Inheritor

by C. J. Cherryh

  The elderly astronomer, Grigiji, who might be the most dangerous man to come out of those mountains since the last atevi conqueror, had been the guest of lordly choice throughout the winter social season, feted and dined, wined and elevated to legend among the amateur philosophers and mathematicians who were the hangers-on of any lordly house — Grigiji, the gentle, the kindly professor, had taught any hearer who would listen (and the respect accorded him approached religious fervor in atevi minds) his quietly posed and philosophically wandering views.

  Now Grigiji was back in his mountain observatory confusing his graduate students. And the paidhi, who had survived the social shocks of the paidhi-successor's adventurous offering of faster-than-light, didn't even want to imagine what was going on in atevi universities all over the continent in the last several months, as that faster-than-light concept, along with the mathematics that supported it, hit the lecture halls and the ever fertile minds of those same atevi students, who were neither hangers-on nor amateurish.

  Considering the excitement the old man had raised, and considering the ability of atevi to take any mathematical model and elaborate on it, the paidhi on certain bad nights lay awake imagining atevi simply, airily declaring at year's end they'd discovered a physics that didn't need a launch vehicle or a starship to convey them to the stars, and, oh, by the way, they didn't truly need humans, either.

  The paidhi, who thought he'd had a very adequate mathematics education in his preparation for his office, thank you, had had six very short months to study up on a branch of mathematics outright omitted from the Mospheiran university curriculum for security reasons — mathematical concepts now spreading limbs and branches in other areas of atevi academe besides the lately fashionable astronomers.

  And all this brain-bending study he did only so he, the paidhi, who was not a mathematical genius, could laboriously translate the documents of atevi who were mathematical geniuses — to humans on the island and on the ship who didn't half suspect the danger they were in from a species they thought dependent on them.

  He hoped at least to keep well enough abreast of matters mathematical so that conceptual translation remained possible between two languages, and two (or counting the ship's officers, three) governments; he also had to translate between what was formerly two, but definitely now three, sets of scientists and engineers, all of whom were flinging concepts at each other with a rapidity that numbed the sensibilities.

  Now humans who had never met atevi face to face — the crew of that ship — were proposing to bring atevi into space and to hand atevi the kind of power that, by what he understood, couldn't be let loose on a planet.

  Only last year the University advisory committee on Mospheira, who did know something of atevi, had maintained that nuclear energy, like digital clocks and the concept of time more finely reportable than atevi numerologists were accustomed to reckon it, was still far too dangerous to put into atevi hands. And humans up there proposed to bring the technology of a stardrive into atevi awareness.

  What the humans on that ship still had difficulty getting through their heads was that it hadn't been just a bad day on which the space age humans who had landed on the planet had legitimately lost the war they'd fought with the then steam age atevi. Humans had really, militarily lost the war, so that, indeed, and by the resulting Treaty, Mospheira had been surrendering their technology a step at a time to the atevi of the Western Association — Treaty mandate, not a voluntary choice.

  And in all those years, a process mediated by two centuries of paidhiin, technological change had been deliberately slowed and managed so that atevi and humans could achieve technological parity without ever again destabilizing atevi society and starting another atevi war.

  The ship, by the conversations he'd had with its captain, and with Jason Graham, with whom he shared quarters back in the capital, seemed convinced atevi would adapt.

  He hoped they were right. He was by no means convinced.

  As it was, certain factions within the Western Association of the atevi were viewing with considerable suspicion the flood of knowledge and engineering pouring down on them from the sky, knowledge and space age science that could be turned — very easily — against them, in their regional and historical quarrels with the capital of the Association, situated at Shejidan.

  The current aiji, Tabini, the atevi president, whose capital was at Shejidan, was ethnically Ragi, a distinction the ship didn't understand. Tabini-aiji, whose position was both elective and to some meaningful degree hereditary, was also clever, and bent on taking every bit of power he could get into the atevi central government, for good and foresighted reasons, by Bren's estimation; but tell that to the provinces whose ancestral rights were being taken away by this increased centralization.

