Banichi arrived with breakfast, with an armload of mail, the predictable ads for vacations, new products, and ordinary goods. It was quite as boring as he’d expected it to be, and a chilly, unseasonal morning made him glad of the hot tea the two substitute servants brought. He had his light breakfast—now he wanted his television.
“Are the channels out all over the city, or what?” he asked Banichi, and Banichi shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”
At least there was the weather channel, reporting rain in the mountains east, and unseasonal cool weather along the western seaboard. No swimming on the Mospheira beaches. He kept thinking of home—kept thinking of the white beaches of Mospheira, and tall mountains, still patched with snow in the shadowy spots, kept thinking of human faces, and human crowds.
He’d dreamed of home last night, in the two hours of sleep he seemed to have gotten—he’d dreamed of the kitchen at home, and early mornings, and his mother and Toby at breakfast, the way it had been. His mother wrote to him regularly. Toby wasn’t inclined to write, but Toby got the news, when his letters did get home, and Toby sent word back through their mother, what he was up to, how he was faring.
His mother had taken the community allotment he’d left when he’d won the paidhi’s place and had no more need for his birthright: she’d combined it with her savings from her teaching job, and lent his family-bound and utterly respectable brother the funds to start a medical practice on the north shore.
Toby had the thoroughly ordinary and prosperous life their mother had wanted for herself or her children, with the appropriately adorable and available grandchildren. She was happy. Bren didn’t write her with things like, Hello, Mother, someone tried to shoot me in my bed. Hello, Mother, they won’t let me fly out of here. It was always, Hello, Mother, things are fine. How are you? They keep me busy. It’s very interesting. I wish I could say more than that…
“Not that coat,” Banichi said, as he took his plain one from the armoire. Banichi reached past him, and took the audience coat from the hanger.
“For the space council?” he protested, but he knew, he knew, then, without Banichi saying a word, that Tabini had called him.
“The council’s been postponed.” Banichi shook the coat out and held it for him, preempting the new servants’ offices. “The ratios in the slosh baffles will have to wait at least a few days.”
He slipped his arms into the coat, flipped his braid over the collar and settled it on with a deep breath. The weight wasn’t uncomfortable this crisp morning.
“So what does Tabini want?” he muttered. But both the servants were in the room, and he didn’t expect Banichi to answer. Jago hadn’t been there when he waked. Just Tano and his glum partner, bringing in his breakfast. He hadn’t had enough sleep, for two nights now. His eyes stung with exhaustion. And he had to look presentable and have his wits about him.
“Tabini is concerned,” Banichi said. “Hence the postponement. He wishes you to travel to the country this afternoon. A security team is going over the premises.”
“What, at the estate?”
“Stone by stone. Tano and Algini will pack for you, if necessary.”
What could he ask, when he knew Banichi wouldn’t answer—couldn’t answer a question Tabini hadn’t authorized him to answer? He took a deep breath, adjusted his collar, and looked in the mirror. His eyes showed the want of sleep—showed a modicum of panic, truth be known, because the decision not to call Mospheira was fast becoming an irrevocable one, with decreasing opportunities to change his mind on that score without making a major, noisy opposition to people whose polite maneuvering—if that was what he perceived around him—might not be profitable to challenge.
Maybe it was paralysis of will. Maybe it was instinct saying Be still—don’t defy the only friend humanity has on this planet.
Paidhiin are expendable. Mospheira isn’t. We can’t stand against the whole world. This time they have aircraft. And radar. And all the technological resources.
They’re very close to not needing us any more.
In the room behind him the door opened and Jago came in, he assumed to supervise the two servants, whose words to him had consisted in controversies like: “Preserves, nadi?” and “Sugar in the tea?”
Moni and Taigi had known answers like that without asking him at every turn. He missed them already. He feared they wouldn’t be back, that they’d already been reassigned—he hoped to a stable, influential, thoroughly normal atevi. He hoped they weren’t in the hands of the police, undergoing close questions about him, and humans in general.
Banichi opened the door a second time, for them to leave for the audience, and he went out with Banichi, feeling more like a prisoner than the object of so much official concern.
“Aiji-ma.” Bren made the courteous bow, hands on knees. Tabini was in shirt and trousers, not yet at his formal best, sitting in the sunlight in front of the open doors—Tabini’s doors, high in the great mass of the Bu-javid, faced not the garden, but the open sky, the descending terraces of the ancient walls, and the City that was the fortress’ skirt, a geometry of tile roofs, hazed and softened by the morning mist to faintest reds, roofs auspiciously aligned in their relationship to each other and in the city’s accommodation to the river. Beyond that, the Bergid range, riding above a haze of distance, far across the plains—a glorious view, a cool, breathless dawn.
The table was set in the light, half onto the balcony, against that prospect. And Tabini was having breakfast.
Tabini made a hand-sign to his servants, who instantly procured two more cups, and drew out from the table the two other chairs.
So they were completely informal. He and Banichi sat down at the offered places, with the Bergid range a misty blue and the City spread out in faint tile reds below the balcony railing.
“I trust there’s been no repetition of the incident,” Tabini said.
“No, aiji-ma,” Banichi answered, adding sugar.
“I’m very distressed by this incident,” Tabini said. A sip of tea. “Distressed also that you should be the object of public speculation, Bren-paidhi. I was obliged to take a position. I could not let that pass.—Has anyone approached you in the meetings?”
“No,” Bren said. “But I do fear I was less than observant yesterday. I’m not used to this idea.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Disturbed.” He wasn’t sure, himself, what he felt. “Disturbed that I’ve been the cause of so much disarrangement, when I’m here for your convenience.”
‘That’s the politic answer.“
“—And I’m very angry, aiji-ma.”
“Angry?”
“That I can’t go where I like and do what I like.”
“But can the paidhi ever do that? You never go to the City without an escort. You don’t travel, you don’t hold entertainments, which, surely, accounts for what Banichi would counsel you as habits of the greatest hazard.”
“This is my home, aiji-ma. I’m not accustomed to slinking past my own doors or wondering if some poor servant’s going to walk through the door on my old key… I do hope someone’s warned them.”
“Someone has,” Banichi said.
“I worry,” he said, across the teacup. “Forgive me, aiji-ma.”
“No, no, no, I did ask. These are legitimate concerns and legitimate complaints. And no need for you to suffer them. I think it would be a good thing for you to go to Malguri for a little while.”
