A cable lift existed in the guarded back corridors of the aiji's apartment, a creaky thing, an antique of brass filigree and an alarming little bounce in the cables; but Bren rated it far, far better than a long walk. He went down with Tabini, with Banichi and with Tabini's senior personal guard, Naidiri, a two-floor descent into the constantly manned security post below, and out a series of doors which gave out onto a hall not available to the public.
By that back passage, one came to a small guard station with a choice of three other doors that were the secure access to separate meeting rooms which had, each, one outside general access. It was the closed route the Bu-javid residents used to reach the area where atevi commons and atevi lords met elbow to elbow, with all the vigorous give and take the legislatures employed.
On this route the lords of the Association, who held court at other appointed times, could reach their meetings safe from jostling by crowds and random, improper petitioners — and on this route one comparatively fragile and battered human could feel less threatened by collision in the halls.
More, the walk from the lift to the committee rooms was quite short, the room being, in this case, the small Blue Hall, which the Judiciary and Commerce Committees regularly used.
Jago and Tabini's second-rank security had preceded them down, were already at the doors, and briskly opened them on a noisy debate in progress among the twenty or so lords and people's representatives — the Minister of Finance shouting at the lord Minister of Transport with enough passion to jar the nerves of a weary, aching, and somewhat queasy human.
Perhaps they'd rather shout and finish the business they clearly had under consideration; and if he asked Tabini very nicely they might get him to his bed where he could fall unconscious.
But the debate died in mid-sentence, a quiet fell over the room, and lords and representatives of the Western Association bowed not just once to Tabini, but again to the paidhi, very clearly directing that courtesy at him.
Bren was taken quite aback — bowed before he thought clearly, and doubted then in muzzy embarrassment whether the second courtesy could be possibly aimed him at all.
"Nadiin," he murmured, confused and dizzy from the exertion, hoping only to make this short and not to have to answer more than a few questions.
Aides and pages hastened to draw out chairs and to settle him at the table, a flurry of courtesy, he thought, unaccustomed to the solicitousness and the attention, as if the paidhi looked to be apt to die on the spot.
Death wasn't an option, he thought, drawing a breath and feeling pain shoot through the shoulder, the wind from the air ducts cold on his perspiring face. But fainting dead away — that, he might dp. Voices came to him distantly, surreal and alternate with the beating of his heart.
"Nadiin," Tabini said quietly, having sat down at the other end of the table, "Bren-paidhi is straight from surgery and a long plane flight. Don't be too urgent with him. He's taxed himself just to walk down here."
Came then a murmur of sympathy and appreciation, the tall, black-skinned lords and representatives who set a lone, pale human at a childlike scale. A small tray with water and a small pot of hot tea arrived at Bren's place, as at every seat, then a small be-ribboned folder that would be, like the other such folders, the agenda of the meeting. He opened it, perfunctory courtesy. He wanted the water, but having settled at a relatively pain-free angle, didn't want to lean forward to get it.
"We were hearing the tape," lord Sigiadi said, the Minister of Commerce. "Does the paidhi have some notion, some least inkling, what the dialogue is between the island and the ship?"
"I haven't heard the tapes, nand' Minister. I'm promised to have them tomorrow."
"Would the paidhi listen briefly and tell us?"
The whole assembly murmured a quick agreement to that suggestion. "Yes," they said. "Play the tape."
At which point the paidhi suddenly knew, by the suspicious lack of special ceremony to Tabini's arrival, and by the equally elaborate courtesy to the paidhi, that the committee had almost certainly seen Tabini earlier in the same session.
And that the paidhi had just been, by a master of the art, sandbagged.
But it was a relief to sit still, at least, after a long day's jostling about. Even in the brief spell of sitting he'd had in Tabini's apartment, he'd exhausted himself, and the Council of Committees demanded nothing of him more than to sit in this late-night session and listen to the week's worth of tapes he urgently wanted to hear and get the gist of.
Which made it necessary to keep every reaction off his face, while men and women of the Western Association, themselves minimally expressive and capable of reading the little expression which high-ranking atevi did show in public, were watching his every twitch, shift of posture, and blink.
So he sat propped at his least painful angle, chin on hand, facial nerves deliberately disengaged — the paidhi had learned that atevi art early in his tenure — listening to the numeric blip and beep that atevi surveillance had picked up from Mospheira communications to the abandoned space station, machine talking to machine, the same as every week before the ship had arrived out of nowhere.
"This is computers talking," he murmured to the committee heads. "Either stored data exchange or one com puter trying to find the protocols of another. I leave the numbers therein to the experts, to tell if there's anything unusual. If the technician could go directly to the discernible voices —"
Then, with a hiccup of the running tape: "Ground Station Alpha, this is Phoenix. Please respond."
Even expecting it to happen, that thin voice hit human nerves — a voice from space, talking to a long-dead outpost, exactly as it would have done all those centuries ago.
But it was real, it was contemporary. It was the ship-dwelling presence orbiting the planet — a presence expecting all manner of things to be true that hadn't been true for longer than anyone alive could reckon.
'They're asking for an answer from the old landing site," he said, trying to look as blas6 as possible, while his pulse was doing otherwise. "They've no idea it's been dead for nearly two hundred years."
On that ship might even be — his scant expertise in relativity hinted at such — crew that remembered that site. The thought gave him gooseflesh as he listened through the brief squeal and blip, computers talking again: as he judged now, searching frequencies and sites for response from what optics had to tell the ship was an extensive settlement. He was about to indicate to the aide in charge of the tape to increase the playback rate.
"What are the numbers?" Judiciary asked. Loaded question.
"I believe they have to do with date, time, authorizations. That's the usual content."
Then he heard an obscure communications officer in charge of the all but defunct ground-station link answer that inquiry. "Say again?"
