It was a strange perspective, either on the scale of human problems or human capacity for delusion, that one hour of daylight could dull acute, even rational, concerns and persuade an exhausted man he'd had 'a night's sleep.
At least he'd achieved a functional distance from the insanity he'd slept with, the carpet had survived the water, the lamp had survived the fall, a breakfast of tea and toast and jam to cushion the necessary antibiotics — not the pain pills — hadn't upset his stomach, and the breakfast room turned out to have a beautiful view.
More, life on earth had not after all ended with his relationship with Barb. He couldn't fix it from where he was, he probably hadn't the right to fix it — it was the old story: it was going to be too late for him to do a damned thing by the time he had a chance to do anything.
Meanwhile he had urgent work to do, and the context-sensitive language programs he needed to work out his translation appeared to have made it into his machine.
So after a tolerably leisurely breakfast in a privacy for which the paidhi's bathrobe was completely if informally sufficient, he sent Tano to attack the bowlful of mail, so that, excused by his injury, he could sit in said bathrobe in the solarium in view of the magnificent Bergid range, rummage through his Mospheira-origin computer message files and wait for the voice records Tabini had promised him would arrive as soon as possible.
The message download was immense. Whenever he logged on at his Mospheira office port he'd inevitably acquire, through the filter that censored and frequently made hash of what it let him have, a mishmash of messages, some official, some scholarly inquiries, some the advisories of the hard-worked staff that supported the paidhi's office, from the devoted crew that sifted the outpourings of the phone-ins of every ilk, to the more reliable information that came to him down official channels, and to the Mospheira news summaries, neatly computer-censored for buzzwords and restricted concepts the paidhi couldn't take with him across the strait. That he'd gotten anything on his flags reassured him that, Hanks or no Hanks, he was getting cooperation from official channels, and he did have his authorizations intact.
His message-load held personal letters from a list of correspondents he'd flagged as always full-text, at least as full-text as the censors let him have, ranging from university professors of linguistics and semantics, to old neighborhood friends giving him news of spouses, kids and summer vacations.
And came the State Department output, which was not, this time, highly informative: information on pensions. Helpful. God.
Some of it had to go — he ordered Explore, and saw the Interactives come back with characteristics and content of the files; he asked it next to Search ship/Phoenix/station/ history content, and it came back with lists.
And lists.
And lists.
With tags of correspondents both regular and names he didn't at all know: everyone with access to the Foreign Office had had an opinion and offered it when the news broke about the ship returning, that was what had happened — he'd done such a fast turnaround the staff hadn't had the time they usually had to weed and condense — meaning he had the whole damned load, God help him, every crackpot who could find the address in the phonefile.
Several of the files were absolutely huge. University papers. Theses. Dissertations.
He hadn't thought it possible to crowd the memory limits. It was a big storage. He checked through the overlays, scared something might have started a memory resident to chewing up the available space, but nothing checked out as active but things that ought to be, and nothing was actively eating memory. It was just that much data he'd sucked up in his connection time.
It wasn't going to be an easy sift-out. The computer was going to have to search and search.
And there was one thing he had to do, before he sank all the way into study: he asked Saidin for a phone, sat down in his bathrobe and, calmly composed, called through the Bu-javid phone system with a request for Hanks-paidhi.
Not available, the operator said.
"Message to her residence," he said patiently, very patiently.
"Proceed, nand' paidhi. Record now."
"Hanks-paidhi," he said in the atevi language. "Kindly return my call. We have urgent business. End, thank you, nadi."
The bloody hell Hanks wasn't available. He took a deep breath, dismissed Hanks and her maneuvers from his list of critical matters, and went back to his chair and his computer.
He set his background search criteria, then, to his needs, defaulted to print-matches-to-screen at his own high-rate data-speed, which was damn fast when he was motivated and the criteria were subject-narrow: a lifetime of foreign language, semantics, dictionary work and theoretical linguistics gave him some advantages in mental processing and rapid reading, and what he did in his head with the files was a personal Search and Dump and Store that didn't even half rely on conscious brain. Just the relevant stuff reached the mental data banks, a process that rapidly occupied all the circuits, preempted the pain receptors, turned off everything but the eyes and the fingers on a very limited set of buttons.
