He composed his further messages and answers in the sitting room, while Tano, armed with the paidhi's own message cylinders and seal, answered the simple and the routine.
He expressed the wish for a simple, in-house lunch, and settled down to Tano's summation of the clerical situation: three of Damiri's staff were perfectly competent — more competent, serving in a noble house — at etiquette to answer routine inquiries, with Tano to handle the substance and himself to catch the odd or difficult ones.
A telegram, from a primer-school class in Jackson City, requesting the paidhi to assure them that there wouldn't be a war. No, he said. Atevi are quite as anxious as humans to keep the peace.
Too damn much television.
He asked the staff to scour up a tape of the news coverage. He made a note to send Ilisidi the translation transcripts.
He wrote a note to Tabini that said, Aiji-ma, I am doing well today. Thank you for your kind intervention last night. I hope for your success in all undertakings.
Meaning grandmother hadn't served up the wrong tea, Tano hadn't broken his ribs last night, and he was waiting, hoping for information.
Hanks, meanwhile, hadn't cracked. Wasn't home, contrary to security's expectations. Or had flung herself on security wires rather than listen to the ringing.
He sent his brief message to Tabini; and the one damning Hanks to diplomatic hell to the Foreign Office.
He had his sandwich: the Bu-javid was always kabiu, strictly proper, and the game allowable in the season was by no means his favorite: that left fish and eggs, the allowable alternatives, as his diet until the midpoint of this month, which was, thankfully, almost on them.
The Bu-javid, relatively modern among atevi antiquities, but shared by various atevi philosophical schools, was more meticulously kabiu than Malguri, in fact, where wise chefs put by a cooked roast or two of this and that. Atevi never shot game out of season, one never trafficked in — unthinkable — domestic meat and never sold meat out of season, but Malguri cannily managed to have leftovers enough to stretch through the less palatable months. A civilized solution, in his reckoning and, one suspected, the original custom of which the strict kabiu of the Bu-javid was the rigid, entrenched rule, probably more to do with early lack of refrigeration than any ceremonial reason — but the paidhi wasn't about to suggest such a solution to the very kabiu Atigeini chef. The paidhi had enough controversy on his hands, thank you, and such a suggestion might set him on the side of some provincial philosophical sect bloodily opposed to some other one critical to the union the Bu-javid represented.
He took to the afternoon reports, wondering now where Jago had gone. She'd just not turned up in the to-do with the office. Add that to Banichi, who wasn't here.
Tano, meanwhile, God help him — coped.
Someone arrived at the door; he hoped it was Jago or Banichi, if only to have the important parts of his household in one place and within his understanding.
But a trip to the door proved it to be another batch of messages — one from the installation at Mogari-nai, which received the transmissions from the ship, which he was anxious to get. That transmissions existed showed, for one thing, that the ship was talking again, and offered a possibility that something might have budged. So he took the tape from Tano, walked back to the study where he had the recorders set up, put it in and set it to play.
The usual chatter of machines talking to machines.
And past that exchange of machine protocols, more chatter, involving, this time, the transmission of documents or images — he wasn't sure, but it was digital, and he was sure the atevi machinery could spit it out, the same as atevi documents ended up intercepted by Mospheira, where there was a listening station: spying on each other was a full-time, well-funded operation, an absolute guarantee of employment for the practitioners.
Tano came in bearing a stack of paper: more correspondence, he thought. But Tano said, quietly:
"I think this must go with the tape, nadi Bren."
It certainly did. He saw that when he opened it, and no wonder the machine-to-machine talk went on and on: Mospheira had elected to go to written transmission, and the transcript…
It was a nonphonetic Mosphei' transcript. On this side of the strait.
It was — he had no trouble recognizing the text — the first chapters of The History of Contact, by Meighan Durna, a work that laid out every action, every mistake of the Landing and the war.
