It was the old argument, highway transport versus rail, bringing intense lobbying pressure from the highway transport operators, who wanted road expansion into the hill towns, versus the rail industry, who wanted the highspeed research money and the eventual extensions into the highlands. Versus commercial air freight, and versus the general taxpayers who didn’t want their taxes raised. The provincial governor wanted a highway instead of a rail spur, and advanced arguments, putting considerable influence to bear on the minister of Works.
Computer at his elbow, the screen long since gone to rest, Bren listened through the argument he’d heard in various guises—this was a repainted, replastered version—and on a notepad on the table in front of him, sketched interlocked circles that might be psychologically significant.
Far more interesting a pastime than listening to the minister’s delivery. Jago was outside, probably enjoying a soft drink, while the paidhi-aiji was running out of ice water.
The Minister of Works had a numbing, sing-song rhythm in his voice. But the paidhi-aiji was obliged to listen, in case of action on the proposal. The paidhi-aiji had no vote, of course, if the highway came to a vote today at all, which didn’t look likely. He had no right even to speak uninvited, unless he decided to impose his one real power, his outright veto over a council recommendation to the upper house, the tashrid—a veto which was good until the tashrid met to consider it. He had used his veto twice in the research and development council, never with this minister of Works, although his predecessor had done it a record eighteen times on the never-completed Trans-montane Highway, which was now, since the rail link, a moot point.
One hoped.
There was the whole of human history in the library on Mospheira, all the records of their predecessors, or all that they could still access—records which suggested, with the wisdom of hindsight, that consuming the planet’s petrochemicals in a vast orgy of private transport wasn’t the best long-range choice for the environment or the quality of life. The paidhi’s advice might go counter to local ambitions. In the case of the highway system, the advice had gone counter, indeed it had. But atevi had made enormous advances, and the air above the Bergid range still sparkled. The paidhi took a certain pride in that—in the name of nearly two hundred years of paidhiin before him.
The atevi hadn’t quite mastered steam when humans had arrived on their planet uninvited and unwilling.
Atevi had seen the tech, atevi had been, like humans, eager for profit and progress—but unlike humans, they tended to see profit much more in terms of power accruing to their interlocked relationships. It was some thing about their hardwiring, human theorists said; since the inclination seemed to transcend cultural lines; a scholarly speculation useful for the theorists sitting safe on Mospheira, not for the paidhi-aiji, who had to make practical sense to the aiji of the Ragi atevi in the city of Shejidan, in Mospheira’s nearest neighboring Association and long-term ally—
Without which, there might be a second ugly test of human technology versus atevi haroniin, a concept for which there was no human word or even complete translation. Say that atevi patience had its limits, that assassination was essential to the way atevi kept their social balance, and haroniin meant something like ‘accumulated stresses on the system, justifying adjustment.’ Like all the other approximations: aiji wasn’t quite ‘duke’ it certainly wasn’t ‘king,’ and the atevi concept of countries, borders and boundaries of authority had things in common with their concept of flight plans.
No, it wasn’t a good idea to develop highways and independent transport, decentralizing what was an effective tax-supported system of public works, which supported the various aijiin throughout the continent in their offices, which in turn supported Tabini-aiji and the system at Shejidan.
No, it wasn’t a good idea to encourage systems in which entrepreneurs might start making a lot of money, spreading other entrepreneurial settlement along roadways and forming human-style corporations.
Not in a system where assassination was an ordinary and legal social adjustment.
Damn, it was disturbing, that attempt on his apartment, more so the more time distanced him from the physical fear. In the convolutions of thinking one necessarily was drawn into, being the paidhi—studying and competing for years to be the paidhi, and becoming, in sum, fluent in a language in which human words and human thought didn’t neatly translate… bits and pieces of connections had started bobbing to the surface of the very dark waters of atevi mentality as he understood it. Bits and pieces had been doing that since last night, just random bits of worrisome thought drifting up out of that interface between atevi ideas and human ones.
Worrisome thoughts that said that attacking the paidhi-aiji, the supposedly inoffensive, neutral and discreetly silent paidhi-aiji… was, if not a product of lunacy, a premeditated attack on some sort of system, meaning any point of what was.
He tried to make himself the most apolitical, quiet presence in Tabini’s court. He pursued no contact with the political process except sitting silently in court or in the corner of some technological or sociological impact council—and occasionally, very occasionally presenting a paper. Having public attention called to him as Tabini had just done… was contrary to all the established policy of his office.
He wished Tabini hadn’t made his filing of Intent—but clearly Tabini had had to do something severe about the invasion of the Bu-javid, most particularly the employer of the assassin’s failure to file feud before doing it.
No matter that assassination was legal and accepted—you didn’t, in atevi terms, proceed without filing, you didn’t proceed without license, and you didn’t order wholesale bloodbaths. You removed the minimal individual that would solve a problem. Biichi-gi, the atevi called it. Humans translated it… ‘finesse.’
Finesse was certainly what the attempt lacked—give or take the would-be assassin hadn’t expected the paidhi to have a gun that humans weren’t supposed to have, this side of the Mospheira straits.
A gun that Tabini had given him very recently.
And Banichi and Jago insisted they couldn’t find a clue.
Damned disturbing.
Attack on some system? The paidhi-aiji might find himself identified as belonging to any number of systems… like being human, like being the paidhi-aiji at all, like advising the aiji that the rail system was, for long-range ecological considerations, better than highway transport… but who ever absolutely knew the reason or the offense, but the party who’d decided to ‘finesse’ a matter?
The paidhi-aiji hadn’t historically been a target. Personally, his whole tenure had been the collection of words, the maintenance of the dictionary, the observation and reporting of social change. The advice he gave Tabini was far from solely his idea: everything he did and said came from hundreds of experts and advisers on Mospheira, telling him in detail what to say, what to offer, what to admit to—so finessing him out of the picture might send a certain message of displeasure with humans, but it would hardly hasten highways into existence.
Tabini had felt something in the wind, and armed him.
And he hadn’t reported that fact to Mospheira, second point to consider: Tabini had asked him not to tell anyone about the gun, he had always respected certain few private exchanges between himself and the aiji, and he had extended that discretion to keeping it out of his official reports. He’d worried about it, but Tabini’s confidences had flattered him, personally and professionally—there at the hunting lodge, in Taiben, where all kinds of court rules were suspended and everyone was on holiday. Marksmanship was an atevi sport, an atevi passion—and Tabini, a champion marksman with a pistol, had, apparently on whim, violated a specific Treaty provision to provide the paidhi, as had seemed then, a rare week of personal closeness with him, a rare gesture of—if not friendship, at least as close as atevi came, an abrogation of all the formalities that surrounded and constrained him and Tabini alike.
