Foreigner

Foreigner

by C. J. Cherryh

BOOK ONE

I

^ »

I T WAS THE DEEP DARK, unexplored except for robotic visitors. The mass that existed here was Earth’s second stepping‑stone toward a strand of promising stars; and, for the first manned ship to drop into its influence, the mass point was a lonely place, void of the electromagnetic chaff that filled human space, the gossip and chatter of trade, the instructions of human control to ships and crews, the fast, sporadic communication of machine talking to machine. Here, only the radiation of the mass, the distant stars, and the background whisper of existence itself rubbed up against the sensors with force enough to attract attention.

Here, human beings had to remember that the universe was far wider than their little nest of stars–that, in the universe at large, silence was always more than the noisiest shout of life. Humans explored and intruded against it, and built their stations and lived their lives, a biological contamination of the infinite, a local and temporary condition.

And not the sole inhabitants of the universe: that was no longer possible for humans to doubt. So wherever the probes said life might exist, wherever stars looked friendly to living creatures, humans ventured with some caution, and unfolded their mechanical ears and listened into the dark–as Phoenix listened intently during her hundred hours traverse of realspace.

She heard nothing at any range–which pleased her captains and the staff aboard. Phoenix wanted to find no prior claims to what she wanted, which was a bridge to a new, resources‑rich territory, most particularly and immediately a G5 star designated T‑230 in the Defense codebooks, 89020 on the charts, and mission objective, in the plans Phoenix carried in her data banks.

Reach the star, unlimber the heavy equipment… create a station that would welcome traders and expand human presence into a new and profitable area of space.

So Phoenix carried the bootstrap components for that construction, the algaes and the cultures for a station’s life‑sustaining tanks, the plans and the circuit maps, the diagrams and the processes and the programs, the data and the detail; she carried as well the miner‑pilots and the mechanics and the builders and processors and the technical staff that would be, for their principal reward, earliest shareholders in the first‑built trading station to develop down this chain of stars–Earth’s latest and most confident colonial commitment, with all the expertise of past successes.

Optics told Mother Earth where the rich stars were. Robots probed the way without any risk of human life… probed and returned with their navigational data and their first‑hand observations: T‑230 was a system so rich Phoenix ran mass‑loaded to the limit, streaking along at a rate a ship dared carry when she expected no other traffic, and when she had no doubt of refuel capabilities at her destination. She shoved the gas and dust around her into a brief, bright disturbance, while her crew ran its hundred‑hour routine of maintenance, recalibrations, and navigational checks. The captains shared coffee on the last watch before re‑entry, took the general reports, and approved the schedule the way the navigator, McDonough, keyed it.

But what the pilot received of that discussion was a blinking green dot on the edge of his display and a vague sense that things were proceeding comfortably on schedule, aboard a ship in good order. Taylor was On, which meant Taylor had input coming at him at rates it took a computer interface to sort, and, insulated from the tendencies of an unassisted human mind to process laterally and distract itself from the rush of data, Taylor had his ears devoted to computer signals and his eyes and his perceptions chemically adjusted to the computer‑filtered velocity of the ship’s passage.

The green dot had to be there before he hyped out. The dot had showed up, and what other human beings did about it was not in any sense Taylor’s business or realization. When that exit point came at him, and time folded up in his face, he reached confidently ahead and through space, toward T‑230.

He was a master pilot. The drugs in his blood made him highly specific in his concentration, and highly abstract in his understandings of the data that flashed in front of his eyes and screamed into his ears. He would have targeted Phoenix into the heart of hell if those had been the coordinates the computer handed him. But it was to T‑230 he was looking.

For that reason, he was the only one aboard aware when the ship kept going, and time stayed folded.

And stayed.

His heart began to pound in realtime, his eyes were fixed on screens flashing red, lines, and then dots, as those lines became hypothetical, and last of all a black screen, where POINT ERROR glowed in red letters like the irretrievable judgment of God.

Heartbeat kept accelerating. He reached for the ABORT and felt the cap under his fingers. He had no vision now. It was all POINT ERROR. He scarcely felt the latch: and time was still folding as he uncapped the ABORT, for a reason he no longer remembered. Unlike the computer, he had no object but that single, difficult necessity.

Program termination.

Blank screen.

POINT ERROR.

God had no more data.

II

« ^ »

T he ship dropped and the alarm sounded: This is not a drill. Computer failure. This is not a drill…

McDonough’s heart was thumping and the sweat was running from exertion as he pressed the button to query Taylor. Every screen was blank.

This is not a drill…

The hard‑wired Abort was in action. Phoenix was saving herself. She blew off v with no consideration of fragile human bodies inside her.

Phoenix then attempted to re‑boot her computers from inflowing information. She queried her captain, her navigator, and her pilot and co‑pilot, with painful shocks to the Q‑patch. Two more such jolts, before McDonough found data taking shape on his screens at the navigation station.

Video displayed the star.

No, two stars, one glaring blue‑white, one faint red. McDonough sat frozen at his post, seeing in Phoenix’ future‑line a coasting drift to white, nuclear hell.

“Where are we?” someone asked. “Where are we?”

It was a question the navigator took for accusation. McDonough felt it like a blow to his already abused gut, and looked toward the pilot for an answer. But Taylor was just staring at his screens, doing nothing, not moving.

“Inoki,” McDonough said. But the co‑pilot was slumped unconscious or worse.

“Get Greene up here. Greene and Goldberg, to the bridge.” That was LaFarge on the staff channel, senior captain, hard‑nosed and uncompromising, calling up the two back‑up pilots.

McDonough felt the shakes set in, wondered if LaFarge was going to call up all the backups, and oh, one part of him wanted that, wanted to go to his bunk and lie there inert and not have to deal with reality, but he had to learn what that binary star was and where they were and what mistake he might conceivably have committed to put them here. The nutrients the med‑plug was shooting into him were making him sick. The sight in front of him was insane. Optics couldn’t be wrong. The robots couldn’t be wrong. Their instruments couldn’t be wrong.

“Sir?” Karly McEwan was sitting beside him, as stunned as he was–his own immediate number two: she was shaken, but she was punching buttons, trying, clamp‑jawed as she was, to get sense out of chaos. “Sir? Go to default? Sir?”

“Default for now,” he muttered, or some higher brain function did, while his conscious intelligence was operating on some lower floor. The ‘for now’ that had bubbled up as a caution hit his faltering intelligence like a pronouncement of doom, because he didn’t see any quick way to get a baseline for this system. “Spectrum analysis, station two and three. Chart comparison, station four. Station five, rerun the initiation and target coordinates.” The forebrain was still giving orders. The rest was functioning like Taylor, which was not at all. “We need a medic up here. Is Kiyoshi on the bridge? Taylor and Inoki are in trouble.”

“Are we stable?” Kiyoshi Tanaka’s voice, asking if it was safe to unbelt and go after the pilots, but every question seemed to echo with double meanings, every question trailed off into unknowns and unknowables. “Stable as we can be,” LaFarge said, and meanwhile the spectral analysis program was turning up a flood of data and running comparisons on every star system on file, a steady crawl of non‑matches on McDonough’s number one screen, while the bottom of it reported NOT A MATCH, 3298 ITEMS EXAMINED.

“We’re getting questions from channel B,” came from Communications. “Specials are requesting to leave quarters. Requesting screen output.”

Taylor’s routine. Taylor had always given the passengers a view, leaving Earth system, entering the mass points, and leaving them…

“No,” LaFarge said harshly. “No image.” A blind man could see it was trouble. “Say it’s a medical on the bridge. Say we’re busy.”

Tanaka had reached Taylor and Inoki, and was injecting something into Taylor, McDonough was aware of that. The passengers were feeling the variance in routine, and the NOT A MATCH hadn’t changed.

SEARCH FURTHER?

The computer had run out of local stars.

“Karly, you prioritized search from default one?”

“From default,” Navigation Two answered. The search for matching stars had started with Sol and the near neighborhood. “Our vector, plus and minus ten lights.”

The sick feeling in McDonough’s gut increased.

Nothing made sense. The backup pilots showed up, asking distracting questions nobody could answer, the same questions every navigator was asking the instruments and the records. The captain told the medic to get Taylor and Inoki off the bridge–the captain swore when he said it, and McDonough distractedly started running checks of his own while Tanaka got the two pilots on their feet–Taylor could walk, but Taylor looked blind to what was going on. Inoki was moving, but just scarcely: one of the com techs had to haul him up and carry him, once Tanaka unbuckled him and unplugged the tube from his implant. Neither of them looked at Greene or Goldberg as they passed. Taylor’s eyes were set on infinity. Inoki’s were shut.

SEARCH FURTHER? the computer asked, having searched all the stars within thirty lights of Earth.

“We stand at 5% on fuel,” the captain reported calmly–a potential death sentence. “Any com pickup at all?”

At this star? McDonough asked himself, and: “Dead silent,” Communications said. “The star’s noisy enough to mask God‑knows‑what.”

“Go long range, back up our vector. Assume we overshot the star.”

“Aye, sir.”

A moment later, hydraulics whined up on the hull. The big dish was unpacking and unfolding, preparing to listen. V was down to a crawl safe for its deployment–safe, if it was Earth’s own Sun, but it wasn’t. There was no data on this system. They were gathering it, drinking it in every sensor, but nothing gave them even minimal certainty there wasn’t a rock in their path. Nobody had ever come in at a close binary, or a mass as large. God only knew what had happened to the field.

McDonough’s hands were shaking as he punched up the scope of both search sequences, approaching a hundred lights distant in all directions, search negative, past their objective. They still didn’t know where they were, but with 5% fuel in reserve, they weren’t leaving soon, either. They had the miner‑craft: thank God they had the miner‑craft and the station components. They might gather system ice and refuel…

Except that was a radiation hell out there, except the solar wind that blue‑white sun threw out was a killing wind. This was not a star where flesh and blood could live, and if the miners did go out to work in that, they had to limit their time outside.

