Precursor

by C. J. Cherryh

  “None within the rooms,” Banichi said, “but we remain uncertain about the corridor.”

  “I have the structural plans,” he said, to Banichi’s thoughtfully astonished glance. “I am a fount of secrets,” Bren said. “I should have purged the contents of the machine before we left; nothing that the ship doesn’t contain, or shouldn’t. Nothing that isn’t duplicated in the archive, or available to them for the asking: I think a search should turn it up. I’ve no trouble with them knowing what I know, but I’m a little more worried about them knowing that I know certain things. The very size of the archive buries things; but we had part of the archive. I do know the location of the search key in the original archive. It used to be extraneous information. Now… not so.”

  “One completely comprehends,” Jago said.

  “Have you followed much of what we said today?”

  “And the day before. A good deal of it,” Banichi said. “Does the paidhi wish an opinion?”

  It was a measure of the relationship of confidence that had grown between them that Banichi did ask him that question, and would give it thoroughly.

  “Yes. Very much so.”

  “I think the aiji will approve,” Banichi said. “I think he will very much approve.”

  “One hopes,” Bren said fervently. Do you think sol welled up from the human heart, but one didn’t ask Banichi obvious questions. “Thirteen more days before the mission goes back down. But we ourselves may go down and up again on the shuttle’s return flight. Can we can manage it? I know we have materials tests that need to run. But if we place a permanent presence here, they can manage those tests much more quickly.”

  “Indeed,” Banichi said.

  “Shall we leave an establishment here?” Jago asked.

  “I hesitate to ask it of staff. They didn’t agree to a protracted stay.”

  “They agreed to accompany you, nadi. And if we establish our security in these quarters, I would be reluctant to interrupt it for any reason. This is our center of operations, however we branch out from here.”

  “I think so, too,” Bren said.

  “Tano and Algini would stay, perhaps Kandana. That would suffice.”

  Bindanda’s role as reporting to Lady Damiri’s irascible and very powerful uncle was in fact an asset: to abandon Bindanda up here unable to report… Tatiseigi would immediately suspect it was no accident.

  And the old man probably knew that they knew Bindanda was a spy. Between great households there were courtesies. And some courtesies they could not violate.

  While Narani… a possibility as head of a continuing station presence… yet he was an old, old man.

  “We should ask Narani,” Bren said. “Do offer him the post, but stress I value him equally going with me. I would trust his experience in either post. How is he faring?”

  “Very well,” Jago said. “He worries excessively that you and Jasi-ji were not accorded greater respect. He’s quite indignant the officials haven’t come here to pay their respects. He wonders if he has failed in some particular. One attempts to assure him otherwise.”

  There was some humor in the statement. Narani was exceedingly set in his devotion, but it was not an outrageous sentiment, in the atevi mind-set.

  “By no means has he failed,” Bren murmured. “These are not atevi. And for the two of you, for Tano and Algini, too, I understand their manners; I give way to them more than I ought, perhaps, but I still believe we will gain what we need.”

  “We defer to your judgment.”

  “Tell the staff. I would willingly place Narani or Kandana in charge here, with the understanding this area must remain sacrosanct. Jase may come here. Or Yolanda.”

  “One wishes Jase were available now,” Jago said.

  “They still refuse me contact with him. I intend to see him before we go down.”

  “So the paidhi, too, doesn’t trust implicitly.”

  “I don’t trust. I find out.”

  Banichi gave a wry smile. “We saw two captains,” Banichi said, accurately nailing one of his apprehensions, with all the psychological infelicity that expressed. Never… never in atevi management of a situation would there be four captains in charge over anything, and two, by no means.

  “They don’t see the difficulty,” Bren said.

  “Yet even on the earth we have dealt with the same two aloft. We never hear from the others. Should we be concerned?”

  “Two captains,” Jago added, “two days until a second meeting…”

  “It’s natural to them, these twos. They don’t find infelicity in the number. They don’t think it insulting or ominous.”

  “They have not sought to discover our opinions, either,” Jago said.

  “Baji-naji,” Banichi added in a low voice, which was to say that there was a duality in the atevi mythos, the dice throw of chance and fortune, that black-and-white duality that governed gamblers, computers, and the reach into space. Twos allowed division. Two was implicit in the dual presence, and dual absence.

  “Baji-naji,” Bren echoed, thinking, in fact, of the old troubles with the Guild. Ramirez on every point was far better than their fears of the Guild… thus far. Ramirez had made negotiation possible, was, indeed, consistently the one they dealt with by radio; a handful of times with Ogun, a few with Sabin, very few words with Tamun.

  Ramirez said that Guild agreement was a foregone conclusion… and it certainly would be hard to find disadvantage to the ship in having all their requests met, the same way the shuttle had leaped into production, the same way those files were going down.

  But Banichi and Jago remained uneasy, in the strangeness of the culture… in the lack of relaxation, and the infelicity of numbers. Could atevi ignore that, psychologically?

  And Jago was right. Might they not have thought of that, and tried to amend it? Three years in contact with the world might have taught them something.