“Malguri?” That was the lake estate, at Lake Maidingi—Tabini’s retreat in early autumn, when the legislature was out of session, when he was regularly on vacation himself. He had never been so far into the interior of the continent. When he thought of it—no human had. “Are you going, aiji-ma?”
“No.” Tabini’s cup was empty. A servant poured another. Tabini studiously dropped in two sugar lumps and stirred. “My grandmother is in residence. You’ve not encountered her, personally, have you? I don’t recall you’ve had that adventure.”
“No.” He held the prospect of the aiji-dowager more unnerving than assassins. Ilisidi hadn’t won election in the successions. Thank God. “Aren’t you—forgive me—sending me to a zone of somewhat more hazard?”
Tabini laughed, a wrinkling of his nose. “She does enjoy an argument. But she’s quite retiring now. She says she’s dying.”
“She’s said so for five years,” Banichi muttered. “Aiji-ma.”
“You’ll do fine,” Tabini said. “You’re a diplomat. You can deal with it.”
“I could just as easily go to Mospheira and absent myself from the situation, if that’s what’s useful. A great deal more useful, actually, to me. There’s a load of personal business I’ve had waiting. My mother has a cabin on the north coast…”
Tabini’s yellow stare was completely void, completely implacable. “But I can’t guarantee her security. I’d be extremely remiss to bring danger on your relatives.”
“No ateva can get onto Mospheira without a visa.”
“An old man in a rowboat can get onto Mospheira,” Banichi muttered. “And ask me if I could find your mother’s cabin.”
The old man in a rowboat would not get onto Mospheira unnoticed. He was willing to challenge Banichi on that. But he wasn’t willing to own that fact to Tabini or Banichi for free.
“You’ll be far better off,” Banichi said, “at Malguri.”
“A fool tried my bedroom door! For all I know it was my next door neighbor coming home drunk through the garden, probably terrified he could be named an attempted assassin, and now we have wires on my doors!” One didn’t shout in Tabini’s presence. And Tabini had supported Banichi in the matter of the wires. He remembered his place and hid his consternation behind his teacup.
Tabini sipped his own and set the cup down as Banichi set his aside. “Still,” Tabini said. “The investigation is making progress which doesn’t need your help. Rely on my judgment in this. Have I ever done anything to your harm?”
“No, aiji-ma.”
Tabini rose and reached out his hand, not an atevi custom. Tabini had done it the first time ever they met, and at rare moments since. He stood up and took it, and shook it solemnly.
“I hold you as a major asset to my administration,” Tabini said. “Please believe that what I do is out of that estimation, even this exile.”
“What have I done?” he asked, his hand still prisoner in Tabini’s larger one. “Have I, personally, done something I should have done differently? How can I do better, if no one advises me?”
“We’re pursuing the investigation,” Tabini said quietly. “My private plane is fueling at this moment. Please don’t cross my grandmother.”
“How can I escape it? I don’t know what I did to bring this about, Tabini-aiji. How can I behave any more wisely than I have?”
A pressure of Tabini’s fingers, and a release of his hand. “Did one say it was your fault, Bren-paidhi? Give my respects to my grandmother.”
“Aiji-ma.” Surrender was all Tabini left him. He only dared the most indirect rebellion. “May I have my mail routed there?”
“There should be no difficulty,” Banichi said, “if it’s sent through the security office.”
“We don’t want to announce your destination,” Tabini said. “But, yes, security does have to know. Take care. Take every precaution. You’ll go straight to the airport. Is it taken care of, Banichi?”
“No difficulty,” Banichi said. What ‘it’ was, Bren had no idea. But there was nothing left him but to take his formal leave.
‘Straight to the airport,’ meant exactly that, evidently, straight downstairs, in the Bu-javid, to the lowest, inner level, where a rail station connected with the rail systems all over the continent.
It was a well-securitied place, this station deep in the Bu-javid’s heart, a station which only the mai’aijiin and the aiji himself and his staff might use—there was another for common traffic, a little down the hill.
Guards were everywhere, nothing unusual in any time he’d been down here. He supposed they maintained a constant watch over the tracks and the cars that rested here—the authorities in charge could have no idea when someone might take the notion to use them, or when someone else might take the notion to compromise them.
What looked like a freight car was waiting. The inbound tram would sweep it up on its way below—and it would travel looking exactly like a freight car, mixed in with the ordinary traffic, down to its painted and, one understood, constantly changed, numbers.
It was Tabini’s—cushioned luxury inside, a council-room on wheels. That was where Banichi took him.
“Someone has checked it out,” he said to Banichi. He’d used this particular car himself—but only once annually on his own business, on his regular departure to the airport, and never when there was any active feud in question. The whole proceedings had a surreal feeling.
“Destined for the airport,” Banichi said, checking papers, “no question. Don’t be nervous, nadi Bren. I assure you we won’t misplace you with the luggage.”
Banichi was joking with him. He was scared. He’d been nervous walking down here, was nervous on the platform, but he walked to the back of the windowless car and sat down on the soft cushions of a chair, unable to see anything but the luxury around him, and a single televised image of the stationside with its hurrying workers. He was overwhelmed with the feeling of being swallowed alive, swept away to where no one human would ever hear of him. He hadn’t advised anyone where he was going, he hadn’t gotten off that phone call to Hanks or a letter home—he had no absolute confidence now that Banichi would deliver it if he wrote it this instant and entrusted it to him to take outside.
“Are you going with me?” he asked Banichi.
“Of course.” Banichi was standing, looking at the monitor. “Ah. There she is.”
A cart had appeared from a lift, a cart piled high with white plastic boxes. Jago was behind it, pushing it toward the car. It arrived, real and stuck on the uneven threshold, and Jago shoved and swore as Banichi moved to lend a hand. Bren got up to offer his efforts, but at that moment it came across, as Tano turned up, shoving from the other side, bound inside, too.
The cart and the baggage had to mass everything he had had in the apartment, Bren thought in dismay, unless three-quarters of that was Banichi’s and Jago’s luggage. They didn’t take the luggage from the cart: they secured the whole cart against the forward wall, with webbing belts.
Protests did no good. Questions at this point only annoyed those trying to launch them with critical things they needed. Bren sat down and stayed still while Banichi and Jago went outside, never entirely leaving the threshold, and signed something or talked with other guards.