Or if the ship was, as it might well be, infalling, on a massive star’s gravity slope… they’d meet that radiation close‑up before they went down.

“We’ve rerun the initiation sequence,” Greene said, from Taylor’s seat. “We don’t find any flaw in the commands.”

Meaning Taylor had keyed in on what navigation had given him. A cold apprehension gnawed at McDonough’s stomach.

“Any answer, Mr. McDonough?”

“Not yet, sir.” He kept his voice calm. He didn’t feel that way. He hadn’t made a mistake. But he couldn’t prove it by anything they had from the instruments.

A ship couldn’t come out of hyperspace aimed differently than it had on entry. It didn’t. It couldn’t.

But if some hyperspace particle had screwed the redundant storage, if the computer had lost its destination point and POINT ERROR was the answer, they couldn’t run far enough on their fuel mass to be out of sight of stars they knew.

Two stars, in any degree near each other, both with spectra matching the charts, were all they needed. Any two‑star match against their charts could start to locate them, and they couldn’t be more than five lights off their second mass point, if they’d run out all the fuel they were carrying–couldn’t be. Not farther than twenty lights from Earth total at most.

But there wasn’t a massive blue‑white within twenty lights of the Sun, except Sirius, and this wasn’t Sirius. Spectra of those paired suns were a no‑match. It wasn’t making sense. Nothing was.

He started looking for pulsars. When you were out of short yardsticks you looked for the long ones, the ones that wouldn’t lie, and you started thinking about half‑baked theories, like cosmic macrostructures, folded interfaces, or any straw of reason that might give a mind something to work on or suggest a direction they’d gone or offer a hint which of a hundred improbables was the truth.

III

« ^ »

S omething’s wrong, was the word running the outer corridors from the minute that the station staff and construction workers had permission to move about. The rumor moved into the lounges, where staffers and pusher pilots and mechanics all stood shoulder to shoulder in front of video displays that said, on every damned channel, STAND BY.

“Why don’t they tell us something?” someone asked, a breach of the peace. “They ought to tell us something.”

Another tech said, “Why don’t we get the vid? We always got the vid before.”

“We can go to hell,” a pusher pilot said. “We can all go to hell. They’re too good to bother.”

“It’s probably all right,” somebody else said, and there was an uneasy silence–because it didn’t feel like the other times. That had been a hell of a jolt the ship had dealt when she braked, coming in, and the techs who knew anything about deep space were as long‑faced and nervous as the Sol‑space miners and construction jocks, who had no prior voyages at all to draw on.

It wasn’t Probably All Right in Neill Cameron’s thinking, either–even a pusher mechanic like him could feel the difference between this system entry and the last. Friends and couples like himself and Miyume Little were generally just standing close and waiting. Miyume’s hand was cold and still. His was sweating.

Possibly–he’d said it to Miyume–the techs up topside were working up some big show for their arrival in their new home.

Maybe there was just a routine lot to do because they were shutting down and staying here–the crew might be figuring their insystem course or their local resources, and they’d get a take‑hold call any time now, so that Phoenix could do course corrections. He’d heard that speculation offered by someone in the lounge. It was what he sincerely hoped.

Or Phoenix was in some sort of trouble. That was implicit in all the questions… but it was much too soon to panic. The ship’s crew was up there doing their job and a one‑sun spacer brat at least knew better than to borrow trouble or start rumors–either with hopeful lies or the speculations on the worst case that had to be in everybody’s thoughts, like infall, an entry too near the star itself.

Foolish fear. Robots had been here and fixed T‑230’s position with absolute certainty. Phoenix‘ crew was an experienced, hand‑picked lot– Phoenix herself had run trade for five years before they diverted her to the stations start‑up at T‑230, and the U.N. didn’t commit billions to any second‑rate equipment or any crew that was going to drop a ship into a star.

God, infall couldn’t be the trouble up there. That was too remote a chance.

He could take pusher and miner‑craft apart and put them together again. Most that went wrong with an insystem miner ship, a mechanic could fix with a good guess and a screwdriver; but what could go wrong with a stardrive–what could go amiss in the massive engines that generated effects into hyperspace–fell entirely outside his competency and his understanding.

The STAND BY flasher suddenly went off. A star‑view came on‑screen and a collective breath of relief went up from the room, chilled by a murmur of consternation from a handful of techs, all standing together in the center of the room. Miyume’s hand tightened on his, his on hers, while the tech staff were saying things like, That’s not right and Where in hell are we?

The white glare looked like a star to him. Maybe it did to Miyume. But techs were shaking their heads. And there was a red glow in the view he didn’t understand.

“That’s not a G5,” one of them said. “It’s a damn binary.” And when ordinary worker‑types started asking what he meant, the tech snapped, “We’re not where we’re supposed to be, you stupid ass!”

What are they talking about? Neill asked himself. What they were hearing wasn’t making sense, and Miyume was looking scared. The techs were saying calm down and not to start rumors, but the tech who had claimed they were wrong shouted over the other voices,

“We’re not at any damned G5!”

“So where are we?” Miyume asked, the first words she’d said. She was asking him, or anyone, and Neill didn’t know how to answer that–he didn’t see how they could miss T‑230 if they had gotten to any star at all… by what he knew, by the education he’d had, ships just kept going in the directions they were going, that was a basic law of physics… wasn’t it? You aimed and you built your field and you went, and if you had fuel enough you got there.

And meanwhile his hardware‑biased brain was thinking, Could we have overshot? How far off could we be, on the fuel we’ve got?

“ This is Capt. LaFarge …”

That was the general address, and people shouted urgently for quiet.

“… unfortunate circumstance ,” was all that got through, that Neill could hear, and he was desperate to hear what the captain said. Miyume’s nails bit deeply into his hand, people were talking again, and Miyume shouted, “Shut up!” at the top of her lungs, at the same time others did.

“… positional problem ,” was the next clear phrase. Then: “ which does not pose the ship any imminent danger… ”

“That’s a blue‑white star!” a tech shouted. “What’s he think it is?”

Someone got the fool shut down. Others hushed the ones that wanted to ask questions.

“… ask everyone to go about business as usual ,” LaFarge was saying. “ And assist the technical crew while we try to establish position. We’ll be looking into our resources in this system for refueling. We’re very well equipped for dealing with this situation. That’s all. Stand easy .”

‘Establish position’ sounded comforting. ‘Refueling’ sounded even more hopeful. ‘Well equipped for dealing with this,’ sounded as if the crew already had a plan. Neill clung to that part of it, while a frantic part of him was thinking: This can’t be happening to us, not to us…

Things can’t go wrong with this ship, there were too many precautions, everything taken care of…

They’d been screened, their skills had been tested, they’d had to have recommendations atop recommendations even to come close to this job. They didn’t send foul‑ups on a ship that carried Earth’s whole damned colonial program, and disasters didn’t happen to a mission as important as this one. People had planned too long. People had been too careful. Everything had been going so right.

“Establish position,” a tech said. “I don’t like that ‘Establish position.’ Are we talking about infall?”

“No,” a senior tech said. “We’re talking about where we are. Which is clearly not where we’re supposed to be.”

“Refuel, hell,” another tech said. “That’s a radiation bath out there.”

The pusher‑craft aren’t shielded to work out there, Neill thought, with a sudden sick feeling, as the dynamics came clear to him. Jupiter was a radiation hazard. This thing… this double sun, with light that made the cameras flare and distort…

The miner‑pilots couldn’t survive it. Not for any long operation. The miners couldn’t deploy here, not without an inevitable cost, as the exposure tags went dark, and the hours of running time added up. Pusher‑craft were shielded for the environment they had to deal with, and their designated environment had been a mild, friendly G5.

He didn’t say that. Miyume looked scared. Probably he did. The numbers started adding up, that was what the pilots said when things started going wrong: the company might lie, and the captain the company hired might refuse you answers, but the numbers wouldn’t deceive you, no matter what.

They added, and the result didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t change from what it was. Wishes didn’t count.

IV

« ^ »

M cDonough’s shadow arrived, hovered over Taylor’s chair, saying there hadn’t been a mistake. Taylor processed that datum in the informational void. Things came painstakingly slowly or not at all. Other inputs in his surroundings were irrelevant. His mind refused distraction to trivia. But the navigator he paid close attention to… and tried to ask him, although one had to slow the brain down incredibly to frame a single complex sound:

“What?”

Babble, then, unauthorized people touching him and talking to him. Taylor tuned the voices out until McDonough’s voice came back, telling him in its infinite slowness that they were fueled up.

That was something to process: they’d been at this star some months of realtime, then. Major datum.

The navigator said next that Greene was sick, something about an accident, about miner‑pilots and crews dead or dying of radiation, pilots training pilots to do their job once they were dead… something about the star they hoped to go to. The navigator had one for him, and they were fueled and going now, away from this hellish vicinity, this double monster that sang to him constantly in his slow‑moving dark. For the first time in a recent, lonely eternity, new data came in.

“Point,” Taylor managed to say, needing destination, and McDonough fed him coordinates that didn’t make sense off the baseline, or with where they had to be.

“Wrong,” Taylor said. But McDonough said then that they’d taken a new zero point, at this star, that they’d spotted a possible mass point by optics and targeted a G5 beyond it.

McDonough reeled off more numbers–Taylor grew drunk with them, the relief he felt was so great, but he didn’t process forward, he was still listening to McDonough with painful, slow attention. McDonough said the crew and the captain wanted him to know they were going to move. Said–McDonough wasn’t precise on the matter–they thought he might have some awareness of the ship’s motion.

Hell, yes, he did. Things were moving faster and faster. There were actual data‑points in sight, more than one at a time. Taylor said, laboriously, at McDonough’s speed, “Bridge. Now.”