It released a devil of a lot of intimate knowledge about Mospheira and atevi in the process, which he had rather not have had happen on Duma's occasionally incomplete understanding of atevi motivation — but he didn't totally disagree with the decision to transmit the book. It was certainly a way to bring the Phoenix crew up to speed, or at least as far as most of Mospheira itself knew the truth: every school on Mospheira studied it as foundational to understanding where Mospheirans were and who they were, all three hundred and more pages. He jotted down a background note to the ship, for transmission at the first opportunity: The History, while expressing the origin of the Mospheiran mindset, could not accurately account for atevi behavior and should never be used to predict or explain atevi motivation ...
He wanted to get on with the tape. At home, he could have used voice-search. The atevi machine didn't have that luxury. He fast-forwarded and listened to the pitch.
There was indeed a voice section.
He sat and listened, then turned on his second recorder, the one with a blank tape, and used the directional mike to make a running commentary and quasi-translation for Tabini.
"Mostly operational protocols, discussion of the gap in relays. Schedules of contact."
Then it was something else. Then it was a ship captain asking to speak to the President of Mospheira.
Almost immediately the sign of a break, and probably an interval in which they patched the communications link together.
The President came on.
The captain said, after preliminary well-wishes, "We're very impressed, Mr. President, with the extensive development, on both sides of the water. Peace and prosperity. You're to be congratulated."
"Thank you, Captain," came the answer. The President quite comfortably taking credit for all of it. Leave it to him.
"The condition of the station is such," the captain continued, "that we can with effort bring it up to operational. We'd like to offer you a cooperative agreement. As I understand — you trade with the atevi, technology, raw materials, anything you want."
"There are limits, Captain. Nothing that destabilizes the society or the environment."
Good, Bren thought. The man at least said that.
Then:
"You're preparing," the ship captain said, "a return to space. You are making efforts in that direction."
"Yes. Considerable effort. The circumstances that forced our landing —"
"Yes. I'm aware. On the other hand — we can provide a far shorter route to orbit. We'll provide the design. You provide the manufacturing, build the ground-to-orbit craft and we can put this station back into full-scale operation . . . "
Bren took deep breaths to calm his heart. With what resources? He shaped the words with his lips, willing the answer, hoping it wasn't a package dropped in from space, free of effort.
"We can make secure habitat for five hundred workers to start with; ten thousand in three years, then — then there's no practical limit, Mr. President."
That's labor crews, Mr. President, do you hear it?
"You should know, you're not unique in space. We've got another station, near to this star, small operation, but we're growing. This is prosperity, Mr. President. This is the human future we came for."
There was a lump of ice in Bren's chest.
"You're saying," the President answered slowly, "that you've already built another station. Out there. Somewhere. "
"A mining and repair operation, self-sustaining food supply. Humanity is in business in this district of space, Mr. President. We're asking you to rejoin the universe. We don't dispute whatever arrangements you've made down there. It clearly works. All we're interested in is the station. "
How nice. How magnanimous. How concerned for everyone's rights.
"We can restore what we had. We can build, Mr. President. All you've got to do is get up here: a share of the station, exactly what the original mission charter calls for, to all the builders and their descendants."
"I have to consult," the President said. "I have to consult with the council and the Departments."
Depend on it. God, the man couldn't executive-order a fire drill.
"That's fine, Mr. President. I'll be here."
So what are you going to do now, Mr. President? Consult about what?
Strangers to our whole way of life are on the station. They're sitting up there in possession of it, and now they want manpower, Mr. President. They want what they wanted from us two hundred years ago, and you don't even know for a fact there's another station, the way they claim. We've got their word for it, don't we, the way we've got their word for everything else in space.
The way we had their word for it they'd let the station-builders and the miners run the station once they finished it, and you know how much say we had over what they did with the ship, and how much say we had over policy on the station. They double-crossed the station-keepers to get fuel for their ship, and now they're mad that the station-keepers couldn't keep the station going?
The good ones in the crew, the heroes — they'd volunteered to go out into the radiation hell of the star we came to after the accident, to get us to a kinder sun. The brightest and the best, they died way young, back when Taylor was captain.