What came through to him was an impression, variously derived from his university scholar correspondents and the mishmash from correspondents both authorized and not, of a degree of concern about the ship's long absence, and its careful questioning of Mospheiran officials.
He couldn't nail the specific questions: the letter that might have been most specific was full of censored holes.
But references abounded to that bitter dispute among the original settlers, whether to land on the one livable world in the system, or mine and stay in space. There were specific names of ship crew, which he tagged as useful — who had been in important positions versus where descendants ranked might tell him something about the difference between the power structures that existed two hundred years ago — the foundation of scholarly and governmental assumptions — and those that existed now: clues to the passing of power downward.
A university professor he'd thought long-retired offered him information about the final ship-station exchanges, a file which contained exact quotes. Those he dived after and read, and read, and read, at a speed at which his eyes dried out and his teacup stayed suspended until a deft touch removed it from his hand.
Banichi said, "Would the paidhi care for hot tea?"
"Thank you," he said, stopped the dataflow of that not-friendly exchange, and took a brief intermission to what atevi genteelly called the necessity.
A servant had meanwhile supplied a fresh teapot, a clean cup and a plate of wafers, and he restarted the dataflow three minutes before the interrupt point.
The sun inched up out of the window. Lunch appeared, sandwiches ceremoniously brought to his chair. .
There arrived, with it, Banichi, and a message from Tabini that asked whether he had any questions Banichi and Jago couldn't answer. "No, nadi," he said to Banichi's inquiry. "Just the ground-station transmission records. Please. Do you have any idea the reason of the delay, nadi?"
"I believe they're changing format," Banichi said.
"Banichi, if I'm supposed to listen to the tapes, I don't need the intelligence people to clean them up. Peel the access codes out, I don't care about the numbers, I swear to you, I don't have to have their precious numbers — we're not 'counters here. Just get me the damn — excuse me — voice recordings. That's all I ask, nadi."
"I'll urge this point with Tabini. I need the paidhi's authority to approach him against other orders."
"Please do." He was frustrated. Time was running. Someone in Defense was apparently holding things up for real concerns or obstructionist motives. He couldn't guess. He couldn't let go of his thoughts. He'd built too fragile a web of translated conjecture. He'd never yet taken his eyes from his screen and the reminders of where he was in the structure; and when Banichi left, he reached for half a sandwich with the same attention he'd given his teacup, then dived back into his work, only moving a leg that had gone to sleep.
"Tabini-aiji asks," Banichi said at another necessity-break, "if the paidhi would care to issue a statement for the news. It's by no means a command. Only a suggestion, if the paidhi is able."
> "Tell them," he said, floundering brain-overloaded in a sea of input, "tell them in my name that I would wish to speak to them, but I'm in the middle of a briefing. Whatever you can contrive, Banichi-ji. I can't possibly issue a definitive statement yet. I'm translating and memorizing as fast as I can. I'm drowning in details. — And they won't get me the records. What in hell are they doing, Banichi?"
"One is aware," Banichi said carefully. "Steps have been taken. Forgive my intrusion."
Banichi was a professional — at the various things Banichi did. The paidhi at the moment had one focus: data and cross-connection; reading for hours on end at unremitting scroll.
Figuring out how, with a limited dictionary, to explain interstellar flight in unambiguous words for the Determinists and the Rational Absolutists, whose universe didn't admit faster-than-light, was absolutely terrifying. He didn't understand FTL, himself, and finding two atevi-mentality numerical philosophies a linguistic straw of paradox to cling to, to keep two provinces of the Association from disintegrating into riot, made his brain ache. It was all a structure of contrived cross-connections and special pigeonholes for the linguistically, historically, mathematically and physically irresolvable — and he hoped to God nobody asked the question.
Especially when all the historical information contradicted itself — and indicated the Mospheiran records, God help him, were not infallible.
Paidhiin before him had elevated atevi science from the steam engine to television, fast food, scheduled airlines, and a space program — and he didn't know if the next step might be Armageddon.
So he bent himself again to his reading, seeing the Seeker had come up with a further digest of content — slow, memory-hungry operation, running slower than usual in the background — and had the summary of thirty-three trivial files, all inquiries, none informative.