In a little while, they both came back into the car, saying that the train was on its way, and would couple them on in a few minutes. Tano meanwhile offered him a soft; drink, which he took listlessly, and Algini arrived with a final paper for Banichi to sign.
What? Bren asked himself. Concerning what? His commitment to Malguri, might it be?
To the aiji-dowager’s prison, where she was dying—this notorious, bitter woman, twice passed over for aiji.
One wondered if she had had a choice in lodgings, or whether the rumors about her were true… that, having offended Tabini, she had very little choice left.
The jet made a quick rise above the urban sprawl of Shejidan—one could pick out the three or four major central buildings among the tiled roofs, the public Registry, the Agricultural Association, the long complex of Shejidan Steel, the spire of Western Mining and Industry, the administrative offices of Patanadi Aerospace. A final turn onto their course swept the Bu-javid past the aircraft’s wing-tip, a sweep of fortified hill, interlocked squares of terraces and gardens—Bren imagined he could see the very court where he had lived… and wondered in a moment of panic if he would ever see his apartment again.
They reached cruising altitude—above the likely capability of random private operators. A drink appeared. Tano’s efficiency. Tano’s proper concern. Bren sulked, not wanting to like Tano, who’d replaced the servants he very much liked, who had had their jobs with him since he’d taken up residence in Shejidan, and who probably had been transferred by a faceless bureaucracy without so much as an explanation. It wasn’t fair to them. It wasn’t fair to him. He liked them, even if they probably wouldn’t understand that idea. He was used to them and they were gone.
But sulking at Tano and Algini wasn’t a fair treatment of the new servants, either: he knew it and, in proper atevi courtesy, tried not to show his resentment toward them, or his feelings at all, toward two strangers. He sat back instead with as placid a face as he could manage and watched the land and the clouds pass under the wing, wishing he was flying instead toward Mospheira, and safety.
And wishing Banichi and Jago were culturally or biologically wired to understand the word ‘friend’ or ‘ally’ the way he wanted to mean it. That, too. But that was as likely as his walking the Mospheira straits barefoot.
His stomach was upset. He was all but convinced now that he had made a very serious mistake in not calling Deana Hanks directly after the incident, while the attempt on his bedroom was still a matter of hot pursuit, and before Banichi and Jago might have received specific orders to prevent him calling.
But he hadn’t even thought of it then—he couldn’t remember what he had been thinking, and decided he must have gone into mental shock, trying first to dismiss the whole matter and to look brave in front of Banichi; then he’d launched himself into ‘handling it,’ even to a fear of Hanks’ seizing control over the situation—meaning he was losing his grip on matters, and knew it, and was still denying things were out of control.
Now he was well past the end of his options for action, so far as he could see, unless he wanted to contemplate outright rebellion against Tabini’s invitation to an estate hours away from the City—unless he was willing to break away in that remote airport screaming kidnap and murder, and appealing to the casual citizen for rescue from the aiji.
Foolish notion. Foolish as the notion of refusing Tabini in the invitation, under the terms he had had—and now that he began to think about phones and the lake estate, and getting any call out to Mospheira, from where he was going—the request to transfer a call to the Mospheira phone system would have to go back through the Bu-javid for authorization, so it was the same damned thing.
Eventually his office on Mospheira would wonder why he hadn’t called… in, say, a week or two of silence. It wasn’t unusual, that lapse of time between his calls and consultations. And, after that two weeks of silence, his office might be worried enough to think about contacting Foreign Affairs, over them, who would tell them to wait while they went through channels.
In another week, Foreign Affairs on Mospheira might have exhausted the approved channels it had at its disposal, and decided to send a memo to the President, who might, might, after consulting the Departments in Council, make personal inquiries of his own and finally lay the inquiry on Tabini’s doorstep.
Count it the better part of a month before Mospheira decided for certain that Shejidan had somehow misplaced the paidhi.
Disturbing, to discover that individual atevi he had personally thought he understood and an atevi society he had thought he intellectually understood suddenly weren’t acting in any predictable way. He felt it as an offense to his pride that he found nothing now wiser or more resourceful to do than to pretend he was utterly naive and that he wasn’t actually being kidnapped across the country—where, face it, he could disappear for good and all. Nobody from Mospheira, not even Hanks, was going to fracture the Treaty looking for a paidhi who just might have made some unforgivable mistake.
Hell, no, they wouldn’t demand him back. They’d just send a new one, with as good a briefing as they could manage and instructions to pull in a bit and not to be so stupid.
He’d trusted so implicitly… never expected Tabini to be other than a hundred percent for atevi and his own personal interests, but he’d always believed he knew what those interests were. Tabini hadn’t resisted his suggestions: not in the rail system, not the space program, not medical research, not the computerization of the supply system. Tabini wasn’t opposed to anything he’d put forward, or, for God’s sake, Tabini could have said something, and they could have talked about it—but, no, Tabini had listened with intelligent interest, asking lively questions—Tabini’s predecessors had all listened to reason, and invested themselves to the hilt in the interlocking of ecology and technological advance, a concept that atevi were quick to understand.
Reciprocally, there’d never been anything an aiji of Tabini’s house had asked that humans hadn’t done, or given, or tried to comply with, since the War of the Landing itself, right down to his current paper regarding processed meat, which tried… tried to explain to Mospheira that commercialization of meat production was deeply offensive to Ragi, no matter that Nisebi saw nothing wrong with it and were willing to sell. That cultural adaptation went both ways, and Mospheira ought to rely on the sea, and fish, which had no season, and thereby show their hosts on the planet that they had made an effort to change themselves to conform to atevi sensibilities, the way atevi had changed their behaviors toward humans…
Sometimes his job seemed like rolling the proverbial boulder uphill. Just not losing ground seemed hard.
But atevi were on the very threshold of manned space-flight. They had satellite communications. They had a reliable light launch system. They were on the verge of developing the materials that, with human advice, could leapfrog them past the steps humans had taken getting down here, right to powered descent, interlinked maneuvering—terms he was having to learn, concepts that he was studying up on during his so-called fall vacations, cramming into his head the details behind the next policy paper he might give—that he ached to give—some time in the next five years, granted the intermediate heavy-lift rocket was going to work.