Which he rendered, and rare laughter touched the solemn faces about the table — surprise-reaction as humor being one of those few congruent points of atevi-human psychology; he was very glad of that reaction. It was an overwhelmingly important point to make with them, that humans had been as surprised as atevi; he hoped he'd scored it hard enough to get that fact told around.
That recorded call skipped rapidly through an increasingly high-ranking series of phone patches until he was experiencing the events, he was waiting with those confused technicians — recovering the moments he'd missed while he was tucked away in remote places of the continent, and which, with Hanks sitting idle and unconsulted, atevi had had to experience without knowing what humans were saying.
After the first few exchanges, the realization that the contact was no hoax must have rocketed clear to the executive wing in less than an hour, because in a very scant chain of calls, the President of Mospheira was talking directly to the ship's captain.
"He's telling the ship's captain that he is in charge of the human community on Mospheira. The captain asks what that means, and the President answers that Mospheira is the island, that he is in charge…"
He lost a little of it then, or didn't lose it, just whited out on a wave of acute discomfort. He caught himself with a tightness around the mouth, and knew he had to keep his face calm. "Back the tape, please, just a little. The shoulder's hurting."
"If the paidhi is too ill —" Finance said; but stern, suspicious Judiciary broke in: 'This is what we most need to hear, nand' paidhi. If you possibly can, one would like to hear."
"Replay," he said. The paidhi survived at times on theater. If you had points with atevi you used them, and going on in evident pain did get points, while the pain might excuse any frown. He listened, as the President maintained indeed he was the head of state on an exclusively human-populated island —
God. It already hit sensitive topics. He was no longer sure of his own judgment in going on when he'd had a chance to stop and think; he thought wildly now of falling from his chair in a faint, and feared his face was dead white. But pain was still a better excuse than he'd have later.
"The captain asks about the President's authority. The President says, 'Mospheira is a sovereign nation, the sta tion is still under Mospheiran governance. The ship's captain then asks, 'Mr. President, where is the station crew?' — he's found the station abandoned — and then the President asks, 'Why — ' " He tried not to let his face change as he played the question through and through his head in the space of a few seconds, trying not to lose the thread that was continuing on the tape.
"What, nand' paidhi?" the Minister of Transportation asked quietly, and Bren lifted his hand for silence, not quite venturing to silence an atevi lord, but Tabini himself moved a cautioning hand as the tape kept running.
"The President of Mospheira complains of the ship's abandonment of the colony. The ship's captain suggested that the humans on Mospheira had a duty to maintain the station."
And after several more uneasy exchanges, in which he knew he'd gotten well over his head in this translation, came the conclusion from the ship: "Then you don't have a space capability."
Bluntly put.
He rendered it: "The ship's captain asks whether Mospheira has manned launch capability." But he understood something far more ominous, and there seemed suddenly to be a draft in the room, as if someone elsewhere had opened a door. He sat and listened to the end of that conversation, feeling small chills jolt through him — maybe lack of sleep, maybe recent anesthetic, he wasn't sure.
No. Mospheira didn't have a space capability. Atevi didn't have, either. Not to equal that ship. And there was clear apprehension on atevi faces, expression allowed to surface; these heads of committee were steeped in atevi suspicion of each other — in a society where assassins were a legal recourse.
Damn, he thought, damn. He didn't know what he could do. The ship was not flinging out open arms to its lost brethren. The Foreign Office had called the exchanges touchy, and they were clearly that. His expression couldn't be auspicious or reassuring at the moment, and he hoped they attributed it to the pain.
"Cut the tape off," he said, "please, nadi. I think we have the essential position they're taking. The two leaders are signing off. I'll give you a full transcript as soon as tomorrow, I'm just —" His voice wobbled. "Very shaky right now."
"So," Tabini said in the silence that followed. "What does the paidhi think?"
The paidhi's mind was whited out in thought after tumbling thought. He rested his elbow on the chair, chin on his hand, in the one comfortable position he'd discovered, and took a moment answering.
"Aiji-ma, nadiin-ji, give me one day and the rest of the tapes. I can tell you… there is no agreement between the ship and Mospheira on the abandonment of the station. It seems an angry issue." Set the hook. Convince the committee heads they were getting the real story. Make them value their information from the paidhi, not Hanks and not the rumor mill. "Please understand," he said in a very deep, very profound silence, "that I haven't heard the full text, and that the bridge between the atevi and human languages is very difficult on some topics such as confidence or nonconfidence, for biological reasons. Even after my years of study I've discovered immense difference in what I thought versus what I now realize of atevi understanding. Words I've always been told are direct equivalents have turned out not to be equivalent at all. But that I do understand gives me hope, even if —" he laid a hand on the sling "— it was a painful acquisition — that if my brain can make the adjustment to your way of thinking, then there must be words; and if I can find the words I can deal with this. Believe me, tonight, that what I hear on that tape disturbs me, but does not alarm me. I hear no threat of war, rather typical posturing and position-taking, preface to negotiation, not to conflict."
"Have they, nadi, not mentioned atevi?" The question, coldly posed, came from the conservative Minister of Defense. "Am I mistaken that that word occurs?"
"Only insofar as, nandi, in the discussion of territory, Mospheira asserted its sovereignty over humans."
"Sovereignty," Judiciary repeated.
Loaded word. Very.
"Sovereignty over humans was the phrase, nand' Minister. Remember, please, the President can't use the atevi word 'association' to them and make the ship's captain understand it. He has to use words — as do I in translation — which carry inconvenient historical baggage. We don't have a perfect translation for every thought. This is why the paidhi exists, and I will be very sure the President understands his Treaty obligations and that he's sensitive to implications in translation. The Treaty will stand."
Suspicions remained evident, but tempers were settling, judgment at least deferred. The shoulder ached, muscle tension, perhaps, and he tried to relax — impossible thought, when he was beginning to shiver in the draft from the doorway.
