“By all means, nandi!” Rejiri said. All this meeting and conversation had left the new arrival standing practically in the doorway, assaulted with observations and questions with no time at all taken for tea or consultation—an outrageous haste by atevi standards. One could all but hear Ilisidi say, the thousandth reminder to Cajeiri, that gentlemen did their conversing seated. But Rejiri was difficult to keep still and no one had insisted on tea.
And with very little more than that exchange of words, the young lord of Dur declared he would go fuel his plane immediately—if the lords would be so gracious as to give him leave to do that.
“My staff will assist, young Dur,” Tatiseigi declared, with a wave of his hand, and that unseemly haste was that. Off went the young lord of Dur with several of Lord Tatiseigi’s servants trailing him from the doorway, bound outside to provide the fuel, one supposed.
“Certainly a very forceful young gentleman,” Lord Tatiseigi said, as if a hurricane had just blown through the hall; and: “Tea, nadiin!” No nadiin-ji for his servants, not from this stiffly formal lord, an elderly gentleman who looked quite harried, quite disturbed, and, like all of them, very short of sleep. Tatiseigi might not be up with the times in technology, but very few had ever outfigured him in politics, and perhaps he, too, was rearranging his concept of Tabini’s intentions—all the while muttering: “Looking over neighbors’ borders. Buzzing over roofs. Not even time to sit down in decency to consult. Can a rifle shot possibly do damage to such a machine?”
“It can,” Tabini said. “And the young man very well knows it, one is quite sure. No, no tea for us, nandi. We are inundated with tea. Lunch, however, would be welcome.”
“Indeed,” Tatiseigi said, clearly rattled, unaccustomed to being ordered in his own hall.
And somewhere in the swirl of servants and security in the general area, Cajeiri had left his chair, and was nowhere in the room. Bren became aware of it, leaped up and went to the door, where Banichi and Jago waited with the rest of the bodyguards. “Cajeiri,” he said abruptly. “Banichi-ji.” That was all.
“Yes,” Banichi said crisply, and immediately left, doubtless having known the boy had left, and needing only an instruction.
No possible doubt where the boy had gone. To watch fuel being pumped into the plane. To watch buses rallied for a run to the train station, and—thank God he was with his young bodyguard—to be underfoot in all possible operations.
“Tell Cenedi,” Ilisidi said from her chair, cane poised before her, “that my great-grandson should not go within stone’s throw of that plane.”
“Cenedi-ji.” Bren was the one nearest the door. Cenedi, salt-and-pepper haired as his lady, was also among the bodyguards outside.
“One hears,” Cenedi said without his saying a thing, and left on the same mission as Banichi, to be absolutely sure where Cajeiri was when buses left or when planes took off.
Bren turned back to the room, somewhat easier about the boy, and realizing only then that he and the dowager had both just leaped into order-giving regarding the aiji’s own son, in the aiji’s and the consort’s presence and in front of witnesses.
Habit. Two years of habit. He was mortified.
Tabini wore the faintest of considering looks, and Damiri offered no expression at all. Bren gave a little bow, knowing that what he and the dowager knew about the boy’s habits and inclinations his own father and mother could only guess at this point, and the middle of Tatiseigi’s drawing room was no place to discuss the heir’s failings. They should have done what they had done; he only wished he could have been subtler.
Meanwhile at Rejiri’s urging, buses and trucks would be loading up with armed guards, themselves likely refueling and moving around out there, one could only assume. He took his seat again with the conviction that Banichi and Cenedi would keep the boy out from under the wheels. The plane would go up, and at least one bus or truck would go off into Taiben, to approach the train station, to come back this evening loaded with forces from Dur…God knew how or when Ajuri planned to arrive, but things were definitely cooking here.
They only had to hope, in the process, that their unasked air support wandering the skies near Kadagidi territory didn’t provoke an answering escalation from the other side—take a look to the eastern border, indeed. A damned dangerous look, and, considering what he suspected Tabini was setting up here, and what the Kadagidi might be preparing to counter him, he worried about it going wrong.