McDonough went away. The data stopped. Taylor waited. And waited. Sometimes it seemed to be years, and there was no sanity but to wait for that next point, that next, authorized contact.

But McDonough’s voice came back, after a long, long time, saying the captain wanted him to sit as pilot on the bridge. Goldberg would back him up. Greene, McDonough reminded him, was sick. Inoki was dead. Three years ago. Earth time.

Datum. He had to factor in Goldberg as backup. His mind wanted to race. He held it down. There would be numbers. At long last there would be data at speed, mission resumed.

He sat down. He felt the chair around him. Somebody said–it was an authorized voice, Tanaka, he thought–that he didn’t need the drug. That his brain manufactured it on its own now.

Interesting datum. It accounted for things. Goldberg talked, then, saying how they were clear to hell and gone from Earth and Sol, that they still didn’t know how they’d gotten there, but they’d gone through something they hoped wasn’t attached permanently to this star.

Watch it, Goldberg said. Are you hearing me?

“Yes,” Taylor said, with slow patience. But numbers had begun to proliferate.

He saw the destination mass. He had it. He couldn’t lose it this time.

Goldberg was with him. And the universe was talking to him again, at a rate he could understand. He skipped into the mass well and out again with a blithe disregard of gravity. He had a G5 in sight. Goldberg stopped talking to him, or had just gotten too slow to hear. He had the star and he reached for it, calm and sure now that those numbers were true.

He brought his ship in.

He shut down, system by system, in the light of a yellow sun.

Then he knew he could sleep.

BOOK TWO

I

« ^ »

T he foreign star was up, riding with the moon above the sandstone hills, in the last of the sunlight, and Manadgi, squatting above strange, regular tracks in the clay of a stream‑bank, and seeing in them the scars of a machine on the sandstone, tucked his coat between his knees and listened to all quarters of the sky, the auspicious and the inauspicious alike. He heard only the small chirps and the o’o’o’click of a small creature somewhere in the brush.

There were more unfixed stars now, tiny specks of light in irregular motion about the first. Sometimes the very sharp‑eyed could count them, two and three motes at a time, shining before dawn or before the dusk, in proximity to the foreign star.

Their numbers changed. They combined and uncombined. Should one count the foreign star in their number or reckon only the attendant stars, and from what date? How could one reckon whether such activities were auspicious or not?

Neither had the astronomers been able to say, when, a hundred and twenty‑two years ago, the foreign star had first begun to grow in the heavens, a star so faint at first that only the strongest eyes could see it, so the story was–a star that rose and set with the moon, in its ancient dance with the sun.

Then the astronomers had been embarrassed, because with their lenses and their orreries they still could not define that apparition as a moon or a star, since in appearance and behavior it was both, and they could not swear to its influence. Some thought it good, some thought it bad and, as many events as proponents could bring up on one side to prove it good, opponents could prove as many of bad issue. Only nand’ Jadishesi had been unequivocal, insisting, cleverly, that it portended change.

But so, also and finally, most astronomers swore, while the star grew in magnitude year by year, and gathered companions to itself: continual instability.

Now dared one call it fortunate?

The tracks yonder, the marks of the machines, were, beyond dispute, real, and bore out the story of repeated excursions from the landing‑site–even at dusk, even to the eyes of a city‑dweller. The Tachi, who herded in these hills and knew them as well as a city‑dweller knew his own street, said that the machines had fallen from the sky, suspended from flowers, and drifted down and down and down by this means until they landed.

So was it indeed from the clouds that the visitations had come, and with those descending flowers, came machines that ran about the land ripping up trees and frightening Tachi children.

Manadgi had doubted that origin in the clouds the same way he doubted that autumn moon‑shadow was curative of rheumatism. People nowadays knew that the earth circled the sun, that in the axial tilt they had their seasons confirmed. All such things they had come to understand in this age of reason, and understood them better once the astronomers of the aiji’s court had taken to the problem of the misbehaving star and commissioned better and better lenses.

The moon, as all educated people knew now, was a sphere of planetary nature, traveling through the ether, the same as the earth–their smaller cousin, as it were, measuring its year by the earth as the earth measured its time by the sun.

So the falling of machines out of the heavens was astounding, but not incredible. In considering this awesome track which no farmer’s cart had ever made in the clay, one could easily suppose people lived on the moon. One could imagine them falling down to earth on great white petals, or on canvas sails, which Manadgi hoped to witness for himself tomorrow, that being the full of the moon, the likeliest source of visitors.

Or, for an alternative source of flower‑sails, there was the unfixed star, the persistent oddness of which argued at least that it had something to do with this manifestation of machines, since it was a newcomer to the skies, and since it had been, in the last forty years, acquiring a plethora of what might be unfixed moonlets, mere sparks, yet.

But again, Manadgi thought,–the sparks themselves might grow–or come nearer to the earth and deal with men.

Perhaps moon‑folk had drawn the foreign star to the position it presently occupied, sailing their created world across the winds of the ether, in the way that ocean‑faring ships used the worldly winds.

There had thus far seemed no correspondence between the appearance of the star or the stage of the moon phases when the flower‑sails came down.

But one could wonder about the Tachi’s records‑keeping as well as their grasp of the situation, when, simple herders that they were, they insisted on flowers instead of ordinary canvas and, in the clear evidence of people falling from the clouds, had endured this event for a quarter of a year debating what to do–until now, now that the machines were well‑established and ravaging the land as they pleased, the Tachi aiji demanded immediate and severe action from the aiji of the Mospheiran Association to halt this destruction of their western range and the frightening of their children.

Manadgi stood up, dusted his hands, and found, in the last of the sunlight, a flat stone to take him dry‑shod across the brook–a slab of sandstone the wheeled machine had crushed from the bank as it was gouging a track up the hill. It was a curiously made track, a pattern in its wheels repeating a design, its weight making deep trenches where the ground was wet. And not bogging down, evidencing the power of its engine… again, not at all astonishing: if the moon‑folk could catch the winds of the ether and ride enormous sails down to earth, they were formidable engineers. And might prove formidable in other ways, one could suspect.

He certainly had no difficulty following the machine, by the trail of uprooted trees and mud‑stained grass. Dusk was deepening, and he only hoped for the moon‑folk not to find him in the dark, before he could find them and determine the nature and extent of their activity.

Not far, the Tachi aiji had said. In the middle of the valley, beyond the grandmother stone.

Almost he failed to recognize the stone when he climbed up to it. It lay on its side.

Distressing. But one would already suppose by the felling of trees and the devastation of the stream down below, that moon‑folk were a high‑handed lot, lacking fear of judgment on themselves, or perhaps simply lacking any realization that the Tachi were civilized people, who ought to be respected.

He intended to find out, at least, what was the strength of the intruders, or whether they could be dealt with. That was ahead of other questions, such as where they did come from, or what the unfixed star might be and what it meant.

All these things Manadgi hoped to find out.

Until he crested the next rise in the barren clay track of the wheeled machine, and saw, in the twilight, the huge buildings, white, and square, and starkly unadorned.

He sank down on his heels. There was no other way to hide in the barrenness the moon‑folk had made, this bare‑earth, lifeless sameness that extended the width of the valley around cold, square buildings painted the color of death, their corners in no auspicious alignment with the hills. He put his hands in front of his mouth to warm them, because the sinking of the sun chilled the air.

Or perhaps because the strangeness suddenly seemed overwhelming, and because he doubted he could go alive into that place so ominously painted and so glaringly, perhaps defiantly, misaligned to the earth–he began to be in dread of what he might find as their purpose, these folk who fell to Earth on petal sails.

II

« ^ »

T he sun eclipsed by the planetary rim was a glorious sight from space, but a station‑dweller saw it only from cameras and stored tape–while a planet‑dweller saw it once a day, if he cared to go outside, or stop on his way back from work. And Ian Bretano still did care to, because it was still that new to him.

New and disorienting, if he fell to thinking about where he was on the planet… or where home was, or what it was or would be, for the rest of his life.

And sometimes, at night when the stars swung above the valley, sometimes when the moon was above the horizon line and all of space was over their heads, he missed the station desperately and asked himself for a wild, panicked moment why he had ever wanted to be down here at the bottom of a planetary well, why he’d ever left his family and his friends and why he couldn’t have contributed to the cause from the clean, safe laboratories upstairs–Upstairs, they all called it, now, having taken up the word from the first team down.

Upstairs–as if the station and safety and families and friends were still all as attainable as a ride in a lift.

But family and friends weren’t in their reach–wouldn’t be soon, nor might ever be, for all they could know. That was the gamble they had all taken, coming down here and subjecting themselves to unregulated weather and air so thin that just walking across the compound was strenuous exercise.

They’d acclimate to thinner air with no trouble, the medics claimed, they’d adjust–although a botanist who’d previously had mostly to do with algaes in convenient tanks and taxonomy in recorded text wasn’t sure that he was adequate to be a discoverer or a pioneer.

Still, for all of the discomforts there were compensations. Every specimen in the lab was a new species, the chemistry and the genetics was all to discover.

And for those of them who’d grown used to the day sky, and all that glowing, dust‑diffracted blue space overhead, for those of them who had convinced their stomachs that they weren’t going to fall off the planet when they looked outward to the horizon–thank God for the hills around them, that gave the illusion of a positive, not a negative curvature–they could take deliberate chances with their stomachs, walk with their eyes on an opaque sky and watch the colors change behind the hills as the world turned its face to deep space.

Every evening and every morning brought new variations of weather and different shadows on the hills.

Weather and hills… words they’d learned in Earth Science, from photos that had never hinted at the transparencies of a worldly sky, or the coolth of a storm wind and the rushing sound it made in the grasses. He still found it unnerving that windows dared be so thin that thunder rattled them. He’d never realized that a cloud passing over the sun would cool the air so quickly. He’d never have guessed that storms had a smell. He’d never imagined the complexity of sound traveling across a landscape, or the smells, both pleasant and unpleasant–smells that might be more acute once his nose quit bleeding and his lungs quit aching.

