The wind blew from the sea, out of the west, sweeping up to the heights of the balcony and stirring the white tablecloth with a briskness that made the steaming breakfast tea quite welcome. The view past the white-plastered balustrade was blue water, pale sky, and the famous cliffs of Elijiri, from which, the thought had crossed Bren Cameron's mind, wi'itikiin might just possibly launch themselves.
But no, the sea was surely too great a hazard for the small, elegant gliders.
"Eggs," lord Geigi urged with a wave of his fingers. It was a delicate preparation, a sort of crusted souffle, eggs of a species the cook swore were innocent of toxins for the human guest.
Bren trusted himself to his staff, Tano and Algini having made his sensitivities to certain native spices quite clear to the cook; and having made equally clear, he was sure, the consequence of such an accident to the reputation of lord Geigi, who had a personal stake in not poisoning him. He allowed the servant to pile on a second helping of the very excellent spiced dish. Rare that he found something he liked that he dared eat in quantity — it was a piece of intradepartmental wisdom that the way to survive atevi cuisine was to vary the intake and not allow the occasional trace of an objectionable substance to become three and four traces at the same meal — but Tano and Algini thought this dish should be perfectly safe.
Geigi was pleased, clearly, at his enthusiasm for the cuisine, pleased in the crisp, clean air of a seaside morning, pleased in the presence of an important guest. Geigi's appetite ran to another, far larger helping of the souffle. Black-skinned, golden-eyed, towering head and shoulders taller than any tall human, besides being gifted with an alkaloid-tolerant metabolism, Geigi, like any ateva of the mainland, viewed food as a central point of hospitality, the consumption of it a mark of confidence and assurance of honesty, understandable in a society in which assassins were an important guild, and a regular recourse in interpersonal and political disputes.
Such, as happened, were Tano and Algini, watching over Bren's shoulder, standing near this breakfast table on the balcony; such, Bren was very sure, were the pair who hovered on Geigi's side of the table, near the balustrade. Gesirimu, Tano had said, was the woman's name, and Casurni, her senior partner — the pair in a dark, fashionable cut of clothes perfectly in character for a lord's private security. And one assumed Tano knew. One assumed that, among the thousands of members of the Assassins' Guild, the highest did know each other by reputation and, more importantly, by man'chi — that word something like loyalty, that meant nothing to do with hire, or birth, or anything humans were equipped to understand.
But it wasn't necessary that humans understand the passions of atevi minds and souls — at least, it never had been necessary that humans understand, so long as all humans in the world — save one — occupied the island of Mospheira, which lay some distance across the haze of the blue and beautiful strait the other side of that balcony.
That was the state of atevi-human affairs under which Bren had begun his tenure in office not so many years ago. Translator, Foreign Affairs Field Officer, he was, in atevi terms, the paidhi-aiji, the only human permitted by the Treaty of Mospheira to set foot on the mainland.
He, Bren Cameron, descendant of spacefarers stranded for nearly two centuries on the earth of the atevi, was the one human alive who walked and lived among the atevi, and Bren, at twenty-seven, had it as his lifelong business and sacred trust to mediate the differences between atevi and humans.
Until last year that business had been much the same as that of his predecessors. Most of his days had been spent in the atevi capital of Shejidan, rendering the vocabulary of atevi documents into the one permitted human-atevi dictionary for the human University of Mospheira, for use in the training of other paidhiin. A years-long program from which the twenty percent who did go all the way through to the degree in Foreign Affairs disappeared into the bowels of the Foreign Office, all but the one scoring next highest marks: the paidhi-successor, the other tenured graduate of the program (and usually not a voice of any importance at all), who waited in the wings for the Field Officer to quit, die in office, or need a two week vacation. As all the others waited, in the order of their scores, as the paidhi's support staff in the Foreign Office. That was the program. That was one job the paidhi did. Train one successor and write dictionaries.
The other job was to serve as the conduit through which the Mospheiran State Department made a slow transfer of human technology into the atevi economy. The paidhi did have definite importance in that regard. And he served as his government's eyes and ears in the field. He reported what data he gathered; he took requests from the atevi government and relayed them; he handled customs questions, and the occasional legal tie-up or bureaucratic snag. Based on what information he passed through, the University of Mospheira and the Mospheiran State Department slowly made decisions about what technology to release — debated sometimes for years over the release of a word, let alone, say, microchips. The goal was to keep the technology compatible, to keep, say, the standards such that a grade of wire produced on the continent could be connected inside a toaster built on Mospheira with no thought of difficulty.