Not even that they absolutely needed to take that step; but the office on Mospheira said stall, let atevi develop the intermediate lift capacity. The quality in the synthetic materials wasn’t there yet, and the chemical rocket lifter and the early manned experience would give atevi the experience and the political and emotional investment in space—atevi were much on heroes. It was a cultural decision, a scientific decision… it disappointed hell out of him, because he wanted to be the paidhi that put them a hundred percent into the business of space, and he wanted it while he was young enough to go up himself. That was his secret, personal dream, that if atevi were going to trust any human to go, they might trust the paidhi, and he wanted to be that person, and steer the attitudes if not the spacecraft—
That was the dream he had. The nightmare was less specific, only the apprehension which, long before the assassin tried his bedroom, he had been trying to communicate to Hanks and the rest of the office, that you couldn’t go on giving atevi bits and pieces of tech without accelerating the randomness in the process, meaning that atevi minds didn’t work the same as human minds, and that atevi cultural bias was going to view certain technological advances differently than humans did, and atevi inventiveness was going to put more and more items together into their own inventions, about which they didn’t consult the Mospheira Technology Commission.
Thank God so far the independent inventions hadn’t been ICBMs or atomic bombs. But he knew, as every paidhi before him had known, that, if someday the Treaty broke down, he’d be the first to know.
He watched the land pass under the wings, the farmland, the free ranges and forests… eventually a tide of cloud rolled under them, with the black, snow-capped peaks of the Bergid thrusting up like steep-sided islands—fascinating, to see the edge of his visible world go past, and exciting, in a disturbing way, to be seeing country humans never saw. Everything was new, hitherto forbidden.
But after a time, cloud closed in around the peaks, and while the sky remained blue, there was a sheet of wrinkled white under them, hiding the land.
Disappointing. This sort of thing set in over the strait and didn’t let up. Even the planet kept atevi secrets.
Which didn’t mean there wasn’t useful work he could do while he was being kidnapped. He’d rescued his computer from baggage. He set it up on the table and brought up his notes for the end of the quarter development conference, his arguments for creating a computer science center in Costain Bay, modem-linked to atevi students in Wingin.
If there is, he wrote now, one area of technological difficulty, it is ironically in mathematics, in which the different uses of mathematics by our separate cultures and languages have led to different expressions of mathematics at an operational level. While these different perceptions of math are a rich field for speculation by mathematicians and computer designers for the future, for the present, these foundational differences in concept remain an obstacle particularly to the beginning atevi computer student attempting to comprehend a logical machine which ignores certain of his expectations, which ignores the operational conveniences and shortcuts of his language, and which proceeds by a logical architecture adapted over centuries to the human mind.
The development of a computer architecture in agreement with atevi perceptions is both inevitable and desirable for the economic progress of the atevi associations, particularly in materials development, but the paidhi respectfully urges that many useful and lifesaving technologies are being delayed in development because of this difficulty.
While the paidhi recognizes the valid and true reasons for maintaining the doctrine of Separation in the Treaty of Mospheira, it seems that computer technology itself can become the means to link instructors on Mospheira with students on the mainland, so that atevi students may have the direct benefit of study with human masters of design and theory, to bring computers with all their advantages into common usage—while encouraging atevi students to devise interfacing software which may take advantage of atevi mathematical skills.
Such a study center may serve as a model program, moreover, for finding other areas in which atevi may, without harm to either culture, interface directly in the territory of empirical science and form working agreements which seem appropriate to both cultures.
I call to mind the specific language of the Treaty of Mospheira which calls for experimental contacts in science leading to agreements of definition and unequivocal terminology, with a view to future intercultural cooperations under the appointment of appropriate atevi officials.
This seems to me one of those areas in which cooperation could work to the benefit of atevi, widening inter-cultural understanding, fulfilling all provisions of the Treaty wherein…
Banichi dropped into the seat opposite.
“You’re so busy,” Banichi said.
“I was writing my text for the quarterly conference. I trust I’ll get back for it.”
“Your safety is of more concern. But if it should be that you can’t attend, certainly I’ll see that it reaches the conference.”
“There surely can’t be a question. The conference is four weeks away.”
“Truthfully, I don’t know.”
Don’t know, he thought in alarm. Don’t know— But Jago set a drink in front of Banichi, and sat down, herself, in the other seat facing his. “It’s a pleasant place,” Jago said. “You’ve never been there.”
“No. To Taiben. Not to Malguri.” Politeness, he could do on autopilot, while he was frantically trying to frame a euphemism for kidnapping. He saved his work down hard and folded up the computer. “But four weeks, nadi! I can’t do my work from halfway across the country.”
“It’s an opportunity,” Banichi said. “No human before you, nand’ paidhi, has made this trip. Don’t be so glum.”
“What of the aiji-dowager? Sharing accommodations with a member of the aiji’s family, with a woman I don’t know—has anyone told her I’m coming?”
Banichi drew back his lip from his teeth, a fierce amusement.
“You’re resourceful, paidhi-ji. Surely you can deal with her. She’d have been the aiji, for your predecessor, at least…”
“Except for the hasdrawad,” Jago said.
The hasdrawad had chosen her son, whom she’d wished aloud she’d aborted when she’d had the chance, as the story ran; then, adding insult to injury, the hasdrawad had passed over her a second time when her son was assassinated—ignoring her claims to the succession, in favor of her grandson, Tabini.
“She favors Tabini,” Banichi said. “Contrary to reports. She always has favored him.”
She’d fallen, riding in the hunt, at seventy-two. Broke her shoulder, broke her arm and four ribs, got up and rode through the rest of the course, until they’d caught the quarry.
Then she’d attacked the course manager with her riding crop, for the lost hide on her precious, high-bred Matiawa jumper—as the story went.
“Her reputation,” Bren said judiciously, “is not for patience.”
“Oh, very much it is,” Jago said “When she wants something that needs it.”
“Is it true, what people say about the succession?”
“That Tabini-aiji’s father died by assassination?” Banichi said. “Yes.”
“They never found the agency,” said Jago. “And very competent people searched.”
“Not a clue to be had—except in the dowager’s satisfaction,” said Banichi. “Which isn’t admissible evidence.—She wasn’t, of course, the only one so motivated. But her personal guard is no slight matter.”
“Licensed?” Bren asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Banichi.
“Most of her guard are old,” Jago said. “A bit behind the times.”
“Now,” said Banichi. “But I wouldn’t say they were, then.”
“And this is where Tabini-aiji sends me for safety?”