But he wanted that information, too. He had spent two years and more in a transparent universe where people couldn’t sneak about behind bushes or hide behind hills. He longed to go outside and ask for current information from Tatiseigi’s Guild staff, who might more likely know what movements were happening on the other side—but in the same way farmers weren’t supposed to get involved in lords’ disputes, lords weren’t supposed to meddle in security.
He’d formed some disgraceful habits in the long voyage, he decided, impulses that had flung him out of his seat and after the boy, and habits proper gentlemen might consider far more pernicious than ordering the aiji’s heir about. He’d gotten the very dangerous habit of involving himself in his own security’s affairs, and the very fact that he wanted to be out there right now, giving advice and getting it, where the paidhi flatly didn’t belong—that was a habit he had to break, a shocking breach, for outsiders, doubtless an embarrassment to his own staff.
No matter that Lord Tatiseigi, the least qualified person to be giving orders in that department, was laying down his own set of priorities left and right, including repairs to the foyer, repair and rewiring of outmoded devices in his hedges, and rebuilding the mecheita pen, which would divert hands from more useful occupations.
But Tabini, meanwhile, was up to something entirely deliberate, something that had clearly had time to draw people clear from the coast, and had not yet heard his report. From his vantage at the end of the arc of chairs, he cast Tabini a desperate look and failed to make eye contact—possibly Tabini was ignoring him after that last embarrassment, was reminding him to observe protocols. Clearly the aiji had things better in hand and much farther advanced than he had known.
“Aiji-ma, aijiin-ma,” he asked, clearing his throat, desperate for one critical piece of knowledge, “may one ask—shall we indeed stay here tonight?”
“It seems so,” Tabini said placidly. “Does the Lord of the Heavens have grounds to recommend otherwise?”
Not the warm and familiar ’paidhi-ji,’ translator for human affairs, but his other office, his capacity as atevi lord, and in that address, he found his window of opportunity. “One has a host of recommendations, aiji-ma.” He got up, remote from the aiji as he was, bowed, received the little move of the hand that meant he could approach, and he did so—bowed in front of the chair, then, undiscouraged, dropped to his knee at Tabini’s very chairside for a quick, private piece of communication, with only Damiri adjacent. “We met other foreigners out there, aiji-ma, foreigners to humans, too, and, all credit to the dowager and to your son, aiji-ma, these new foreigners are expecting—our whole agreement with them rests on it—to find you in power and able to answer them. We have assured them you sent our mission out to them, to unwind all the mistaken communications between them and humans. We have assured them you are in charge, and will take charge, a situation for which they have reasonably high hopes.”
“We have heard something of the sort.” It could only have come from the dowager. “You have been quite busy in remote space, paidhi-aiji.”
“But there is a grave complication, aiji-ma. These foreigners themselves claim powerful and dangerous enemies, still another batch of foreigners, aggressive and with a bad history, on the far side of their territory. In short, aiji-ma, these foreigners are involved in a situation we do not understand, nothing that threatens us yet, but there are details—everything—in my computer, aiji-ma, including linguistic records and transcripts of negotiations in which the dowager and your son were deeply involved.
They will tell you events; but I have a long, long account to give, information which the legislature and the Guild must understand, information absolutely critical to our safety. If one could engage the media, we have a reason it is absolutely essential for you to be safe—”
“We have already heard something of the details,” Tabini said, “which are neither here nor there at the moment. There are more urgent things.”
“We might publish the news, aiji-ma, attack the Kadagidi with information, unseat Murini from the capital. If we were to go back to the hills, we could—”
“Back, nandi? Who said where we have been?”
It was information the paidhi had not been told, precisely the sort of information the paidhi-aiji could never afford to let pass his lips anywhere he could be overheard. The tightly-contained ship-world he had lived in had given him very bad habits, and his staff, even Banichi and Jago, could fall into extreme and deadly disfavor if Tabini suspected they had told him classified matters they had learned from his staff.