He'd never looked for things to change appreciably in his lifetime, not the toaster, not the society and not the level of technology. Steady, economically stable progress: that had been the design for the atevi-human future. Interlocked economies, meshing just like perfectly standardized nuts and bolts.
Now, just since last year, there was one more human on the mainland, one Jase Graham, born lightyears removed from the earth of the atevi, and certainly not a product of the University's Field Officer candidate program.
And Jase Graham's arrival was why he, Bren, was sitting on lord Geigi's balcony eating a souffle of spiced eggs and relying on two assassins' professional judgment that there was nothing by design or default harmful in the dish.
The situation and his job had changed radically overnight when the starship had turned up, the same starship that, two hundred years ago, had left his ancestors to fend for themselves among the atevi. The atevi government (which had elevated intrigue to an art form) had consequently suspected the human government of Mospheira (which Bren well knew couldn't site a new toilet in a public park without political dithering) of double-crossing atevi high, wide, and with considerable cleverness for nearly two hundred years.
It was not the case, of course; there had been no human double-cross of the atevi, though for a time even the paidhi had had to wonder whether his own government really had been more clever than his park-toilet estimate. The humans on Mospheira had had no idea that the ship would return. They had, in fact, believed quite to the contrary.
As it had turned out, the State Department on Mospheira had truly reacted as desperately and as ignorantly as he'd feared. They had tried to contact the ship directly, and in secrecy, to secure its alliance exclusively for Mospheira.
They'd tried, in short, to shut the atevi out of the dealings.
If they'd asked, Bren could have told them they were fools, that you didn't double-cross the atevi. To be sure, the State Department at first had been unable to secure his advice; but they hadn't listened to him once he did get through, no — since his advice hadn't agreed with what their fears and their biases said they should do in responding to the Atevi Threat.
The atevi government had, of course, found them out. Sharp atevi eyes had spotted the new star that attached itself to the abandoned space station in the heavens, and atevi antennae had intercepted the communications between Mospheira and the ship. The atevi had promptly taken action, in which Bren had been inextricably involved, that had placed them in direct communication with the starship.
Mospheira's maneuvers hadn't won the sympathy of the starship, which had turned out willing to deal with the atevi and with the human enclave on an equal basis — anyone, the starship maintained, was welcome up in space, but the one thing they wouldn't agree to was time.
The ship wanted help, manpower to repair the station abandoned two centuries before, and they wanted it immediately, or as immediately as a world without a manned spacecraft could build one. The ship cared nothing about the careful work of centuries not to destabilize the atevi government — which in turn supported the atevi industrial base, which in turn supplied the factories and shops on Mospheira and the human economy.
But with the mutability of self-interest, Mospheira's attitudes had shifted. Of course the State Department supported the atevi government, and of course it was more than willing to work with the atevi to obtain materials the atevi needed to go into space equally with humans, and of course it supported the paidhi, any paidhi the atevi wanted, just so the Treaty stood firm.
Meanwhile the average human citizen was both scared of the ship in the skies, which bid to change a way of life they'd thought would go on forever, and scared of the atevi, who had defeated them once in war and who were alleged in popular understanding to be utterly incomprehensible to humans — this at the same time atevi were supposedly growing more and more like humans, having television and fast food, skiing and soccer — which of course defined everything.
So somehow, without destabilizing the atevi, as they'd been taught all their lives would happen if someone slipped too much tech to atevi too fast, they were going to merge the cultures instantly and have universal peace.
No wonder the population of Mospheira was confused.
As a result, Bren Cameron no longer exclusively served the President on Mospheira who'd allowed that state of confusion to develop. He damn sure no longer exclusively served the higher-ups in the State Department, who'd tried to browbeat the Foreign Office and to use the situation for domestic political leverage.
The Foreign Office within the State Department, well, yes, he was loyal to them — if the commotion his actions had caused had left anyone of his staff and his superiors in office.
He'd last heard from his old chief Shawn Tyers two months ago. His personal bet was that the President wouldn't dare jerk Shawn out of office, because without Shawn, the Mospheiran government had no chain on the paidhi. But even the two months since he'd last talked by phone was a long time, and the silence since implied that Shawn had no power to call him as often as he'd like; or, evidently, to send him mail.
And by now (unless Shawn had somehow protected within the system the computer codes Shawn had ingeniously slipped him on his last trip home) the Field Officer's access codes to the Mospheiran computer net were useless. His access to Shawn himself grew increasingly less assured.
He didn't know the true distribution of power in Mospheiran governmental offices any longer. He knew who might be in charge. And for that reason he wouldn't link his precious computer to Mospheiran channels right now for all the fish in the briny sea — because without the protection of updated codes and the access they gave, some electronic disease might come flashing back to its vulnerable systems from people who really didn't want his computer to hold the records it did.