The heroes weren't in charge when the scum that let them do the dying made all the later decisions.
The real heroes in the crew died and left the self-saving sons-of-bitches to run the thing they died for, Mr. President: don't believe these people. What they're dealing for is not just a ticket to fly. The idealists, the dreamers, the engineers and the nose-in-a-data-table scientists, are all in the same basket with this generation of sons-of-bitches who want off the planet, the ones who want their political party up where they control real power — power not to deal with atevi except down the barrel of a gun, a laser, whatever state of the art they've got up there. After that, nobody but them gets up there —
They're still fighting the damn war, Mr. President, but they don't let me on conference programs to call it what it is — they're still nursing a hatred of atevi that has nothing to do with the facts either present or past. They're the ones who write the letters about plots in atevi advances. They don't see anything but war. They think God made them perfect, in His image, and atevi…
Atevi can't love, they have no feelings, the separatists told those willing to listen — they couldn't expound it on television: the censors bleeped them off as inciting to break the peace; but they said it in places where people gathered who wanted to listen — not many people, because Mospheirans weren't political, weren't discontent, didn't give a damn so long as water came from the tap and they could observe their annual cycles of vacation at the shore-sides, winter break for the mountains, total employment, pensioned retirement — the bowling societies, the touring societies, the dance societies, the low and the fashionable nightclubs, and the concern, if they worried about anything, over the weather, their health, their social standing, their vacation schedules, their kids' schools, and their various annual community festivals. That was the public the activists of whatever stripe had to deal with, a public that didn't grow exercised over any situation until it inconvenienced their plans: that was the Mospheiran political reality, in a system without real poverty, real threat, real anxiety, a system where stress was a rainy spell during your harvest celebration. Nobody got involved in politics except the few with an agenda, and lacking sources for funds and door-to-door campaigners, politics became a land of long-term benevolent chair-warmers and occasional agenda-pushers.
You only hoped to get the chair-warmers in office. And the pro-spacers, who were generally idealistic sorts — except this small, this hitherto mostly laughable nest of people who believed atevi were secretly building rockets to hurl at Mospheira — had been a private lunacy, not practiced in public, so the Secretary of State was secretly scared of atevi. It wasn't critical to the operation of the Foreign Office, which was Treaty-mandated, therefore set in concrete, and university-advised, therefore too esoteric to matter to the purveyors of corporate largesse that fed the successive Secretaries of State.
Until now.
There was public ignorance out there — fertile ground for fears.
There were people who'd never bothered to educate themselves about atevi because it wasn't their job to deal with atevi. The public just knew there was a different and far more violent world beyond their shores; the conservative party, which made a career out of viewing-with-alarm and deprecating esoteric scientific advances as costing too much money — those whose whole political bent was to conserve what was or yearn for what they thought had been, feared progress toward any future that didn't fit their imaginary past.
And they played to an undereducated populace with their demands for stronger defense, more secrecy, more money for a launch vehicle to get humans off the planet — which, of course, they could get by spending less for atevi language studies, and nothing at all for trade cities, as giving too much to atevi.
Lately the conservatives had tried to get three perhaps ill-advised university graduate students' grant revoked for teaching atevi philosophy as a cultural immersion experience for human eight-year-olds.
And in the ensuing flap, the more radical conservatives had tried to get all atevi studies professors thrown off the State Department's university advisory committee. Everyone had thought that an extreme reaction. Then. Before the ship.
The list of attempts to nibble away at the edges of intercultural accommodation went on and on, and it all added up in the paidhi's not apolitical mind to a movement that wasn't in any sense a party, wasn't in any sense grassroots, an agenda that only a minute fraction of the population agreed with in total.
But the closer atevi and human cultures drew to each other, the more the radicals, turning up in high places, generated issue after issue after issue — because the majority of humans, while not hating atevi, still had just a little nervousness about their neighbors across the strait, who did shoot each other, who looked strikingly different, who were ruled by a different government, who couldn't speak Mosphei; and people, be they human, be they atevi, always wanted to feel safer than they did, and more in charge of their future than they were.