That could go down to temp-store on a card. Free up memory. Make the computer run faster. The paidhi had other problems.
And, seeing that the Seeker had created another ship/ history thread through a chain of files, he said, "Thread, ship/history, collect," and saw the result rip past at his fast-study speed.
But the information wouldn't coalesce for him. He'd blown his concentration or there was something else knocking at the back door of his awareness, something large and far-reaching, all associative circuits occupied —
"Forgive me again," Banichi said, and Bren restrained a frantic impulse to wave it off, because he had almost realized there was something there.
But Banichi laid a recorder on the table — along with a message cylinder carrying the red-and-black seal that indicated it came from Tabini himself.
Thoughts went to the winds. He suffered a cold chill, murmured a, "Thank you, nadi, wait a moment," and opened the message cylinder, finding a note in Tabini's hand: This is the complete record, paidhi-ji, with the numbers. I hope this proves helpful.
He hoped to God. He found lunch not sitting well on his stomach. "Thank you, nadi-ji," he said, dismissing Banichi to his own business, and lost no time first in setting his computer to run full bore on the time-consuming Seeker summary program, then in setting the recorder to play back.
The first of it — he'd heard last night. He sped past that and fast-played the computer chatter.
More voices, then.
It fit the suspicion he'd formed from the records he'd been handed — the parting nastiness of Pilots' Guild politics suddenly played out real-time in what had gone on while he was in the east: the Pilots' Guild, for reasons for which one had to trust the distinguished university professor's unpublished history, had cast some obstacles in the way of the Landing all those years ago, ostensibly to protect atevi civilization.
But, the professor's account suggested, the Guild had both promoted and double-crossed the operation, because the Guild's real objective had been to maintain the ship as paramount, over the station, over any planetary settlement. The Guild had intended to run human affairs — as it had done during the long struggle to get to the earth of the atevi.
Trusting any history for the truth in a situation rapidly becoming current was, by its very nature, trusting a sifted, condensed account of hour-by-hour centuries-old events that he couldn't recover — events sifted by somebody with a point of view rooted in his own time, his own points to prove. He doubted that the detail he needed still existed even in the computer records on Mospheira: the war had taken out one big mass of files.
The fact was — he knew far less about Phoenix than he knew about atevi; he knew Phoenix' present attitudes, inclinations and crew list less than he knew the geography of the moon. He didn't know what Phoenix meant, or intended, or threatened.
He didn't know the capabilities of the ship, whether it had traveled at FTL speeds or — considering the length of time it had been gone — sublight, which seemed a possibility.
But, ominously, the dialogue between ship and ground-station had gone from massively informative and high-level in the initial moments to, finally, the converse of under-secretaries and ship's officers niggling their way through questions neither side was willing to bring anybody to the microphone to answer.
What was the state of affairs, the ship asked, between Mospheira and the world's native population?
Mospheira wasn't answering that question. The State Department, the same close-mouthed upper echelon that backed Deana Hanks, was advising the President on an entity it didn't know a damned thing about; and the executive once it got involved was used to having weeks, months, even years and decades to study and debate a problem.
Mospheira didn't have or want rapid change. The social and technological dynamics meant what was, would be, foreseeably, for fifty, a hundred years, and its planning was always well in advance, a simple steerage of the world at large, atevi and human, toward matching technological bases, toward goals decades away. And if the executive got off its butt and moved — the sub-offices through which governmental communications ran weren't geared to decide faster than they did.
And if the ship knew what it wanted and pushed…
He listened, as back the two sides came to another foot-dragging exchange of minor ship officers demanding station records which they thought Mospheira should have; and after a day and a half, by the time markers, another exchange demanding in turn where the ship had been for two hundred years.
Damn again, Bren thought, hearing Phoenix ignore the question and then hail the world at large, wondering if anyone else down there was listening.
Phoenix was trying to make contact on its own. Thank God nobody in the atevi world understood enough to fire back an answer and begin a dialogue. Thank God the Treaty provided the paidhi at least as a unified contact point. Phoenix was unknowingly charting a very dangerous course.