He still found it hard to make the mental conversion from being on the station looking at tape of a planet he couldn’t touch, and being on the ground looking at a point of light he might never reach again.

It had been a hard good‑bye, Upstairs. Parents, grandparents, friends… what could one say? He’d hugged them for what he knew might be the last time, in the lounge where the cameras weren’t allowed–and he’d been fine right down to the moment he’d seen his father’s expression, at which point his doubts had made a sudden lump in his throat and stayed there for the duration of the capsule ride, even after they had felt the parachute deploy.

“See you,” he’d said to them when he was leaving. “Five years. In five years, you’ll ride down.”

That was the plan–set up the base, and start taking selected colonists down–force the building of the reusable lander, once they’d found something the Guild wanted badly enough; and priority on that safer transport would go to family and friends of the team members on the initial phase of the on‑world mission. That was a privilege he won for them by being here and taking the risk… not quite among the first down, but still on the list, dropped in early enough to be counted a pioneer.

God, he’d been scared when he’d walked out of that room and into the suiting area, with the ten other team members. If there’d been a way to turn around, run back, beg to wait for another year of capsule‑drops, to prove to him that that chute was going to open.

If that was being a hero, he didn’t want to do it twice, and God, the freefall descent… and the landing…

The first astronauts had done planetfall in such capsules, by parachute. The history files said so. All old Earth’s tech was in the data banks. They’d known that that first capsule would work, the same way they knew the recoverable lander was going to work–when the Guild turned loose enough resources to see it built.

But come what might, they were down. The Guild might have refused to fly them down, but the Guild hadn’t had the right to stop the launch of what they’d built–and what they’d built, by its unpowered nature, hadn’t needed Guild pilots; what they’d built had come all of spare parts and plans from history files the Guild in its wisdom had called irrelevant to where they were.

The Guild could have applied force to stop them, hauled the capsules back after launch–of course, the Guild could still do that, and the division was potentially that bitter.

But so had the station its own force to use, if the Guild wanted to play by those rules–and the Guild evidently didn’t. The Guild hadn’t reached consensus, maybe, or hadn’t expected the first cargo lander to make it, or had a crisis of, God help them, conscience–no station‑dweller knew what passed in Guild councils, but the almighty Guild hadn’t made a move yet. And the Guild couldn’t starve them out once they were down here without bringing about a confrontation with the station that they’d already and repeatedly declined. The food and equipment drops, so far, kept coming.

Food and equipment drops that might not be absolutely critical by this time next year. And then let the Guild order what they liked. If they could eat what grew here–they could live here. The first close look Phoenix had had at the planet, had seen cities and dams and the clear evidence of agriculture and mining and every other attribute of a reasonably advanced civilization… natives, with rights, to be sure. But not rights that outweighed their own rights.

The sun sank in reds and yellows and golds. A planet shone above the hills. That was Mirage, second from the sun they called just… the sun, having no better name for it, the way they called the third planet the world, or sometimes… Down, in the way the Guild‑born didn’t use the word.

Stupid way to name the planet, Ian thought; he personally wished the first generation had come up with some definite name they could use for the world… Earth, some of them had wanted to call it, arguing that was what anyone called their home planet, and this was, in all senses that mattered, home. The Guild had immediately rejected that reasoning.

And others, notably the hydroponics biologist, Renaud Lenoir, had argued passionately and eloquently that, no, it wasn’t Earth. It mustn’t be. It wasn’t the Sun. And it wasn’t the star they’d been targeting–when whatever had happened in hyperspace, had happened, and Taylor had saved the ship.

Taylor might be the Guild’s saint–Taylor and McDonough and the miner‑pilots that, God save them, every one alive owed their lives to–but Lenoir, who’d argued so convincingly not to confound the names of Earth with this place, was due a sainthood, too, no matter that what would soon become the Guild had voted with him for reasons totally opposed to what Lenoir believed in; and that the construction workers and the station technicians, whose sons and daughters would carry out Lenoir’s vision and go down to the surface, had mostly voted against him in that meeting.

Not Earth, Lenoir had argued, and not their target star. The planet had undergone its own evolution, all the way to high intelligence, and by that process made up its own biological rules, through its own initially successful experiment at life, and its own unique demands of environment on those ancestral organisms.

The biochemistry, the taxonomies and the relationships of species down to microbes and up to Earth’s major ecosystems–whole branches of human science sat in Phoenix’ library: the systematic knowledge of the one life‑affected, human‑impacted biosphere humans had thoroughly understood, thousands of years of accumulated understanding about Earth’s natural systems and their evolution and interrelationships.

Pinning Earthly names on mere surface resemblances, Lenoir had argued, would confuse subsequent generations about where they were and who they were. It could create a mindset that thought of the world in a way connected with their own evolutionary history, a proprietary mindset, which Lenoir argued was not good; and more, a mindset that would repeatedly lead to mistaken connections throughout the life sciences and, by those mistaken connections, to expensively wrong decisions. Corrupting the language to identify what they didn’t wholly understand could on the one hand prove fatal to their own culture and their humanity, and on the other, prove damaging to the very ecosystems they looked to for survival.

So, Earth it was not. The council had deadlocked on the other choices; and what could Lenoir’s great‑great‑grandson find now to call it but the world, this blue, cloud‑swirled home they had, that Taylor had found for them?

So now that they had mined the solar system, built the station, built an economy that could, with difficulty, build the lander to reach the planetary surface, the Pilots’ Guild wanted them to leave–asked them, after nearly a hundred fifty years of orbiting the world, to shut down the station and transfer everything to the airless, waterless planetary base the Guild would gladly give them on Maudette, fourth from the sun… far from interference in a world the Guild adamantly maintained should stay sacrosanct, untouched by human influence, uncontaminated by human presence.

Meaning that the Guild wanted them all to live under the Guild’s thumb–because that was also the price of Maudette.

The sun touched only the top of the buildings now. The western face of the hill was all in shadow, and Ian leaned his back against lab 4 and watched the colors flare, gazing past the red clay scar of the safe‑tracks toward the hills of sighing grass.

Grasses was definitely what they were, the department had ruled so officially, and they could officially, scientifically, use that word as of two weeks ago–confirming the theories and the guesses of a century and a half of orbital survey. They were exact in their criteria, the ones of them that believed such things were important–the ones of them who had spent their careers memorizing the names for things they saw only in pictures and teaching them to generation after generation–a hundred fifty years of studying taxonomies and ecosystems of an ancestral world they’d never known–

No damned use, the Guild said, of course. The Guild’s sons and daughters didn’t enter Earth Studies, oh, no. The Guild’s sons and daughters had been learning physics and ship maintenance and starflight in all those long years before Phoenix had flown again–and was that practical, to launch a starship when they were struggling for basic necessities?

But, Fools, the Guild brats called the station kids fools and worse…

For what? Fools for endangering a planet the Guild didn’t give an honest damn about? Fools for wanting the world they could see offered abundantly everything they had so precariously, most of what they mined reserved for the Guild’s list of priorities?

Fools for challenging Guild authority–when you couldn’t be Guild if you weren’t born a descendant of Phoenix crew? Wasn’t that the real reason the Guild‑born called them fools? Because no station‑builder brat could ever cross that line and train as Guild, and the Guild had every good reason for keeping it that way.

Of course the name‑calling had stung with particular force, the way the Guild kids had meant it to. Never mind that if the older generations caught the Guild brats at it, they put them on rations for a week… it didn’t break a Guild brat’s pride, and it didn’t admit a station kid to what he wasn’t born to reach, or make the science of their lost Earth and lost destination either relevant or important to the Guild.

So now the Guild said, Leave this world? Go colonize barren Maudette, while they searched the stars for other planetary systems free of claimants–oh, and, by the way, mine and build stations at those stars to refuel the Guild’s ships, and live there and die there and do it all over again, all the lost lives and the sweat and the danger–be the worker‑drones while Guild ships voyaged to places that would need more worker‑drones to build, endlessly across space, all the while the Guild maintained its priorities and its perks that took most of every resource they had.

Better here, in a cold wind and under a fading sky. Their sky, in which Mirage was setting now and Maudette had yet to rise, that curious interface between the day‑glow and the true night.

They could die here. Things might still go wrong. A microbe could wipe them out faster than they could figure what hit them. They could do terrible damage to the world and every living creature on it.

The fears still came back, in the middle of the dark, or in the whispering silence of an alien hillside. The homesickness did, when he thought of something he wanted to say to his family, or his lifelong friends–then, like remembering a recent death, recalled that the phone link was not all that easy from here, and that there was no absolute guarantee that the reusable lander they had bet their futures on would ever be built.

Estevez had come Down with him, God help Julio and his sneezes. Estevez and he just didn’t talk about Upstairs, didn’t talk about the doubts… they’d gone through Studies together, been in training together–known each other all their lives… how not, in the limited world of the station? He and Julio had hashed over doubts aplenty before they’d made the cut, but not dwelled on them once they knew they were on the team, and most of all hadn’t rehashed them once they were down here. Here everything was fine and they weren’t scared, and Estevez wouldn’t worry if he was late for dinner, no, of course not. Julio would just be standing by the window by now, wondering if he’d gotten sick on the way or gotten bitten by some flying creature they hadn’t catalogued yet.

Ian shoved his hands into his pockets and began to walk back to the barracks–Estevez probably had supper in the microwave, timed to the last of sunset–they had no general mealtime, with all of them on lab schedules, and supper, such as it was, fell whenever the work was done. No amenities, no variety in the menu, no reliance on freezers or fancy equipment: every priority was for lab equipment, everything was freeze‑dried, dried, or add‑water‑and‑boil, and damned disgusting as a lifelong prospect. Probably the Guild looked for the cuisine to bring them to their knees… to have them begging the Guild for rescue and a good stationside dinner.