"There is a rumor," Finance said, "that humans have built more ships."
"I believe I can deny that, nand' Minister, unless someone besides the paidhi understands that from some tape I haven't heard." He said it, and Hanks landed on his mind like a hammer blow. "I ask you, nadiin, please, when you hear such things, make me aware of them, so that I can address them as they deserve in information I give to you. I'll certainly listen to the tapes with that in mind, nandi, and I thank you for the information."
Finance gave a mollified bow of assent, her face entirely expressionless as she leaned back and regarded him under lowered brows.
Meanwhile the room was swinging around and around, and there was no good trying to request to leave until it stopped — the waves of dizziness when they started having at least a few minutes to run. "Be assured," he said, "that I'm back in business — a little weak today, but don't hesitate to send me queries and information at any hour. That's my job."
"The paidhi," Tabini interjected, "is staying in the Atigeini residence for security reasons. You may direct your phone calls and your messages there. Hanks is not here officially. We have cleared up that matter and are proceeding to clear it up with Mospheira."
Some little consternation and curiosity attended on that remark.
"What of the Treaty?" Judiciary asked. "One human."
'They apparently thought I'd died," Bren said. "And since I'm alive, but injured, it's possible they left Hanks in place thinking I wasn't up to my duties. I left Mospheira very rapidly after surgery this morning, and it's possible they briefed me on a number of things immediately after I came to, but I fear I didn't retain them. I by no means dispute she's in violation, but it's likely only a confusion of signals in a very rapidly evolving situation. While I'm paidhi, I promise you, nadiin, ship or no ship, Mospheira will stay within the Treaty."
Triti, in the atevi language. Which they roughly defined as a human concept of association — as humans thought atevi association meant government or confederation, not feeling the instinctual level of it. Bandy "treaty" about in the atevi language in most quarters with any suggestion of it as a paper document and one risked real confusion of human motives.
"But this 'sovereignty,' " Transportation objected.
"Is a difficult word," he said. "A rebel word to you, but it doesn't have such connotations in Mosphei'. It applies to their relations with each other, not with atevi, nand' Minister. How does it stand now? Has there been much more conversation?"
"Not between these two individuals," Defense said, dour-faced, and finding preoccupation in his pen and a paper clip. "We do have numerous exchanges between what we suspect to be lower-level authorities."
"Probably correct, nadi." He felt a sense of panic, sorting wildly through two languages, two psychological, historical realities, trying to make them seamless. "The fact that they've turned talk over to subordinates doesn't mean a settlement or a feud, merely that there's no agreement substantial enough to enable two leaders to talk."
"Two leaders, nadi." Defense was unwontedly peremptory, even rude in that "nadi," evidencing disturbance in his voice. "Two, is it?"
"It's not certain." He fought for calm. It wasn't terri tory he wanted to explore. "Not at all certain, nand' Minister. I think they're trying to see if association exists. I think historically they'll conclude it does. But if they can't find it, I can't imagine that one ship could think it outranks the entire population of Mospheira. At worst, or best, the ship might withdraw to elsewhere in the solar system. I just can't — can't — be definitive right now —"
'The paidhi," Tabini said, "is very tired, and in pain, nadiin. Thank him for his extraordinary effort on this matter, and let him go to his bed and rest tonight. Will you not, nand' paidhi?"
"Aiji-ma, if I had the strength I'd stay, but, yes, I — think that's wise. The shoulder's hurting — quite sharply."
"Then I'll turn you back to your escort and wish you good night, paidhi-ji. I ask you to consider your safety extremely important, and extremely threatened, perhaps even from human agencies. Stay to your security, night and day, nand' paidhi."
Why? was the question that leaped up, disturbing his composure in front of a table full of lords and representatives, some of whom might have been in consultation with Hanks. He wished Tabini hadn't added that — and tumbling to why, he thought: to let the troublemakers in the Association think about the hazard of making associations no ateva understood — like Hanks.
Clever of the man, Bren thought. One could admire Tabini's artistry at a distance. One just didn't want to be the subject of it — and he couldn't protest to the contrary, or call the aiji a liar. He certainly couldn't say that Hanks was an innocent in Tabini's difficulties.
One just, with the help of the table, struggled to his feet, bowed to the assembled committee chairmen — and lost the coat off his shoulders — another twinge as he tried to save it.
Banichi quietly intervened to save his dignity, adjusted the coat, and the lords and representatives gave him the courtesy of bows from their seats, two even rising in respect of his performance, when he was less than certain it was credible or creditable.
"See he rests," Tabini said to Banichi and Jago. "Straight to bed. No formalities, no excuses."
The paidhi had no argument at all with that instruction. He'd believed only giddy minutes ago that he'd controlled that conversation at least enough to hold his own.
But once out of Tabini's immediate presence the spell was broken, the excitement ebbed, and adrenaline was shifting from second-to-second performance to the raw fear that he had a human situation on his hands and that he'd given atevi far too much information.
It hadn't been a total mistake to agree to Tabini's requests. Sometimes he'd gotten extraordinary results when Tabini pulled one of his must-talks. Sometimes he'd been able to skate along on dangerously thin ice, maybe giving just a shade more to Tabini's demands for information than the Department would ever feel comfortable with —
But, dammit, getting concessions back, too — more cooperation between this aiji and Mospheira in his few years in Shejidan than his predecessor had gotten from Tabini's father in his whole career. He'd won expansions of the Treaty, he'd increased trade —
He hadn't said anything that, by the Treaty, they weren't entitled to have, or done anything that he hadn't promised to do when he got back to Shejidan, but he walked the lower hall from the meeting room under the escort of Banichi and Jago, in increasing distress over the tone and tenor of the meeting — definite deterioration in atevi confidence. Definite unease. And maybe justified unease. He needed to talk to Hanks — find out what she'd done and said, and what she understood as the truth.