It had immensely increased his status in the eyes of certain staff. Tabini had seemed pleased that he took to the lessons, and giving him the gun as a present had seemed a moment of extravagant rebellion. Tabini had insisted he ‘keep it close,’ while his mind racketed wildly between the absolute, unprecedented, and possibly policy changing warmth of Tabini’s gesture toward a human, and an immediate guilty panic considering his official position and his obligation to report to his own superiors.
He’d immediately worried what he was going to do with it on the plane home, and how or if he was going to dispose of it—or report it, when it might be a test Tabini posed him, to see if he had a personal dimension, or personal discretion, in the rules his superiors imposed on him.
And then, after he was safely on the plane home, the gun and the ammunition a terrifying secret in the personal bag at his feet, he had sat watching the landscape pass and adding up how tight security had gotten around Tabini in the last few weeks.
Then he’d gotten scared. Then he’d known he had gotten himself into something he didn’t know how to get out of—that he ought to report, and didn’t, because nobody on Mospheira could read the situation in Tabini’s court the way he could on a realtime basis. He knew that some danger might be in the offing, but his assessment of the situation might not have critical bits of data, and he didn’t want orders from his superiors until he could figure out what the undercurrents were in the capital.
That was why he had put the gun under the mattress, which his servants didn’t ordinarily disturb, rather than hiding it in the drawers, which they sometimes did rearrange.
That was why, when a shadow came through his bedroom door, he hadn’t wasted a second going after it and not a second more in firing. He’d lived in the Bu-javid long enough to know at a very basic level that atevi didn’t walk through people’s doors uninvited, not in a society where everyone was armed and assassination was legal. The assassin had surely been confident the paidhi wouldn’t have a weapon—and gotten the surprise of his life.
If it hadn’t been a trial designed to catch him with the gun. Which didn’t say why—
He was woolgathering. They were proposing a vote next meeting. He had lost the minister’s last remarks. If the paidhi let something slip unchallenged through the council, he could end up losing a point two hundred years of his predecessors had battled to hold on to. There were points past which even Tabini couldn’t undo a council recommendation—points past which Tabini wouldn’t undertake a fight that might not be in Tabini’s interest, once he’d set Tabini in a convenient position to deny his advice, Tabini being, understandably, on the atevi side of any questionable call.
“I’ll want a transcript,” he said, as the meeting broke up, and gathered a roomful of shocked stares.
Which probably alarmed everyone unnecessarily—they might take his glum mood for anger and the postponement and request for a transcript as a forewarning that the paidhi was disposed to veto.
And against what interest? He saw the frown gather on the minister’s face, wondering if the paidhi was taking a position they didn’t understand—and confusion wasn’t a good thing to generate in an ateva. Action bred action. He had enough troubles without scaring anyone needlessly.
The Minister of Works could even conclude he blamed someone in his office for an attack that was surely reported coast to coast of the continent by now, in which case the minister and his interests might think they should protect themselves, or secure themselves allies they believed he would fear.
Say, I wasn’t listening during the speech? Insult the gentle and long-winded Minister of Works directly in the sorest point of his vanity? Insult the entire council, as if their business bored him?
Damn, damn, a little disturbance in atevi affairs led to so much consequence. Moving at all was so cursed delicate. And they didn’t understand people who let every passing emotion show on their faces. He took his computer. He walked out into the hall, remembering to bow and be polite to the atevi he might have distressed.
Jago was at his elbow instantly, prim Jago, not so tall as the atevi around her, but purposeful, deliberate, dangerous in a degree that had to make everyone around him reassess the position he held and the resources he had.
Resources the aiji had, more to the point, if, a moment ago, they had entertained any uneasiness about him.
There was another turn of atevi thinking—that said that if a person had power like that, and hadn’t used it, he wouldn’t do so as long as the status quo maintained itself intact.
“Any findings?” he asked Jago, when they had a space of the hall to themselves.
“We’re watching,” Jago said. “That’s all. The trail’s cold.”
“Mospheira would be safer for me.”
“But Tabini needs you.”
“Banichi said so. For what? I’ve no advisements to give him. I’ve been handed no inquiry that I’ve heard of, unless something turns up in the energy transcript. I’m sorry. My mind hasn’t been on business.”
“Get some sleep tonight.”
With death-traps at both doors. He had nothing to say to that suggestion. He took the turn toward the post office to pick up his mail, hoping for something pleasant. A letter from home. Magazines, pictures to look at that had human faces, articles that depended on human language and human logic, for a few hours after supper to let go of thoughts that were going to haunt his sleep a second night. It was one of those days he wanted to tell Barb to get on the plane, fly in here, just twenty-four human hours…
With lethal wires on his bedroom doors?
He took out his mail-slot key, he reached for the door, and Jago caught his arm. “The attendant can get it.”
From behind the wall, she meant—because someone was trying to kill him, and Jago didn’t want him reaching into the box after the mail.
“That’s extreme,” he said.
“So might your enemies be.”
“I thought the word was finesse. Blowing up a mail slot?”
“Or inserting a needle in a piece of mail.” She took his key and pocketed it. “The paidhi’s mail, nadi-ji.”
The attendant went. And came back.
“Nothing,” the attendant said.
“There’s always something,” Bren said. “Forgive my persistence, nadi, but my mailbox is never empty. It’s never in my tenure here been empty. Please be sure.”
“I couldn’t mistake you, nand’ paidhi.” The attendant spread his hands. “I’ve never seen the box empty either. Perhaps there’s holiday.”
“Not on any recent date.”
“Perhaps someone picked it up for you.”
“Not by my authorization.”
“I’m sorry, nand’ paidhi. There’s just nothing there.”
“Thank you.” He bowed, there being nothing else to say, and nowhere else to look. “Thank you for your trouble.” And quietly to Jago, in perplexity and distress: “Someone’s been at my mail.”
“Banichi probably picked it up.”
“It’s very kind of him to take the trouble, Jago, but I can pick up my mail.”
“Perhaps he thought to save you bother.”