A situation that half a year ago had had the Foreign Secretary hiding computer codes in a cast on the paidhi's arm didn't inspire the paidhi to confidence in the State Department even at that time, and his government having since then reacted in internal partisan panic and having done things and issued statements which, unmediated, could have blown the fragile peace apart, he didn't think the situation had improved.
So with Shawn and every living soul in the Foreign Office who actually knew the atevi seeming not to have power to prevent such folly, the paidhi, Bren Cameron, loyal to the previous regime, but damned sure not to the present one, conceived it as his personal duty to stay in his post on the mainland and not to come home.
The paidhi counted himself lucky to be sitting on this balcony, in that consideration.
The paidhi reflected soberly that humans and atevi alike were extremely lucky that the situation, touchy as it occasionally became, had never quite surpassed the ability of sensible humans and sensible atevi to reason with one another.
The fact was, their two species had reached a technological level where they had a common ground for understanding. It was possible that the threatened economic and social destabilization was no longer a justifiable fear. The trouble was — it was a deceptively common ground. Or a commonly deceptive ground — again, that interface was the paidhi's department.
Fortunately, too, the essential interests of both species were not incompatible, meaning that both of them could adapt to space — and it had been the aim of both species and the better-thinking members of both governments to get there some time this century, even before the ship reentered the picture.
But the common ground was treacherous in the extreme. There had already been moments of extreme risk: a particularly nasty moment when he lay senseless in a Mospheiran hospital, when conservative political interests on Mospheira, led by Secretary of State Hampton Durant, had sent in the paidhi-successor to replace him, hoping to make irrevocable changes while their opposition in the government was having a crisis.
And they'd nearly succeeded.
Deana Hanks, dear Deana, daughter of a prominent conservative on Mospheira, had within one week man-a*ged to founder two hundred years of cooperation when she'd used the simple words faster-than-light to lord Geigi of Sarini province.
The same lord Geigi with whom and on whose balcony Bren shared breakfast.
Simple word, FTL. Base-level concept — to human minds. Not so for atevi. Through petty malice or towering folly, Deana had managed in a single phrase to threaten the power structure which governed in this province and the sizeable surrounding territory, which in turn held together the Western Association, the Treaty, and the entire industrialized world — because FTL threatened the very essence of atevi psychology and belief.
The atevi brain, steered by the principal atevi language (a chicken or the egg situation), was ever so much more clever than the human brain at handling anything to do with numbers. The atevi language required calculation simply to avoid infelicitous numbers in casual utterance.
Math? Atevi cut their teeth on it. And questions abounded. There could not be paradox in the orderly universe on which atevi philosophy depended.
Fortunately, an atevi astronomer, a despised class of scientists since their failure to predict the human Landing, had been able to find a mathematical logic in the FTL paradox that the philosophical Determinists of the peninsula could accept. Vital reputations had been salvaged, the paidhi-successor had been bounced the hell back across the strait where she could lecture to conservative human heritage groups to her heart's content and harm no one.
But as a result of Deana's brief foray onto the continent, and thanks to the publicity that had flown about atevi society on what had otherwise been a quietly academic question, the FTL concept had leapt into atevi popular culture last fall.
He'd had to explain to the atevi populace on national television that the human ship which had come to their world had entered their solar system and come from another sun, which was what all those stars were they saw in their skies at night, and about which most atevi had never wondered overmuch. Yes, humans had fallen down to earth on the petal sails of legend (there were even primitive photographs) and no, humans were not originally from the moon. But the difference between a solar system and a galaxy and the dilemma of the origin of humans, until now shrouded in secrecy from atevi, was up for question.
Yes, he'd said, there were other suns, and no, such suns weren't in this solar system, and yes, there were many, many other stars but not all of them had life.
So now the atevi, who had been building a heavy lift rocket launch system, in an undeclared space race with Mospheira, were building an earth-to-orbit spacecraft that would land like an airplane, thanks to the information the ship in the heavens had released to them. That spacecraft under construction was what his entire trip to this province was about.
And he had to admit he was far less worried about the spacecraft and its materials documentation dumping unconsidered tech wholesale into the atevi economy (although a year ago the proposed import of a digital clock had — justifiably — raised storms of concern in the Foreign Office) than he was about the work of the gentle, slightly daft atevi astronomer who'd come up with that mathematical construct that let them translate FTL into atevi understanding.