Meanwhile Banichi talked to someone on his pocket-corn, the device against his ear, and directed him to an express lift he was well familiar with, the one he'd used «n his other visits to the third floor. He rode it up with Banichi, seeing the conference room downstairs more vividly than the utilitarian metal around them — reviewing the nuance of remembered dialogue, and agonizing over how, without going back and forth with Mospheira, he was going to straighten out concepts.
More, there were names in the text, which made it a human Rosetta Stone for atevi grammarians. An extensive text limited to topics on which atevi already knew certain Mosphei' words — and knowing words didn't mean knowing the language. Words like loyalty that didn't quite mean man'chi; and propriety that didn't quite mean kabiu; and, on the atevi side, triti that, unknown to most humans, didn't mean treaty, but a homing instinct under fire — damn Hanks and her assumptions.
Her campaigning for atevi partisans of her own couldn't be Foreign Office policy. The faction behind Hanks had absolutely no interest in screwing up on that dangerous a level. Hanks wanted the job; Hanks wanted what she'd trained for all her life, he understood that — and she was flattered to be making real headway with the likes of lord Geigi and the hard-to-handle fringes of the Association, real proof of her competency, the hell with the university liberals who couldn't be right about the associational fringe elements…
Damn, damn, and damn.
They exited into the upper hall, near the door, walked the hand-loomed carpet runner past extravagant porcelain bouquets in glass cases.
He ought to call Mospheira and brief someone — tonight, if he could get a call through — if he could keep his wits about him to make a report, no surety at all.
Worse, he wasn't sure, in view of Hanks' being left here, that he dared pick up a phone to make a call or even receive one. He'd started down a course of action he couldn't backtrack on — and he couldn't afford to have the upper echelons of the Department pull the rug out from under the Foreign Office or the paidhi with any wait-for-official-decision or a mandated consultation with Hanks.
The paidhi had damned sure better have authority in the field. Atevi certainly thought he did. The aiji of Shejidan wouldn't talk to anyone who didn't have authority to make a decision stick.
It was a situation you had to stand on both sides of: for the currently serving paidhi, it meant living up to your ears in real-time guesswork.
And yes, sometimes even that paragon of Departmental rectitude, his predecessor, Wilson-paidhi, hadn't consulted.
The hall was a haze of gold carpet patterns and pastel porcelain bouquets and he felt increasingly sick at his stomach. He wanted to be in his bed without fuss, unconscious.
He wanted to wake up in the morning with an arm that didn't hurt and with a clear-headed, logical insight into how he was going to keep everything humans and atevi had built together from blowing up in their faces.
He also wanted, pettishly, to have had more personal time at home, dammit, before they dropped him back into the boiling oil. He'd won his time off: he'd planned to sit for at least a day on his brother's white-railed porch watching the waves roll in and letting his mind go to the zero-state it longed to achieve —
Paidhiin had taken fast action before to keep an aiji of Shejidan in power. But they'd never — never — handed over the human fall-back positions in negotiating before the State Department ever got to the negotiations.
God — he thought suddenly, as that hit, asking himself what he'd done. Or what he'd actually said, or they'd implied. He suddenly couldn't remember. It was all coming apart in his mind, bleeding into confusion as they reached his door, as Jago keyed through the lock into state-of-the-art security systems which could, if forced, deal death on an intruder in ways that made a human unused to such conveniences feel very, very queasy.
Tano met them in the foyer. That was a welcome surprise. Tano might have been chasing them since the airport, but he hadn't actually seen Tano since Malguri, and in the surreal flux of events around him he was ever so glad to see the man in good health. Tano was security the same as Banichi and Jago were: deadly and grim and all of that. But Tano was on his side, on Tabini's orders, more particularly on Banichi's, and Banichi ranked very, very high in the Guild of Assassins by all he could figure.
"Your luggage is safe, nand' paidhi," Tano said. "I've also set your computer in safekeeping."
"Thank you, nadi. I very much regret your difficulties. I hope to be a very quiet resident here and give you absolutely no adventures."
Tano took his coat. "One does hope so, nand' paidhi." Another, probably real, servant appeared a few steps ahead of the gracious nadi Saidin, captured the coat from Tano and whisked it away under Saidin's direction, one supposed for cleaning and pressing. "There are messages," Saidin said, indicating the reception table by the door, where filigree silver message cylinders in daunting abundance waited in a silver basket, along with one paper simply rolled and sealed.
"The paidhi is exhausted, nadi," Banichi objected, which was only sense. Bren knew he should let those messages alone, go to bed and sleep the uneasy sleep of the truly morally compromised, without knowing or imagining who would have sent him messages so urgently early in his return: every head of every committee he'd just talked to downstairs, he was certain; plus every atevi official who saw in his accession to this apartment, and his return to Shejidan, the new importance of the paidhiin.
And possibly ordinary citizens as far as Malguri had recently seen the paidhi on local television and seen the ship in their skies and just wanted to ask: Are we and our children safe in our towns?
Certain cylinders announced their nature at a cursory glance. And, dammit, he wasn't constitutionally capable of walking past that table without assuring himself there wasn't a life-and-death communication in the lot.
Or word from Mospheira.
"A moment, nadiin-ji. Just a moment," he said and, shaky with exhaustion, nipped out of the basket the ones in particular that had caught his eye — the plain, uncylindered one: that usually meant telegrams from Mospheira; men two more, one seal that he feared he recognized, and one he was damned well sure of. Other familiar seals he didn't need to question: the head of the Space Committee — who hadn't been at the meeting, and who would have urgent, businesslike and thoroughly reason able questions to ask the paidhi, such as: Is there still a space program, nand' paidhi? What do we do?
And, dead sure, What can we tell the Appropriations Committee?
One certainly understood that good gentleman's concern. He saw the seals of Transportation and Trade, too — logical that they had questions for the paidhi: he hoped he'd answered them adequately downstairs.