  And in that light, damned right the atevi of the Peninsula had a reason to worry about the space program in the hands of the Ragi atevi; most of the atevi of the Peninsula weren't Ragi — they were Edi, who had been conquered by the Ragi five hundred odd years ago.

  While lord Geigi, across the table from him, likewise sipping his tea in a dawn wind, wasn't even Edi: he was Maschi, which was a complete history unto itself, but he was an Edi lord. And, to add to the puzzle — which neither the ship nor his roommate would understand — until lately, last year, in fact, Geigi had been in a very uncomfortable position, trying to do well economically and legislatively for his district, trying to be a moderate in a region of well-armed hotheads who were almost-but-not-quite his ethnic relatives, while trying not to lose what humans might call his soul in dealings with Tabini, who headed the Ragi atevi, the Western Association, and the civilized world.

  Tabini, even before the advent of the ship, had been dealing with Mospheira hand over fist for every piece of human tech he could get his hands on. Now Tabini dealt with the ship instead, wanting whatever technical diagrams and materials information the ship would send down to the great dish at Mogari-nai and into his control. Tabini was hell-bent on new tech, and all it implied about central power and respect for the traditional mathematical philosophies which still constituted the atevi view of the universe.

  Geigi had been the one provincial lord who, thanks to his unique position as technologically and mathematically educated, and a Lord of the larger Ragi Association, and a philosophical Determinist (as the peninsular atevi generally were), suddenly had had to find honest answers to the FTL paradox that Deana Hanks had posed.

  FTL was a devastating challenge (via a mathematics implied in its new universe-view) to the philosophy by which lord Geigi and all his Edi neighbors lived and conducted their affairs: if something could move faster than light, science, which thought it had understood the universe, was wrong and the peninsular philosophers and all the Edi who had been part of a philosophical rebellion against Absolutist number theory had been made to look like fools.

  Yet Geigi, tottering on the brink of public embarrassment and a loss of respect that could collapse his financial dealings, had sought the truth face to face, had challenged Bren-paidhi to answer for him the mathematical questions Deana-paidhi had raised.

  The support and resources Bren-paidhi had gotten from Tabini himself had enabled him to answer that question, and that answer had undoubtedly saved Geigi's reputation and probably his life, counting the financial and political chaos that would have erupted in the province.

  Bren rather liked the plump and studious lord, this man who posed courageous questions of his universe because if it killed him, lord Geigi wanted the truth: baji-naji, as atevi put it, turn the world upside down, lord Geigi didn't want some surface assurance that would let him ignore the universe. No, he was a scientifically educated man, not because an atevi lord had to be, but because he wanted to embrace the universe, understand it, see it in all its mathematical beauty.

  Understand the human side of the universe — maybe Geigi could even approach that.

  But lord Geigi would not, on a gut level, understand being liked, his language having no
such word and his atevi heart feeling no such emotion. What went on inside Geigi was equally complex, it might produce the same results, but it was not human; and that was the first understanding of all understandings the paidhi had to accept in dealing with atevi.

  As a human, he liked lord Geigi; he also respected Geigi's courage and good sense, and that latter sentiment Geigi could understand, at least closely enough to say there was congruence enough between their viewpoints for association (a very atevi word) of Geigi's interests and his — in the way atevi looked at things. Geigi also seemed to respect him, the paidhi, as the one official of Tabini's predominantly Ragi household ironically most able to understand the tightrope Geigi walked as a Maschi in an Edi district in a Ragi nation. That was another point on which they were associated, that atevi word of such emotionally charged relationship.

  Or their mutual numbers added, giving them no cosmic choice but association.