He sighed and shook his head, and walked away, Jago right with him, from the first step down the hall. “His office, do you think?”
“I don’t think he’s there. He said something about a meeting.”
“He’s taken my mail to a meeting.”
“Possibly, nadi Bren.”
Maybe Banichi would bring it to the room. Then he could read himself to sleep, or write letters, before he forgot human language. Failing that, maybe there’d be a machimi play on television. A little revenge, a little humor, light entertainment.
They took the back halls to reach the main lower corridor, walked to his room. He used his key—opened the door and saw his bed relocated to the other end of the room. The television was sitting where his bed had been. Everything felt wrong-handed.
He avoided the downed wire, dead though it was supposed to be. Jago stepped over it too, and went into his bathroom without a please or may I? and went all around the room with a bug-finder.
He picked up the remote and turned on the television. Changed channels. The news channel was off the air. All the general channels were off the air. The weather channel worked. One entertainment channel did.
“Half the channels are off.”
Jago looked at him, bent over, examining the box that held one end of the wire. “The storm last night, perhaps.”
“They were working this morning.”
“I don’t know, nadi Bren. Maybe they’re doing repairs.”
He flung the remote down on the bed. “We have a saying. One of those days.”
“What, one of those days?”
“When nothing works.”
“A day now or a day to come?” Jago was rightside up now. Atevi verbs had necessary time-distinctions. Banichi spoke a little Mosphei’. Jago was a little more language-bound.
“Nadi Jago. What are you looking for?”
“The entry counter.”
“It counts entries.”
“In a very special way, nadi Bren. If it should be a professional, one can’t suppose there aren’t countermeasures.”
“It won’t be any professional. They’re required to file. Aren’t they?”
“People are required to behave well. Do they always? We have to assume the extreme.”
One could expect the aiji’s assassins to be thorough, and to take precautions no one else would take—simply because they knew the utmost possibilities of their trade. He should be glad, he told himself, that he had them looking out for him.
God, he hoped nobody broke in tonight. He didn’t want to wake up and find some body burning on his carpet.
He didn’t want to find himself shot or knifed in his bed, either. An ateva who’d made one attempt undetected might lose his nerve and desist. If he was a professional, his employer, losing his nerve, might recall him.
Might.
You didn’t count on it. You didn’t ever quite count on it—you could just get a little easier as the days passed and hope the bastard wasn’t just awaiting a better window of opportunity.
“A professional would have made it good,” he said to Jago.
“We don’t lose many that we track,” Jago said.
“It was raining.”
“All the same,” Jago said.
He wished she hadn’t said that.
Banichi came back at supper, arrived with two new servants, and a cart with three suppers. Algini and Tano, Banichi called the pair, in introduction. Algini and Tano bowed with that degree of coolness that said they were high hall servants, thank you, and accustomed to fancier apartments.
“I trusted Taigi and Moni,” Bren muttered, after the servants had left the cart.
“Algini and Tano have clearances,” Banichi said.
“Clearances.—Did you get my mail? Someone got my mail.”
“I left it at the office. Forgive me.”
He could ask Banichi to go back after it. He could insist that Banichi go back after it. But Banichi’s supper would be cold—Banichi having invited himself and Jago to supper in his apartment.
He sighed and fetched an extra chair. Jago brought another from the side of the room. Banichi set up the leaves of the serving table and set out the dishes, mostly cooked fruit, heavily spiced, game from the reserve at Nanjiran. Atevi didn’t keep animals for slaughter, not the Ragi atevi, at any rate. Mospheira traded with the tropics, with the Nisebi, down south, for processed meat, preserved meat, which didn’t have to be sliced thin enough to admit daylight—a commerce which Tabini-aiji called disgraceful, and which Bren had reluctantly promised to try to discourage, the paidhi being obliged to exert bidirectional influence, although without any veto power over human habits.
So even on Mospheira it wasn’t politic for the paidhi to eat anything but game, and that in appropriate season. To preserve meat was commercial, and commercialism regarding an animal life taken was not kabiu, not ‘in the spirit of good example.’ The aiji’s household had to be kabiu. Very kabiu.
And observing this point of refinement was, Tabini had pointed out to him with particular satisfaction in turning the tables, ecologically sound harvesting practice. Which the paidhi must, of course, support with the same enthusiasm when it came from atevi.
Down in the city market you could get a choice of meats. Frozen, canned, and air-dried.
“Aren’t you hungry, nadi?”
“Not my favorite season.” He was graceless this evening. And unhappy. “Nobody knows anything. Nobody tells me anything. I appreciate the aiji’s concern. And yours. But is there some particular reason I can’t fly home for a day or two?”
‘The aiji—“
“Needs me. But no one knows why. You wouldn’t mislead me, would you, Jago?”
“It’s my profession, nadi Bren.”
“To lie to me.”
There was an awkward silence at the table. He’d intended his bluntness as bitter humor. It had come out at the wrong moment, into the wrong mood, into their honest and probably frustrated efforts to find answers. Of all humans, he was educated not to make mistakes with them.
“Forgive me,” he said,
“His culture will lie,” Banichi said plainly to Jago. “But admitting one has done so insults the victim.”
Jago took on a puzzled look.
“Forgive me,” Bren said again. “It was a joke, nadi Jago.”
Jago still looked puzzled, and frowned, but not angrily. “We take this threat very seriously.”
“I didn’t. I’m beginning to.” He thought: Where’s my mail, Banichi? But he had a mouthful of soup instead. Making too much haste with atevi was not, not productive. “I’m grateful. I’m sure you had other plans this evening.”
“No,” said Jago.
“Still,” he said, wondering if they’d fixed the television outage yet, and what he was going to say to Banichi and Jago for small talk for the rest of the evening. Maybe there was a play on the entertainment channel. It seemed they might stay the night.
And in whose bed would they sleep, he asked himself.—Or would they sleep? They didn’t show the effects of last night at all.
“Do you play cards?”
“Cards?” Jago asked, and Banichi shoved his chair back and said he should teach her.
“What are cards?” Jago asked, when what Bren wanted to ask Banichi involved his mail. But Banichi probably had far more important things on his mind—like checking with security, and being sure surveillance items were working.
“It’s a numerical game,” Bren said, wishing Banichi wasn’t deserting him to Jago—he hoped not for the night. When are you leaving? wasn’t a politic question. He was still trying to figure how to ask it of Banichi, or what he should say if Banichi said Jago was staying… when Banichi went out the door, with, “Mind the wire, nadi Bren.”