“The aiji-dowager does favor him,” Jago said. “Well, in most regards,” Banichi said.
The plane thumped onto the runway in a blinding downpour—other planes had been diverted out to the lowland airport. Banichi said so. But the aiji’s crew went right on through. Engines reversed thrust, brakes screeched on wet pavement, the plane veered into a controlled right turn and blazed a fast track to the small terminal.
Bren stared glumly at the weather, at guards and trucks hurrying out to the aiji’s plane—a more elaborate reception than he got at Mospheira. But, then, the people meeting him on Mospheira didn’t carry guns.
He unbelted, got up with his computer, and followed Banichi to the door as the pilot opened it, with Jago close in attendance.
Rain whipped into their faces, a mist thick enough to breathe. Rain spattered the pavement of the runway. It veiled the scenery in gray, so the lake visible from the airport melded seamlessly with the sky, and the hills around it were banks of shadow against that sky.
Malguri, he thought, must be somewhere on those high shores, overlooking the lake.
“They’re sending a car,” Jago yelled into their ears—had pocket-com in hand, as a crew began pulling up a movable stairs for their descent. The device had no rain canopy such as Shejidan airport afforded. One supposed they were expected to make a dash for it, down the steps.
One wondered whether, if Tabini had been on the plane, they would have found such a canopy. Or parked the car closer.
Thunder rumbled, and lightnings glared off the wet concrete.
“Auspicious,” Bren muttered, far from anxious to venture metal steps in the frequent lightning. But the stairs thumped against the side of the plane, rocking it; rain gusted in, cold as autumn.
The raincoated attendants yelled and beckoned them to come ahead. Banichi went. Hell, he thought, and ducked through the door and hurried after, clinging to the cold, slick metal hand-grip, flinching as lightning lit the ladder and the pavement and thunder cracked overhead. Light up like a candle, they would. He reached the bottom and left the metal ladder with relief, spied Banichi at the open door of the transport van, and, trying not to slip on the pavement, ran for it, with Jago rattling her way down the steps behind him.
He reached shelter. Jago arrived, close behind him, flung herself into the seat, rain glistening on her black skin, as the van driver got out to close the van door and stopped to stare, wide-eyed, while the cold mist gusted in. Evidently no one had told the driver a human was in the party.
“Shut the door!” Banichi said, and the drenched driver slammed it and made haste to climb in his seat in front.
“Algini and Tano,” Bren protested, leaning to glance back at the plane, through a rain-spotted window, as the driver’s door shut.
“They’ll bring the baggage,” Jago said. “In another car.”
In case of bombs, Bren supposed glumly, as the driver took off the brake, threw the van into gear and launched into what must be the standard verbal courtesies, gamely wishing them Welcome to Maidingi, Jewel of the Mountains, a practiced patter that went on into the felicitous positioning of the mountains, cosmically harmonious and fortunate, and the ‘grateful influences’ of the mountain springs above the Lake, the Mirror of Heaven.
The Mirror of Heaven reflected nothing, at the moment. Rain shattered the images of drowned buildings and gray void beyond the glass as the car sped along—Bren had expected them to pull up at the terminal and catch a train to Malguri, but the van had whisked them right past the terminal entrances, one and the next and the next, as they headed for the wire fence and the lake.
“Where are we going?” Bren asked, casting anxious glances at Banichi—surely, he thought, Banichi would protest this strange detour; possibly they were all in danger and he should keep his mouth shut.
“This is scheduled, nadi,” Jago said, laying a hand on his knee. “Everything as arranged.”
“What’s arranged?” He was short of temper. He divided his attention nervously between the oncoming fence and Jago’s placid face, then paid it all to the fence, as collision seemed imminent.
But the driver swung toward a gate, which opened automatically in front of them. And Jago hadn’t answered him. “Where are we going?”
“Be calm,” Banichi said quietly. “Please take my assurances, nand’ paidhi, everything is quite in order.”
“Aren’t we taking the rail?”
“There’s no rail to Malguri,” Banichi said. “One goes by car.”
One wasn’t supposed to go by car. There wasn’t supposed to be a car link between an airport and any end destination, no matter how rich one was: the nearest rail link was supposed to be the rule… and was there no rail at all between Malguri and the airport?
The designation on the van, written in large letters right above the driver, was, Maidingi Air… and did an airline vehicle regularly serve private destinations? They weren’t licensed to be a ground transport.
Maybe it was a special authorization security had. But was it that dire an emergency?
“Are we afraid to hire a bus?” he asked, and indicated, right in front of them, and clear to be read, Maidingi Air.
“There’s no bus to Malguri.”
“It’s the law. There’s supposed to be a hired bus…”
The van caught an abrupt turn and threw him against Jago’s arm.
Jago patted his leg, and he folded his arms and sank back to reassemble the pieces of his dignity and his self-possession, while the thunder rumbled.
There were places where the local tech hadn’t caught up to the regulations. There were places with economic exceptions.
But the aiji’s own holding damned sure wasn’t one. Tabini couldn’t hire a bus? Or the bus to Maidingi Township didn’t serve Malguri, when it was right next door? The aiji was supposed to set an example of environmental compliance. Kabiu. Good precedent. Correct behavior. Appearances.
Where in hell was the estate, that the town bus couldn’t get them there?
Gravel scattered under the tires, and the van jolted onto a road in which gray void was on one side and a mountain on the other. The road ceased to be Improved in any sort, and one recalled the vetoes of one’s predecessor, overriding the access highway bill from the high villages—and one’s own assertion to the aiji, mildly tipsy, that such would ‘undermine the rail priority,’ that the appeal from the mountain villages was a smoke screen—the aiji had taken to that expression with delight, once he understood it—covering provincial ambitions and leading provincial aijiin to sedition.
It was the identical argument his predecessors had used—he had been queasy about the paranoid logic it encouraged in Tabini, from an ethical standpoint—but Tabini had seemed to accept it as perfectly reasonable atevi logic, and the paidhi didn’t vary from his predecessors’ arguments for mere human reasons: the paidhi adhered to what had worked with past administrations, argued by atevi logic, unless he had very carefully worked out a change and passed it by council.
And this road was evidently the by-product of that logic, founded on his predecessor’s vetoes over the highway system, and sustained on his own.
No bus. No pavement.
He skiied, on his vacations. He was a passionate skiier. He had been on interesting roads, up Mt. Allan Thomas, on Mospheira.