The fact was, living on an island and hearing for nearly two hundred years of their government turning more and more sophisticated technology over to atevi — and lately knowing that the highest tech humans owned was on the negotiating table, and that within their children's lifetimes, the remaining technogap was going to close — could one wonder that humans who hadn't made atevi studies part of their education were becoming more than a little anxious?
On the atevi side of the strait, an atevi who sincerely believed there were secret human spaceships lurking on the great moon was very likely to be outspoken, to be known throughout the structure of his man 'chi as holding those opinions, and not be appointed to office.
But on Mosphiera nobody had ever asked, when a candidate stood for public office, or stood for appointment, whether that candidate was a separatist. A State Department appointee could believe that atevi were stealing human children to make sausages, for God's sake, and none of that belief could turn up in the legislative review of fitness for office, because it wasn't a belief polite people expressed in public.
From totally insignificant, in the one hour of that ship's arrival, the separatists had come within reach of the kind of power that could keep them, they were sure, safe.
Because up there any human could deal with the Pilots' Guild for political power, for management authority over the station, while hiring the pro-spacers and their own malcontents to go risk their rears doing the real work.
The Pilots' Guild didn't know the situation on the planet, even if it had the best intentions in the world: it had to trust what it was told, and by all the history he knew the Pilots' Guild didn't care that damn much what they dealt with so long as it agreed with their agenda. The number of times the Guild had switched sides back in the debate over the Landing — even double-crossing the station management, then to patch things with the station, double-crossing the Landing faction — damned well ensured that the station population would be so bitterly divided and angry at each other that negotiation became impossible: that was the state of affairs he'd learned from his professors' unpublished notes. The station's demise had been virtually certain once the ship left, because station management was, in the view of the workers, compromised, untrustable, and lying through their teem.
Screwed over, screwed up, and now the great holy Ship was back, offering paradise in space and the sun, the moon and the stars to anybody who'd come up there, risk their necks in the service of the all-important ship.
The same damned business all over again.
The same damned lot that had — perhaps not shoved Gaylord Hanks' daughter over here —
But certainly bestirred itself to keep her here. Maybe — they were not even aware as yet the degree of trouble she was stirring up, but just pushing their candidate in place, and pushing. A blow-up in atevi relations might be exactly what would put a finish to Bren Cameron's liberal dealings, could render the atevi interface unworkable and, in the minds of the opposition, put everything in their hands at a time when there was power to be had.
It was too stupid to be a reason. It was too far removed from sanity.
But his political sense kept up a persistent itch that said: A, Given ignorance in the mix, stupidity was at least as common in politics as astute maneuvering; B, Crisis always drew insects; and, C, Inevitably the party trying to resolve a matter had to contend with the party most willing to exploit it.
He found himself, with this voice-tape, sitting in possession of information that led him places he didn't at all want to go — conclusions that on one level were suspect, though informed: a set of conclusions that — even if they didn't fit present reality — still described its behavior — and the Hanks situation — with disturbingly predictive accuracy.
If he went down, humanity was in for a long, long siege of trouble — and might not win the ensuing civil wars, the breakdown of atevi peaceful tech and the acceleration of weapons development: witness planes in Malguri dropping homemade bombs, when Mospheira had made every design attempt to keep atevi aircraft stall rates where it would discourage that development. Humans never reckoned on atevi ingenuity, and even the best of the academics kept relying on human history to predict what atevi would logically come up with next.
But atevi ability to solve math problems, applied to design, meant everything you gave atevi mutated before sundown.
And some humans thought you could double-cross atevi, outnumbered in their solar system, and keep them planetbound and out of the political question?
That, or there were people with notions of dealing with atevi that the paidhi didn't even want to contemplate.
Departmental policy said: Don't discuss human politics. Don't discuss internal and unresolved debates.