“Aiji-ma, your whereabouts was my own guess, unfounded, probably entirely inaccurate. One can only apologize, and urge—”
“A guess, indeed.”
“One unfounded on any particular information.”
“A very clever guess, paidhi.”
“Only a surmise, aiji-ma, knowing that this entire unfortunate business has centered around me and foreign influence…”
“Around you!” Tabini outright laughed at the temerity of his notion. “Around you, paidhi-aiji!”
“Indeed,” Ilisidi said, leaning forward on her stick, as she sat on Tabini’s other side. “Around the paidhi, around this galloping modernity which you promoted far and wide, grandson, from shuttles we needed, to television, which we might—gods less fortunate!—have escaped. Kabiu violated. This modern device become the center of attention. You never would listen to advice.”
“Oh, indeed,” Tabini said, and his position had by now become very uncomfortable to hold, kneeling for conversation with one of the powers of the earth and having another primal force suddenly going at her grandson on the other side, in what could well become a lengthy debate. Bren cast about for a graceful way to get up and back to his chair and found none, none at all.
“So you went up into the high hills, did you,” Ilisidi said, “and settled your presence on the innocent Astronomer, who was bound himself sooner or later to be a target? Our esteemed human had no trouble reasoning out this brilliant move. How long before the Kadagidi approach the same conclusion and do harm to the distinguished man and his students?”
“Aijiin-ma.” Peacekeeper being the paidhi’s job, it seemed time to perform it, urgently so, at the risk of extreme disfavor. “It was by no means an apparent guess, if that was where the aiji indeed resided.”
“The hill provinces sheltered us,” Tabini said, “but no longer. They will be here, mani-ma, presently, in force.”
My God, Bren thought. The hillmen, a hundred little clans at tenuous peace with each other, and for centuries ignoring the rest of the world—what in all reason could move them to come down to the Padi Valley? They’d detested flatland politics. They’d desperately wanted the University that Tabini had finally built up there, and then argued with its modern advice and advisements once they had it.
Not to mention the Observatory, the precious Observatory, adjunct to the University—all the students there. They were set at risk. The University library and all its generations of work, the center for the space program, the shuttle work, the translations of human-given books, the technical translations, many of which were only available by computer reader manuals…
Perhaps the look was transparent. “At the University,” Damiri said, looking directly at him, “there was, this year, a general suspension of classes, nand’ paidhi, by order of the pretender. There was a particular attack on the library.”
The bottom dropped out of his stomach.
“The night previous, warned by computer messages, the students dispersed in all directions,” Tabini-aiji said with evident satisfaction, “and took the new books with them. Some have gone back to their homes, some sheltered in the hills, and no few of them have set up on the coast, taking resources with them, spreading word wherever they go, and establishing their own communications network. They have the portable machines. And we are informed they will be here.”
“Do you say,” Uncle Tatiseigi asked querulously from across the room, and, with debate opening up to yet another quarter, it seemed time for the paidhi-aiji to get up and get out of the way. “Do you say not only the hill clans, but next, those ragtag radical students? Those upstarts that deny their clan?”
“Indeed,” Tabini said, and shot out a hand and seized Bren’s arm as Bren attempted to rise from his awkward position and remove himself from the verbal line of fire.
“Aiji-ma.”
“There will be ample time for us to hear your records, paidhi-ji. But for now the books are all in hiding. The shuttles are under Kadagidi guard, and the pilots have all fled to the outer regions and taken their flight manuals with them. The Kadagidi have the University computers, but their mathematicians are so unwilling to accept the computers’ calculations that, the last we heard, they are paralyzed in debate and argument, refusing to let their own people use the machines. The traditional mathematicians cannot justify what the computers tell them. Their political supporters support the Kadagidi mathematicians, because the computers are, of course, a human idea.” Grim amusement danced in Tabini’s eyes. “And you know best of all, do you not, paidhi-ji, what that means?”