Meanwhile he had discovered a sudden, unusual preference for sweets, which, with the coppery taste he had almost constantly, was the only thing that tasted good. And mostly those came out of the labs he’d worked in, so he named them what they were, in all their chemical parts.

There was, in their reliance on food from orbit, a most pressing reason to identify grasses, and dissect seeds, and figure out their processes and their chemistry, where it was like Earth’s and where it was different: ecologically different, the Guild had said, probably full of toxins, not to meddle with.

But the Guild was going to be wrong on that one, if the results held–God, the tests were looking good, down to the chemical level where it really counted: there were starches and sugars they recognized, no toxins in the seeds that, the Phoenix histories informed them, could be processed and cooked in ways human beings had done for a staple food for thousands of years.

That again, for the Guild’s insistence they needed no understanding about natural systems–the Guild said they had no use precisely because in the Guild’s opinion planets had no use, and, the unspoken part, stations and station‑dwellers had no use except for the services they provided. The Guild talked about ecological disasters–about native rights, about all manner of rights including the local fauna that had more rights than the workers on the station… the Guild, that adamantly refused understanding of any natural system.

But contrary to predictions, the microbes they collected and the ones that necessarily attended human beings showed no dispensation to run amok with each other or with them or the planet–that had been their greatest fear, viruses getting a hold in human bodies or human‑vectored bacteria wreaking havoc faster than the genetics people could patch the problems. They’d prepared for it, they’d taken precautions–but it hadn’t happened catastrophi‑cally; they weren’t seeing the problems they’d prepared for, even in lab cultures. The very fact they were finding biological correspondences was a hazard, of course, but so far and with fingers crossed, the immunologists were beginning to argue that the mere fact there were correspondences might mean some effective defenses. Talk around the lab began to speculate on microbial‑level evolution more intimately related to geology and planetary formation than theory had previously held to be the case, wild stuff, the geneticists and the geologists and the botanists putting their heads together on one spectacular drunk the night they’d gotten the supply drop with the unscheduled Gift from Upstairs–

God, the irreverent insanity down here, after a lifetime of the solemn Cause, and the politics, and the Movement. But discoveries were pouring in on them after a century and a half of stagnant study of taxonomies. They were drunk with invention. They were understanding the natural systems they were seeing. They’d formed a comparative framework with its essential questions foremost, worked out on Lenoir’s principles, for a hundred fifty years of information trickling up through optics and hands‑off observation of the planet; they’d held on to planetary science–and they’d done it in the face of the Guild’s ridicule and the Guild’s absorption of resources, and the Guild’s ship‑building, and every Guild‑blessed project that drank up station time and materials.

And if the Guild profoundly repented anything it had let pass council, it had to be the decision that had begun station construction here, in orbit about a blue, living planet, instead of barren, virtually airless Maudette.

Safer, the scientists of that day had argued. Within reach of resources, if something went wrong.

It certainly was within reach of resources, resources and the intelligent civilization they had already detected on the planet. Oh, yes, the Guild raised ethical arguments from the start, but say the truth–the Guild with its talk of moral choices, the right of the planet to develop on its own–they had such a deep concern for the planet‑dwellers, papa was wont to say. So why is life down there so sacred to the Guild, and why do they count our lives so cheap?

So he was here, because papa couldn’t be, and mama wouldn’t, without papa: the station and the Movement needed them where they were, if that lander was going to pass a council vote.

What the Guild reasoned now, he didn’t know. Or care. Thank God, hereafter the politics of the Movement, and who was in charge, and who led and who followed (being an administrator’s son, he’d heard all the arguments for and against his being down here, and suffered personally from some of them) and what steps were first and what their policy would be in dealing with the Guild–none of that was his problem anymore. He was down here to practice the science he’d become fascinated with at age eight… and realized when the Guild brats ridiculed him that he’d have no real chance of doing anything with it as a job.

But papa’s dream had been an of‑course to him, even at eight… that was why he’d spoken out without thinking, of course they’d go to the world, of course they’d walk down there someday.

And now he did walk the planetary surface, now he did Lenoir’s work, he did it, and for Lenoir’s reasons: all the collections, the taxonomies, the equivalencies that might let them extrapolate from the natural system in the data storage to deal with a living one. He was laying the foundation for a natural science of this world and a means of dealing with this world and protecting it from their own mistakes–because, dammit, they had to; sooner or later they had to be here. Lenoir was right–the world might have a higher life form already, and the world already and for thousands of years had surely had a name, in someone or something’s language–but humanity had come to this solar system without a choice, and it was equally inevitable that they deal with the world, before it was space‑faring or after, because Maudette was not their choice, and they knew Maudette was not even the Guild’s choice–just a way to get the Guild’s worker‑drones away from the only planet that gave them options. The world had become their hope and their way of securing their freedom and their identity, before they had ever set foot on it.

Until here he was, in a place generations had worked to reach, and, one way or the other, he wouldn’t be admitting defeat. He wouldn’t be going back Upstairs, rescued from starvation by some Guild ship.

And he damned sure wouldn’t be gathered up and transported to airless Maudette, on Guild terms.

Too late for that now, everlastingly too late.

Speaking of late…

It was Julio in the window, shadow against the light.

Shadow that ducked its head in a sudden sneeze.

III

« ^ »

P erhaps it was cowardice, Manadgi thought, that held him from going down to the valley. Perhaps it was prudence that argued, in the quiet he saw settle about the buildings as the sun set, that watching and thinking through the night might grant him some useful understanding.

One building had windows. Most did not. The size and the height of the windows was ambiguous with distance. He saw the isolated movements of living beings between the buildings, toward twilight, and occasionally after.

He saw the predating machines, prowling about the desolation they had made. None came near him, perhaps because he had settled himself well away from such tracks, which evidently it was the purpose of such machines to make, all about the area, a net of them, as if there were less intent to reach any specific place than to have as many routes as possible within the immediate sight of these buildings.

But did they need devastation on which to walk?

Or was there some purpose to this stripping of the land that made sense to moon‑folk? They feared the approach of enemies, perhaps. Perhaps they wished to afford no cover to spies.

Perhaps they wished to demonstrate the devastation, or–one hated to imagine–found such destruction aesthetic.

He might walk up to the buildings as he had purposed and present himself to some authority. But aesthetic destruction… that thought gave him considerable pause.

A machine passed below his hiding‑place, casting light as bright as the vanished sun along the rutted ground and over the grass along the edge of the devastation. It had no wheels, but linked plates on which it crawled. Its forepart was a claw, which it held rigid. It might be for digging or for stripping the ground. It might be a weapon.

Certainly one did not want to walk up to that and ask its inclinations.

A beam of light hit the rocks and ran along the hill, and Manadgi held his breath, not daring to move. Someone surely sat in mastery of that machine, he told himself, but there was something so disturbingly clockwork about the swing of those lights that watching it made his flesh crawl.

What, he asked himself, if they were clockwork, such machines? What if the owners simply turned them loose to destroy, committing them to fortune and not caring what or whom they laid waste?

A spear of light stabbed backward from the clanking machine. Too close, Manadgi said to himself, and drew back from his position–then stopped cold as he saw the sheen of glass and smooth metal among the brush and the grass of the slope just below him.

An eye, he thought, a machine’s single eye thrust up through the grass, as yet not moving, perhaps not cognizant of him.

He had come here to make considerate approach. But not to this. Not to this. He held his breath, wondering if he dared move, or if it would move, or how long this eye had been there until the light from the machine showed it to him.

The area of brush where the clawed machine had disappeared was dark, now, and he sat in an awkward crouch, half ready to move away, doubting whether he dared, wondering if there was another such machine lurking with mechanical patience, or if such eyes might be threaded all through the grass and the rocks, and he had somehow blundered through them unseen. He trembled to think, considering that it was himself on whom the fortunes of greater people leaned, and that on his auspicious or inauspicious choice, on a sum of strange participants whose number he could not at all reckon, chance was delicately balanced, awaiting his decision one way or the other to tip events into motion, for good or for ill to the aiji, whose interests bound up many, many lives.

Clearly the moon‑folk had no right intruding on Tachi land, within the aiji’s power. They had done damage in their arrogance and their power and challenged the people of the whole Earth–and it was on him to decide what to do, whether to risk this eye developing legs and running to report, or a voice, to alert other eyes, and to call the clawed machine back to this slope.

It had done neither, so far. Perhaps it was shut down. Perhaps it was not a whole machine, in itself, only a part from a damaged one. If they fell from the sky, perhaps a petal‑sail had failed, and one had smashed itself on the rocks.

He could scarcely get his next breath, as he moved himself ever so silently backward and backward, straining his mortal eyes into the dark toward the eye and asking himself if the eye might have ears to hear the whisper of cloth or the drawing of his breaths or–it seemed possible to him–the hammering of his heart. But the eye sat in darkness, perhaps blind, perhaps asleep–or feigning it. Did clockwork things hear, or smell, or think?

Or how did they know to move? Did they turn on and off their own switches? That seemed impossible.

It stayed inert, at least. He gained his feet, moving with what stealth he could, uphill, encountering, at least, no other eyes in the grass.

He settled into a nook higher on the hill, there to tuck up among the yet unravaged rocks, to catch his breath and regain his composure.

The aiji, he told himself, should have sent one of his assassins, not a speaker–should have sent some one of his guard accustomed to hazardous actions, who would know how to move silently and how to judge the hazards of this situation.

And perhaps having seen clearly that it was a matter outside his judgment, his wisest course would be to withdraw with what he had seen, and to advise the aiji and the hasdrawad to send someone with the skill to penetrate this devastation. He saw no safe approach.