“Gin,” Jago said.
Bren sighed, laid his cards down, glad there wasn’t money involved.
“Forgive me,” Jago said. “You said I should say that. Unseemly gloating was far from—”
“No, no, no. It’s entirely the custom.”
“One isn’t sure,” Jago said. “Am I to be sure?”
He had embarrassed Jago. He had been mishidi—awkward. He held out his palm, the gesture of conciliation. “You’re to be sure.” God, one couldn’t walk without tripping over sensitivities. “It’s actually courteous to tell me you’ve won.”
“You don’t count the cards?”
Atevi memory was, especially regarding numbers, hard to shake, no matter that Jago was not the fanatic number-adder you found in the surrounding city. And no, he hadn’t adequately counted the cards. Never play numbers with an atevi.
“I would perhaps have done better, nadi Jago, if I weren’t distracted by the situation. I’m afraid it’s a little more personal to me.”
“I assure you we’ve staked our personal reputations on your safety. We’d never be less than committed to our effort.”
He had the impulse to rest his head on his hand and resign the whole conversation. Jago would take that as evidence of offense, too.
“I wouldn’t expect otherwise, nadi Jago, and it’s not your capacity I doubt, not in the least. I could only wish my own faculties were operating at their fullest, or I should not have embarrassed myself just now, by seeming to doubt you.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“I’ll be far brighter when I’ve slept. Please regard my mistakes as confusion.”
Jago’s flat black face and vivid yellow eyes held more intense expression than they were wont—not offense, he thought, but curiosity.
“I confess myself uneasy,” she said, brow furrowed. “You declare absolutely you aren’t offended.”
“No.” One rarely touched atevi. But her manner invited it. He patted her hand where it rested on the table. “I understand you.” It seemed not quite to carry the point, and, looking her in the eyes, he flung his honest thoughts after it. “I wish you understood me on this. It’s a human thought.”
“Are you able to explain?”
She wasn’t asking Bren Cameron: she didn’t know Bren Cameron. She was asking the paidhi, the interpreter to her people. That was all she could do, Bren thought, regarding the individual she was assigned by the aiji to protect, since the incident last night—an individual who didn’t seem in her eyes to take the threat seriously enough, or to take her seriously… and how was she to know anything about him? How was she to guess, with the paidhi giving her erratic clues? Will you explain? she asked, when he wished aloud that she understood him.
“If it were easy,” he said, trying with all his wits to make sense of it to her—or to divert her thinking away from it, “there wouldn’t need to be a paidhi at all.—But I wouldn’t be human, then, and you wouldn’t be atevi, and nobody would need me anyway, would they?”
It didn’t explain anything at all. He only tried to make the confusion less important than it was. Jago could surely read that much. She worried about it and thought about it. He could see it in her eyes.
“Where’s Banichi gone?” he asked, feeling things between them slipping further and further from his control. “Is he planning to come back here tonight?”
“I don’t know,” she said, still frowning. Then he decided, in the convolutions of his exhausted and increasingly disjointed thoughts, that even that might have sounded as if he wanted Banichi instead of her.
Which he did. But not for any reason of her incompetency. Dealing with a shopkeeper with a distrust of computers was one thing. He was not faring well at all in dealing with Jago, he could not put out of his mind Banichi’s advisement that she liked his hair, and he decided on distraction.
“I want my mail.”
“I can call him and ask him to bring it.”
He had forgotten about the pocket-com. “Please do that,” he said, and Jago tried.
And tried. “I can’t reach him,” Jago said.
“Is he all right?” The matter of the mail diminished in importance, but not, he feared, in significance. Too much had gone on that wasn’t ordinary.
“I’m sure he is.” Jago gathered up the cards. “Do you want to play again?”
“What if someone broke in here and you needed help? Where do you suppose he is?”
Jago’s broad nostrils flared, “I have resources, nadi Bren.”
He couldn’t keep from offending her.
“Or what if he was in trouble? What if they ambushed him in the halls? We might not know.”
“You’re very full of worries tonight.”
He was. He was drowning in what was atevi; and that failure to understand, in a sudden moment of panic, led him to doubt his own fitness to be where he was. It made him wonder whether the lack of perception he had shown with Jago had been far more general, all along—if it had not, with some person, led to the threat he was under.
Or, on the other hand, whether he was letting himself be spooked by his guards’ zealousness because of some threat of a threat that would never, ever rematerialize.
“Worries about what, paidhi?”
He blinked, and looked by accident up into Jago’s yellow, unflinching gaze. Don’t you know? he thought. Is it a challenge, that question? Is it distrust of me? Why these questions?
But you couldn’t quite say ‘trust’ in Jago’s language, either, not in the terms a human understood. Every house, every province, belonged to a dozen associations, that made webs of association all through the country, whose border provinces made associations across the putative borders into the neighbor associations, an endless fuzzy interlink of boundaries that weren’t boundaries, both geographical and interest-defined—‘trust,’ would you say? Say man’chi— ‘central association,’ the one association that defined a specific individual.
“Man’china aijiia nai’am,” he said, to which Jago blinked a third time. I’m the aiji’s associate, foremost. “Nai’danei man’chini somai Banichi?” Whose associate are you and Banichi, foremost of all?
“Tabini-aijiia, hei.” But atevi would lie to anyone but their central associate.
“Not each other’s?” he asked. “I thought you were very close, you and Banichi.”
“We have the same man’chi.”
“And to each other?”
He saw what might be truth leap through her expression—and the inevitable frown followed.
“The paidhi knows the harm in such a question,” Jago said.
“The paidhi-aiji,” he said, “knows what he asks. He finds it his duty to ask, nadi.”
Jago got up from the table, walked across the room and said nothing for a while. She went to look out the garden doors, near the armed wire—it made him nervous, but he thought he ought not to warn her, just be ready to remind her. Jago was touchy enough. He hadn’t quite insulted her. But he’d asked into a matter intensely personal and private.
“The Interpreter should know he won’t get an honest answer,” she’d implied, and he’d said, plain as plain to her politically sensitive ears, “The Interpreter serves the aiji by questioning the true hierarchy of your intimate alignments.”
Freely translated—Faced with betraying someone, the aiji or Banichi… which one would you betray, Jago?
