information.
The lift let them out in an echoing vault of concrete and living rock, a large, heavily guarded hall, a mostly vacant walk toward the Bujavid’s internal freight and passenger train station—huge spaces, cut into the high hill, with guarded accesses for the trains.
Forklifts carried cargo to and fro. Security offices were constantly busy. Everything here was scrutinized—everything examined.
A red-curtained train waited at the siding—theirs, beyond a doubt, one of the short, well-appointed specials that sometimes had tagged them on to a long-range train, sometimes ran them straight to the airport.
It was the latter, this time, and Bren made a quick check of his wristwatch as they walked.
“We’re just a little late,” Banichi said. “No worry, nadi.”
No worry.
“I need a copy of Tabini’s speech, nadiin-ji.”
“As soon as possible,” Jago assured him, and he hoped that would happen before he was in the air. Absolutely no copies had been leaked, not even to intimates and staff, and he remained marginally uncertain whether Tabini, damn him, might have ad-libbed the whole thing. Tabini was capable of it, completely capable, but it was important enough he thought not. He himself wanted a re-read before the tone cooled in his memory, and neither he nor staff could take time now to secure one by ordinary channels.
They approached the red-curtained car—Tabini’s private car, on loan to him… and he recognized the operations car that went next. It was arguably the tightest security on the rails. Banichi quickened his pace, entered the passenger car first to check out the situation there, then came back to signal him and Jago to come inside.
A guard just inside surrendered a computer case, the computer, to Banichi, and Bren breathed a sigh of relief as Banichi handed it to him. The man was Tabini’s, known to them. The car next door likely held the rest of that team. All of that was Banichi’s concern. Bren took his precious computer—the computer he’d not expected to have to leave anywhere he wasn’t, and had. He’d rather leave a newborn child on a railway track than have it out of his hands for five minutes—but if he trusted any staff as allied to him, it was logically Tabini’s.
Not that Tabini wouldn’t spy on him—excruciating to contemplate certain of the computer’s files in Tabini’s hands, but at least there would be no hostile use of them.
The red velvet bench seat at the rear of the car, beyond the bar, was his usual spot. He sat down on the bench seat, holding the computer in both arms. He felt violated, telling himself the while there was absolutely no reason to worry about Tabini’s men getting into it, swearing to himself he was going to take off his personal files on the next trip.
The dark red shutters and velvet curtains at his elbow concealed bulletproofing. The body armor chafed under the dress coat and bound like a corset, and he longed to be rid of it… but not yet. Not yet.
“Fruit juice?” Jago asked.
“Yes, Jago-ji.” His throat was dry. He thought he looked ridiculous holding to the computer as he was, and persuaded himself to turn it loose and set it on the seat beside him. He looked at his watch, trying to re-situate himself in the outside schedule, in his senselessly interrupted agenda aloft. There was Geigi, among others. Jase—Captain Jase Graham, who’d so badly wanted to take this trip.
Four minutes behind schedule, not his staff’s fault. It took an unpredictable time to end a speech, move people through narrow halls, to wait for lifts. The shuttle might wait a little for him. It had some leeway. It didn’t like to use it.
The train began to move. Banichi, communications still in hand, had rechecked the situation with the pair who had handled the baggage. “The baggage is already aboard the shuttle,” Banichi said. That wouldn’t delay them. “They’re advised we’re on our way.”
Moving the baggage was a risk. They didn’t like to advertise their movements. With chaos inside the Bujavid, it was particularly risky.
As for missing the flight—Bren imagined to himself having to return to the Bujavid, to dodge news questions for days until the next shuttle—that was a political risk he chose not to run. Escape, on schedule, seemed to raise the fewest questions— leaving everyone only with the original question.
Why?
Why bring him down to the planet in the first place, hold a social meeting, a memorial, and dismiss him?
Jago gave him the requested glass of fruit juice, a sweet mixture. He took a sip. She had her own, and sat down beside him, a wall of living warmth and good will in what had been a chill day of vaults and lower level corridors.
Banichi sat down opposite, his large frame disposed on a seat the image of Bren’s… a seat that fit Banichi.
Bren was young Cajeiri’s size, used to finding his feet didn’t reach the ground, used to standing in the shadow of his atevi bodyguards. Either could pick him up and carry him at a run… Jago had done it, to tell the truth. She and Banichi both could break a human arm entirely by accident. Atevi could jump higher, run faster, and see in what he called total darkness—all advantages to Banichi and Jago in their work.
All assets, on his side, in any dispute—assets that somewhat equalized the disadvantages of a Mospheiran on the atevi side of the strait.
The island of Mospheira, with its human enclave, very likely had gotten the broadcast of the ceremony simultaneously with broadcast on the mainland. The recent treaty said they would. But it didn’t come translated, and Mospheira was incredibly short of talent in the Foreign Office since he’d left and taken the best with him. Kate Shugart and Ben Feldman were both aloft—so likely Mospheira would send the tape up to them and bring it down again before they put it on the air.
That meant the station—and his own staff up there—would have gotten the feed.
And of speeches this was an incredibly difficult one to render, with so much dependent on situation, nuance and context… positional meanings meant headaches for a translator. Whatever they could put out needed footnotes. Whatever they rendered needed someone wholly fluent—
It needed him, when he could get his hands on it, to supply those footnotes, and he hoped the effects of human guesswork didn’t ripple outward too far or generate position statements from human agencies before he had a chance at it. He rarely exercised his old function as a translator any longer—but there were moments when it was critical he personally do it, and this was one.