Yet had any machine attacked him? Had the machines harmed the children, or could the Tachi prove such wandering machines had killed any of their herds?

He had to admit fear had swayed his judgment a moment ago. The clockwork machines had wreaked havoc on the land, but not, though given opportunity, attacked people or livestock. The children that had reported machines had escaped unharmed, and nothing had tracked them to their village. The herdsmen that had spied on the landing places of the petal‑sails had escaped, alive and well, without the machines of the moon‑folk following them.

So perhaps the machines were deaf and even witless things, and he had been foolish to run, just now.

He was certainly glad no one was here to witness his dilemma, huddled in a hole in the dark, shivering, and not with the cold.

Was that the story he wanted to tell the aiji and his court, how he had fled, without any closer observation? He had confidence in his skills as an observer and as a negotiator. And could he fail to gather at least an assessment of numbers and position, which would be useful as the hasdrawad debated and the aiji arranged another, more aggressive, mission?

He dared not carry back a mistaken report, or ask for assassins, and perhaps, in an assassin’s too‑quick reaction to threat, push the whole situation to hostilities that might not be anyone’s intention. He had come here plainly to ask the moon‑folk what they were doing, and to have an answer from them for the aiji. He had always realized the chance of dying by error or by hostile action. It was a risk he had been willing to run, when the aiji asked him the question in the safety of the aiji’s apartments.

Could he retreat now, claiming the machines had threatened him–his only excuse but cowardice–knowing that report would be taken as a reasoned conclusion, and that it would loose irremediable consequences?

No. He could not. He could not remotely justify it. The aiji had seen applicability in his skills to make him the aiji’s considered choice for this mission.

He hoped the aiji had also seen intelligence, and judgment, and resourcefulness, not alone for the honor of the aiji’s opinion, but because his personal resources seemed very scant just now, and the night was very cold, and nothing in his life had prepared him for this.

IV

« ^ »

T he morning came as milky pale as the first morning Ian had wakened on the planet, with a scattering of improbably pink clouds. Pink… and gold, and pearl white, with a little mist in the low places. Condensation due to the air being saturated with moisture and the ambient temperature reaching the critical point: weather. The moisture came from previous precipitation and from evaporation from the ground and from respiration from the plants. One could generate the same effect in the herbarium, up on the station, by a combination of natural and mechanical processes.

It was a pretty effect there. But they’d never thought of pink clouds. A shame, Ian thought. They should put gels on the spots and arrange tours. See the planetary effects.

It’s pretty, Julio had said from the barracks door.–It’s pretty, it’s cold, have fun.

Estevez with his regulated temperatures and filtered air: a life systems engineer with an allergy to the environment was not a happy experimental specimen for the medics.

Estevez flinched from the day sky. And Estevez admit to his fear? Retreat from it? Not if he had to go back in and throw up, after his glance at the weather. Allergies, Estevez said.

And it was funny, but it wasn’t, since Estevez couldn’t leave this world. Steroids weren’t the long‑term answer, and they hadn’t had an immune response problem in a hundred years and more on‑station. Gene‑patching wasn’t an option for their little earth‑sciences/chemistry lab down on the planet, they couldn’t send specimens Upstairs, they hadn’t anybody trained to run the equipment if they could get it down here, they weren’t a hundred percent sure a gene‑patch was what they ought to try under exotic circumstances, anyway, and, meanwhile, Archive had come up with an older, simpler idea: find the substance. Try desensitization.

Fine, Estevez said, sleepless with steroids, stuck with needles, patched with tape, experimented on by botanists and zoologists. He’d try anything. Meanwhile Estevez stayed under filtration and stayed comfortable and maintained his sense of humor–except it was scary to react to something after two months down here. The medics thought it should take longer. They weren’t sure. There’d never been a hundred‑fifty‑year‑old genetically isolated, radiation‑stressed human population exposed to an alien world. Not in their records.

Wonderful, said Estevez.

Meanwhile all of them who went out on Survey, laying down their little grids of tape and counting grass species, took careful specimens of anything new, bushes, grasses, seeding and sporing plants and fungi and the like. The medics waved a part of that sample past Estevez‘ nose and taped other samples to his skin. They hung simple adhesive strips in the wind, and counted what impacted them, and analyzed snips of the filters, figuring at first that whatever Estevez was reacting to had to be airborne. But they were working on a new theory now, and analyzed samples of soil and dead grasses, looking for molds.

So they added the soil punch to the regular test, and extended the grid of samples beyond the sterilized ground. Ian took a soil sample every hundred meters, a punch of a plastic tube down past the root‑line, and left his blue plastic tube inserts in a row down the hillside, to pick up on the way back. The old hands down here could walk briskly. He ambled, stopped often, lungs aching, on the long easterly climb uphill, into the rising sun.

He’d spotted different color on the east hill yesterday. It looked like a blooming plant, and if it did bloom, in the economy of nature, one could guess it did that to put forth genetic material for sexual combination to produce seed, as the grasses did, a likely and advantageous system according to their own Earthly prejudice.

That indicated, then, that it was shedding something into the air, and if it was shedding something, one might well argue it was pollen. The committee was still arguing the matter–quasi‑pollen or quasi‑spores from quasi‑flowers, but ask Estevez if he cared. The reproduction of the broadleaf grasses might need debate, and possibly a new nomenclature, but those looked to him like flowers of the sort they grew in the herbarium from Earth seed, red‑violet, specifically, different than anything they had yet seen in the landscape.

And sweet‑smelling, deliciously sweet, once he’d climbed far enough up the hill to catch the scent, and to take his whole‑plant sample.

Stowing that, with best hopes for Estevez, he drew his square, pegging one‑meter lines on a plastic grid, took up his handheld recorder, and began counting ordinary grasses–there was a type, Lawton argued, that, with 136 grains per ear on average, showed evidence of artificial selection, probably had drifted from cultivated fields, and that that might let them, at safe distance, gather information on the edibility for humans of what the natives cultivated.

Which would tell them–

A siren blasted out abruptly, down among the base buildings. Ian froze, sitting as he was, looked downhill and looked about him, thinking some surveyor across the valley must have misjudged his position and triggered the perimeter alarm.

Grass near him whispered out of time with the breeze.

Startled, he spun on one knee and found himself staring at a pair of brown, dusty boots, and the hem of a brown, knee‑length, many‑buttoned coat, and the tall perspective of an ebon‑skinned giant.

He couldn’t move. He heard the alarm sounding in the distance, and realized in shock that he was the emergency, and this was the cause of it, this… man , this creature that had picked his approach and his moment and chosen him …

The native beckoned to him, once, twice, unmistakably, to get up. Impossible not to recognize the intelligence, the purpose, the civilized nature of the native, who was black as night, with a face not by any remotest kinship human, but sternly handsome in its planes and angles.

A third time it beckoned. He saw no imminent threat as he rose. It was imposingly tall–more than a head taller–and broad‑shouldered. He saw no weapons about its person–in which thought he suddenly realized that it might take some of his equipment for weaponlike. He was afraid to reach even for the probe he’d used, afraid to make a move in any direction, recalling all Earth’s history of war‑making mistakes and missed chances for reason.

But he moved a cautious hand to his breast pocket, thumbed the switch on the pocket radio to the open position, all the while watching for the least alarmed reaction.

He said quietly, “Base, I’ve made contact,” and watched the native’s face. “Base.” He kept his voice low, his eyes constantly on the intruder, as if he were speaking to him. “Base, this is Ian. I’ve made contact. I’ve got company out here.”

The native still offered no objection, but in sudden fear of an imprudent answer from Base blasting out, he thumbed the volume control in the direction he devoutly hoped was down.

“Nil li sat‑ha,” the intruder said to him–it sounded like that, at least, a low and, thank God, reasonable‑sounding voice. He indicated the downward course toward the base, making his own invitation.

It motioned again up the bill.

“Base,” he said, trying not to let his voice shake, “that was him talking. I think it’s a he. It looks to be. Tall fellow. Well‑dressed. No weapons. Don’t come up here. He seems civilized. I’m going to do what he wants, I’m going out of perimeter, I don’t want to alarm him. Stay back. And don’t talk to me.”

A hard, strong grip closed on his arm. He looked around in startlement at the intruder–no one in his life had ever laid hands on him with that intimation of force and strength. But the situation was suddenly sliding into confusion: a glance downhill showed him his friends running upslope toward them, the intruder was clearly alarmed–and their lives and everything they had worked for were at risk if someone miscalculated now.

Come, the intruder wanted. And a part of him wanted more than anything to run back to safety, back to things he knew, things he could deal with on his own terms.

But the hand that pulled at his arm was too strong to fight to any advantage, and he went where it wanted, still trying to think what to do–he left the communications switch open, hoping no one would chase them or corner the alien,–panted, “Base, it’s all right, I’m safe, it’s wanting to talk, for God’s sake, base, tell them pull back…”

But he had no idea why they were coming headlong after him, whether they knew something he didn’t or whether base was talking at all. They couldn’t fight. They had a handful of weapons against the chance of animal intrusions, but they were a very few humans on a world they knew wasn’t theirs, they couldn’t get off the planet, nobody could get down to them, not even the Guild, until the lander was built, and there was no way they could hold out against a native population that decided to attack them.

Someone downslope shouted, he didn’t know what, but the intruder began to run and he found himself compelled by a grip on his arm that hauled him along at a breathless, stumbling pace.

“Stay back!” he said to whoever was listening. “Dammit, he’s not hurting me, don’t chase him!”

Breath failed him. He wasn’t acclimated to the air, he couldn’t run and talk, he struggled to keep his feet under him as the intruder dodged around brush and rocks and pulled him along.

Then his ankles did go, and pitched him onto his knees on the stony hill, the intruder still holding his arm with a grip that cut off the blood to his hand.