Which have you?
Fool to ask such a question, when he was alone in a room with her?
But he was alone in the whole country, for that matter, one human alone with three hundred million atevi, and billions around the world, and he was obliged to ask questions—with more intelligence and cleverness than he had just used, granted; but he was tired enough now, and crazed enough, to want to be sure of at least three of them, of Tabini, Banichi, and Jago, before he went any further down the paved and pleasant road of belief. There was too much harm he could do to his own species, believing a lie, going too far down a false path, granting too much truth to the wrong people—
Because he wasn’t just the aiji’s interpreter. He had a primary association that outranked it, an association that was stamped on his skin and his face—and that was the one atevi couldn’t help seeing, every time they looked at him.
He waited for Jago to think his question through—perhaps even to ask herself the questions about her own loyalties that atevi might prefer not to ask. Perhaps atevi minds, like human ones, held hundreds of contradictory compartments, the doors of which one dared not open wholesale and look into. He didn’t know. It was, perhaps, too much to ask, too personal and too dangerous. Perhaps questioning the loyalty atevi felt as a group inherently questioned a tenet of belief—and perhaps their man’chi concept was, at bottom, as false as humans had always wished it was, longing at an emotional level for atevi to be and think and hold individual, interpersonal values like themselves.
The paidhi couldn’t believe that. The paidhi daren’t believe that deadliest and most dangerous of illusions. He was off the emotional edge.
And, perhaps recognizing that the paidhi was off the edge, Jago declined to answer him. She used the pocket-com again, asking Banichi if he was receiving—and still didn’t look at him.
Banichi still didn’t answer.
Frowning, then, perhaps for a different reason, Jago called headquarters, asking where Banichi was, or if anyone knew where he was—and, no, headquarters didn’t know.
Maybe Banichi was with some woman, Bren thought, although he decided he should keep that idea to himself, figuring Jago was capable of thinking of it for herself if it was at all likely. He wasn’t sure whether Banichi and Jago slept with each other. He had never been completely certain what the relationship was between them, except a close, years-long professional partnership.
He saw the frown deepen on Jago’s face. “Someone find out where he is,” she said into the com.
There were verbal codes; he knew that and he couldn’t tell whether the answer he overheard was one: “Lab-work, ” HQ said, but Jago didn’t seem to like the answer, “Tell him contact me when he’s through,” Jago said to HQ, not seeming pleased, and shut the contact off on the affirmative.
“You had no sleep last night,” she said, in her smoother, professional tones, and, evading the wire, she slid the glass garden doors open on the lattice, “Please rest, nadi Bren.”
He was exhausted. But he had rather plain answers. And he was far from sure he wanted his garden doors open. Maybe they were setting up a trap. He was in no mood tonight to be the sleeping bait.
“Nadi,” he said, “have you forgotten my question?”
“No, paidhi-ji.”
“But you don’t intend to answer.”
Jago fixed him with a yellow, lucent stare. “Do they ask such questions on Mospheira?”
“Always.”
“Not among us,” Jago said, and crossed the room to the door.
“Jago, say you’re not angry.”
Again that stare. She had stopped just short of the deadly square on the carpet, turned it off, and looked back at him. “Why ask such a futile question? You wouldn’t believe either answer.”
It set him back. And made him foreign and deliberate in his own reply.
“But I’m human, nadi.”
“So your man’chi isn’t with Tabini, after all.”
Dangerous question. Deadly question. “Of course it is.—But what if you had two… two very strong man’chiin?”
“We call it a test of character.” Jago said, and opened the door.
“So do we, nadi Jago.”
He had caught her attention. Black, wide, imposing, she stood against that bar of whiter hall light. She stood there as if she wanted to say something.
But the pocket-com beeped, demanding attention. She spoke briefly with headquarters, regarding Banichi’s whereabouts, and HQ said that he was out of the lab, but in conference, asking not to be disturbed.
“Thank you,” she said to the com. “Relay my message.” And to him: “The wires will both be live. Go to bed, paidhi Bren. I’ll be outside if you need me.”
“All night?”
There was a moment of silence. “Don’t walk in the garden, nand’ paidhi. Don’t stand in front of the doors. Be prudent and go to bed.”
She shut the door then. The wire rearmed itself—he supposed. It came up when the door locked.
And did it need all of that—Jago and the wire, to secure his sleep?
Or where was Banichi and what was that exchange of questions, this talk about loyalties? He couldn’t remember who’d started it.
Jago could have forgone an argument with him, at the edge of sleep, when he most wanted a tranquil mind—but he wasn’t even certain now who’d started it and who’d pressed it, or with what intention. He hadn’t done well. The whole evening with Banichi and then Jago had had a stressed, on the edge quality, as if—
In retrospect, it seemed that Jago had been fishing as hard as he had been to find out something, all along—pressing every opportunity, challenging him, or ready to take offense and put the worst construction on matters. It might be Jago’s inexperience with him—he’d dealt mostly with Banichi and relied on Banichi to interpret to her. But he couldn’t figure out why Banichi had deserted him tonight—except the obvious answer, that Banichi as the senior of the pair had had matters on his mind more important to the aiji than the paidhi was.
And so far as he could tell, neither he nor Jago had completely gotten the advantage, neither of them had come away with anything useful that he could figure out—only a mutual reminder how profound the differences were and how dangerous the interface between atevi and human could still turn, on a moment’s notice.
He couldn’t even get his points across to one well-educated and unsuperstitious woman with every reason to listen to him. How could he transmit anything, via his prepared statements to the various councils, make any headway with the population at large, who, after two centuries of peace, agreed it was a very good thing for humans to stay on Mospheira and grudgingly conceded that computers might have numbers, the way tables might have definite sizes and objects definite height, but, God, even arranging the furniture in a room meant considering ratios and measurements, and felicitous and infelicitous combinations that the atevi called agingi’ai, ‘felicitous numerical harmony.’
Beauty flowed from that, in atevi thinking. The infelicitous could not be beautiful. The infelicitous could not be reasoned with. Right numbers had to add up, and an even division in a simple flower arrangement was a communication of hostility.
God knew what he had communicated to Jago that he hadn’t meant to say.
He undressed, he turned out the light and cast an apprehensive look at the curtains, which showed no hint of the deadly wire and no shadow of any lurking assassin. He put himself to bed—at the wrong end of the room—where the ventilation was not directly from the lattice doors.