He still had Shawn Tyers’ private phone number, too, high though Tyers had risen—the presidency of Mospheira, at the moment, and a damned good president at that. He even reported to Shawn now and again, with Tabini’s full knowledge, and Shawn’s gratitude to Tabini for allowing it. Mospheira being the nation he had served until, in one of its prior administrations and in a bad moment in its politics, it had tried to kill him, remembering to report to Shawn did serve as a reminder where home had used to be, and it did make his service to Tabini far more comfortable, morally speaking, humanly speaking.
And what would he say this time? What had Tabini, that master of not quite saying what one thought one heard, given for specifics in that terrifying address?
Or was half he’d heard buried in context, which the best translator in the world couldn’t quite fish out for safe human viewing? Threat, in Mospheiran context, could be toxic. Among atevi, it could be reassuring, a demonstration of stabilizing power.
The aishidi’tat built a starship in orbit over their heads. Don’t forget, don’t forget the old ways… that was the end of what Tabini had said.
But there were details… details so damned full of thorns a conscientious translator needed gloves. The atevi nervous system, the atevi body and brain that interpreted the degree of threat and promise in that twos and threes business and he couldn’t guarantee that even Shawn Tyers would understand what it felt like in that room, the absolute terror, the threats, the resolutions, the business of an atevi association, an aishi, being transacted in face to face encounter and gut-level emotion.
Where did humans have an analog—except a funeral among passionately feuding relatives?
And how to describe what it most felt like—
What it most felt like was the moment in a machimi-play when the holder of secrets divulged them, and set the fox among the chickens—so to speak—and sent things into freefall, all points of reference revised, usually with weapons involved.
And what did it mean, now, when conservative Ilisidi happened to be the highest-ranking ateva who had ever gone to space—and her pro-space, pro-foreigner grandson assembled the leaders of the nation to lecture them on anti-foreigner traditional values in her own words, while she was conspicuous in the audience and in new and conspicuous guardianship of the aiji’s butter-fingered heir?
It could mean, on the one hand, trouble—that grandmother Ilisidi, newly custodian of her ally Tatiseigi’s grandnephew, simultaneously Tabini’s heir—was being outflanked by a maneuver that far outdid the previous dangerous push-pull maneuvers of that private relationship. If that was the case, it could more than get someone killed… it could remotely mean Tabini was about to shove Lady Damiri out the door.
Or, conversely, that Damiri and Tabini together had decided to push young Cajeiri out the door, effectively to disinherit him—
Was riding a mecheita through a formal garden that unforgivable an error?
He couldn’t think it of Tabini or Damiri, or of Ilisidi, but even this far along in his association with the atevi, he couldn’t imagine he understood what the familial relationships were, or what atevi felt.
They didn’t feel friendship, among first points. They didn’t know love. They obeyed a different set of emotions. They herded. They flocked. They rushed to a leader in time of distress, and that leader was distinguished primarily by qualities a human regarded with suspicion: an atevi leader led because he had no higher emotional attachments, and flocked to no one.
A leader took care of his own. A leader preserved those he led. A leader became passionately distressed at a threat to what was his.
But the high leaders, the aijiin, didn’t bring up their own children. They passed them around, fostered them out to high-level relatives and trusted associates to be tutored, taught manners—and to form associations with those same relatives on whom the whole structure depended. Cajeiri had been with his great-uncle Tatiseigi. Now he was with Ilisidi. He might not be with his parents again until he was nearly adult.
The boy would never, perhaps, forget this assembly in the tomb of his grandfather. That speech from his father would brand itself on a boy’s memory. Even given species differences, that was likely true.
But how did a human understand the situation that might logically relegate a child elsewhere? Or even dispose of him? It happened in the machimi, in the hard, brutal feudal age. One didn’t hear of it happening in modern times.
And there were some things he had always been a little hesitant to ask even the atevi he trusted with his life. But the questions nagged him.
“Nadiin-ji,” he said, as the rails clicked beneath the wheels, as the car took a turn he well knew, “Mospheiran humans regard their children very highly, protect them at all costs, and Mospheirans generally don’t hand off their children to raise—” He supposed in that understanding his own father was not quite respectable, but he tried to simplify the case. And tried not to insult the people he lived with. “So I remain perplexed about Cajeiri’s situation, to put it very delicately. Is there satisfaction with him? Is he in any way the focus of this ceremony? Why did Tabini ask me here, and why is Cajeiri suddenly with Ilisidi, when I thought he was with Tatiseigi, and has that anything to do with this event?”
They were mildly amused, and perhaps a little puzzled.
“Regarding the invitation,” Banichi said—Banichi had had that question a dozen times in the last few days, “one still fails to understand the reason. We have kept a careful ear to the Guild, Bren-ji, and no one has given us a clue. Regarding the heir, Tatiseigi has appealed to the dowager to take the boy in charge: the dowager has received Tatiseigi, and the boy packed his bags last night.”
“The dowager’s plane has entered the hangar,” Jago said. “Her crew has taken quarters in the Bujavid.”
That was interesting: Ilisidi was not, then, returning to Malguri immediately. She was staying in the Bujavid with the boy in tow, and staying at least long enough to warrant a hangar for her private jet.