  It was a lot like friendship. The human in the equation might like the man. But add them up to equal friendship? That wasn't what Geigi's atevi nerves were capable of feeling, let alone what Geigi's atevi brain thought was going on; and that very delicate distinction was true of any atevi, no matter what. Basic law of the Foreign Service: Atevi aren't friends. Atevi can't be friends. They don't like you. They're not capable of liking you. The wiring isn't there.

  Never forget it. Never expect it. Start building that construct to satisfy your needs and you're dead. Or you'll be dead. And the peace will be in shambles.

  Based on his own experiences, he'd add, if he were, like his own predecessor Wilson-paidhi, talking to a university class in Foreign Studies, Don't lead them to expect too much of you, either.

  He hoped Geigi didn't attribute Tabini-aiji's shift of attitude and the grant of manufacturing in this district directly to the paidhi's doing. That would be a mistake, and dangerous. Tabini's actions were for Tabini's reasons, and he never, ever wanted to get between the aiji of Shejidan and any of the lords of the Association. A human had no business whatsoever in the lines of man'chi, of loyalty between lord and lord, and, taking that one element of his predecessor's advice greatly to heart, he never intended to stand there.

  A brown lizard whipped along the balustrade. It feared nothing. Djossi flowers were in bloom again with the coming of spring, and the little reptile dived in among the blooms and heart-shaped leaves, on the hunt for something tasty.

  Humans came and humans might go. But the land went on, and the sea washed the rocks, and atevi, like Geigi, who knew such rhythms of this world of their birth in blood and bone… were a force to be reckoned with, wherever it regarded this planet.

  He was glad, seeing this dawn, that he had opted to guest in lord Geigi's house. His security had had very serious misgivings about his accepting Geigi's invitation to stay with him in his ancestral home rather than in the Guild-guaranteed hotel. It was unprecedented that a person of Tabini-aiji's household (and so the paidhi was accounted, socially speaking) should guest in this house, which until recently had not had the status, the resources, or the security clearance to receive such a visitor from the court at Shejidan.

  Well, the considerations once in the way of such a move had changed. And clearance had come from the aiji himself for the paidhi to accept Geigi's invitation.

  One couldn't say lord Geigi was particularly in the paidhi's debt for that latter change of heart, either. In that, Tabini had been informed and had decided for his own reasons to change Geigi's status.

  Figure that lord Geigi, too, was risking something in having such an unprecedented guest, since it certainly would be talked about — talked about on the evening news, coast to coast if it was an otherwise quiet day — and would set lord Geigi at some odds with the politics of his Edi neighbors: not seriously so, Bren hoped.

  But personally the paidhi, by taking this very sip of tea (out of a kitchenful of herbs lethal to humans), bet his life that Geigi was exactly what he seemed. He had bet it last night and he had slept quite soundly under this roof. Wilson-paidhi would hold that he was in danger of transgressing common sense, and that a paidhi who started having such confidence in his assessments of atevi was headed for serious trouble, but, ah, well, here he was.

  On the other hand, where did he invest emotionally? His treatment of the paidhi-successor and his refusal to knuckle under to the head of the State Department meant, effectively, that he couldn't go home. Meant he would have no more chances to sit by the sea on the other side of this strait. Meant he would have no more breakfasts on his brother's front porch — and this place, this moment, this association in an alien government was what he'd traded it all for, in some very real sense: the chance to sit here, in the position he occupied with an alien lord. He had a mother, a brother, an estranged father, and his brother's family all over there in that haze that obscured the strait, and there was a chance he'd never see his mother again, considering the troubling reports he'd gotten on her health this winter. He was bitter about that penalty his government made him and her pay; he was angry, and he asked himself at odd and very dangerous moments like this one, if it wasn't psychologically or professionally acceptable for him to build careful little fences around certain atevi in his mind and, one-sidedly, think about liking them, what in hell was he going to do?

  He had a human roommate. He had Jase Graham. There was that.

  He could like Jase Graham. That was permitted, psychologically, politically, in every way approved by the State Department; that was permissible.