Where the breeze was too weak to reach.
He was not going to sleep until the wind shifted. He could watch television. If it worked. He doubted it would. The outages usually stayed through the shift, when they happened. He watched the curtain, he tried to think about the council business… but his mind kept circling back to the hall this morning, Tabini making that damnable announcement of feud, which he didn’t want—certainly didn’t want public.
And the damned gun—had they transferred that, when they moved his bed?
He couldn’t bear wondering if anyone had found it. He got up and felt under the mattress.
It was there. He let go a slow breath, put a knee on the mattress and slid back under the sheets, to stare at the darkened ceiling.
Many a moment in the small hours of the morning he doubted what he knew. Close as he was to Tabini in certain functions, he doubted he had ever made Tabini understand anything Tabini hadn’t learned from his predecessor in office. He did his linguistic research. The paper that had gotten him on the track to the paidhi’s office was a respectable work: an analysis of set-plurals in the Ragi atevi dialect, of which he was proud, but it was no breakthrough, just a conclusion to which he’d been unable to add, since, thanks to Tabini’s patient and irreligious analysis.
But at times he didn’t understand, not Tabini, not Taigi and Moni, God knew what he would figure about the glum-faced servants Banichi and Jago foisted off on him, but that was going to be another long effort. He was in a damned mess, was what he’d made for himself—he didn’t catch the nuances, he’d gotten involved in something he didn’t understand. He was in danger of failing. He’d imagined once he had the talent to have done what the first paidhi had done: breach the linguistic gap from conceptual dead zero and in the heart of war…
In the years when humans had first come down here, few at first, then in greater and greater numbers as it seemed so easy… they’d been equally confident they understood the atevi—until one spring day, twenty-one years into the landings, with humans venturing peacefully onto the continent, when that illusion had—suddenly and for reasons candidates for his job still argued among themselves—blown up in their faces.
Short and nasty, what atevi called the War of the Landing—all the advanced technology on the human side, and vast numbers and an uncanny determination on the part of the atevi, who had, in that one year, driven humans from Ragi coastal land and back onto Mospheira, attacked them even in the valley the bewildered survivors held as their secure territory. Humanity on this world had come that close to extinction, until Tabini-aiji’s fourth-removed predecessor had agreed, having met face-to-face with the man who would be the first paidhi, to cede Mospheira and let humans separate themselves from atevi completely, on an island where they’d be safe and isolated.
Mospheira and a cease-fire, in exchange for the technology the atevi wanted. Tabini’s fourth-removed predecessor, being no fool, had seen a clear choice staring him in the face: either strike a deal with humanity and become indispensable to them, or see his own allies make his lands a battlefield over the technology his rivals hoped to lay their hands on, killing every last human and potentially destroying the source of the knowledge in the process.
Hence the Treaty which meant the creation of the paidhi’s office, and the orderly surrender of human technology to the atevi Western Association, at a rate—neither Tabini’s ancestor nor the first paidhi had been fools—that would maintain the atevi economy and the relative power of the aijiin of various Associations in the existing balance.
Meaning, all of the rivals, the humans and the technology securely in the hands of Tabini’s ancestor. The War had stopped… Mospheira’s atevi had resettled on the Ragi aiji’s coastal estate-lands, richer than their own fields by far, a sacrifice of vast wealth for the Ragi aiji, but a wise, wise maneuver that secured the peace—and every damned thing the Mospheira atevi and the Ragi atevi wanted.
Humans weren’t under this sun by choice. And (the constant and unmentioned truth) humans to this day didn’t deal with the atevi by choice or at advantage. Humans had lost the War: few in numbers, stranded, their station soon in decay, their numbers dwindling above and below… descent to the planet was their final, desperate choice.
Impossible to conceal their foreignness, impossible to trust a species that couldn’t translate friendship, impossible to admit what humans really wanted out of the agreement, because atevi in general didn’t—that foreign word—trust people foolish enough to land without a by-your-leave and possessing secrets they hadn’t yet turned over.
The paidhi didn’t tell everything he knew—but he was treaty-bound to the slow surrender of everything humans owned, to pay the rent on Mospheira—and to empower the only human-friendly government on the planet to keep humanity’s most implacable enemies under his thumb. The aiji of that day had wanted high-powered guns—the atevi had had muzzle-loading rifles and cumbersome cannon, and took to high-velocity bullets with—terrible turn of speech—an absolute vengeance.
Fastest piece of talking a paidhi had ever done, pressed with the aiji’s request for designs that would put a terrifying arsenal in Ragi hands, Bretano had pointed out that such weapons would surely reach Ragi rivals as well, and that the Ragi already had the upper hand. Did they want to tip the balance?
Pressed for advanced industrial techniques, Bretano had objected the ecological cost to the planet, and the whole committee behind him, and his successors, had begun the slow, centuries-long business of steering atevi science steadily into ecological awareness—
And toward material production resources that would serve human needs.
The one tactic, the ecological philosophy… hoped to get war out of the atevi mindset, to build experimental rockets instead of missiles, rails instead of cannon, to consider what happened to a river downstream when a little garbage went in upstream, to consider what happened when toxic chemicals blew through forests or poisons got into the groundwater—thank God, the atevi had taken to the idea, which had touched some cultural bent already in the Ragi mentality, at least. It had locked onto successive generations so firmly that little children in this half-century learned rhymes about clean rivers—while human tacticians on Mospheira—safe on Mospheira, unlike the paidhi—deliberated what industry they dared promote, and what humans needed the atevi to develop in order for humans to get launch facilities and the vehicle they needed.
The unspoken, two hundred-year-agenda, the one every human knew and the paidhi walked about scared out of his mind because he knew—because even if atevi guessed by now that getting themselves a space program meant developing materials as useful to humans as to themselves, even if he could sit in the space council meetings and surmise that every atevi in the room knew what they developed had that potential, it was a question he never brought up, not with them, not with atevi he knew the best—because it was one of those impenetrable thickets in atevi mindset, how they’d take the knowledge if it became impossible to ignore it. He’d certainly no idea at all how it would play outside Tabini’s court, out across the country—when popular novels still cast human villains, and they appeared in shadow, in nebai, in the machimi plays—nebai, because they couldn’t get human actors…
Humans were the monsters in the closet, the creatures under the bed… in a culture constantly on its guard against real dangers from real assassins, in a culture where children learned from television a paranoid fear of strangers.