“One fears for the porcelains,” Banichi said.
“His own parents would not—forgive me for a distasteful question—harm him?”
“No,” Jago said quickly. “No, nadi-ji.”
What do they feel? was the question he tried to ask, and wondered whether he ought just to blurt it out and trust his long relationship—but Banichi and Jago themselves were father and daughter: he had had a parent-child relationship right in front of him for years, and still couldn’t quite decipher what they thought, or felt, except a strong loyalty—no, they existed within the same man’chi, and that was different: they’d served the aiji before they attached to him, still within that man’chi, and that told him nothing about their own ties to each other.
“I remain bewildered,” he said to them.
“So are we all, Bren-ji,” Banichi said. “So are the lords in the Bujavid. So are the newsservices.”
“That’s at least informative,” he said. “They did broadcast it.”
“To the whole aishidi’tat,” Jago said.
“And the station, I’ll imagine.”
“One believes so,” Banichi said.
“Curious. Troubling, nadiin-ji.”
“Your staff is troubled, too,” Jago said. “But we detected nothing aimed at you, nandi.”
“Rather I’m aimed at someone else, perhaps.”
“Yet we don’t detect that, either,” Banichi said. “And we gather nothing from usual sources. It’s all very curious.”
“What is the relationship of a child to parent?”
He amused them. Jago laughed softly. “It depends on the parent.”
“It depends on the child,” Banichi said.
“This child, nadiin-ji. I know I could never explain either of you.”
“Cajeiri is bright, precocious, and the porcelains are in danger. If one could advise the aiji, best foster him to our Guild, to teach him where to put his elbows.”
“Everyone has something to teach, is that it?”
“To the aiji’s heir?” Banichi asked. “Very many have something to teach.”
“Yet he has no security to speak of. When no one else draws a breath without security.”
“He has a great deal of security,” Banichi said, “in the man’chi of those in charge of him. He learns to rely on them. And they learn what he will do.”
The train reached another curve. The protected windows obscured everything outside, but he had a vision of where they were, a brief stretch of wild land before the airport.
“Do you suppose this transfer of the boy to Ilisidi’s hands, coupled with my presence, coupled with this honor to Valasi, and her attendance, and mine—all sums up to a declaration of peace in the household? Ilisidi supporting the aiji’s push to space?”
“Her visit to the station did that quite well,” Jago said.
“Yet something might be afoot in the east,” Banichi said. “Or something might be brewing closer to Shejidan.”
Never mind that atevi had no word for friend or love. Enemy translated closely enough. One who threatens my interests applied on both sides of the strait.
What they thought of a human’s prolonged association with the dowager as well as Tabini— Well, atevi had an untranslatable word for a person who bridged a gap and created an association they’d rather see in hell. Troublemaker was close. And that described him, for sure.
And Tabini made a point of having him down to the planet and then sending him back, dragging him like a lure past certain noses?
Half his primary security wasn’t on the planet—couldn’t therefore watch his computer, and Tabini’s security hadn’t wanted people carrying packets into the mausoleum, a situation Banichi and Jago had not, in fact, been warned of, not until two of Tabini’s staff showed up not only to assist and guard the baggage while the two of them guarded him, but to take charge of the offending object. On the one hand it could be simple indication they were being strict with the lords and didn’t want to make an exception in his case. On the other—his stomach reacted—it could have robbed him of one bodyguard or set a stranger with him, which Banichi and Jago wouldn’t allow, not even for Tabini’s men—or it could all be a ploy to get their hands on the computer. Banichi and Jago were as nervous as he had ever seen them and, when that was presented to them, about as put out as he had ever seen them. One rarely saw them vexed with the authority that ruled them all—but vexed they had been. They’d been a week on the planet, and suddenly and without warning, no, the computer couldn’t go with them into the service, even when they were told the service would run close to shuttle launch?
So here they were, having gotten through it, headed back to orbit with no more explanation than before, but at least back into his own security, back into the safety of a closed world, where such surprises wouldn’t come up. Much as he missed the world, much as he pined for blue sky and the heave of the deep sea under him, much as he missed the people he couldn’t take with him—he knew the world up there was safe. He ran his own section of the world up there, and he knew what was going on in it.
Down here he’d had to take the computer back, not knowing what might have been done in two hours. And he wasn’t wholly sure Algini, the best computer wizard on his staff, had the expertise or resources to find out quickly—not compared to the resources Tabini-aiji could draw on.
The tracks clicked at a rate now that told him the engineer had clearance all the way, and that they were doubtless inconveniencing trains all over the system. They were late. But they were going to get him off the planet. If they were rushing like this, they were going to make it.
The train took a hard right turn, the last. Jago got up and restored the juice glass to the rack, untroubled by the motion of the car.
They had made the airport spur with that turn, not destined for the public terminal, but to the far end of the airport, which handled diplomatic cargo, spacebound cargo, and occasionally explosives, curious juxtaposition.
They braked. “Plenty of time,” Banichi said.
Another exposure to daylight and the chance of assassins. Bren personally gathered up his computer, but willingly entrusted it to Jago’s offered hand. The body armor chafed. He tugged at it, straightened his cuffs and saw to his pockets— ready for a dash once the train stopped.
“The packages made it into baggage?” He even hesitated to ask, amid more serious difficulties his staff had had to track.
“Early this morning, nadi-ji. No worry.”