After that the ship broke off transmissions for what seemed a long time, and atevi date notations on the tape confirmed it. The ship asked no questions and ominously provided not one answer, not one clue to the President's persistent questions: Where have you been? Why have you come back? What do you want here now?
Mospheira had revealed a great deal to the incomers — necessarily, with the whole planet spread out for the orbiting ship to see — a tapestry of railroads and lighted towns and cities and airports, the same on one side of the strait as on the other, which had not at all been the case when the ship left. And he knew what the ship's optics were capable of seeing, at least the equal of what Mospheira had been able to see through the failing eyes of the station — hype that several times, for what a ship with undamaged optics could pick up.
And there was no way to see inside the ship or the station.
While Mospheira had, he mused, knuckle pressed against his lips, revealed more in its questions than it might realize, too, certainly to him. He knew the Department, he knew the executive, he knew personalities — the ship didn't, unless it discovered old patterns, but, damn, he could almost detect the fingerprints on the questions, the responses, the attitudes. It was Jules Erton, senior Policy; it was Claudia Swynton — it was the President's Chief of Staff, George Barrulin: the President didn't have opinions until George told him what he thought.
The records became contemporaneous. Mospheira talked. The ship continued its efforts at contacting population centers, Shejidan in particular. There hadn't been contact between the ship and Mospheira for two days. The ship was not currently answering questions from Mospheira about its business or its activities.
The cold that had started with his arm had spread to a general shivery unease and left him wishing — which he never thought in his life he would wish — that he could pick up the phone, call Deana Hanks, and say, amicably, sanely, Look, Deana, differences aside — we have a problem.
Which was not, damn the woman, a comfortable proposition. The rift was not a resolvable rift between two people, it was ideological, between two political philosophies on Mospheira. The camp he feared now had thrown Deana Hanks onto the mainland was the same that had supported Hanks through the selection process no matter her test scores, and he suspected foreknowledge of key questions she still hadn't answered with as high a score as his, as well as outside help on the requisite paper. She was Raymond Gaylord Hanks' granddaughter, and S. Gaylord Hanks' daughter: that was old, old politics, a conservative element that had, ever since the war, argued that Shejidan was secretly hostile — the same damned suspicion among humans that, mirror-image among atevi, believed in death rays on the station, maintained that the atevi space program got atevi funding because, along with getting into space, atevi meant to take the station and use it as a base to deny access for Mospheira.
The fixation of the conservatives lately was the snowballing advances in technology during his and Wilson's tenure, both technological and social: the conservatives held that Tabini was hostile and using a naive paidhi for his own purposes.
That very conservative camp of human interests moldered away, not in obscure university posts, but in the halls of the presidency, the legislature: they were the old guard politicians, whose families had been in politics since the war, in an island community where politics had traditionally not mattered a damn in ordinary human affairs and nepotism got more immediate results.
In the State Department, most of the view-with-alarmers were at senior levels, entrenched in lifelong tenancies: they had never, ever accepted the official atevi assertion that Tabini was innocent of his father's assassination. It was a tenet of the conservative faith that Tabini had done it, and that Tabini had demanded Wilson-paidhi resign to get a new and naive paidhi to carry out his programs.
In brutal atevi fact, they were very probably right, granted Tabini's grandmother hadn't beaten him to it — but parricide didn't weigh the same on the mainland as it did on Mospheira. One just couldn't judge atevi by human ethics. Assassinate someone of the same man'chi, the same hierarchical loyalty? That was shocking.
Assassinate a relative? That was possibly a rational solution.
The damn trouble was — the paidhi had far better pipelines and mechanisms for dispensing new information into the atevi mainland than he had for moving public opinion on Mospheira. It had never been necessary before for the paidhi to convince Mospheirans. It had never been necessary before for the paidhi to campaign against the conservatives, because the conservatives had never had a crisis in which they could move members of academe, as he feared they had done, to interfere in the paidhi's office.
But the academic insulation that supported the paidhi and assisted in the decision-making — usually without the politicians involved in the process — was a politically naive group of people, who, confronted with panic, might have been rushed to put Hanks in a position where she could at least observe at a time when lack of information seemed very ominous.