Paved roads. Thank you. Going down a mountain on skis was one thing.
This…
… vehicle was not designed to climb. It slipped on the turns.
He clutched his computer to keep it from sliding to the rear of the van. He thought he might change his recommendation on the non-township roads proposal.
The van ground its way for what felt like well over an hour up rainwashed gravel, whined and slipped and struggled around an uphill serpentine curve with a spit of gravel from beneath the wheels at the last. Gray space and driving rain filled the windows on every side but one. The van lurched upward into void, tilted, and Bren held to the seat white-knuckled with his free hand, Jago swaying into him, with what might be Lake Maidingi or empty air beside and below and in front of him—he didn’t want to look. He didn’t want to imagine.
How long would it take searchers to find them if a tire slipped off the rain-washed edge, and they plunged off into the lake?
Another jolt—a slip. “God!”
The driver gave him a startled look in the rearview mirror that took his attention from the wheel. Bren clamped his mouth shut after that. But Banichi and the driver started a conversation—during which the driver kept looking to the back seat to make his points.
“Please, nadi!” Bren said.
Gravel went over the edge. Their right tires bridged a washout and narrowly missed the rim. He was certain of it.
Then, around that curve, curtained in rain, a mass of shadow towered on the gray brink. Stone towers and spires rose there, in a rain-crystaled spatter on the glass—he couldn’t tell where the road was, now, except the rattle of gravel under the tires assured him they were still on it.
“Malguri,” Banichi said in his deep tones.
“A fortress of the forty-third century,” the driver said, “the architectural jewel of this province… maintained under the provincial trust, an autumn residence of the aiji-major, currently of the aiji-dowager…”
He sat and hugged his computer case and watched as the towers grew larger in the windshield, as they gathered detail out of the universal gray of the mist, the lake below, and the clouds… then acquired colors, the dark gray of stone and the rain-soaked drip of heraldic banners from the uppermost tiers.
He was used to atevi architecture, was accustomed to antiquity in the City, and found it in the customs of the aiji’s hall, but this place, bristling with turrets and castellations, was not the style of the Landing, like so much of Shejidan. The date the driver had given them was from long, long before humans had ever come into the system, from long before there had ever been a strayed ship or a space station—before—he made a fast re-reckoning—there’d been a human in space at all.
The wipers cleared the scene in alternate blinks, a world creating and recreating itself out of primeval deluge as wooden gates yawned for them and let them inside, onto a stone-paved road that curved beneath a broad, sheltering portico, where the rain only scarcely reached.
The van stopped. Banichi got up and opened the door from inside, on a darkly shadowed porch and open wooden doors. A handful of atevi hastened out of that warm, gold-lit darkness to meet the van—in casual dress, all of them, which fit what Bren knew of country life. Except the boots, it was attire appropriate to a hunting lodge like Taiben, which Bren supposed that Malguri was, in fact, considering the wild land around it… probably very good hunting, when some more energetic member of the aiji’s family was in residence.
He followed Banichi out of the van, computer in hand, reckoning, now that he saw the style of the place, that there might even be formal hunts while they were here, if the staff lent itself to entertaining the guests. Banichi and Jago would certainly be keen for it. He wouldn’t: tramping through dusty weeds, getting sunburn, and staring at his supper down a gun barrel was not his favorite sport. He was concerned for his computer in the cold mist that was whirling about them, sucked under the portico by the drafts; and he was more than anxious to conclude the welcome and get in out of the wet.
“The paidhi,” Banichi was saying, and Banichi laid a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Bren Cameron, the close associate of Tabini-aiji, the very person, give him good welcome…” It was the standard formality. Bren bowed, murmured, “Honor and thanks,” in reply to the staff’s courtesies, while Jago banged the van door shut and dismissed the driver. The van whined off into the storm and somehow the whole welcoming party advanced, by degrees and inquiries into the aiji’s health and well-being, across the cobbles toward the main doors—thank God, Bren thought. A backward glance in response to a question spotted an antique cannon in the paved courtyard, through veils of rain; a forward glance met gold, muted light coming through the doors on a wave of warmer air.
It was a stone-paved hall, with timbered and plastered walls. The banners that hung from the time-blackened rafters looked centuries old themselves, with their muted colors and complex serpentine patterns of ancient writing that, no, indeed, the paidhi didn’t know. He recognized Tabini’s colors, and the centermost banner had Tabini’s personal emblem, the baji on a red circle, on a blue field. There were weapons on every wall—swords and weapons the names of which he didn’t know, but he’d seen them in the lodge at Taiben, with similar hides, spotted and shaded, pinned on walls, thrown over chairs that owed nothing to human designs.
Banichi seized him by the shoulder again and made further introductions, this time to two servants, both male, introductions which required another round of bows.
“They’ll take you to your rooms,” Banichi said. “They’ll be assigned to you.”
He’d already let the names slip his attention. But, was on his tongue to say,—but what about Algini and Tano, on their way from the airport? Why someone else?
“Excuse me,” he said, and bowed in embarrassment. “I lost the names.” The paidhi was a diplomat, the paidhi didn’t let names get away like that, even names of servants—he wasn’t focussing, even yet, asking himself whether these servants were ones Banichi knew, or Jago did, or how they could trust these people.
But they bowed and patiently and courteously said their names again: Maigi and Djinana, honored to be at his service.
Dreadful beginning, with atevi trying to be polite to him. He was being pushed and shoved into places he didn’t know in a culture already full of strangenesses, and he was overwhelmed with the place.
“Go with them,” Banichi said gently, and added something in one of the regional languages, to which the servants nodded and bowed, regarding him with faces as impassive as Banichi’s and Jago’s.
“Nand’ paidhi,” one said. Maigi. He had to get them straight.
Maigi and Djinana, he said over and over to himself, as he followed them across the hall, through the archway, and to the foot of bronze-banistered stone stairs, He realized of a sudden they had just passed out of the sight of Jago and Banichi, but Banichi had said go, Banichi evidently believed they were trustworthy. He had no wish to insult the servants twice by doubting them.
So it was up the stairs, into the upper floor of a strange house ruled by a stranger old woman. The servants he followed talked together in a language the paidhi didn’t know, and the place smelled of stone and antiquity. Plastering didn’t exist in these wooden-floored upper halls, which, he supposed, were for lesser guests. Pipes and wires ran across ceilings clearly ancient, and bare tungsten-based bulbs hung in brackets festooned by aged copper-centered insulated wire, covered with dust.