Intellectual turmoil. The new mathematics. University teachers had so carefully skirted any confrontation of belief against demonstrable mathematical proof, had constructed examples to avoid direct offense, and now that confrontation, blindly pushed forward by the conservatives, had run straight into the University computer department. “Yes, aiji-ma,” he said, envisioning that moment, the traditionalists afraid to destroy the computers, afraid to let information out. The books, the translations would go if the Kadagidi became too frustrated—or too frightened—by their impasse. Everything he had built, everything the University had built, was on the brink not just of hostile rule, but destruction. A return to the precomputer world. A denial of everything the University taught.
“Leave matters to these fools, paidhi-aiji, and let them ban the new books, and deny the evidence and hide what will not fit their numbers, and we will be two hundred years climbing back out of the pit. They say your advice was wrong. Is that not so?”
He was inches from Tabini’s face. Tabini’s grip cut off the blood to his lower arm, the arm an ateva had once broken with his bare hands. It was irrelevant, that old pain. The atevi world swayed, tottered, threatened to crash.
“I might have done things better, aiji-ma. Even if what I said was my best advice.”
“Tell me, paidhi-ji. If one opens a door and discloses a room afire, is the fire one’s fault?”
“If it spread the fire, aiji-ma. If the paidhi has to be at fault, one is ready to be at fault.”
“This fire, this fire, paidhi-aiji, has been eating at the timbers under our feet for a very long time. It would have dropped us all into the flames sooner or later. You knew the hazards. You warned us. And we likewise are not fools. You showed us numbers that the counters could not refute, nor take into their systems, did you not? Have you fed us poison?”
“No, aiji-ma.” But he had dismissed the danger of disturbed philosophers and outright fortune-tellers as secondary to greater dangers ever since the ship had arrived in the heavens, the ship that had brought them Jase, with all the attendant troubles. Humans on Mospheira had begun to politic with the ship-folk and some of them had decided to determine the future of the atevi whose planet this was…which was wrong, by his lights, morally wrong. He had fought that fight, for atevi ownership of their own world. He had gained atevi their place in the heavens.
But he was not, in the long run, atevi. He
could not feel what atevi felt. His ’place in the heavens’ had meant earth-to-orbit flight, and computers, which had meant human mathematics. Human ways of viewing the universe had come flooding into an atevi culture that rested so heavily on its mathematics, its perceptions of balance and harmony, its linguistic accommodations, its courtesies and orders of power and precedence. He had loosed the genie, he had known what he was doing, he had foreseen the danger…that he might compromise what was atevi, even while trying to save them. Atevi could fix the problem—the mathematics embedded even in the atevi language was able to accommodate a mutable universe…of course they could. Was there not the dowager? Was there not the Astronomer, and the mathematicians of the University? Didn’t they adjust their thinking and come back with uniquely atevi insights?
He had thought they could ride the whirlwind, and, being no mathematician, he had left the details to the scholars to hammer out.
And had not the aiji-dowager herself warned him that the whirlwind could not be dismissed? Wrong. Very dangerously wrong. And Tabini had reinforced those rural fears, by more and more gifts of dazzling technology to even out the economy in the remoter regions, the aiji trying to balance economic advantage, and risking the whole structure. He had had his misgivings all along. He had progressively stifled them, in worse and worse revelations from the heavens. He had never argued with Tabini’s economic policy, his awarding of new construction to depressed regions. It ought to have lifted the whole country up.
He saw, as in a lightning flash, a landscape in convulsion.
And Tabini-aiji, son of a bloody, dangerous man, grandson of a conniving Easterner, had listened to him, attempting to be a different, modern kind of atevi ruler.
“Well, well,” Tabini said, “so we are where we are, paidhi. Our enemies have steadfastly refused to advance their philosophy or their mathematics in the last three hundred years. They may be factually wrong. But, gods less fortunate, they are persistent.”
Pretender Page 6