What were humans really up to on Mospheira? What dark technological secrets was Tabini-aiji keeping for himself? What was in the telemetry that flowed between the station in space and the island an hour by air off Tabini’s shores?
And why did some loon want to kill the paidhi?
He had a space council meeting tomorrow—nothing he considered controversial, a small paper with technical information the council had asked and he’d translated out of the library on Mospheira.
No controversy in that. None in the satellite launch upcoming, either. Communications weren’t controversial. Weather forecast wasn’t controversial.
There was the finance question, whether to add or subtract a million from the appropriation to make the unmanned launch budget add up to an auspicious number—but a million didn’t seem, against six billion already committed to the program, to be a critical or acerbic issue, over which assassins would swarm to his bedroom.
There was, occasionally smoldering, the whole, sensitive manned versus unmanned debate—whether atevi should attempt to recover the human space station, which was in increasing disrepair, with its tanks empty now, in its slow drift out of stable orbit.
The human policy wasn’t to scare anyone by bringing up the remote possibility of infall in a populated area. Officially, statistically, the station debris would come down in the vast open oceans, in, oh, another five hundred years, give or take a solar storm or so—he couldn’t personally swear to any of it, since astrophysics wasn’t his forte, but the experts said that was what he should say, and he’d said it.
He’d advanced his modest paper on the topic of mission goals at his inaugural meeting with the space council, proposing the far from astonishing concept that lifting metal to orbit was expensive, and that letting what was already orbiting burn up was not economical, and that they should do something with the dead, abandoned station before they sank large resources into unmanned missions.
Manned space advocates of course agreed immediately, with celebration. Astronomers and certain anti-human lobbies disagreed passionately. Which put the question into the background, while council members consulted numerologists on truly important issues such as (the currently raging question) whether the launch dates were auspicious or not, and how many dates it was auspicious to approve in reserve—which got into another debate between several competing (and ethnically significant) schools of numerology, on whether the current date should be in the calculation or whether one counted the birthdate of the whole program or of the project or of the date the launch table was devised.
Never mind the debate over whether the fuel chamber baffle in the heavy lift booster could be four-partitioned without affecting the carefully chosen harmonious numbers of the tank design.
The truly dangerous issues that he could think of, lying here flat on his back, waiting for assassins, were all the quiet ones—the utilization of the station as an atevi mission goal was one item of some controversy he’d strenuously advocated, now that he began to add up the supporters, some of them less reasonable, behind the genteel voices of the council.
And always factor into any space debate the continual exchange of telemetry and instructions between Mospheira and the station, which had gone on for two hundred years and was still going.
A certain radical element among atevi maintained there were weapons hidden aboard the abandoned station. The devoted lunatics of the radical fringe were convinced the station’s slow infall was no accident of physics, but a carefully calculated approach, perhaps in the hands of humans secretly left aboard, or instructions secretly relayed from Mospheira, now that they knew about computer controls, which would end with the station descending in a blazing course across the skies, ‘disturbing the ethers to disharmony and violence,’ and creating hurricanes and tidal waves, as its weapons rained fire down on atevi civilization and placed atevi forever under human domination.
Forgive them, Tabini was wont to say dryly. They also anticipate the moon to influence their financial ventures and the space launches to disturb the weather.
Foreign aijiin from outside Tabini’s Association actually funded offices in Shejidan to analyze those telemetry transcripts on which Shejidan eavesdropped—the numerologists these foreign aijiin employed suspecting secret assignments of infelicitous codes, affecting the weather, or agriculture, or the fortunes of Tabini’s rivals… and one daren’t call such beliefs silly.
Actually Tabini did call them exactly that, to his intimates, but in public he was very kabiu, very observant, and employed batteries of number-counters and geometricians of various persuasions to study every utterance and every bit of intercepted transmission, just as seriously—to refute what the conservatives came up with, to be sure.
From time to time—it was worth a grin, even in the dark—Tabini would come to the paidhi and say, Transmit this. And he would phone Mospheira with a segment of code that, transmitted to the station, would be complete nonsense to the computers, so the technicians assured him—they just dropped it into some Remark string, and transmitted it solely for the benefit of the eavesdroppers, and that fixed that, as Barb would say. Numbers would then turn up in the transmission sequences that burst some doomsayer’s bubble before he could go public with his theory.
That, God help them all, was the space program. And that was not worth a grin. That was every program they promoted. That was the operation of the council and the hasdrawad and the tashrid and the special interests that operated in the shadows—radical groups among those special interests, groups that called the Treaty of Mospheira a mistake, that called for those things the most radical humans—and God knew there were those—suspected as existing in extensive plans and Tabini dismissed as stupid, like another attack on Mospheira.
Humans might have no illusion of welcome in the world—but there were certainly the serious and the non-serious threats. Serious, were the human-haters who focussed on the highway dispute as a human plot to keep the economy under Tabini’s thumb—which cut much too close to the truth neither the paidhi nor the aiji wanted in public awareness.
There was, thank God, the moonbeam fringe—with a slippery grip on history, the laws of physics, and reality. The fringe went straight for the space program (one supposed because it was the highest and least conceivable technology) as the focus of all dire possibility, ideas ranging from the notion that rocket launches let the atmosphere leak out into the ether… to his personal favorite, the space station cruising at ground level causing hurricanes and blasting cities with death rays. Atevi could laugh at it. Humans could. Humor at the most outrageous hate-mongering did everyone good, and poked holes in assumptions that otherwise would lie unventilated.
The fringe had done more good, in fact, for human-atevi understanding than all his speeches to the councils.
But if you ever wanted a source from which a lunatic, unlicensed assassin could arise, it was possible that one of the fringe had quite, quite gone over the edge.
Maybe the numbers had said, to one of the lunatics, one fine day, Go assassinate the paidhi and the atmosphere will stop leaking.
Thus far… Tabini and his own predecessors at least juggled well. They’d dispensed technology at a rate that didn’t overwhelm the economy or the environment, they’d kept ethnic differences among atevi and political opinions among humans well to the rear of the decision-making process—with the Ragi atevi and the Western Association they led profiting hand over fist, all the while, of course, by reason of their proximity to and special relationship with Mospheira; and, oh, well aware what that relationship was worth, economically. Tabini had probably had far more than an inkling for years where human advice and human techonology was leading him.