He looked up at the native, then, scared, trying to get his breath, trying to get up, and it snatched him up, wrenching his arm as it looked back the way they had come, as afraid as he was, he thought, despite the pain.

“I’m all right,” he said for the radio. “I’ve turned the volume off. I can’t hear you. I don’t want to scare the man, don’t come after me!”

The native jerked him along, and he cooperated at the best pace he could manage, his lungs burning, his breath coming on a knife’s edge. His head spun, then, and he had the intruder half‑carrying him, while he gasped after air and saw the world in shades of gray.

At last it dragged him into a dark place and smothered him with its body and his coat. He made no protest, except to try to breathe, and, getting his face clear, lay in the shelter of the native’s panting body, wanting only to stay alive, and not to provoke any craziness out of anyone.

V

« ^ »

L eft with the creature,” Patton Bretano said, with a sinking heart, and Pardino, down on the surface, went on about how they’d gotten radio transmission, they were still getting it, and they wanted a decision from the station.

Pattern Bretano sat with the receiver in his hand, listening to it, asking himself why it was his son, and what kind of craziness had sent Ian out by himself, or why Ian hadn’t run for the base instead of away from it, but he feared he knew that answer already.

Ian wouldn’t risk the project, wouldn’t risk it. Working near the perimeter, Pardino said. In an area where they thought they had years yet to find the answers.

But the answers had found them. Found Ian, on the edges and unprotected. Pardino talked about how the radio was still open, and if it stayed that way they had a chance to track them.

But, How can I tell Joy? was the thought chasing through Patton’s mind, scattering saner notions. The father’s instincts were to mount a search party, to curse Ian for doing what he’d done, the father’s instincts didn’t damn care what risks the search would run.

The father didn’t give a damn how a rescue attempt would play politically with the Guild. The politician was thinking of the risks they knew they’d run, where they’d put the base… God, of course there were dangers, and there were procedures for avoiding them. They’d created an electronic perimeter. The natives weren’t advanced enough to bypass it. They’d been down there for months without an incident. They’d never let their precautions lapse, and Ian hadn’t been in the first team down, he’d pulled every string he had and absolutely made sure that Ian wasn’t in the first team–

“ Pat ,” Pardino said, “ Pat, are you there ?”

“Yes,” he said, thinking, God help us, it’s happened, hasn’t it? Contact’s made. Irrevocable from this point. But my son…

“ We can’t go after him ,” Pardino said. “ The staff’s in consensus, we can’t go after him, we aren’t in that kind of position here …”

“I want the transmissions.” He was trembling. The shock was still richocheting through his nerves, saying nothing was real. But that open radio was the only fragile link to Ian, and he wanted to be hearing that, not Pardino; he wanted to hear for himself that Ian was all right, never mind what the Guild was going to make of it, never mind that the news was going to be all over the station with the speed of the phone system, and somehow he had to break the news to Joy and get some kind of official news release out.

Had to take a position before the Guild released the story on its own.

He wasn’t a bad man. He told himself he wasn’t a bad man. He was walking a narrow line between a Pilots’ Guild that wouldn’t scruple to use the story against everything their hopes rested on, and a council skittish of opposing them too radically… and now Ian had gone and put himself in the middle of what, God help him, he’d planned.

Because he knew and the committee knew there were inhabitants in that area of the island, non‑technological as they needed, as they’d wanted the first contact to be, not to bring them face‑to‑face with the savviest politicians and the most advanced technology on the planet… but he hadn’t on any terms wanted Ian in the middle of that encounter.

Pardino was saying something about the patch on channel B, and he couldn’t but think how the Guild was going to be monitoring their transmissions the instant they realized there was something happening. Everything they said, everything Ian said, was going to the Guild the same as it went to them, bet on it.

“ Pat ,” Pardino said, obscuring what he wanted to hear, Ian’s voice, “ Pat, the boy’s resourceful, he’s being clever, he’s not hurt, they’re not threatening him, whatever’s happened. He talks, but they can’t suspect there’s a pickup, they haven’t got radio. He said he’s got the volume down so they can’t hear, but he’s not that far away. The batteries are good for at least four days solid, he says don’t come after the guy, they’re not threatening him. You copy, Pat?“

“Yeah. Yes, I understand you. I want the transmissions, dammit.”

“You’ve got everything we have.”

Pardino signed off with that, as if it made anything better than it was; but, He’s resourceful, Pardino had said, too, and Patton clutched that thought to himself when Pardino went out and left him a quiet, static‑ridden breathing.

Then Ian’s voice, saying, out of breath, “ It’s still all right, don’t worry, he’s just afraid someone’s following us. We’re in a cave in the rocks. He keeps touching my arm, very gentle, like he’s trying to get me to be quiet, he talks to me and I act like I’m answering him .”

The other voice came back then, a low, quiet burr.

“ He’s at least a head taller than me ,” Ian’s voice said, “ mostly like us, but incredibly strong. His skin is black as space, his eyes are narrow and his nose is kind of arched, flat to the face, he frowns, you can tell that .…”

The other voice again. A pause, then:

“He’s talking to me, I guess you can hear that, real quiet, like he’s trying to tell me everything’s all right.”

Ian’s voice was shaking. Patton felt the fear in his son, felt the strain telling on him, and Ian’s breaths were short and desperate. He knotted his hands together and knew the Guild was recording by now, every desperate minute, to play back to the council and the station at large.

Ian wasn’t the type to crack, he knew his son. Ian was doing all right emotionally. It was the physical stress or a physical constraint that was putting that quaver into lan’s voice, but others might not think so.

He punched in his wife’s office number, before the news could go out. He said it the way Pardino had said it, just, “Joy, Ian’s in a little trouble, don’t panic, but they’ve got a contact down there and Ian’s met it.”

“ A contact ,” Joy said, on the other end of the line.

“What do you mean, they’ve got a contact? Is he all right? Pat? Is he all right?”

“So far he’s fine,” Patton said. “We can hear him, he’s got his radio open, I’ve got him on the other channel. Turn on your B.”

“ I’ve got it ,” Joy said, “ I’ve got it .”

“– a little out of breath ,” Ian was saying, and coughed. “ My legs are wobbly. I’m not acclimated down here. I’d say we’re a couple klicks from the base, don’t know how to judge it. There’s like trees around here, kind of soft‑trunked, big flat leaves, there’s like a lot of moss, there’s got to be water near here, I’d think, it’s all soft‑leaved stuff …”

God, Patton thought, the boy was still observing, still was sending back his damn botany notes, but it was the native he wanted to know about.

He heard the creature talking again, he heard Joy ask, “ Is that one of them ?” and he muttered, “So far there’s just one of them. Walked right through the perimeter alarm and accosted Ian. Ian ordered the rescue party back. He apparently wasn’t feeling threatened.”

“ Sir ,” his secretary’s voice broke in, on override. “ Vordict’s calling in, says it’s urgent, about your son, sir .”

The Guild had heard. The Guild was going to raise bloody hell about the situation and play hard politics with the electorate. He wasn’t ready for this. He had a son in trouble down there and Vordict, damn him, wanted to make an issue of what they all sensibly knew had been inevitable from the hour they reached this star, all to read him might‑have‑beens.

“ He wants to keep moving ,” Ian’s faint voice said. “ He wants us to walk again. I’m cold, I’m out of breath, excuse the shakes .…”

“Put him on,” he told his secretary, regarding Vordict, and told Joy, “It’s Vordict. I’ve got to talk to him. Ian can’t hear us. But whatever he’s found down there, it’s not hostile, it’s all right…”

Ian gasped, a short, small intake of breath, and Patton’s heart froze.

Ian said, long‑distance, “ I lost my balance, is all. It’s all right, it’s all right, don’t anybody do anything stupid .”

Patton wished the Guild would take that to heart.

“ Patton ,” came the voice from the other channel. “ Patton, you’ve forced this, this is on your head, it’s your son in danger, and you knew damned well there was a settlement close to the base. I have the documents. I have the witness. You knew before you made the drop there, tell me otherwise, and be advised I intend to take this before the council .”

VI

« ^ »

T here was no offer of resistance, no threat, no weapon, and thus far the luck had been with the effort. Perhaps the moon‑man sensed so and made no resistance to his kidnapping. Or perhaps malicious chance was running otherwise and everything only seemed this easy.

Manadgi did not reckon himself a superstitious man, nor a gullible one, or he tried not to be. Anything that proceeded this easily with so much force available to the other side, he greatly distrusted.

But the moon‑man, at least a head shorter than he, seemed a fragile creature, easily out of breath, quickly winded on the mildest climb. The creature’s pale complexion turned paler still, and at times it staggered, but it never ceased to try to walk with him.

It might be he had put it in fear of its life. It might be it was simply the disposition of moon‑folk to be acquiescent, for reasons such folk understood, but he could not persuade himself to trust that chance, no more than he could entirely persuade himself that the clockwork machines were harmless to intruders.

He walked and walked, and the moon‑man stumbled along beside him, muttering to himself so constantly he began to wonder if the creature was habitually that addled or somehow injured in its wits. He had found it sitting in front of a square of grass, plucking stems and talking to itself, while poking at a black box full of buttons that perhaps made sense, but about what business he could not determine.

Perhaps it was mad. Perhaps all moon‑folk were–along with those furious early pursuers that had given chase and then given up.

Or perhaps they were, after all, frail and gentle folk who could not even resist the kidnapping of one of their number–

But who then loosed the clockwork machines to destroy the valley?

The moon‑man was lagging farther and farther off the pace he wanted, was staggering in his steps and then fell to his knees, holding his side. “Get up!” Manadgi told it sternly, and waved his hand.

The moon‑man wiped his face and there was blood, most evidently blood, red as any man’s, running from its nose–a flood of life, broken forth by the running and the climbing he had forced it to.