  He couldn’t ignore the duality, for all of those reasons: the Pilots’ Guild was in some senses an autocracy, but it was an autocracy on a twenty-four-hour, four-watch schedule, with four captains who shared absolute power on a time clock; and they’d consistently heard from the two seniormost… on the surface that was good; but in the subsurface, Jago was right, and Banichi was. It did raise questions.

  “We’ve agreed for three years,” Bren said. “Most compelling, they have reason to deal with us, the best reason… supposing they’re telling the truth, supposing Jase is telling the truth, which I do believe: they at least haven’t time to start a war here. And they are sending down the very large files. I’ve heard from the Messengers, and they confirm it. The local communications post says I can access the files here, just as Ramirez said.”

  “And we shall be building that second ship for them,” Banichi said. “Do we understand that is still agreed?”

  “Yes.” There wasn’t a thing yet the atevi hadn’t pried apart and learned, not least of it the mathematics, not least of it computers, which they were taking in their own direction. “I have the commission from the aiji to agree to this, nadihi; I don’t say I’m without misgivings.” One couldn’t say, of all things, half have agreed in the atevi language: it came out an oxymoron, agreement meaning agreement. “We haven’t seen all of the captains; we assume their agreement. Let them teach us how to build a starship. Atevi have something as great to teach them, Nadiin-ji. If they’ve started a war with strangers, then we and the Mospheirans have very important things to teach them. The Mospheiran economy and the mainland economy… both have things to teach them about how to build. We can’t be the same as these ship-humans, but we don’t need to be. We won’t be.” He caught himself using we, as he used it in his thoughts. “Atevi don’t need to be. And atevi won’t be.”

  They listened to him very soberly, and remained silent a moment after.

  Then Jago said, “So, this starship. Shall we have one, too?”

  “If the aiji wills,” he said. That was the answer to all official policy; and he knew
what Jago asked: separate command, on the station, was a problem. Establish another aiji and there was a potential rivalry within the aishidi’tat, an unsettling of the balance of power. “But with atevi, every outpost, every separated community must find honest aijiin who can agree with the aiji in Shejidan for good and logical reasons; as we may have to find an honest lord to command a starship. A hundred, two hundred, a thousand years from now, who knows what will be possible for any of us?”

  “Perhaps we’ll all be so virtuous there’ll hardly be aijiin, or presidents,” Jago said.

  “One doubts it,” Banichi said.

  “More than starships, Nadiin-ji, far more than starships is the skill to absorb change, and atevi do excel at that. Atevi managed the resolution of the War. We, Mospheirans and atevi, wrote the Treaty of Mospheira, and the atevi economy every year makes technology transfer an asset, not a detriment. It’s taken two hundred years to refine the economy to do that. Now we absorb an immense rate of change without social upheaval.”

  “Without much social upheaval,” Banichi said.

  “Give or take what happened three years ago. But to accomplish what atevi and Mospheirans have done, Nadiin-ji, welding together two completely different economies, peacefully, prosperously, that’s no small thing.”

  “No,” Banichi said, “nor managed by fools, as delicate as it is.”

  The mathematical gift of atevi was prodigious. They hadn’t needed computers at the start of the relationship, and in the last few decades of this two-century partnership, the University and the Foreign Office on Mospheira had stalled… very, very fearful of releasing computers into the information pipeline.

  They had done it, truth be told, because atevi knew about computers and had begun to understand them as more than an aid for humans. As trade proliferated, the economy expanded, the population bloomed, and—second truth—the Mospheiran economy could no longer fine-tune itself fast enough to sustain its more advanced industries once atevi competed with them, unless there was closer contact. Atevi, who made a rug or a vase to stay in the economy for centuries, had discovered a use for fast food and ephemeral gains… as a blunt-force weapon in an economic war and as a useful communal experience in an ethnically diverse province.

  Highways had once started wars. Trains were the appropriate answer.

  Computers had helped atevi understand how humans perceived the universe. Atevi were reinventing them, hand over fist.

  But dared one think of a space station and a starship as the equivalent of a provincial fast food chain, feeding a carefully-modulated interprovincial money flow?

  They sipped their liqueur, and he had his misgivings.

  The banking system, with its new computers, was set up to do that kind of calculation down to the small exchanges. Coinage as such was one of those imports from the human side of the straits, more token than intrinsically valued.

  Coinage was going to be a problem on the space station, getting crew into possession of coinage was another question.

  And within the aishidi’tat there were questions. Provinces, however loosely they defined borders, still had borders in terms of economic interest, and that was going to be a touchy problem.

  They had to be careful of the ethnic composition of the work force the aiji sent, keeping the provinces and great houses from seeing advantage to their rivals; and keeping the ubiquitous number-counters from seeing calamity in obstinate human dualities. Computers, God knew, had been a controversy in that regard.

  He felt a headache at the mere thought of the provincial lords. The hasdrawad. The tashrid. The committees. Mospheira was not alone in its proliferation of committees.

  “So,” Banichi said, in this post-supper discussion, “we shall set up, shall we, nadi, as a permanent installation? And then, shall Tano and Algini look to stay?”