But that cylinder of real silver was indeed the seal he'd thought it was, a diamond-centered crest he'd seen not so long ago and, in view of Tabini's warning, expected.
Grandmother.
The aiji-dowager.
Ilisidi had brought him to Shejidan. Saved his neck. And risked it. Awkward with the cast, he cracked the seal with his thumbnail, slid out the little scroll and pulled it open.
Nand' paidhi, it said, in a fine, spidery hand, I swear to your safety. The return of this cylinder on whatever day you feel able will signal your availability for breakfast. You must keep me posted. An old woman can grow so quickly out of touch with the world.
He really truly wanted to go to bed and not to think about Ilisidi.
But there remained the two letters, one with his own white ribbon and red wax seal.
I hope you are aware, it read, that the aiji has resorted to threats of assassination against this office to secure your return to the mainland, while repercussions of your unannounced venture into the hinterlands are still disturbing the capital. In the present crisis, I have taken measures to smooth over the damage in public relations.
Damn!
/ am continuing to conduct business, to hold discussions with responsible parties, and to send regular reports to the Department as the sole functioning diplomatic officer. That the aiji has offered you his personal hospitality is beside the point. I have not received, nor under the present conditions expect to receive, nor can I accept from you, any instruction whatsoever. I shall continue as paidhi in Shejidan until I receive official recall from the head of the State Department.
He trusted he kept his face calm. He let the paper roll up and dropped it and his own, damn the woman, message cylinder with the paidhi's seal back into the basket, before he unrolled the paper he was glad to read, the one he was sure was a telegram from Mospheira — a communication from his family or from Barb, certainly not from the Department, which used other, more secure, means to reach him.
It said, in Mosphei'-to-atevi phonetic rendering, Sorry I missed your phone call. Bren, I know it's probably not the time to tell you, but there's no good time and this mustn't go on longer. I've married Paul. Forgive me. I wish I could build a life on your visits, but I can't. — Barb.
He couldn't believe it. He read it again. Then somewhere inside him a little autopilot tick of professionalism reminded him he was under the witness of atevi who had every reason to assume danger to themselves lay in telegrams from Mospheira.
So he rolled up the scroll. The steadiness of his own hands amazed him. He trusted his expression was calm.
"Is there a problem, nadi Bren?"
He hadn't managed, then. Jago saw through it.
"A personal one. My — f-f-fiance'e —" Atevi language failed him. The word was just suddenly there in his mouth — no other atevi way he could think of to explain a long relationship and emotional investment. "— got tired of waiting. She married someone else."
There was silence around him. He supposed they didn't know what to say. He didn't either, except, "Hold the rest of the messages, Tano, please, I'll deal with them in the morning. The aiji-dowager's — is not that urgent."
"Was this expected?" Banichi asked him, not, he was sure, regarding the dowager.
He shook his head. Then remembered with a little trepidation where he was and to what a dangerous agency he was speaking. "No, nadi. But she's quite justified."
Another small, uncomfortable silence. He supposed he'd passed their professional limits. He didn't know. Then Jago said harshly, "She was not justified."
"Jago-ji," Banichi said. "Go set up for the night with Security. The paidhi is retiring. The aiji was right. We shouldn't have delayed."
"Yes," Jago said, and quietly took herself off into the apartments, pocket-corn in hand, back stiff, braid swinging, while Banichi waved a hand in the same direction, toward the inner apartments.
He'd never seen Jago blurt out anything so uncontrolled. But Jago was Banichi's business, and he was more than willing to take Banichi's direction and go to bed, where he hoped he was exhausted enough to fall immediately into a sound sleep. He couldn't take any more physical or emotional jostling.
He went with Banichi and Tano through the sitting room and on to the inner chambers. The rest of the rooms were a geographical jumble in his mind, but he knew where the bedroom was.
"Will the paidhi want a bath tonight?" Banichi asked. "Or had the paidhi rather go directly to bed?"
"Bed, nadi. I'm very tired." He was grateful that Banichi had reverted to formality, Banichi's cure for too much intimacy, perhaps: it cooled the air and quietly distanced him from the problems of the world, the most important of which certainly weren't the paidhi's botched-up personal life, the paidhi's nonexistent personal life.
The paidhi had had a lot else on his mind for no few days prior; Barb had probably been trying to reach his office in Shejidan time after time without getting him — chasing him down with a telegram at his Mospheira office had probably been her last resort. Barb wasn't an ungracious person — was a very kind, very gentle person, in fact, which was what he was most going to miss, and he hoped that Paul Saarinson appreciated what he'd won. He hoped there'd be a chance to take them both to dinner and wish Barb well.
The gracious thing. The civilized thing to do. God knew he was civilized. He took his losses with entirely professional perspective.
But, dammit!
"Nadi," Tano said, and wished to help him with his shirt cuffs. He'd never felt comfortable letting servants, or security only masquerading as a servant, dress and undress him. It was the one atevi convention he'd evaded.
But he was the prisoner of a cut-up, taped-together shirt, a human-style shirt the Department must have come up with, because the one he'd arrived in at the hospital had been a total loss, and the hospital had turned up the next afternoon with this, which they'd cut to accommodate the cast.
He didn't, come to think of it, know how he was going to get into a shirt in the morning, or how he was going to bathe except with a sponge. For God knew how long. He was numb.
It hadn't, he knew, quite sunk in yet about Barb.
It hadn't altogether sunk in yet about what Tabini had pulled, and what he'd done downstairs, either. It kept coming back to him in flashes, snatches of what he'd said and what Tabini had said, like a recurring nightmare.
He managed the trousers on his own, kicked the shoes off, and intended to sit down on the bed just as a female servant, arriving out of nowhere, flicked down the covers. He was so tired he flinched at the whisk of coverlet and sheets from under him and sat down suddenly, jolting the arm.