The video games for staff had made it, then, likewise Bindanda’s request for two particular spices. And the treats… those were his idea. He wished he’d been able to think of something appropriate for Jase—something that wouldn’t touch on Jase’s longing to be down here and cause more frustration than it cured.
The car’s doors opened on a daylight he had last seen from his apartment windows before the ceremony. The view beside the car was a vast tract of concrete, a clouded sky—blue-green foliage walled off by a high fence. A van was waiting for the train, but it would not be Tano and Algini backing Banichi and Jago up this time—no: two more of Tabini’s own, stationed there to swear to the van’s integrity.
He made the small jump down—a small atevi-scale jump that jolted his knees—to the siding. Jago brought all the hand-baggage, a trifle to her strength, and escorted him briskly to the waiting van—holding back just that small bit that let Banichi double-check that the driver and the guard were indeed Tabini’s agents. Members of the Assassins’ Guild knew one another socially, so to speak—shot at one another, under contract, that being their job, but exchanged pleasant words at other times.
C1early everything did check. Banichi signaled them, and they boarded.
They were going to make it. Bren believed it now, heaved a long sigh as he hit the seat and the door shut. The van moved. Chain-link fence and blue-green scrub gave way to a wide panorama.
Then the shuttle came in view, on the runway.
Sleek and white: Shai-shan, oldest of the fleet, the first shuttle built and the one whose crew they knew best.
Fear of flying be damned, Bren thought—it was far safer than where he had just been. It was safer than the whole planet had become—in terms of schemes and plots, and those, in atevi society, were never without consequence.
They halted right at the bottom of the cargo lift… cargo lifts still serving for personnel, a minor economy in a program otherwise making progress hand over fist. They were in time. They exited the van in haste, walked up onto the platform.
One could hold a transcontinental airliner half an hour or so, but the calculations were made for Shai-shan: she rode favorable numbers, and her ground crew didn’t like to revise them. Stewards at the open hatch door above waved at them anxiously.
A wind was blowing cold as, with a bang and a jolt of the hydraulics, they rose up and up to the open hatch. Banichi spoke to someone on his pocket com, confirming their arrival.
They’d made it.
Air inside was immediately warmer. “Have I time to shed the coat?” Bren asked, and the steward said there was at least that, yes, nadi.
Bren immediately peeled off the coat, with Jago’s help— slipped out of the heavy vest and let the stewards, who were well accustomed to such precautions, stow coat and vest discreetly in baggage.
Hand-baggage went, too. All but the computer. Jago had that, and kept it.
In the democracy of the space effort—and a single, rear-boarded aisle—they passed alongside atevi station workers bound for their jobs in orbit—most back from leave, a few first-timers. Bren knew no few names, and a few rose, bowing under the cramped overhead.. “Thank you, nadiin,” Bren said. “Thank you.” He found himself exhausted, after very little exertion for days—very little exertion, and a great deal of tension. He wanted his seat, which was always up in the front, where the steward was waiting. He made what haste he could.
“Nandi.” The steward’s position marked his proposed seat, not quite the first row, this time, but close.
The forward steward he knew very well—having shared with this crew and the shuttle team the effort that consumed their lives and energies. These were zealots, enthusiasts for the program. He was in their association; they were in his. Boarding, he was already home.
But there were, among atevi—not too unexpectedly—a handful of human passengers, too, in the middle batch of seats. They were going up, workers who’d flown over from the island to catch the shuttle up to their jobs.
And his own seat, forward, turned out to have a human companion—a surprise, and a very pleasant one. He liked Ginny Kroger, and had by no means expected her on this flight.
Not his age, not his field, no longer his country… unless one counted the station itself, which for purposes of allegiances, he did. Virginia Kroger was gray-haired, thin, a woman with a fierce sobriety, a mouth that gave nothing away until she absolutely astonished a novice with a grin. No fashion-plate: she wore a thick gray, ugly as sin cardigan and doubtless had an equally unstylish parka in storage: Ginny always complained of the chill on flights, and was usually prepared: count on it.
“Gin.” He saw now that rank and courtesy had handed him this seatmate, and probably Banichi and Jago had foreknown that before they boarded. “Nadiin-ji,” he said to Jago and Banichi.
They took his meaning—certainly had no need to protect him from Gin, and no need to spend the flight pretending not to understand a word of Mosphei’, either.
“No difficulty,” Banichi said. The two of them had their reading and their amusements, and the hand-baggage that contained them.
It was his first chance to talk with Ginny in half a year. The moment they reached the station, duty would take them to two different zones. And her presence on station was very rare. “How’s the island?” he asked, settling in beside her.
“Wet,” Ginny said. Of course. It was spring. Rain was a given. “How’s the mainland?”
“Wet. Security-heavy. The aiji’s holding a family ceremony—that was the must-see that brought me down to here, it turns out.” He bet that Gin had had a briefing from the Department of State as well as her own wing, Science, and knew he was here, but without an understanding, he couldn’t give her a reason. “But I suppose I agree with the call: I did need to be here.” Grand negligence. Let Shawn be as puzzled as he was… until he learned something.
The hatch had already shut. The passenger comfort systems had come up. Now Shai-shan’s engines roared to life.
“Welcome aboard,” the copilot said over the intercom, and began the rollout litany, the set of instructions, the list of horrors that a nervous flier hardly liked to listen to, but needed to, no matter how experienced: what to do if the takeoff roll aborted, what to do if they had to evacuate… all the scenarios in which a passenger had any choice.