The elderly astronomer, Grigiji, who might be the most dangerous man to come out of those mountains since the last atevi conqueror, had been the guest of lordly choice throughout the winter social season, feted and dined, wined and elevated to legend among the amateur philosophers and mathematicians who were the hangers-on of any lordly house — Grigiji, the gentle, the kindly professor, had taught any hearer who would listen (and the respect accorded him approached religious fervor in atevi minds) his quietly posed and philosophically wandering views.
Now Grigiji was back in his mountain observatory confusing his graduate students. And the paidhi, who had survived the social shocks of the paidhi-successor's adventurous offering of faster-than-light, didn't even want to imagine what was going on in atevi universities all over the continent in the last several months, as that faster-than-light concept, along with the mathematics that supported it, hit the lecture halls and the ever fertile minds of those same atevi students, who were neither hangers-on nor amateurish.
Considering the excitement the old man had raised, and considering the ability of atevi to take any mathematical model and elaborate on it, the paidhi on certain bad nights lay awake imagining atevi simply, airily declaring at year's end they'd discovered a physics that didn't need a launch vehicle or a starship to convey them to the stars, and, oh, by the way, they didn't truly need humans, either.
The paidhi, who thought he'd had a very adequate mathematics education in his preparation for his office, thank you, had had six very short months to study up on a branch of mathematics outright omitted from the Mospheiran university curriculum for security reasons — mathematical concepts now spreading limbs and branches in other areas of atevi academe besides the lately fashionable astronomers.
And all this brain-bending study he did only so he, the paidhi, who was not a mathematical genius, could laboriously translate the documents of atevi who were mathematical geniuses — to humans on the island and on the ship who didn't half suspect the danger they were in from a species they thought dependent on them.
He hoped at least to keep well enough abreast of matters mathematical so that conceptual translation remained possible between two languages, and two (or counting the ship's officers, three) governments; he also had to translate between what was formerly two, but definitely now three, sets of scientists and engineers, all of whom were flinging concepts at each other with a rapidity that numbed the sensibilities.
Now humans who had never met atevi face to face — the crew of that ship — were proposing to bring atevi into space and to hand atevi the kind of power that, by what he understood, couldn't be let loose on a planet.
Only last year the University advisory committee on Mospheira, who did know something of atevi, had maintained that nuclear energy, like digital clocks and the concept of time more finely reportable than atevi numerologists were accustomed to reckon it, was still far too dangerous to put into atevi hands. And humans up there proposed to bring the technology of a stardrive into atevi awareness.
What the humans on that ship still had difficulty getting through their heads was that it hadn't been just a bad day on which the space age humans who had landed on the planet had legitimately lost the war they'd fought with the then steam age atevi. Humans had really, militarily lost the war, so that, indeed, and by the resulting Treaty, Mospheira had been surrendering their technology a step at a time to the atevi of the Western Association — Treaty mandate, not a voluntary choice.
And in all those years, a process mediated by two centuries of paidhiin, technological change had been deliberately slowed and managed so that atevi and humans could achieve technological parity without ever again destabilizing atevi society and starting another atevi war.
The ship, by the conversations he'd had with its captain, and with Jason Graham, with whom he shared quarters back in the capital, seemed convinced atevi would adapt.
He hoped they were right. He was by no means convinced.
As it was, certain factions within the Western Association of the atevi were viewing with considerable suspicion the flood of knowledge and engineering pouring down on them from the sky, knowledge and space age science that could be turned — very easily — against them, in their regional and historical quarrels with the capital of the Association, situated at Shejidan.
The current aiji, Tabini, the atevi president, whose capital was at Shejidan, was ethnically Ragi, a distinction the ship didn't understand. Tabini-aiji, whose position was both elective and to some meaningful degree hereditary, was also clever, and bent on taking every bit of power he could get into the atevi central government, for good and foresighted reasons, by Bren's estimation; but tell that to the provinces whose ancestral rights were being taken away by this increased centralization.
And in that light, damned right the atevi of the Peninsula had a reason to worry about the space program in the hands of the Ragi atevi; most of the atevi of the Peninsula weren't Ragi — they were Edi, who had been conquered by the Ragi five hundred odd years ago.
While lord Geigi, across the table from him, likewise sipping his tea in a dawn wind, wasn't even Edi: he was Maschi, which was a complete history unto itself, but he was an Edi lord. And, to add to the puzzle — which neither the ship nor his roommate would understand — until lately, last year, in fact, Geigi had been in a very uncomfortable position, trying to do well economically and legislatively for his district, trying to be a moderate in a region of well-armed hotheads who were almost-but-not-quite his ethnic relatives, while trying not to lose what humans might call his soul in dealings with Tabini, who headed the Ragi atevi, the Western Association, and the civilized world.