A servant tried to kneel — he bent to cope, one-handed, with the socks, before she took that over. He was appalled, locked, he began to realize, in an atevi lady's female household, with servants accustomed to do things he'd never wanted servants to do for him, and no provisions at all for a man's privacy.
"I'm terribly tired," he said in a wobbly voice, an appeal to Banichi for peace, for quiet, for some kind of guard against a troop of women relentless in their hospitality. "Please," he said. "I'd like a small light left burning, Banichi-ji. I've been in too many strange rooms lately, and I'm afraid if I have to get up, I'll walk into a wall."
"Perfectly understandable," Banichi said, though one was certain Banichi would never do such a foolish thing; Banichi passed the requisite orders with more fluency than the paidhi could manage at the moment — and the women absconded with his clothes, shoes, socks and all.
"The shirt will be a problem in the morning." Small obstacles preoccupied him, looming up as insurmountable. He turned querulous, close to tears, for no sane reason. "I don't know what I'm going to do."
"The staff will have them adjusted, nadi," Tano said. "It's all taken care of. We'll manage."
"They gave me a folder for the doctors. — Pills. I'll want my traveling case by the bedside. Water."
Such things arrived, from one source and another, servants going hither and yon. He fumbled together a nest of pillows, there being no scarcity of them in the huge bed, and stuffed them about him to rest his arm and his shoulder, while Banichi and Tano and random female servants hovered over him.
"Do you want your medicine, nadi?"
"Not right now," he said. The arm ached — but he'd been moving about, and he hoped it would ease without it. He'd regretted taking the painkiller this afternoon. They hadn't warned him it would make him dim-witted. He'd made one mess of things this evening. He didn't want to wake up stupid in the morning.
As much as anything, he didn't want to move from where he'd settled, not until daylight, not maybe for the next five days.
Banichi laid a pocket-corn on the table in front of his face.
"What's that for?"
"In case, nadi. Don't go wandering about if you need something. Please call. One of us will come, very quickly. Don't walk into a wall."
"Thanks," he said, and Banichi and Tano found their way to the door — put out the lights, but left the one he'd requested.
Barb was married. Well, he thought — hell. They'd talked about marriage, in a couple of foolish moments when, early in his career, he'd thought his life would be so routine he could arrange regular trips to Mospheira. But she'd said no, said she didn't want marriage — and she'd probably known he was dreaming.
Paul Saarinson was stable. Solid. Paul would be there, all the time.
The one thing he for damn sure couldn't give her. He was the occasions, the events, the flying trips onto the island for a glittering weekend on a far from modest, saved-up salary — then off again, with promises and dates that somehow didn't turn out to be available.
She was right. You couldn't build a life off weekends. He knew that. He guessed Barb just had never told him what she really wanted.
He blinked. The dim light shattered, rebuilt itself. You could get used to pain.
Part of the job, wasn't it? He seemed to have made himself a hero to the atevi around him. They appreciated him in their way, which hadn't anything to do with the sense of human companionship he had from Barb; but it wasn't a bad thing, if you couldn't have other things, to be appreciated by the people you most associated with.
Appreciated, hell, tell that to Tabini. Tabini appreciated him. Tabini appreciated him the way an atevi lord appreciated any useful, entertaining, personally pleasant resource you could put on the spot and get solid value out of.
You couldn't say love, you couldn't say friendship, you couldn't say all sorts of things that resonated off human nerves and satisfied human feelings. That was a trap the first settlers had walked right into, sure that atevi, who laughed at the right times and seemed perfectly agreeable, did, in their own way, understand such feelings; or thinking that atevi would somehow learn to understand, that humans would teach these godlike, tall, reserved natives of the world the way to access their own repressed emotions.
The simple fact was atevi weren't wired for what humans wanted, they weren't in the least repressed, and they didn't feel all the same impulses humans felt. He couldn't take Jago's little outburst of support for him in the foyer and build off it the fantasy that behind that momentarily fractured reserve Jago felt anything like human sympathy. Jago felt. No question that Jago felt strongly about the situation, but you couldn't warp it into what a human wanted to understand, or you missed everything that was Jago.
And did her a great disservice in the process — one always had to remember that, on the other side of the equation. As the ateva she was, Jago was wonderful, reliable, and brave. Banichi — God love him, which Banichi wouldn't at all understand — Banichi had seen him in distress and saved him from total embarrassment out there in front of Tano and the staff, because Banichi had reacted to defuse a charged situation, for whatever reasons ran through atevi nerves, be it only Banichi's sense that protecting the paidhi meant protecting the paidhi's dignity.
A human wanted a familiar tag to call things, and Banichi was a lot of things that humans the other side of the strait would be scared to death to share a room with. So was Jago. And when they'd risked their lives to save yours, you could love them so much — if you didn't need to be loved back.
Like Ilisidi, the other ateva he'd grown close to — God, if he shut his eyes he could have nightmares of the bone snapping and ligaments tearing, which hadn't been the nicest experience of his life- — but he figured if nothing else he'd won points with Ilisidi and her associates simply by surviving, and backing off that invitation of hers would lose everything he'd won.
If somebody did make a move to assassinate Tabini — and him — Ilisidi was one of the likeliest perpetrators. But she asked the paidhi to breakfast at his earliest convenience.
Made perfect sense.
Maybe, the thought came recurring to him during the course of a troubled, hallucinatory night, maybe he should nerve himself, swallow his pride, and call Barb. Maybe there was more to the Paul business than he understood. He didn't like it that he'd gotten the answering machine when he'd called — he didn't know where she'd have been but home on a work night. If she'd moved uptown to Paul's place, her number should still route her calls to her.
Maybe she'd left the answering machine on precisely because she knew he was flying home and just didn't want to deal with the news on the phone — she hadn't meant to blindside him back on the mainland with that letter. He refused to believe that.