He'd never taken Hanks seriously. He'd taken for granted that she'd drown quietly in academe and be so old if she ever got the appointment she'd likely decline it, immersed lifelong in Mospheiran ways and incapable of adjusting if she got here. He'd trusted the academics to just keep shunting his conservative albatross aside for decades, give her some tenured professorship in Philosophy of Contact or some other nap class. Ask him a year ago and he'd have said that was the future of Deana Hanks.
It wasn't.
The shiver that had started wouldn't go away. It wasn't fear, he said to himself. It was simply sitting in one spot in what he now realized, by the blowing of the curtains, was a draft from the windows, until his legs went to sleep. It was the aftereffects of anesthetic. It was the whole crisis he'd been through —
It was the whole, damnable, mishandled situation. He'd been in the eastern part of the continent, out of the information loop, when atevi needed him most. It might not be his fault; atevi might have put him there temporarily until they were assured they could rely on — not trust — him.
But for whatever necessary satisfaction of atevi suspicion, he had been kept in the dark, all the same, and now if he misstepped — if he was even apprehended to misstep, politically — or if he pulled a mistake like Hanks' mistake with lord Geigi, which he still had to clean up —
Hell. He'd made a few mistakes himself, early on in his tenure.
And hell twice — the woman had to have some sense, somewhere located. You couldn't get through Comparative Reasoning or the math and physics requirements if you hadn't at least the ability to draw abstract conclusions. He should give reason a try.
He extricated himself from the chair, bit by slow bit and, letting his foot tingle back to awareness, got up and pulled the bell-cord. Saidin answered it. He sent Saidin after Jago, and Jago to deliver two verbal messages. To Tabini: I've learned all I'm likely to find out. I'm ready to talk to the public.
And to Deana Hanks: I will shortly issue an official position on the ship presence; you will receive a copy. We need to talk. Is tomorrow evening possibly agreeable to your schedule?
Then he went back to his chair, tucked up, and shut his eyes. Amazing how fast, how heavily sleep could come down, once the decision was made and the load was off.
But he could afford to sleep now, he said to himself. Other people could deal with the scheduling and the meetings and the arranging of things. He half-waked when someone settled a coverlet over his legs, decided they didn't need him, that the ship hadn't swooped down with death rays yet, and he simply hugged the coverlet up over a breeze-chilled arm and enjoyed the comfortable angle he'd found.
He waked again when Jago came to him, called his name and gave him another message cylinder sealed with Tabini's seal.
It gave the time of the joint session as midevening, unusual for atevi legislative proceedings, and added, simply, Your attendance and interpretations are gratefully requested, nand' paidhi.
"Any other message?" he asked. "Anything from the island?"
"No, I regret not, Bren-ji."
"Did you talk to Deana Hanks? What did she say?"
"She was very courteous," Jago said. "She listened. She said tell you a word. I hesitate to say it."
"In Mosphei', she gave you this word."
"I think that go-to-'elle is rude. Do I apprehend correctly?"
Temper — was not what would serve him this evening. He made his face quite impassive.
"I made no answer," Jago said. "I am embarrassed to bring you such a report. If you have an answer, I will certainly carry it. Or we can bring this person to your office, Bren-paidhi."
Tempting. "Jago-ji, I've sent you to a fool. You will get an apology, or satisfaction."
"There are less comfortable accommodations than your old apartment, Bren-ji."
"She's in my apartment?"
Jago shrugged. "I fear so, Bren-ji. If I were handling her security, I'd advise otherwise."
"I want her moved out. Speak to Housing. This is not a woman without enemies."
Jago made a little moue, seemed to be thinking, and finally said, "Her security is very tight — for such a sieve. In terms of live bodies, quite a high level. I speak in confidence."
"I've no doubt. Tabini's security?"
"Yes. Which the aiji can relax at will."
Meaning leave her completely unprotected. Jago didn't breach Tabini's security on a whim. That Jago told him anything at all on a matter she didn't need to mention was troubling.
"Did Tabini tell you to tell me this?"
Jago's face was at its most unreadable.
"No," she said.
Which meant narrowly what you could get it to mean — but when Jago took that tone, there was no more information forthcoming.