Mostly there was no choice: there were few runways long enough to accommodate Shai-shan if something went wrong.
“No time for drinks, nand’ paidhi,” the attendant said, pausing by his row. “I’m very sorry.”
“I’ll have a fruit juice and vodka when we get up.” Launch usually had him a mass of nerves, and he liked to have a vodka beforehand to calm down, but he discovered he had no need for that, today. Sitting in his own seat was a victory. “Made it in time,” he said to Ginny, and heaved a sigh, telling himself it was, after all, true, and he was safe. “That’s all I ask.”
“We did hold count a little,” Ginny asked, looking at her watch. “But we’re rolling on schedule.”
“We hurried. The fortunate hours.” A Mospheiran might take a shuttle launch countdown as overriding everything else, but the exigencies of a shuttle launch had nothing against the atevi sense of timing and fortunate numbers, and Ginny did understand that. There were times things were done, as there were days and hours when nothing began. A memorial service and a shuttle flight weren’t remotely in each other’s consideration—except that neither would take place at an infelicitous moment.
Shai-shan moved out, and made a ponderous slow correction onto her runway—she was not agile on the pavement.
Above the entry to the cockpit, the bulkhead had the black and white baji-naji emblem, that tribute to Chance and Fortune, the devil in the otherwise fortunate numbers. Below it was a screen that showed them the runway.
It trued up in the view.
“Baji-naji,” Gin said, meaning, in human terms here goes nothing.
And in atevi—here goes everything.
The engines roared and the acceleration pushed them back. The thumping of the wheels grew thunderous, and abruptly stopped as the screen showed them blue sky.
A split-screen showed the gear retracting safely below, and the ground and all the city falling away under them.
Well, another few roof tiles would fall in Shejidan. The planners had thought they could cease using the public airport once the new dedicated spaceport went into operation, but this one, the old runway—crazy as it sounded to call it that, as if anything was old in this frantic, less-than-a decade push toward space—still was in use, if only for Shai-shan, Shai-shan was Shejidan’s shuttle. The citizens of Shejidan, even after so much inconvenience, prized their broken roof-tiles, gathered them up when they fell, patched their roofs and took pride in their personal sacrifices for the greatness of their city.
Their shuttle. Their station was up there, too, available for anyone with average eyesight, if that person went aside from city lights, as atevi loved to do. Just ask them whose it was.
Their starship, too, was assembling in parts and pieces up there. It seemed mad to say, sometimes, but by agreement it was their starship when, a decade ago, rail transport had been a matter of fierce debate.
The wider universe, the universe humans had opened to them, had caught on with a vengeance in atevi popular culture. A passion for the stars and the new discoveries burgeoned in the very capital of the atevi world. Shejidan was mad for space.
And maybe, thinking of that, it was a good thing Tabini had held that remembrance of things traditional. Remember the old ways, before all that was atevi changed, shifted—abruptly.
They’d already had several dangerous moments in atevi-human relations. For a second time, atevi had become fascinated with humans and humans had become equally fascinated with atevi. Once before this, they had worked together, lived together. Humans had failed to grasp what was emotionally critical to atevi, and vice versa, and the whole system had fractured, catastrophically, with enormous loss of life—which was why humans were living on an island as far out of reach of atevi as they could manage at the time. The social disaster they called the War of the Landing had started on a critical handful of mistaken assumptions—because humans and atevi had gotten along just too well at first meeting, loved, associated, and nearly ruined each other.
Maybe remembering a little history was a very good thing, as fast as things were moving.
Or maybe Tabini just wanted his son to see the human paidhi, if not meet him.
Maybe Tabini had wanted the boy to understand the history behind the aishidi’tat, and to appreciate the official, paternal, national, even space-faring approval behind the hard, uncivilized lessons Ilisidi was about to teach him. It was too easy for a highborn youngster to think the whole world was what he saw around him.
Shai-shan reached her stage one altitude. Wings reconfigured themselves. Hydraulics whined. And Shai-shan kept going.
No word for friend among atevi, no word for love… no word for man’chi among humans, no word for aishi, either.
But maybe both species were wise enough now in dealing with one another.
Maybe this generation figured out how to treat the changes that ran amok through everything they touched.
Maybe kids like Cajeiri would figure out how to deal with situations that shoved biologically different instincts up against one another in what had been, once before this, a dangerous, dangerous intimacy.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Ginny said to him.
And what was he thinking? That atevi were clearly feeling stressed? That the aiji, who ordinarily backed every change proposed to him, held a ceremony in tribute to the old ways?
“The ceremony,” he said. “Just before I took off. Whole reason for the trip down, it seems. Pace of change. Atevi want to catch their balance. Remember the traditional things.”
“Maybe Mospheira should have a ceremony like that.”
Ginny surprised him with that sentiment. She wasn’t the philosophical sort.
“Why so?”
“Kids,” Ginny said. “Kids. This generation thinks it’s all a given.”
“My generation?”
Ginny gave one of those rare laughs. “There’s kids tall as I am who were born during your tenure, paidhi-aiji. You’ve been too busy way too long. There are kids just about to vote who think there’ve always been jobs in space, who think the War of the Landing is a dull chapter in a big book.”
“That’s scary.”
“Oh, damn right it’s scary.”