  But he didn't dare quite turn loose of his suspicion of a man from a human culture centuries divorced from his own, a man who didn't, on his side, offer deep confidences to him. Geigi had flung his life into Bren's hands when he welcomed him and the aiji's Guild members under his roof with every evidence of delight. They'd spent the previous evening and this morning discussing sea shells, architecture, and Geigi's marriage prospects. Jase, who had lived under the same roof, shared dinners and spent the majority of the last six months with him, had trouble talking about his home or his family or his ship's whereabouts over the last couple of centuries.

  And that seemed a significant reticence.

  It takes time to travel between stars, Jase had said. And, We did our jobs, that's all.

  But where were you? he'd asked Jase, and Jase had taken a piece of paper and tried to draw him a diagram of the ship's location for some significant period of time relative to a star he couldn't identify, but he'd made no sense of it. Then they'd gotten a bottle of shibei and tried to talk personally, but Jase said, I don't know, to all questions of how that star where Jase said they'd been sitting for years related to where they were now.

  And to, What's out there? Jase had said to him, It's just stars. It's just stars, that's all.

  Well, maybe it wasn't what a human who'd dreamed of seeing the space station, who'd dedicated his teen-aged years, his romantic hopes and his adult life to the hope of advancing the planet just to the edge of space, wanted to hear from a man who'd been born to it.

  Maybe it had turned things just the least bit sour in the relationship that Jase, after all the excitement with which he'd welcomed him to the world, hadn't had wonders to tell him. He didn't know why he felt put off by Jase Graham.

  But he hadn't been happy since the world changed and since he'd shared his world with an unhappy, often scared young man. He knew that.

  He didn't like to think about that fact on this pleasant morning when his mind had been intermittently, though they were talked dry by now, trying to manage the intricacies of conversation with an atevi lord he admired but didn't know all that intimately.

  He most of all didn't like to think about the fact that, while he was on this side of the strait coaching Jase in a language that wasn't easy to learn, his own mother was suffering phone calls in the middle of the night from crackpots who hated him, crackpots the government over there couldn't seem to catch.

  He didn't like to think about the fact that his almost-fiancee (whom he wa
sn't totally sure he loved, the way he wasn't totally sure nowadays he liked anything in the world without checking his subconscious) had gotten tired of waiting and tired of his absences. So she said. His belief now was that she'd grown scared of similar midnight phone calls.

  But whatever the reason, she'd married a man she didn't in the least love; and there went another tie he'd once had to Mospheira.

  Barb was safe now, off his conscience, and married to Paul Saarinson, who was well-placed in the government. He was sure she didn't get threatening phone calls nowadays.

  His brother, Toby, on the other hand, had no such refuge. His brother had suffered phone threats against his family until his kids were afraid to walk to school in their quiet, tiny town on the north shore of the island, a mostly rural place where behavior like that didn't happen and people hadn't been in the habit of locking their doors.

  He didn't like to think about the fact that if he did go home for a visit and to try to defuse the political situation via consultation with the State Department and the President, he might find himself arrested right at the airport.

  Oh, he didn't think the Mospheiran government could hold him, for one thing because the aiji in She-jidan would threaten global war to get him back, and for another because Tabini-aiji definitely would not accept Deana Hanks as his replacement. He reckoned either one was a sufficiently powerful incentive for the government of Mospheira to behave itself on that surface level, and had toyed with the idea of a few hours' visit to try to straighten matters out.

  Over all, however, he wasn't willing to bet his life or world peace on his own government's common sense the way he bet it right now on Geigi's cook's choice of teas.

  Trust that he was safe on this exposed balcony, drinking this tea maybe seventy miles from an atevi resort area overlooked by radar installations looking for illicit human airplanes? Yes. Crazy as the world had become, he did trust that he was safe here. An ateva who'd conspired against him and then changed his mind had changed his mind not because of the law (which allowed assassination as an alternative to lawsuits) but because it was no longer in Geigi's interests to do him harm.