This is Tabini’s hospitality? he asked himself. This is how his grandmother lives?
He didn’t believe it. He was offended, outright offended, and somewhat hurt, that Tabini sent him to this dingy, depressing house, with out-of-date plumbing and God knew what kind of beds.
They were running out of hallway. Two huge doors closed off the end. More hiking, he supposed glumly, into some gloomy cubbyhole remote from the activity of the dowager and her staff.
It probably wasn’t Tabini’s fault. It might be the dowager had countermanded Tabini’s arrangements. Grandmother might not want a human in her house, and might lodge him under a stairs or in a storeroom somewhere. Banichi and Jago would object when they found out. Grandmother would take offense, Tabini would take offense…
The servants opened the doors, on carpet, a spacious sitting room and furniture… God, gilt, carved over every surface, carpets that weren’t, Bren suddenly realized, mill-produced. The soft, pale light came from a large, pointed-arched window with small rectangular panes, bordered in amber and blue panes—a beautiful frame on a gray, rain-spattered nothing.
“This is the paidhi’s reception room,” Maigi said, as Djinana opened another, side door and showed him into an equally ornate room with a blazing fireplace—illicit heating source, he said to himself in a remote, note-taking, area of his brain; but the forebrain was busy with other details, the heads and hides and weapons on the walls, the carved wooden furniture, the antique carpet with the baji-naji medallions endlessly repeated, identical windows in the next room, which, though smaller, was no less ornate.
“The private sitting room,” Maigi said, then flung open the doors on a windowless side room of the same style, with a long, polished wood table from end to end. “The dining room,” Maigi said, and went on to point out the hanging bell-pull that would summon them, “Like that in the sitting room,” Maigi said, and drew him back to be assured he saw it.
Bren drew a deep breath. Everywhere it was stone walls and polished wooden floors, and dim lights, and gilt… a museum tour, it began to be, with Maigi and Djinana pointing out particular record heads of species three of which they confessed to be extinct, and explaining certain furnishings of historical significance.
“Given by the aiji of Deinali province on the marriage of the fourth dynasty aiji’s heir to the heir of Deinali, which, however, was never consummated, due to the death of the aiji’s heir in a fall from the garden walk…”
What garden walk? he asked himself, determined, under the circustances, to avoid the fatal area himself.
It was the paranoia of the flight here working on his nerves. It must be.
Or it might be the glass eyes of dead animals staring at him, mute and helpless.
Maigi opened yet another door, on a bedroom far, far larger than any reasonable bedroom needed to be, with—Bren supposed at least it was a bed and not a couch—an affair on a dais, with spears upholding the curtains which mostly enfolded it, a bed smothered in skins of animals and set on a stonework dais. Maigi showed him another bellpull, and briskly led him on to yet—God!—a farther hall.
He followed, beginning to feel the entire matter of the paidhi’s accommodations ridiculously out of control. Maigi opened a side door to a stone-floored room with a hole in the floor, a silver basin, and a stack of linen towels. “The accommodation,” Maigi pronounced it, euphemismistically. “Please use the towels provided. Paper jams the plumbing.”
He supposed his consternation showed. Maigi took up a dipper from the polished silver cauldron, an ornate dipper, and poured it down the hole in the floor.
“Actually,” Djinana said, “there’s continual water action. The aiji Padigi had it installed in 4879. The dipper remains, for the towels, of course.”
It was genteel, it was elegant, it was… appalling, was the feeling he had about it. Atevi weren’t animals. He wasn’t. He couldn’t use this. There had to be something else, downstairs, perhaps; he’d find out, and walk that far.
Djinana opened a double door beyond the accommodation, which let into a bath, an immense stone tub, with pipes running across the floor. “Mind your step, nadi,” Djinana said. Clearly plumbing here was an afterthought, too, and the volume of water one used for a single bath had to be immense.
“Your own servants will light the fires for you each evening,” Djinana said, and demonstrated that there was running water, while he absorbed that small advisement that Aigini and Tano were not lost, his luggage might yet make it, and he might not be alone with Djinana and Maigi after all.
Meanwhile Maigi had opened up the boiler, which was mounted on the stone wall, and which had two pipes running into it from overhead, down the wall: the larger one had to be cold water entering the boiler and a hot water conduit carried it out and across to the tub; but he was puzzled by the second, thinner pipe—until he realized that small blue flame in the boiler compartment must be supplied by that smaller gauge pipe. Methane gas. An explosion waiting to happen. An asphyxiation, if the little flame went out and let gas accumulate in the bath.
My God, he thought, racking up violation after violation, several of them potentially lethal as the two servants led the way back through the accommodation and into the hall.
Had Tabini sent him here for safety? Now that he understood what some of these pipes and electric lines must be, he traced other after-thought installations in the ancient stonework, some of which he realized now were certainly carrying methane, throughout the apartments and elsewhere, others of which were an antique electric supply, a source of sparks.
The building was still standing. The wiring was very old. So were the pipes. Evidently the staff had been careful… thus far.
“We, of course, are at your service,” Maigi said as they walked. “Your own staff should be arriving soon. They’ll lodge in the servants’ quarters, too. One ring for them, for personal needs; two for us, for food, for adjustment in the accommodations. We serve Malguri itself, and of course, provide its hospitality in any special requirements the paidhi might have.”
Djinana led the way back to the sitting room—an expedition in itself—and taking a small leather-bound codex from a table, presented it to him along with a pen, “Please add your name to the distinguished guests,” Djinana requested of him, and, as he prepared to do so; “It would be a further distinction, nadi, if you’d sign in your own language. That’s never been, before.”
“Thank you,” he said, quite touched, actually, at the implication of genuine welcome in this shrine, and duly signed in atevi script and, with, ironically, less practice, in Mosphei’.
He heard thumping in the hall. He looked up.
“Doubtless your servants,” Maigi said, and a moment later saw Tano with two big boxes, headed in through the outer door, and, imperiling an antique table, through the reception room.
“Nand’ paidhi,” Tano said, out of breath, and rain-soaked, like the boxes. Djinana hastened to show Tano through into the bedroom, to save the furniture, Bren supposed—and hoped those boxes were his clothes, particularly his sweaters and middle-weight coat.