That letter had, he was absolutely convinced now, chased him from his office to the hospital and back to his office, then transferred right across the strait on the automated system. He'd messaged her that he was going into hospital for some minor repair work — he hadn't elaborated. Maybe she'd planned to see him before he left. She'd certainly had no way to know Tabini was going to request him to do a twenty-four-hour turnaround back to Shejidan.
And he couldn't blame her for the timing. There just was no good time to tell him a piece of news like that. There'd never been a good time to tell each other much of anything: that was the trouble, wasn't it? Never a way to discuss the future, no real complaint except that he'd worked too long and given too much to the job, and he'd always known the office he'd trained for was mistress, wife, mother and sister — he couldn't talk about what he did, he couldn't offload his troubles to anybody without an equivalent security clearance, and he damn sure wasn't romantically inclined toward the Foreign Secretary.
Time after time he'd come back wound tight as a spring and so atevi-wired he couldn't speak or think Mosphei' for the first few hours; and Barb would be the first refuge after the debriefing, someone who, unlike his relatives, never met him at the door with a list of must-dos and a catalog of family feuds. He and Barb hadn't put a load on each other, that was the whole idea of R&R, wasn't it?
But maybe she'd been too good-hearted — she'd known from the start she was the refuge, the safety valve for an occasionally available and generally stressed public servant the whole human race relied on. She'd ask him no classified questions, which was almost everything he knew; she'd never met him at the door with her troubles, never complained about his job, having the sense to know that he and the job weren't ever separable.
She'd laughed and she made him laugh — and he'd lost that without ever imagining it was threatened. That was what felt unfair. To him. Not unfair, he told himself, to Barb.
Hell, maybe human caring was a survival disadvantage. Who knew? It sure screwed up lives.
And where in human hell did this Paul business come from? Paul — God, Paul was so damned dull, so damned safe, a real Department man, never any interest in anything but his computers. He couldn't imagine party-loving Barb sitting in front of the television knitting while Paul was off in computerland. The whole scenario was unbelievable.
If he'd only thought to call again, when he'd stopped by his office on the way to the airport. He'd been so anxious about the travel order, so worried about getting the computer commands in . . .
He hoped those files he'd requested had all transferred. They'd rushed him, the car had been waiting on the street — he should have delayed to check the contents. He couldn't exactly call up Mospheira now and say, Hello, I'm planning to violate Departmental policy, and I need the files you didn't send me…
The State Department was where actions the Foreign Office knew atevi wouldn't tolerate ran head-on into humans who wouldn't remotely understand the atevi view. The State Department refused to admit that the paidhi in the field had authority to negotiate, although it accepted his negotiations for debate; it believed since it selected the paidhiin, that the paidhi, meaning the Foreign Office, should take orders from the State Department, a small disparity in what the Treaty meant to atevi and what humans insisted was the legal reality on their side of the strait.
Translation was going to be worrisome, even paper translation, let alone real-time dealing with the language with a raft of new concepts.
He could make semantic mistakes. He had no Mosphei' dictionary at all, a human-language dictionary being a forbidden item on this side of the strait; the Department and a university committee even censored the entirely atevi-to-atevi dictionary and semantic/contextual reference he could take with him across the strait, since there were, in the usage of certain atevi words (in the active imagination of the committee), ways the paidhi could deliver semantic clues Mospheira didn't want in atevi hands — or minds, as the case might be — until Mospheira was sure officially that they were there.
There was some sense behind that view — there were concepts, even nontechnological concepts, that the committee rated too risky, too culturally based, too biologically based to address in the current atevi-human context, even if the paidhiin had devised reliable ways to express them in answer to questions atevi themselves had asked him.
The whole university/Foreign Office review process meant that the words the paidhi used on the mainland often ended up not being, in the classified official dictionary, the same as what his predecessor had proposed. The damned thing was constantly out of date — or subject to revision once atevi, moving consistently faster than the committee, came up with their own expression in popular usage —
Which the committee still debated, as if they could veto what atevi themselves had decided to call a thing.
More, even the Mosphei' equivalents remained flagged for censorship in documents the computers let cross the strait, computers which made electronic lace out of documents — brilliant decisions like censoring the Mosphei' expression air traffic control system, because supposedly, in the astute minds of the committee, air traffic control system had Defense Department connotations — a censorship that had lasted until well into the implementation of an atevi ATC system on the mainland, part of which, on a technological level, he was still trying to get installed past the objections of provincial atevi lords who thought directing air traffic and assigning landing sequence smacked rather of associational preference, a bad word on this side of the strait.
And faster-than-light?
God help him. They trusted him with a computer with defense codes in its layered programs and restricted him from comprehensive dictionaries.
Meanwhile atevi, miffed at their inability to gain a dictionary of human language (though atevi had compiled one, he was dead certain) didn't allow comprehensive atevi dictionaries into the paidhi's hands on this side of the strait. And he'd bet his unused paychecks that there were atevi who could marginally understand Mosphei'. Banichi came equipped with a little understanding of Mosphei', which surfaced just now and again; Jago had a very little; Tabini very frequently surprised him with a word he'd picked up.
More and more interest from atevi in learning Mosphei' in recent decades, when it became clear that computers, read human number theory, were all bound up in that language, and, oh, damn, yes, even conservative atevi were interested in knowing the human numbers that described the universe. They were avid and eager learners of anything numerical — passionate in rejection of certain human ideas, even ones that patently worked, where they contravened some elegant and elaborate universal number theory; and suddenly, in the last ten years, atevi were presenting elegant solutions to classic problems that the computer people and the mathematicians were still trying to work into their own theory — and spy out further elaborations thereof.
The servants, the security that kept the paidhi safe, doubtless spied on his library and kept it pure of atevi reference.