Tabini, even before the advent of the ship, had been dealing with Mospheira hand over fist for every piece of human tech he could get his hands on. Now Tabini dealt with the ship instead, wanting whatever technical diagrams and materials information the ship would send down to the great dish at Mogari-nai and into his control. Tabini was hell-bent on new tech, and all it implied about central power and respect for the traditional mathematical philosophies which still constituted the atevi view of the universe.
Geigi had been the one provincial lord who, thanks to his unique position as technologically and mathematically educated, and a Lord of the larger Ragi Association, and a philosophical Determinist (as the peninsular atevi generally were), suddenly had had to find honest answers to the FTL paradox that Deana Hanks had posed.
FTL was a devastating challenge (via a mathematics implied in its new universe-view) to the philosophy by which lord Geigi and all his Edi neighbors lived and conducted their affairs: if something could move faster than light, science, which thought it had understood the universe, was wrong and the peninsular philosophers and all the Edi who had been part of a philosophical rebellion against Absolutist number theory had been made to look like fools.
Yet Geigi, tottering on the brink of public embarrassment and a loss of respect that could collapse his financial dealings, had sought the truth face to face, had challenged Bren-paidhi to answer for him the mathematical questions Deana-paidhi had raised.
The support and resources Bren-paidhi had gotten from Tabini himself had enabled him to answer that question, and that answer had undoubtedly saved Geigi's reputation and probably his life, counting the financial and political chaos that would have erupted in the province.
Bren rather liked the plump and studious lord, this man who posed courageous questions of his universe because if it killed him, lord Geigi wanted the truth: baji-naji, as atevi put it, turn the world upside down, lord Geigi didn't want some surface assurance that would let him ignore the universe. No, he was a scientifically educated man, not because an atevi lord had to be, but because he wanted to embrace the universe, understand it, see it in all its mathematical beauty.
Understand the human side of the universe — maybe Geigi could even approach that.
But lord Geigi would not, on a gut level, understand being liked, his language having no such word and his atevi heart feeling no such emotion. What went on inside Geigi was equally complex, it might produce the same results, but it was not human; and that was the first understanding of all understandings the paidhi had to accept in dealing with atevi.
As a human, he liked lord Geigi; he also respected Geigi's courage and good sense, and that latter sentiment Geigi could understand, at least closely enough to say there was congruence enough between their viewpoints for association (a very atevi word) of Geigi's interests and his — in the way atevi looked at things. Geigi also seemed to respect him, the paidhi, as the one official of Tabini's predominantly Ragi household ironically most able to understand the tightrope Geigi walked as a Maschi in an Edi district in a Ragi nation. That was another point on which they were associated, that atevi word of such emotionally charged relationship.
Or their mutual numbers added, giving them no cosmic choice but association.
It was a lot like friendship. The human in the equation might like the man. But add them up to equal friendship? That wasn't what Geigi's atevi nerves were capable of feeling, let alone what Geigi's atevi brain thought was going on; and that very delicate distinction was true of any atevi, no matter what. Basic law of the Foreign Service: Atevi aren't friends. Atevi can't be friends. They don't like you. They're not capable of liking you. The wiring isn't there.
Never forget it. Never expect it. Start building that construct to satisfy your needs and you're dead. Or you'll be dead. And the peace will be in shambles.
Based on his own experiences, he'd add, if he were, like his own predecessor Wilson-paidhi, talking to a university class in Foreign Studies, Don't lead them to expect too much of you, either.
He hoped Geigi didn't attribute Tabini-aiji's shift of attitude and the grant of manufacturing in this district directly to the paidhi's doing. That would be a mistake, and dangerous. Tabini's actions were for Tabini's reasons, and he never, ever wanted to get between the aiji of Shejidan and any of the lords of the Association. A human had no business whatsoever in the lines of man'chi, of loyalty between lord and lord, and, taking that one element of his predecessor's advice greatly to heart, he never intended to stand there.
A brown lizard whipped along the balustrade. It feared nothing. Djossi flowers were in bloom again with the coming of spring, and the little reptile dived in among the blooms and heart-shaped leaves, on the hunt for something tasty.
Humans came and humans might go. But the land went on, and the sea washed the rocks, and atevi, like Geigi, who knew such rhythms of this world of their birth in blood and bone… were a force to be reckoned with, wherever it regarded this planet.