But Tabini’s association also enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world, was very fond of its comforts and its television. And Ragi planes didn’t crash into bridges any more.
Somebody after Tabini’s hide was the likeliest scenario that kept bobbing up—a plausible scenario, in which the paidhi could remotely figure, if whoever was after Tabini, knowing how difficult a target Tabini was, would be content to take out Tabini’s contact with humans and make that relationship more difficult for a season.
A new paidhi, a state of destabilization in which no paidhi was safe. Somebody might even be after a renegotiation of the Mospheira Treaty to spread out the benefits to other associations, which had been proposed, and which the Western Association had adamantly refused.
In that case the paidhi-aiji might well become a critical flash-point. He got along with Tabini. He liked Tabini. Tabini didn’t reciprocate the liking part, of course—being atevi. But Tabini and he did get along with all too much levity and good humor, perhaps—as some might see it, like that business at the retreat at Taiben, far too cozy.
Some might think it, even among the Ragi themselves, or among the outlying allies, each of whom, in the nebulous fashion of atevi associations, had at least one foot in other associations.
Maybe the better, special relationship he thought he and Tabini had—had brought this on, transgressing some boundary too rapidly, too inexpertly, in blind, too-confident enthusiasm.
Frightening thought. Appalling thought. Succeed too well and fail completely?
If Tabini’s government went unstable, and the network of atevi Associations shifted its center of gravity, say, eastward and deeply inland, where there was never that easy familiarity with humans, where ethnic and historical differences between Ragi and Nisebi and Meduriin could find only humans more different and more suspect than they found each other.
Atevi had been, with the exception of the tribals in the remotest hinterlands and the islands in the Edi Archipelago, a global civilization, at a stage when humans hadn’t been. Atevi explorers had gone out in wooden ships, done all those things that humans had, by the records, done on lost Earth—except that atevi hadn’t found a New World, they’d found the Edi, and damned little else but a volcanic, troubled chain of islands, not advanced, not culturally up to the double assault of the explorers from the East and the explorers from the West, who’d immediately laid claim to everything in sight and still—still, for reasons the ethnographers were still arguing—the same explorers met each other in those foreign isles and found enough in common and enough difficult about the intervening geography—the continental divide in the principal continent topped 30,000 feet—to trade not overland, but by sea routes that largely, after the advent of full-rigged ships, excluded the Isles where the two principal branches of atevi had met.
Atevi had, historically, cooperated together damned well, compared to humans. Hence the difficulty of getting atevi to comprehend correctly that humans had been very willing to be let alone on Mospheira, and not included in an association—an attitude which the atevi turned out not to trust. Shejidan had thrown itself into the breach, sacrificed its fear of outsiders for the foreign concept of ‘treaty,’ which it marginally understood as the sought-after association with humans. Which was one of the most critical conceptual breakthroughs the first paidhi had made.
To this day Tabini professed not to comprehend the human word ‘treaty,’ or the word ‘border,’ which he denied had real validity even among humans. An artificial concept, Tabini called it. A human delusion. People belonged to many associations. Boundaries might exist as an arbitrary approximate line defining provinces—but they were meaningless to individuals whose houses or kinships might be both sides of the line.
He lay in the dark, watching the moonlit curtains begin to blow in a generous cool breeze—the weather had greatly moderated since the front had come through last night. He hadn’t been in the garden this afternoon to enjoy it. Someone could shoot him from the rooftop, Jago said. He should stay out of the garden. He shouldn’t go here, he shouldn’t go there, he shouldn’t walk through crowds.
Damned if Banichi had forgotten his mail. Not Banichi. Things regarding the person Banichi was watching just weren’t trivial enough to Banichi that they completely left his mind. This was a man that, in the human expression, dotted his i’s and crossed his t’s.
Second frightening thought.
Why would Banichi steal his mail—except to rob him of information like ads for toothpaste, video tapes, and ski vacations on Mt. Allan Thomas?
And if it weren’t Banichi that had gotten it, why would Banichi lie to him? To protect a thief who stole advertising?
Stupid thought. Probably Banichi hadn’t lied at all, probably Banichi was just busy and he was, ever since the nightmare flash of that shadow across the curtain last night, suffering from jangled nerves and an overactive imagination.
He lay there, imagining sounds in the garden, smelling the perfume of the blooms outside the door, wondering what it sounded like when someone hit the wire and fried, and what he should do about the situation he was working on—
Or what the odds were that he could get Deana Hanks out of the Mospheira office to take up temporary duty in the aiji’s household, for, say, a month or so vacation—God, just time to see Barb, go diving on the coast, take reasonable chances with a hostile environment instead of a pricklish atevi court.
Cowardice, that was. It was nothing to toss in Hanks’ lap—oh, by the way, Deana, someone’s trying to kill me, give it your best, just do what you can and I’ll be back when it blows over.
He couldn’t escape that way. He didn’t know whether he should call his office and try to hint what was going on—he ran a high risk of injecting misinformation or misinterpretation into an already uneasy situation, if he did that. There were code phrases for trouble and for assassination—and maybe he ought to take the chance and let the office know that much.
But if Tabini for some reason closed off communications tighter than they were, the last information his office might have to work with was an advisement that someone had tried to kill him—leaving Hanks de facto in charge. And Hanks was a take charge and go ahead type, a damned hothead, was the sorry truth, apt to take measures to breach Tabini’s silence, which might not be the wisest course in a delicate atevi political situation. He had confidence in Tabini—Hanks under those circumstances wouldn’t, and might do something to undermine Tabini… or play right into the hands of Tabini’s enemies.
Damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Tabini’s silence was uncharacteristic. The situation had too many variables. He was on-site and he didn’t have enough information to act on—Hanks would have far less if she had to come in here, and she would feel more pressed, in the total absence of information, to do something to get him back if there was no corpse… a very real fear from the first days, that some aiji in Shejidan or elsewhere might get tired of having the paidhi dole out technological information bit at a time.
Something about the mythical goose and the source of golden eggs—a parable the first paidhim had been very forward to inject into atevi culture, so that now atevi were certain there was such a thing as a goose, although there was not a bona fide bird in the world, and that it was a foreign but surely atevi fable.
That was the way the game went. Given patience—given time—given small moves instead of wide ones, humans got what they wanted, and Tabini-aiji did.
Goseniin and golden eggs.