Appalling thought. Six years since he’d been on Mospheira. The better part of a decade. And she was right. A ten-year-old kid who didn’t care that much about history so easily became a twenty-year-old who didn’t think it was important, either.
“That’s incredible,” he said.
“Kids think there’ll always be a new invention every week. That there’s a magic fix for every problem.”
“That’s good and bad,” he said. “Bad, if they think someone else is always going to solve it. I’m sorry—I plan to retire someday and leave the mess to them. I expect them to do their homework.”
“Oh, but you haven’t been there. We Mospheirans—we do love our holidays. We love our leisure time. We’re too damn convinced it’s all going to work, so if we choose as a nation not to have aeronautics, it doesn’t matter. We need a new swimming center in Jackson. If we choose not to develop our own security, it doesn’t matter. The threat from space, that’s always been there. Just ask any sixteen-year-old.”
“Damn scary.”
Shai-shan roared on, climbing, still climbing, headed for that queasy moment when, far above the earth, perilously riding her momentum and betting their lives in the process—she would shut down one set of engines, switch on another, and transit to space.
“And damn labor,” Ginny said. “And damn unions. They don’t think the crisis is that urgent either. The aliens out there aren’t coming tomorrow. They might never come. What does the average factory worker care, except they want their televisions, their beach-front homes, their boats and their retirement plans?”
Atevi and humans were reaching a kind of engine-switchover, too: that was what Tabini’s ceremony said. That was what Mospheirans weren’t commemorating. Having gone as far as they could on the old arrangement of separatism, atevi were working directly with humans again, this time in orbit, where it made no sense to build two segregated space stations. On mutually uncommon ground, isolated from everything familiar and historically contested, they tried to adapt.
And that meant the carefully channeled interface was flung wide open, everyone exposed to the same stresses that had brought them to war before. Now with more lethal weapons, more power at their disposal—but with strangers supposedly looming on the horizon, strangers with a grudge, a grievance, or pure native aggression: no one was sure, least of all the human crew of Phoenix, who had seen their handiwork—they waited desperately to be invaded, and their children lost faith that the invaders would come.
The cultural differences, the biological differences that had led atevi to attack the early settlers were continually with them… now known and laughed at, on both sides, but those differences still tweaked live nerves in moments of frustration.
A worker, human or atevi, who couldn’t overcome his own biologically-generated anger and laugh at a situation, had to ship out—he got a quit-bonus for his honesty, but all the same, he had to ship out.
And thus far, years into the project, they’d only had to ship out—what, fourteen, fifteen, out of hundreds? Not too bad a record… thus far. The two species had changed their cultures to fit—somewhat.
They’d developed a stationside culture of interspecies jokes, that was one thing—some bawdy and some stupid. Mospheiran experts had wanted to silence them, but atevi had let them run, and the ship humans had contributed the framework and Mospheirans took to it. A human team and an atevi team had a contest, one such joke began…
There was a whole series of those, that usefully illustrated species differences, cultural differences, and made two species laugh. That was the good news. No one had gotten mad. That was the other good news.
We have to get along had become the common sentiment between humans and atevi aloft, at least.
Aloft, and being over sixteen, they still believed in the invaders.
They just tended to forget about them, for long, long stretches in which the company contests or the prospect of a machimi play took precedence.
The flight, bumpy for a while, smoothed out. The vodka and fruit juice arrived. Bren sipped it and drew a long, long breath. The screen showed nothing but darkening blue ahead of them.
The vodka was down to icemelt, they were on their way in deep vacuum, and take-off nerves were quieter. Banichi and Jago, in the seats opposite, were reading manuals.
With Ginny, there was at least a wealth of small talk— island gossip, some of it hilarious, some of it union spats, political maneuvers that only elevated Bren’s blood pressure and tempted him to have a second vodka.
But he didn’t have to go to the island and deal with the problems, these days, and given the rare opportunity of a trip to earth, he didn’t go there, not even with family to consider. He left island politics to Ginny and Shawn and all the brave souls who had no cultural choice.
And it didn’t damned well matter to the space effort if the island politicked about the shuttle port, and took forever getting its own shuttle off the ground. Four atevi shuttles were flying—well, count Baushi, which was simply a lift engine for heavy modules: a freighter, a simple freighter, that carried passengers in a small afterthought of a module… a lot like the aircraft arrangement that had once, in simpler days, squeezed the paidhi into the regular island flight, ahead of dried fruit and pottery.
He supposed if he had missed the flight, he might possibly have caught a ride on Baushi in a few days. He tended to discount it as a passenger option, but it was. Using both spaceports, servicing two shuttles at once, one on the early and one on the late phase of mission prep while a third underwent systems-checks and cargo loading, they had a flight newly landed or about to go nearly once a week, with rare exceptions, and if Mospheira ever got it completed, Mospheira was building a runway out beyond Jackson limits to improve their narrow choice of weather.
That runway construction was a major victory for the pro-spacers like Ginny Kroger. Jackson Aerospace, moreover, was finally breaking ground for its new cargo-launch facility on Crescent Island, to the south of Mospheira.
And that, Ginny opined, meant it was really going to happen. Businesses were moving onto Crescent—not only aerospace suppliers, but companies like SunDrink and Peterson’s, intending to feed and clothe the workers. Jackson Aerospace was starting up in place of defunct Mospheiran Air… still buying its necessary aircraft from atevi Patinandi Aerospace and concentrating its own manufacturing in narrow but profitable niches—
“But over all,” Ginny said, “good news. If the aiji in Shejidan gives them formal permission.”