“Would the paidhi like tea?” Maigi asked, as a thump of the outer door announced some other arrival, probably Algini. A draft fluttered the fire in the fireplace, and immediately, true to his guess, Algini came through the sititing room, equally soaked, and managed to bow in transit, difficult with two huge boxes in his arms.
Everything he owned, he thought, remembering the pile of boxes they had loaded on the train—God, how long did they propose he stay here?
“Tea,” he recalled distractedly. “Yes—” He felt chilled in spite of the fire, having come, a few hours ago, from a much more southerly and coastal climate, and having suffered a long drive over a trying road. Hot tea appealed to him, and it came to him that, in the confusion, he hadn’t had breakfast, or lunch, except a few wafers on the plane. “Is there a cheese pie, do you think?” That was usually safe, whatever the season.
“Of course, nadi. Although I should remind the paidhi that dinner is only an hour away…”
The time zones, he realized. He’d never been far enough from Mospheira to meet one. But not only was the climate colder, the time zones had to be at least two hours advanced. He wasn’t sure how his stomach agreed with that sudden piece of information, or whether he could last an hour until supper, now that he was thinking about food.
Thunder rumbled, and lightning flashed, whiting out the windows. “No pie, then,” he said, and decided life was not necessarily fast-paced here: he might find diversion in a leisurely, lodge-style supper. “Just the tea, please.”
But he was thinking, hearing another furious spate of rain hit the windows, God, I understand why there’s a lake here.
Supper arrived, after the tea, elegantly served in the dining room. Definitely lodge-style cuisine, and he certainly had no complaint against the menu—the seasonal game, thank God, was different here in the highlands.
But it was a solitary supper—himself alone at the very long and silent table—at the endmost seat, so he could see the window in the sitting room, which he thought would be pleasant, but they were so high up, on the second floor, he had no view but the gray sky, which was darkening sullenly to dusk. Tano and Algini ate in their quarters, Maigi and Djinana served, and he hardly knew either set of servants well enough to make conversation. Attempts died in, Yes, nand’ paidhi, thank you, nand’ paidhi, the cook will be glad, nand’ paidhi.
Finally, though, during the second, post game-dish soup course, Jago came, leaned her arms on the back of the nearest of the ten chairs on either side of the table, and made idle chatter with him, how did he find the accommodations, how did he find the staff?
“Wonderful,” he said. “Though I haven’t seen a phone connection. Or the wires. Is there a portable I could borrow?”
“There’s one, I believe, in the security station. But it’s raining.”
Still.
“You mean the security station is outside.”
“I fear it is. And I really don’t think it prudent to call out, nadi Bren.”
“Why?” It came out angry, and he hadn’t meant that. Jago had instantly withdrawn her elbows from the chair back and stood up straight. “Forgive me, nadi,” he said more moderately. “But I do need to reach my office on some regular basis, I urgently need to have my mail. I do hope my mail is going to get up that difficult road.”
Jago heaved a sigh and set her hands on the chair back. “Nadi Bren,” she said patiently, “while I don’t think our moving you from the capital necessarily deceived anyone, it would hardly be wise to have you phoning out. They’ll expect decoys. Let them think our flight to Malguri was exactly that.”
“Then you know something about them.”
“No. Not actually.”
He was tired, he had had the self-restraint scared out of him, on the drive up, and no matter how much the atevi liked their courtesies and facades, he had felt the situation slipping farther and farther from his control for two days, now. He wanted something to be clear to him. He was ready to lose all patience.
Instead he said, mildly, “I know you’ve done your best. Probably you’d rather be elsewhere than here.”
Jago’s brow furrowed. “Have I given such an impression?”
God help him, he thought. “No, of course not. But I suppose you have other duties than me.”
“No.”
Jago had a habit of doing that to conversations, he decided, once you inquired about anything useful, anything you really wanted to know. He took a spoonful of soup, hoping Jago would find something to say.
She didn’t. She leaned on the chair back, evidently at her ease.
He took another spoonful, and a third, and still Jago leaned on the chair, evidently content to watch him, or guarding him, or something. Thunder was stiil rumbling outside.
“Are you going to stay at Malguri?” he asked.
“Most likely.”
“Do you expect whoever invaded my room can reach here, too?”
“Less likely.”
It went like that, by one syllable and two, and never much more, once he’d started asking questions.
“When do you think the rain will stop?” he asked her finally, only to make Jago carry the conversation for more than three beats.
“Tomorrow,” she said. And stopped.
“Jago, do you favor me? Or am I in your disfavor?”
“Of course not, nadi Bren.”
“Have I done something for Tabini to be put out with me?”
“Not that I know.”
“Are they sending my mail?”
“Banichi’s asking about that. It takes authorizations.”
“Whose?”
“We’re working on it.”
Thunder rolled above the fortress. He finished his supper, intermittent with question and answer with Jago, had a drink or two in which Jago did not share, and even wished, if, as Banichi had said, Jago found him in the least attractive, she would stay in his sitting room and at least make some polite pass at him, if it meant she initiated four consecutive sentences. He just wanted someone to talk to.
But Jago left, all business, seeming preoccupied. The servants cleared supper away in silence.
He cast about for what to do with himself, and thought about a resumption of his regular habits, watching the evening news… which, now that he thought about it, he had no television to receive.
He didn’t ask the servants about the matter. He opened cabinets and armoires, and finally made the entire circuit of the apartments, looking for nothing more basic now than a power tap.
Not one. Not a hint of accommodation for television or telephones.
Or computer recharges.
He thought about ringing the bell, rousing the servants and demanding an extension cord, at least, so he could use his almost depleted computer tonight, if they had to run the cord up from the kitchens or via an adapter, which had to exist in some electronics store in this benighted district, down from an electric light socket.
But Banichi hadn’t put in an appearance since they parted company downstairs, Jago had refused the request for a phone already, and after pacing the carpeted wooden floors awhile and investigating the small library for something to do, he went to bed in disgust—flung himself into the curtained bed among the skins of dead animals and discovered that one, there was no reading light, two, the lights were all controlled from a switch at the doorway; and, three, a dead and angry beast was staring straight at him, from the opposite wall.
It wasn’t me, he thought at it. It wasn’t my fault. I probably wasn’t born when you died.
My species probably hadn’t left the homeworld yet.
It’s not my fault, beast. We’re both stuck here.