It wasn't the paidhi's business to steer atevi policy to oppose a Mospheiran choice. He didn't have that level of information. He wasn't appointed by any election or process to do that.
But he was elected — and appointed — and trained — and briefed on an executive level on this side of the strait. He did know atevi on levels that nobody else, even on the university advisory committee, could inform the State Department.
He sat for a while, while the tape ran down to its end, and there was no more information, there were no more bombs, but the one was enough.
It wasn't that the President had chosen to accept the offer — it was that the political process of decision had been set into motion, and the process was going to be dirty, full of fast-moving politics a slow-moving government wasn't going to stay on top of. Thanks to that apparently generous offer, very dirty, very destructive elements were going to push an agenda that could, if somebody didn't take fast action, crack Mospheira's insular, safe little world apart.
Meaning issues that didn't have a damned thing to do with reality. Mospheira didn't understand atevi. Mospheira had never needed or wanted to understand atevi. Just the paidhi did. That was why they appointed him. That was what they paid him to do. So they didn't have to.
And he had to talk to Tabini. Before the legislatures formulated policy. Before they took a public position.
He cut off the first recorder and went in search of Saidin, his coat, and Tano.
It was already a trying day: an unscheduled but urgent luncheon briefing in Tabini's own residence that postponed a scheduled agricultural council meeting downstairs in the Blue Hall and probably started a flood of rumors.
And trying through that stressful affair to convey — to a man who could with a word start an interspecies war — some sense of the dynamics at work in the Mospheiran population: the small percentage of the opposition involved, the substantial danger to atevi interests and claims on the space station of letting relations deteriorate, and the need to hold firm and resolved in the face of hysterical or bribe-bearing voices on either side of the strait who could only want to aggravate the tensions.
That meant coming up with an atevi negotiating position that took into account the things humans were going to need: the paidhi could count off on both hands, at least if not more knowledgeably than the President of Mospheira, critical raw materials and some finished goods needful to the space effort that humans didn't have available on the island — and the paidhi knew what humans either on Mospheira or on the ship would be able and willing to trade — namely money, designs, and full atevi participation in space, once human prejudice and patronage had had its say and sober realization set in — in order for the ship to get what they had to have: workers in numbers going up to that station.
Meaning atevi had to be willing to shut down trade and go to unified bargaining with Mospheira or with the ship, depending on which party proved reasonable.
"That doesn't allow Hanks-paidhi to deal with lord Geigi for oil," Tabini instantly pointed out. "Does it?"
"The antithesis, I assure you, of what we want, aiji-ma. No province should make independent deals for anything. Everything in this emergency should go through Shejidan, just as Shejidan approves roads, rail, bridges and dams — trade should go through Shejidan, for the good of all the individual provinces so there isn't, for one thing, undercutting of prices and selling of goods for less than their fair value. Pool all trade, all shipping: establish market value, pay the suppliers, the workers, the shippers on that standard, no exceptions, no profit for the central government, but no getting past it, either. The provincials have to understand they can lose money; and they have to understand the hazard of speaking with more than one voice when they deal with humans, exactly as I said in my speech, aiji-ma. Humans may quarrel among themselves: atevi can't afford to. This is where atevi make up the technological disadvantage: atevi know what they want, they've already voted their consensus, and they can vote, hold fast as a bloc, and be ready to deal while the President of Mospheira is still consulting with committees. Be fast enough and the ship folk may well choose to deal with you rather than Mospheira. At least you can scare Mospheira enough to get a better deal than they'd have given otherwise — and they're still your more natural ally, having dealt with you for two hundred years."
"Interesting," Tabini said. Tabini clearly liked that notion. The provincial lords wouldn't like it half as well, count on it. The lords of the provinces — and call a province a convenience of the map that only marginally described the real complexity of the arrangement — were always pulling in various directions for their own profit and for their own power if they could manage it.
"The provincial lords," Bren said, "have to find specific advantage for themselves."
"Believe me that I can find such advantages, in ways they will understand."