Permission to expand out of their enclave and Crescent Island, that they had. There were other proposals for humans moving onto air-reached islands no atevi interest was ready to claim. For political reasons going back to the War of the Landing, that was a major, major concession that hadn’t happened yet.
“I favor it,” Bren said earnestly. “I think it will pass. I don’t, honestly, know whether it’s going to pass this year—” More difficult, if the legislative session in the offing now blew up. Or faster, if it didn’t. “It’s still on the table. It could move soon, if things go as well as possible.”
Better news from Ginny, the Heritage Party was still fragmenting, its idealists taking off to space and its hidebound bigots still scheming and planning a human takeover, but now a national joke, with less and less real power in their hands. In recent memory, the Heritage Party had won the Mospheiran Presidency. Now they struggled to maintain membership.
“Nand’ paidhi.” The steward brought sandwiches—a human notion long popular on the mainland—and melon, an atevi institution. “Nandi.” The latter to Ginny Kroger, with the same offering.
“Thank you,” she said, without Bren’s having to interpose a special courtesy to cover for her. She’d learned—so much. “Very fine, very fine and much appreciated.”
“Indeed,” Bren said on his own behalf. “I do favor these. Well-chosen.”
The steward was pleased.
So there was harmony in the heavens. Talk with Ginny drifted off to their former partner Tom Lund, who had been downworld and office-bound for the last two months on the Jackson heavy-lift project.
“Tom has a real gift for persuading the corporations out of their funds,” Ginny said. “He’s frustrated, but they’re moving.”
“They’re making money.”
“Everyone’s making money,” Ginny said—then added the ultimate islander objection to travel anywhere: “You can make money on the island, too, and still be home for supper.”
“You can make far more money running Crescent operations.” The other Mospheiran passion: finance, and the beacon of a new colonial effort.
“Try getting low-level personnel who want to live out there. That’s the thing. They’ve poured foundations. Getting the houses, getting the facilities—it’s all chasing its own tail. Mospheirans won’t go until there’s advanced plumbing and phone service.”
“Atevi would do it. Will build it, if Mospheirans want to sit in front of their televisions and watch it all pass.”
“Mospheira knows that. The legislature knows it. But it’s the old story: the heads of corporations don’t trust the very ones that are willing to go out there and take charge. The psychological profile of any administrator who’ll leave Mospheira worries the corporations immensely.”
“Micromanaging from remote-control,” he said. “Bad enough from one end of the island to the other. On Crescent, it’ll be a disaster, mark my words.”
“I think Crescent operations can get possibly toilet paper right now without a corporate requisition, but maybe not.”
“SunDrink’s smarter than Jackson Aerospace. They just move.”
“Oh, but now Harbor Foods wants to buy SunDrink.”
“Good God.”
“Exactly.”
A SunDrink concession on the station had become a wildly popular and successful venture, patronized by Mospheirans and atevi who had a thirst for their traditional fruit drinks—wildly popular, too, among ship-folk who had never tasted non-synthetic food in their lives.
But Harbor wouldn’t trust the zealots who’d sell their souls for a ticket to work on-station… oh, no, no one who wanted to be up there could be trusted. More pointedly, they wouldn’t trust workers to make a decision, a guaranteed collision course for labor and upper-tier management.
Well, Shawn would know it was in the offing. Shawn would see the collision of interests coming. Strikes were a sacred institution on Mospheira. So was corporate pigheadedness.
Ah, well, it wasn’t the paidhi’s job any more. The paidhi-aiji, who’d used to mediate trade between the island and the mainland, rescuing fishing boats caught in border disputes, couldn’t prevent Mospheiran companies making bad decisions these days.
“Anyone mediating?”
“Oh, Tom’s on it. Bet he is.”
Tom Lund, however, who’d ridden out the stationside fracas that attended the Tamun coup… Tom knew. Tom was a Commerce man, and had the power, moreover, to seize Harbor executives by the lapels and get their attention.
“I’ll say one thing: there’s not going to be a station strike in SunDrink. I’ll support an atevi industry up there in competition if Harbor starts playing tough games with Sun on the station. There’ll be no strikes. No strikes anywhere humans are in cooperative agreements with atevi. It’s this lovely agreement we have: atevi workers don’t hire the Assassins’ Guild to settle with management and human workers don’t strike.”
“Watch Tom declare Sun a Critical Industry…”
“Where they are, damn right it’s critical, if atevi are in the interface. When did this piece of silliness with Harbor blow up?”
“Hit the rumor mill this week.”
“Oh, good. I’m out of touch for a few days and the next War of the Landing is in the works.” He didn’t want another emergency. “I’ve got to call Tom.”
“I’m sure Tom’s ahead of it.” Ginny’s eyes held a curious smugness at the moment. “So am I.”
“How’s that?”
Definite cat-and-canary expression. “Didn’t I say? We’re shipping, with special inspection to be sure there’s no quality issue.”
Labor fuss, another strike, this most recent one stopping work on the quality checks—but it seemed Ginny’s handful of robots had finally, after a dozen delays, gotten through.
“Who bent?”