Damnable situation. A war of dictionaries. A duel of conceptual linguistic ignorance — when the only thing that had brought the real war to a halt was a farseeing aiji in Shejidan and a scholar on the human side who had, in fact, reached the concept of "treaty" as equivalent to atevi "association" and thereby stopped the bloodshed and the destruction — the dictionary again, victorious.
Meanwhile Hanks stayed, in danger of an assassination that was apt to fracture die Treaty. And Tabini through, he was sure, no wish of his own, had the Association legislatures in session, not only the hasdrawad and tashrid, but the provincial legislatures, in districts whose lords were ready to make a grab for power at any moment Tabini remotely looked like stumbling.
Damned right Tabini needed him to do something fast; Tabini, damn his conniving heart, needed a miracle, ideally a piece of drama pulled off right in front of the joint legislatures — the whole atevi world was waiting for official answers from the Bu-javid, from the aiji and from the paidhi's office.
God only knew what Hanks had actually said. Inexperienced humans, even humans who'd sweated through advanced mathematics courses in the candidacy courses, never believed at gut level how quick atevi were to work math in their heads. The language with its multiple plurals set up a hell of a quick-reckoning system that was a major barrier to a human trying to learn it as a second language; Hanks wouldn't be the first translator who in the simple struggle to handle the verb forms in conversation had edged her way into deep linguistic trouble.
Thoughts like those chased each other in circles for what felt like hours, intermittent with the shoulder aching until he could only count the pulses of the pain and wish in vain for sleep.
Enough to make him think about the pill and the water on the bedside table. If he didn't need his brain tomorrow. But it was a toss-up how the lack of sleep was going to help find a solution, either. He needed a jolt of adrenaline. If he could just summon it up for about six hours tomorrow, he had a fighting chance of thinking his way through to what he ought to do.
Damn, he said to himself. Damn.
He wanted to go back and replay the meeting with Tabini and do it all differently.
He wanted to have made that second phone call from his office, before he'd gone to the airport.
Oh, Barb, you damn fool. Paul, for God's sake.
But when they'd broken his shoulder and he'd believed he'd die, he'd not been able to think about Barb, or Toby, or anybody — just the mountains. Just his mountain and the snow... And he'd felt hollow, and didn't know why he couldn't think of Barb or find any feeling in himself. He'd found it disturbing that he couldn't scrape together any feeling about it — he'd tried, tried to reconstruct his feeling for Barb, but he couldn't get it back the way he remembered it being, not then — not when he'd gotten home.
He'd thought to call her.
He'd been worried when he couldn't reach her — last thought he'd had going under anesthetic, where was Barb? So he'd felt something.
He'd felt real pain when he'd read her message, felt it right in the gut; he was losing Barb — when he didn't know he'd ever had Barb, had no reason to think what they had amounted to a life, didn't know if he loved her — just — a feeling that blinked out on him under the gun in Malguri and blinked on again when he got back to familiar referents and places he was used to being.
So what was it? Love or a habit he'd gotten into? Or what in hell was the matter with a man who hadn't been able to remember Barb's face when he was in the worst trouble he'd ever been in? What was the matter with a man whose deepest feelings blinked on and off like that?
Too long on the mainland, maybe. Too long wrestling the demons of atevi emotions, until what he'd studied grew commonplace to him and what he'd been grew foreign. He was fluent, he was good, he could find his way among atevi by the map he'd made, he'd made, whole new understandings that humans hadn't had before — but he wasn't sure he'd charted the way back.
Snap. And he was playing by human rules and he loved Barb.
Snap. And he was deep in atevi thinking and he didn't know how to do that.
He was scared. He was really scared.
It was two hours before dawn, by the watch he'd pulled out of his office drawer. And he had to function tomorrow. He had to pull his wits together tomorrow.
He had to get some sleep. He daren't take the pill, now; he'd sleep half the day and drag through the rest and he couldn't afford that.
He tried counting. By hundreds. To the highest numbers he could think of.
He tried thinking about committee meetings, reconstructing lord Brominandi's speeches to the Transport Committee, sane lawmakers arguing for fifteen solid days whether requiring airports to maintain computer records on flights could accidentally assign infelicitous numbers and cause crashes.
He woke up dreaming about atevi shadows asking him questions, about an urgent meeting he had to get to — and woke up again with the impression of a beast leering at him from the bedroom wall. But the beast wasn't here, it was in Malguri.
He'd flown home. He'd flown back. He'd met with Tabini, that was where he was. The outlines of the room were strange. He was in an atevi lady's apartment, in a bed a man had died in. He was supposed to solve the ship problem tomorrow.
Stave off the invaders.
Hold the world economy together.
Try to shave and take a damn bath.
Thirty minutes before dawn. If the servant staff started moving about right now and woke him up, he'd have them all assassinated. He wanted at least two hours sleep. He wasn't budging until he'd gotten those two hours. Not if the ship orbiting over their heads started firing death rays down on the city.
Then he started worrying about the computer files and couldn't get back to sleep.
The servants began stirring about in the farther halls.
Don't touch me, he thought. Don't dare come in here.
If I don't move, they won't make any noise. If I don't move, they won't bother me maybe till they think I'm
But he had to find out whether the files had transferred.
And he didn't have that much time to prepare: Tabini had said it, people could die — and he had to be right about the translations, which couldn't — couldn't convey anything atevi could construe as irrevocable threat to them: the answer Tabini got back had to be something that would reassure atevi, not something that would hit the evening news with panic — he had to go over the entire vocabulary he'd allot himself in dealing with the matter; after that he could ad lib all he liked — but not until he was sure of extended and obscure meanings.
He stuck a foot out from under the covers; he got his working elbow under him, unstuffed pillows from under him and made a try to turn on the light.
Knocked the water glass over.
On the carpet.
The pocket-corn followed. And the pill bottle. And the lamp.
The room lights went on.
"Nadi?" Jago asked, all concern, her hand on the light switch. "Are you all right?"