He was glad, seeing this dawn, that he had opted to guest in lord Geigi's house. His security had had very serious misgivings about his accepting Geigi's invitation to stay with him in his ancestral home rather than in the Guild-guaranteed hotel. It was unprecedented that a person of Tabini-aiji's household (and so the paidhi was accounted, socially speaking) should guest in this house, which until recently had not had the status, the resources, or the security clearance to receive such a visitor from the court at Shejidan.
Well, the considerations once in the way of such a move had changed. And clearance had come from the aiji himself for the paidhi to accept Geigi's invitation.
One couldn't say lord Geigi was particularly in the paidhi's debt for that latter change of heart, either. In that, Tabini had been informed and had decided for his own reasons to change Geigi's status.
Figure that lord Geigi, too, was risking something in having such an unprecedented guest, since it certainly would be talked about — talked about on the evening news, coast to coast if it was an otherwise quiet day — and would set lord Geigi at some odds with the politics of his Edi neighbors: not seriously so, Bren hoped.
But personally the paidhi, by taking this very sip of tea (out of a kitchenful of herbs lethal to humans), bet his life that Geigi was exactly what he seemed. He had bet it last night and he had slept quite soundly under this roof. Wilson-paidhi would hold that he was in danger of transgressing common sense, and that a paidhi who started having such confidence in his assessments of atevi was headed for serious trouble, but, ah, well, here he was.
On the other hand, where did he invest emotionally? His treatment of the paidhi-successor and his refusal to knuckle under to the head of the State Department meant, effectively, that he couldn't go home. Meant he would have no more chances to sit by the sea on the other side of this strait. Meant he would have no more breakfasts on his brother's front porch — and this place, this moment, this association in an alien government was what he'd traded it all for, in some very real sense: the chance to sit here, in the position he occupied with an alien lord. He had a mother, a brother, an estranged father, and his brother's family all over there in that haze that obscured the strait, and there was a chance he'd never see his mother again, considering the troubling reports he'd gotten on her health this winter. He was bitter about that penalty his government made him and her pay; he was angry, and he asked himself at odd and very dangerous moments like this one, if it wasn't psychologically or professionally acceptable for him to build careful little fences around certain atevi in his mind and, one-sidedly, think about liking them, what in hell was he going to do?
He had a human roommate. He had Jase Graham. There was that.
He could like Jase Graham. That was permitted, psychologically, politically, in every way approved by the State Department; that was permissible.
But he didn't dare quite turn loose of his suspicion of a man from a human culture centuries divorced from his own, a man who didn't, on his side, offer deep confidences to him. Geigi had flung his life into Bren's hands when he welcomed him and the aiji's Guild members under his roof with every evidence of delight. They'd spent the previous evening and this morning discussing sea shells, architecture, and Geigi's marriage prospects. Jase, who had lived under the same roof, shared dinners and spent the majority of the last six months with him, had trouble talking about his home or his family or his ship's whereabouts over the last couple of centuries.
And that seemed a significant reticence.
It takes time to travel between stars, Jase had said. And, We did our jobs, that's all.
But where were you? he'd asked Jase, and Jase had taken a piece of paper and tried to draw him a diagram of the ship's location for some significant period of time relative to a star he couldn't identify, but he'd made no sense of it. Then they'd gotten a bottle of shibei and tried to talk personally, but Jase said, I don't know, to all questions of how that star where Jase said they'd been sitting for years related to where they were now.
And to, What's out there? Jase had said to him, It's just stars. It's just stars, that's all.
Well, maybe it wasn't what a human who'd dreamed of seeing the space station, who'd dedicated his teen-aged years, his romantic hopes and his adult life to the hope of advancing the planet just to the edge of space, wanted to hear from a man who'd been born to it.
Maybe it had turned things just the least bit sour in the relationship that Jase, after all the excitement with which he'd welcomed him to the world, hadn't had wonders to tell him. He didn't know why he felt put off by Jase Graham.
But he hadn't been happy since the world changed and since he'd shared his world with an unhappy, often scared young man. He knew that.
He didn't like to think about that fact on this pleasant morning when his mind had been intermittently, though they were talked dry by now, trying to manage the intricacies of conversation with an atevi lord he admired but didn't know all that intimately.
He most of all didn't like to think about the fact that, while he was on this side of the strait coaching Jase in a language that wasn't easy to learn, his own mother was suffering phone calls in the middle of the night from crackpots who hated him, crackpots the government over there couldn't seem to catch.
He didn't like to think about the fact that his almost-fiancee (whom he wasn't totally sure he loved, the way he wasn't totally sure nowadays he liked anything in the world without checking his subconscious) had gotten tired of waiting and tired of his absences. So she said. His belief now was that she'd grown scared of similar midnight phone calls.