Ginny grinned. The spare, seamed face transformed from long-faced researcher to elf when she did that. “Management. They give labor what they want, we sign a contract for sixteen more units and get our independent inspector on their line, and it’s all settled. The robots are here.”
“In cargo? Right now? Under our feet?”
“Damned right. Not only that—the deal-maker—they’ve taken an open-ended contract, with minor options. We’ve got our robots, Mr. Cameron.”
It was suddenly a very good flight. The path ahead stretched broad and straight—robots to be delivered, fuel and materials to be mined, and the effort—delayed by politics with the senior captain, by politics with island conservatives and unions, by politics with the mainland traditionalists and the ever-to-be-damned ’counters—stayed on schedule.
“I owe you dinner,” he said. “Ma’am. I owe you—”
“The best vat-culture ersatz meatloaf on the station.”
He wrinkled his nose. Laughed, suddenly in high spirits.
They talked about the island, about mutual acquaintances, island politics.
“And,” Ginny said, suddenly, Ginny who never forgot anything.
“And?”
Ginny reached down for a strap and pulled up her personal kit, from which she extracted a plastic sandwich bag full of mangled green leaves and crushed stems.
“And this is… ?”
“Sandra Johnson said just give it to you and you’d know.”
Sandra Johnson. Sandra Johnson. Good God, it had been years. Dark years, terrible times.
Green leaves, stems… plant cuttings in a sealed container.
Sandra named her plants. He couldn’t remember the names. But for some crazed reason, out of the blue, so to speak, she’d sent him a special remembrance. Two kids and a house in the country, but she still thought of him, and sent him mangled greenery to brighten up his living quarters.
“Old flame?” Gin asked. Not a streak of jealousy, no, there never was that between them.
“Secretary. Lifesaver.” Sandra never had become famous the way certain of the participants in the initial fracas had become household words in two cultures. But none of them would be where they were without her. Some of them wouldn’t be alive without her. “Literally a lifesaver. —Where did you run into her?”
“Oh, she used to work in Science. She dropped by the office, enlisted my help to get the plants through customs. The Head of Botany cleared them, personally, said they’re bug-free.”
He saw the packet had the Science Department seal, official as could be, and he wasn’t about to open it until customs.
So a spider-plant and a whatever-it-was emigrated back to their origins, to meet their distant cousins growing outside the captains’ offices.
“Well, thanks.” He put the packet away in his own kit. “Really, thanks. Old friends. Pleasant suprise.”
“No trouble. Well, it was trouble, but Botany owed me one and I owed Sandra one.”
The steward picked up the sandwich wrappings and trays before they floated. Meanwhile the worker crew behind them let a pen sail too far forward. Banichi captured it and sailed it back. It was the usual games, new workers, zero-g jokes.
And in the long flight after, he and Ginny eventually ran out of gossip, retrieved their computers—Ginny from under the seat and himself from Jago’s keeping—and spread out their own in-flight offices. Ginny had work to keep her occupied, a screenful of numbers.
He had his own. He’d downloaded a considerable mail file, to add to the paper mail that his staff had culled for him physically to take with him—a heavy parcel of it traveling in baggage, paper that, recycled, fed the station’s growing need.
He still got the schoolchildren’s questions. Might the paidhi send a card from space for an honored schoolteacher? Did the Paidhi think that the aliens would come before the ship was built?
He had his answer in file for that one, for parents and children. There was every reason to go on as usual. The hostile aliens had destroyed the station that Phoenix left out among the stars, along with all its records and maps. Phoenix, returning, had taken one quiet look at the destruction and left without a whisper to go find their long-abandoned population—here, at the atevi planet. It was good odds the aliens had no notion where Phoenix came from.
Until—so the captains and the president and the aiji in Shejidan admitted to each other in secret councils—the aliens began to listen very intently to the nearby stars, and look for evidence of planets in their vicinity that might be the origin of that ruined outpost.
There were reasons humans and atevi separately reckoned it unlikely there’d be an immediate attack: two species had a better chance of predicting the behavior of a third.
But after all their reasons for confidence, and in spite of what they told worried children—they dared not bet the world on it.
One atevi class had written him to ask, simply: Will we grow up?
That question haunted his nights. The paidhi damned well planned to see that they did, as far as it was in his hands.
While SunDrink and Harbor played financial games.
Lodged in the back of his mind, too, distracting him from rational estimates and international concerns—was the fact that he was one more time upward bound, on a shuttle flight as irretrievable as a bullet from a gun, and for the second time in a year, he hadn’t called his family while he was on the planet.
No was a hell of a lot easier from orbit than from a few hundred miles away. I can’t visit the island was more palatable than I physically can, but won’t.
But what could he do? He’d told his brother—he’d tried to tell his mother that he didn’t want to go onto the island for exactly such reasons as the SunDrink/Harbor business. He didn’t want another phone call from his mother saying some damned extremist of one stamp or the other had vandalized her apartment building, because his picture had been on the news. He didn’t want his face in the news reports reminding every random lunatic in remote points of Mospheira that the object of a lot of local resentment had a vulnerable human family in their reach.
So he didn’t come. He lied. He dodged.
But this time the news was bound to let them know he could have come. He hadn’t anticipated the television broadcast… and that, this time, was going to be hard.
He switched over to solitaire, pretending to work rather than think. Ginny was doing useful work. The paidhi, who lived by mathematics and pattern arrangements, couldn’t win a single game for the next two hours, not a one.