  Tano and Algini struggled to learn the language. But outside of Banichi and Jago themselves, whom he would not give up, there was no choice, much as he hated the whole idea of leaving atevi unbuffered up here, without him, even for a few weeks.

  “Ask them to consider the assignment. We should widen this zone with every shuttle flight. More, the next flight should bring technicians to assist, and staff to support them, and so on. Increasingly more personnel, until they see it possible to turn the matter over to subordinates. We can’t forgo the materials tests, but we do need to establish several other working modules here, on the station.”

  “Refurbish those areas immediately adjacent,” Banichi said.

  “And areas useful to us… all those things, granted we gain the agreement of all the captains… and the aiji. We get the other shuttles into operation… hire more staff. The dedicated spaceport will have to move on schedule, no matter what. Shejidan can’t spare many more roof tiles.”

  Wry smiles from Banichi and Jago. “The Ragi have a fondness for history.”

  The Ragi of the capital mailed broken tiles to relatives as valued mementos. He’d signed a few.

  “But when their roofs leak, this fall, they may think less of it. We’ve met schedule. We’re up here. We’re up here, unlikely as it still seems. The new runway should be complete as soon as possible, before Shejidan soaks in the winter rains. I have the manager’s word on it.”

  “With the tourist center?”

  “With the tourist center.” He lifted his small glass to atevi determination. Two small industrial towns near the new spaceport—a runway accessible by rail-link and a short flight from the airport space center—had turned out on various holidays to assist the crews driving spikes, to establish a second link with their quaint local steam locomotive, which would run back and forth, half an hour’s round trip to the modern spaceport. The towns anticipated genteel atevi tourists, and prosperity, and perhaps warehouses of goods and a modern rail-link to the national system… all in the concept of what a tourist facility meant. They had not yet grasped what was taking shape at their very doorstep, were contemplating a name change to Jaitonai-shi, Flower-about-to-open.

  Could one look about this cramped, small quarters, austere as the harbor town that might become Jaitonai-shi, and see, as they sat on the floor on their baggage, a place of dreams?

  “I think of the folk of Jaitonai-shi,” he said. “How very strange the world may become.”

  “It’s already done so,” Jago said.

  He massaged his eyes, which stung with the dry air of the station, and asked himself, given the labor of townsfolk who turned out with hoes and shovels to link supply to the new spaceport, how he could think of going to bed in the next hour.

  He could take notes. He needed to take notes.

  “Nadiin-ji, most of all… most of all, I believe what I’ve done is the best thing to do. An enormous effort.” He gazed across into sober, golden eyes, the two of them his absolutely trusted allies, advisors, protectors. “But over all… one that I still fear to report to the aiji-dowager. Do you think she will at all understand?”

  There was no fiercer proponent of the old ways than the aiji-dowager, no more ardent defender of the land, the earth, and its sanctity. And he brought down a proposal for a change that would sweep atevi right off the planet and into an unknown, dangerous future.

  But he saw no choice.

  “The aiji himself supports what you do,” Banichi said to him in that deep, quiet voice. “I have it on the best authority. —Change is the paidhi’s business, is it not?”

  “It remains my business,” Bren agreed, feeling still that change rushed through his fingers, almost out of control, marginally within his grasp.

  “Even before the Foreign Star rose,” Jago said, “the world changed.”

  There had been changes even before the station appeared in the world’s skies… changes wrought by steam engines, wood fires.

  An association of noble houses hellbent on larger and larger associations of interests…

  The ruler of the largest association on the planet remained hellbent on his ancestors’ course, insisting the paid
hi make sense of it all.

  “Change there was,” he agreed, “before there were paidhiin.” He drew comfort from these two who, blood and bone, did understand things.

  And he finished his drink, and sighed. “I’ll work tonight. I have the meeting tomorrow. I’ll prepare my case; we may have a very quick return trip, so it’s best I go tomorrow with my proposals in some sort of order. Will you read them and check my proposals for common sense and provincial mistakes?”

  “One expects to do so,” Banichi said, and finished his drink.

  Bren sat on his bed, made computer notes, nothing quite in Ragi, nothing quite in Mosphei’, a great deal simply in code-labeled graphs that bounced numbers off each other in complex interrelation. He didn’t let himself think about the archive, which might be done by now, which was surely available. Most urgently there was tomorrow’s meeting to prepare for, careful consideration of what specifics he could propose and what he had to insist upon… all the traps, all the considerations on the planet that might blow up into interprovincial matters, or stress between Mospheira and the mainland. Banichi read what he did, discussed it behind the closed door of their small security post with Tano and Algini.

  And, minor point of excitement and relief, larger mattresses arrived, simple cushions, very thin, but exceedingly welcome and curiously new, exactly like the mattresses of the bed, a sealed rectangle of foam in a bright blue plastic skin. New, Bren thought, as if the ship had manufactured them; and by what little he knew of the ship’s resources, that was possible, granted the raw materials.

  So they had gained another point of their requests. There were beds for the night that did not involve stuffed baggage, that were tailored for his staff, and his security passed the stack in, examining them behind the door for any sign of electronic output or potential for it.