But whatever the reason, she'd married a man she didn't in the least love; and there went another tie he'd once had to Mospheira.
Barb was safe now, off his conscience, and married to Paul Saarinson, who was well-placed in the government. He was sure she didn't get threatening phone calls nowadays.
His brother, Toby, on the other hand, had no such refuge. His brother had suffered phone threats against his family until his kids were afraid to walk to school in their quiet, tiny town on the north shore of the island, a mostly rural place where behavior like that didn't happen and people hadn't been in the habit of locking their doors.
He didn't like to think about the fact that if he did go home for a visit and to try to defuse the political situation via consultation with the State Department and the President, he might find himself arrested right at the airport.
Oh, he didn't think the Mospheiran government could hold him, for one thing because the aiji in She-jidan would threaten global war to get him back, and for another because Tabini-aiji definitely would not accept Deana Hanks as his replacement. He reckoned either one was a sufficiently powerful incentive for the government of Mospheira to behave itself on that surface level, and had toyed with the idea of a few hours' visit to try to straighten matters out.
Over all, however, he wasn't willing to bet his life or world peace on his own government's common sense the way he bet it right now on Geigi's cook's choice of teas.
Trust that he was safe on this exposed balcony, drinking this tea maybe seventy miles from an atevi resort area overlooked by radar installations looking for illicit human airplanes? Yes. Crazy as the world had become, he did trust that he was safe here. An ateva who'd conspired against him and then changed his mind had changed his mind not because of the law (which allowed assassination as an alternative to lawsuits) but because it was no longer in Geigi's interests to do him harm.
A human enemy on Mospheira, especially a crazy one, was another matter entirely; and the members of his own species who'd started calling his brother and his mother at three in the morning to threaten them because of actions he took on the mainland were liable to do anything.
So if he did have to visit Mospheira before they got a ship into space and made all issues moot, who knew? Certainly there was reason that chief presidential advisor George Barralin and others high in the administration would feel the heat of their under-the-table, bribe-passing supporters if they found him within their reach and had to yield him back not only to the mainland but back to hold the paidhi's office again, bowing to atevi pressure. They'd done that already, sending him back here straight off the operating table six months ago. But, then, that was no surprise. George and the President were good at bending to pressure. That was why their supporters put them in office.
So, round one, they'd tried firing him. That was what the Deana Hanks affair had been.
Round two, Deana had tried to build her own power base among atevi by (against all carefully considered law and State Department regulation) contacting atevi opposed to Tabini.
Her ignominious return to the island had left George and the President in rather an embarrassing mess, because while they had to talk to atevi to keep the industrial raw goods flowing, there was no paidhi-successor but Deana who wasn't either older and rooted to Mospheira, or so junior as to be collegiate. A replacement for him even if completely qualified would be no more acceptable to the atevi than Deana Hanks had been, because he was the one Tabini insisted on having. And if the atevi bounced their choice back at them again, it just wouldn't inspire confidence among the Mospheiran electorate that the Mospheiran government was in control of things.
The President of Mospheira, elected with the support of various business interests, including Gaylord Hanks, father of Deana Hanks, got his advice from his advisor George Barrulin and the Secretary of State, Hampton Durant.
The Foreign Office, why, that was a mere bureau within the Department of State. It always had been a mere bureau, run by the Foreign Secretary, presently Shawn Tyers, who couldn't get a phone call through to his officer in the field.
So his was the only advice that might come to the President from anyone talking to the atevi. And good old George wouldn't pass it on to the President if it didn't serve the interests of George.
Well, lord Geigi at least had ceased to think that he ought to be shot. And lord Geigi had far more class than to allude to that old business.
The paidhi, for all his other grief, won a point, occasionally. He had to be content with that.
"If only you had another day here," lord Geigi remarked on a deep sigh, "one might arrange a day of fishing. The yellowtail are running at this season, or will. Absolutely a thrill, when they begin jumping. I had one land on the deck of the boat. It was a very exciting moment."
"One doesn't doubt so," Bren said, and laughed. "A
grown one?" It was his impression they were a large species.
"The deck crew couldn't decide whether they wanted the beast in the water or in the locker. He escaped through the rail and probably to this day laughs at us as he swims past. I think he would have been a record. But I wasn't measuring, nand' paidhi, I assure you."
"Oh, you do tempt me." It had been an eight-day series of cities and plants and labs. He hadn't rested in Guild-sanctioned hotels anywhere as well as he'd slept last night, not even on the luxury-equipped plane. And possibly Tabini could spare him a day. Possibly, too, it wasn't a peninsular plot to fling him overboard. Possibly he could convince Tano and Algini that their protection of him during a day's actual vacation was much easier if he was surrounded by all that wonderful blue water.