Meaning — the paidhi hoped — that the aiji would use bribes, fair, historically negotiated division of revenue, and not bullets.
The paidhi was about to pursue that point — when lady Damiri happened in, sat down at the table, set her chin in her hand, and declared that she couldn't help but overhear.
"Daja-ma," Bren said in confusion.
"Perhaps you'll persuade just this provincial, nand' paidhi, of the means with which the Atigeini should deal with Mospheira."
"I — can only urge my host that the Atigeini are in the same position as every powerful house in the Association — that if atevi don't deal as a unit, atevi will be at the mercy of the weakest and most desperate lords who will deal with humans when the aiji would urge —"
"When the aiji would urge," Tabini said, "that the provincial lords not sell to the humans, except at a price we agree, and under conditions we agree — with conditions which above all guarantee us access to the space station."
"What will we do with it?" Damiri asked — not the feckless question it might seem. "How do we come and go to this possession without this marketplace haggling over transport?"
"Atevi are ready," Bren said, and broke a chain of departmental rules, "for a major leap forward. Atevi are capable of safeguarding their own environment, their own government, and their own future. Atevi will secure access to materials and processes that go far beyond the designs we've already released. Atevi will have state-of-the-art earth-to-orbit craft, right along with Mospheira, and the paidhi hopes that atevi do better with advanced power systems than drop bombs on each others' heads, nadiin-nai."
"Does your President say so?"
"Aiji-ma, I say so. You have the Mospheiran President hanging on a frayed rope: there's no way for Mospheira to get critical materials without dealing with atevi. The ship could mine the moon, if it had workers to get the materials to build the robots to get the materials, but that's not practical. It needs supply and it needs workers. There's no way that Mospheirans can come and go at will on their own craft and die paidhi allow atevi to remain only passengers. But — a big but, nadiin — we must rely on computers. We must file flight plans. There must be air traffic control up there. Or whatever one calls it. There will be changes, in short, in atevi thinking, in atevi concepts. The paidhi can't prevent that."
Tabini was amused. The experienced eye saw it in the minute lift of a brow. An actual smile chased it.
"Weinathi Bridge in the heavens?"
A notorious air crash — which had persuaded even most provincial lords that precedence in the air couldn't rely on rank and that flung flight plans and standing by them no matter what was a very good idea. Especially in urban areas around major airports.
"We have only one station," Bren said. "Humans and atevi must live there. Beyond trade cities — the station is very close living, very close cooperation."
"This place that killed so many humans. That humans couldn't continue to occupy. Should atevi die for it?"
"The station itself is suitable for living. And can be made far safer than it is. This is a possible place, daja-ma. This is a place where atevi and humans can find things in common, and work in peace."
"A place with no air. No earth under one's feet."
"Just like in an airplane, daja-ma, one seals the doors and pumps air in."
"From where?"
"In this case — I suppose we bring it in tanks from the planet. Or plants can create it. Engineers know these things. The paidhi is an interpreter. If you wish to see plans, daja-ma, I can say they'll no longer be restricted."
"And the working of this ship?"
Not a simple curiosity, he thought, and was on guard. "Not the actual numbers and dimensions and techniques, daja-ma. I know liquid and solid-fuel rockets very well. But what powers this ship, what kind of technology we may have to create down here to bring us up to date with that ship — I don't know."
"Can you find out such things?" Tabini asked. "Can you get them from the ship?"
"I can tell you that I'll try. That eventually — yes, we'll find a way."
"Find a way," Damiri said.
"Daja-ma, in all my lifetime I've always been able to look around me on Mospheira and see the next technological step. For the first time — Mospheirans and atevi will be making whatever next step there is together, into a future we both don't know. I can't promise. I don't know. But atevi will have their chance. That's what I can work toward."
"There is no word," Tabini said, a question, "what this ship wants — beyond maintenance for the station:"
"On a mere guess," Bren said, "the ship's crew is far more interested in the ship and in space than it is in any planet. What they do out there, where they go, what their lives are like — I suppose is very reasonable to them. I suppose it's enough — to them — to have the ship working."