But most probably he should fly back to the capital this afternoon, and work on the plane while he did so. He had a towering lot of notes to enter, some export lists to glance over and approve, and a handful of quality control questions which had to be translated for the lab technicians in the last two facilities.
"Yellowtail," lord Geigi said wickedly, "cooked over the coals. Nothing finer."
"Lord Geigi, if you go on you will surely corrupt me, and I have to be back in the capital tomorrow. If I don't get my work done the stack of paper may reach orbital height before our ship does. I so wish I could accept."
He took a chance — he hadn't even realized he'd taken it. It was absolutely against Departmental policy to make a joke with strangers of rank, the language was that chancy even for him. But he did it with his guards and he did it routinely with Tabini, of all people: the aiji of Shejidan, whose displeasure was far more to fear.
Still, a lord in his province, touchy about his dignity, facing a human representative of the aiji of Shejidan, who had status of very indeterminate sort, was worthy of fear, too.
Geigi was amused. Geigi seemed mollified at the turn-down, even seemed pleased at the paidhi's assumption of intimacy.
So he had done exactly correctly when Geigi had made his rather stunning overture of a local and rustic pleasure to a human guest and a guest of state at that. It was yet one more of those small moments of triumph that the paidhi treasured unto himself, as part of his job — and a part he couldn't report nowadays, to a State Department convinced he was a fool as well as a turncoat.
And he couldn't explain to anyone else in the world, not even the man from the ship who shared his quarters, why it pleased him. Except it was the real job he'd signed on to do, and it was occasionally nice to have those little operational checks to prove to himself that yes, the larger civilization-threatening decisions he was taking routinely on himself were possibly founded on a more microscopic-level understanding of the people.
"Well, well," Geigi said, "the sun waits not even for the aiji, so I suppose it won't wait for us. We should be on our way."
That signaled that the breakfast was done. Security and servants moved in about their separate business. As Geigi rose from the table, Bren did, and accepted the formal, many-buttoned coat from the junior security (his own) who had had custody of it. He allowed the young woman to hold it for him to put on, and let her deftly adjust his braid to the outside of the fashionable stiff collar as he did so. He hadn't realized he'd been chilled through the shirt, but it was the case. Spring had offered the chance to sit on the balcony, had offered sea air and that marvelous view, and he'd said yes in an instant, never thinking that atevi called brisk what humans called bitter.
He bowed, Geigi inclined his head. Everyone was relaxed and polite. He had to visit his room on the way out and gather up his papers, in the custody of yet another junior security agent, also of the Guild. The luggage would make its way separately to the plane and be waiting for him.
But in all maneuvers of this sort, Tano and Algini never took their eyes off him, and insisted on having a car provided by the Assassins' Guild (oddly enough it was the one way, just as the Guild certified certain hotels, to be absolutely certain a vehicle was safe) to transport him while he was in the province and outside the ordinary security precautions that surrounded the aiji's household in Shejidan.
It was an official visit designed not just to showcase Patinandi Aerospace, the most important industrial complex in Sarini Province, but to allow the paidhi to talk directly to the engineers at this and at other facilities in recent days. He had allotted the morning to the former aircraft assembly plant, not enough time, but he would exit with a load of paper notes and a wallet full of computer files.
And that would go to the staff in Shejidan, the paidhi's now quite extensive clerical and technical staff. He had to go over his notes for the event, which he should be able to do in the car. Lord Geigi was coming too, but he had his own entourage. Once at the plant, he had a briefing and, he was sure, a similar set of pamphlets and papers would come from the company officials, even including personal requests just to be carried to the capital and left with the aiji's staff, a courtesy which official visitors had performed on trips to the capital from ages ago when the mails didn't come in at all reliably.
The collection of data and the succession of meetings and presentations was down to a foreseeable routine. He had, among the security personnel, one hard-pressed member of his secretarial staff who on receiving the news that he was going with the paidhi on this tour had acted as if he were being offered a government-paid holiday.
Possibly the young man was having the time of his young life just seeing the interiors of the Guild-approved hotels, usually luxurious, and the views from the Guild-escorted tours, and even just looking out over the land from the windows of the airplane; but the last he'd seen of him, the young man was collating the papers from the last stop on the tour and trying to bring sense out of them, with his breakfast a cold roll and a cup of tea in the downstairs of Geigi's stately home.
He did trust the papers would be in order before the next set was added to the stack: the young man — Surieji was his name — hadn't let him down yet. And as late as this morning was still cheerful.