Damiri asked, "Can the ship up there take what it wants?"
"I think," Bren said, "daja-ma, that it might possibly, as far as having the power; but what it. wants just isn't so simple as to rob all banks on the planet and go its way. I can't foresee all that it might want, but I can't imagine it taking raw materials and manufacturing things itself. It never did, that I know."
"So what will it want, nadi?"
His hostess never accorded him the courtesy of his tide. There was always the imperious edge to the voice; and he glanced at Tabini, ever so briefly, receiving nothing but a straightforward, interested attention.
"Bren-ji," Tabini said, with a casual wave of his fingers. Tabini wasn't unaware. Be patient, that seemed to mean, and he answered the question.
"I think it wants the station to fuel it and repair it if it needs repair."
"Why?"
"So, perhaps, it can leave us for another two hundred years. In the meanwhile — we have the access to the station."
"This is quite mad," Damiri said.
"Bren-ji," Tabini reproved his unadorned answer.
"Daja-ma, the ship puzzles all humans. I can say it would be very much simpler for it to have Mospheirans work for it and not have to deal with atevi. But that would allow Mospheira power that would unbalance everything the Treaty balanced. I completely oppose any such solution. Even if atevi had rather not deal with them — I don't think it wise to take that decision."
"The paidhi is human."
"Yes, daja-ma. But most Mospheirans don't want to have their affairs run from space. I can't speak for every official in office, but among ordinary people, and many in office as well, atevi have natural allies. Mospheirans stand to lose their authority over their own lives if certain other Mospheirans, very much like rebel provinces, have their way. To answer your very excellent question, nai-ma — I don't think the ship intends violence. By every evidence, they need the station. They want it the cheapest way possible. We have to prevent some humans from providing it too cheaply, without atevi participation. That's the situation as plainly as I can put it. And we have the leverage to prevent it."
"Bren-ji characterizes the Mospheiran government as indecisive. Incapable of strong decision."
"Is this so?" Damiri turned her golden eyes to Tabini, and back to him. "Then why are they fit allies?"
"Daja-ma," Bren said, "Mospheirans have a long history of opposition to the ship. Second, there's no strong dissent on Mospheira. There never has been, in any numbers that could cause trouble. The government isn't used to dealing with the tactics of opposition — which I feel this time there will be. Shejidan, on the other hand, is used to dissent and rapidly moving situations. The President of Mospheira can't conceive of what to do next, many but not all of his advisors are selfishly motivated, and he urgently needs a proposal on the table to give him a tenable position he can consider — results that he can hold up in public view. Publicity. Television, aiji-ma, that demon box, can draw his opposition into defending against the proposal you make rather than pushing their own program."
Tabini rested his chin on his hand. The two of them were mirror-images, Tabini and the prospective partner in his necessary and several years postponed heir-getting. One had to think of Tabini's lamented father, and the dowager, and breakfast.
And all that atevi talent for intrigue.
"Such a reprehensible, furtive tactic," Tabini said. "Can we not just assassinate the rascals?"
One suspected the aiji was joking. One never dared assume too far. "I think the President believes his alternatives are all human. I think he would welcome a well-worded and enlightening message from Shejidan, particularly one suggesting workable solutions."
"Interesting," Tabini said. And didn't say he had to consult. One had the feeling Tabini's brain was already working on the exact text.
In the next moment, indeed, the forefinger went up, commanding attention: "Say this, Bren-ji. Say to your President, Tabini-aiji has raw materials indispensable to your effort. Say, Tabini-aiji will sell you these materials only if humans and atevi are to share the station. Say that to him… in whatever form one speaks to president. Make up words he will understand and will not refuse." The fingers waved. "I leave such details of translation to you."
Tabini said, further, "We'll call the ship this evening, Bren-ji. Be ready."
He almost missed that. And didn't know what to say, but, "Yes, aiji-ma."