He was sorry for it, then–he had not meant to do it harm and still it was trying to do what he asked it, with the blood pouring down its face.

He gestured with a push at its arm for it to sit down again, and it seemed glad and relieved, bent over and pinched its nostrils shut, then began to cough, which, with the bleeding, made him worry that it might choke itself.

Manadgi tucked his hands between his knees and squatted, waiting, hoping the creature knew what best to do to help itself. It was far from threatening anyone at the moment, rather, it seemed choked, so imminently in peril of its life that he took his water‑flask and offered it, hoping it would help.

The moon‑man looked at him with suffering eyes, then unstopped the flask and poured a little water out on his hand, to be sure it was water, he thought, before he wiped his face with it. Then he poured a little more into his bloody hand and had a mouthful, which seemed to help the coughing.

And the moment he stopped choking, the moon‑man began muttering again, the odd creature…

Not an ugly or a fearsome being, Manadgi decided, except the blood smeared on its pale face. Its strangeness made him queasy about touching it, certainly about ever using the flask, but he greatly regretted hurting it, not having known how delicate it was.

Still, for all he knew, its associates had set one of the clockwork monsters on their trail.

“Get up,” he said to it, exactly the words he had used before. “Get up.”

The moon‑man immediately tried to do what he asked, without a gesture, so the creature had understood a word or two. He gained his feet with the flask tucked under his arm as if he meant to keep it, and kept talking to himself as he went, a thin, uncertain voice, now, lacking all affirmation.

They were past the stricken grandmother stone. They had left the scarring of the land and they went in tangle‑grass that clung to the trousers and about the ankles. There was a stream down the hill, he remembered it at the other side of a steep bank and a stand of fern, a slab of rock. That was what he intended–a cold, clean stream and a moment to rest in a more sheltered place, difficult for the clockwork machines to negotiate.

“Be careful,” he cautioned the creature, with a tug at the blue sleeve, and it looked around at him, pale, bloody‑faced, with a startled expression, after which the moon‑man slipped and slid away from him in a rattle of rock and a crashing of fern.

The creature never cried out. It landed at the bottom half in the water and half on the bank and never moved as he came skidding down to it in fear and fright.

He thought it might have broken bones in that fall. It lay still, and he could only think that if there had been any niche for ill fortune in their meeting he must just have destroyed himself and the aiji at once–he dreaded even to touch it, but what was he to do, or where else could he find help?

So he pulled its arm and its shoulder out of the water–and it looked at him with dazed strange eyes and went on looking at him as if its bewilderment was as great, as if its understanding of its universe was devastated and disordered as his own.

He let it go, then, and it crouched there and bathed its face and washed its neck, while blood ran away in the clean water, an omen of things, he feared as much.

But he saw clearly that he had driven it beyond any sane or reasonable limit, and how desperate and spent it was, and yet not protesting.

Overall it seemed a brave creature, and never violent, never anything but willing to comply with everything he asked of it. He found himself glad when it seemed to recover its breath, and not to be badly hurt from its fall. It looked at him then as if expecting to have to go on, crazed as their course had been, and able only to ask with its eyes who he was and what he wanted and where they were going, all the things a sane creature would want to know–would he not? Would not any man ask what he wanted and why should he go?

Why indeed should he go, when he had every advantage of defense in the strange buildings, and why should he have been alone on the hill, and why should he have run from his own people, this strange moon‑man who sat and counted grass stems?

Perhaps fortune was tending that way and the moon‑man had felt it, and given himself up to it.

And if that was so, if that was so, dared he lose what the auspicious moment had put in his hands, or risk its safety by driving it beyond its strength?

He spoke to it quietly, he ventured to touch it gently on the knee as he knelt by it on the stream bank, and kept his voice low and calming. “Rest, rest here, catch your breath. It’s all right. Drink.” One supposed it regularly drank ordinary water and not substances of the ether. He shaped a cup with his hand and had a drink from the stream himself, said again, “Drink,” to make the word sure, and the moon‑man said it back to him, faint and weak as he was.

More, the man’s eyes were for a moment clear and unafraid, if he could judge expression on such a face, eloquent of curiosity about him, and even gratitude. “Ian,” the man said, indicating himself, and said it a second time, so he became reasonably sure it was a name. He said his own name, “Manadgi,” in the same way.

“Ian,” the man said, and put out his hand, as if he was to do the same.

“Manadgi.” He put forth his own hand, willing to be a fool, and the creature seized on it and shook it vigorously.

“Ian, Manadgi,” the creature said, and seemed delighted by the discovery. They sat there shaking each other by the hand, fools together, mutually afraid, mutually relieved, mutually bewildered by their differences.

He had no idea what its native customs or expectations must be. It could have very little idea about his. But it was possible to be civilized, all the same, and he found it possible to be gracious with such a creature, odd as it was–possible, the dizzy concept came to him, to establish associate relations with what was certainly a powerful association of unknown scope, of beings skilled in a most marvelous craft.

“We shall walk,” he said slowly, miming with his fingers. “We shall walk to the village, Ian and Manadgi, together.”

BOOK THREE

I

« ^ »

T he air moved sluggishly through the open garden lattice, heavy with the perfume of the night‑blooming vines outside the bedroom. An o’oi‑ana went click‑click , and called again, the harbinger of rain, while Bren lay awake, thinking that if he were wise, he would get up and close the lattice and the doors before he fell asleep. The wind would shift. The sea air would come and cool the room. The vents were enough to let it in. But it was a lethargic, muggy night, and he waited for that nightly reverse of the wind from the east to the west, waited as the first flickers of lightning cast the shadow of the lattice on the stirring gauze of the curtain.

The lattice panels had the shapes of Fortune and Chance, baji and naji . The shadow of the vines outside moved with the breeze that, finally, finally, flared the curtain with the promise of relief from the heat.

The next flicker lit an atevi shadow, like a statue suddenly transplanted to the terrace outside. Bren’s heart skipped a beat as he saw it on that pale billowing of gauze, on a terrace where no one properly belonged. He froze an instant, then slithered over the side of the bed.

The next flash showed him the lattice folding further back, and the intruder entering his room.

He slid a hand beneath the mattress and drew out the pistol he had hidden there–braced his arms across the mattress in the way the aiji had taught him, and pulled the trigger, to a shock that numbed his hands and a flash that blinded him to the night and the intruder. He fired a second time, for sheer terror, into the blind dark and ringing silence.

He couldn’t move after that. He couldn’t get his breath. He hadn’t heard anyone fall. He thought he had missed. The white, flimsy draperies blew in the cooling wind that scoured through his bedroom.

His hands were numb, bracing the gun on the mattress. His ears were deaf to sounds fainter than the thunder, fainter than the rattle of the latch of his bedroom door–the guards using their key, he thought.

But it might not be. He rolled his back to the bedside and braced his straight arms between his knees, barrel trained on the middle of the doorway as the inner door banged open and light and shadow struck him in the face.

The aiji’s guards spared not a word for questions. One ran to the lattice doors, and out into the courtyard and the beginning rain. The other, a faceless metal‑sparked darkness, loomed over him and pried the gun from his fingers.

Other guards came; while Banichi–it was Banichi’s voice from above him–Banichi had taken the gun.

“Search the premises!” Banichi ordered them. “See to the aiji!”

“Is Tabini all right?” Bren asked, overwhelmed, and shaking. “Is he all right, Banichi?”

But Banichi was talking on the pocket‑com, giving other orders, deaf to his question. The aiji must be all right, Bren told himself, or Banichi would not be standing here, talking so calmly, so assuredly to the guards outside. He heard Banichi give orders, and heard the answering voice say nothing had gotten to the roof.

He was scared. He knew the gun was contraband. Banichi knew it, and Banichi could arrest him–he feared he might; but when Banichi was through with the radio, Banichi seized him by the bare arms and set him on the side of the bed.

The other guard came back through the garden doors–it was Jago. She always worked with Banichi. “There’s blood. I’ve alerted the gates.”

So he’d shot someone. He began to shiver as Jago ducked out again. Banichi turned the lights on and came back, atevi, black, smooth‑skinned, his yellow eyes narrowed and his heavy jaw set in a thunderous scowl.

“The aiji gave me the gun,” Bren said before Banichi could accuse him. Banichi stood there staring at him and finally said,

“This is my gun.”

He was confused. He sat there with his skin gone to gooseflesh and finally moved to pull a blanket into his lap. He heard commotion in the garden, Jago yelling at other guards.

“This is my gun,” Banichi said forcefully. “Can there be any question this is my gun? A noise waked you. I lay in wait for the assassin. I fired. What did you see?”

“A shadow. A shadow coming in through the curtains.” Another shiver took him. He knew how foolish he had been, firing straight across and through the doors. The bullet might have kept going across the garden, into the kitchens. It could have ricocheted off a wall and hit someone asleep in another apartment. The shock persisted in his hands and in his ears, strong as the smell of gunpowder in the air, that didn’t belong with him, in his room…

The rain started with a vengeance. Banichi used his pocket‑com to talk to the searchers, and to headquarters, lying to them, saying he’d fired the shot, seeing the intruder headed for the paidhi’s room, and, no, the paidhi hadn’t been hurt, only frightened, and the aiji shouldn’t be wakened, if he hadn’t heard the shots. But the guard should be doubled, and the search taken to the south gates, before, Banichi said, the rain wiped out the tracks.

Banichi signed off.

“Why did they come here ?” Bren asked. Assassins, he understood; but that any ordinary assassin should come into the residential compound, where there were guards throughout, where the aiji slept surrounded by hundreds of willing defenders–nobody in their right mind would do that.

And to assassinate him , Bren Cameron, with the aiji at the height of all power and with the nai’aijiin all confirmed in their houses and supportive–where was the sense in it? Where was the gain to anyone at all sane?

“Nadi Bren.” Banichi stood over him with his huge arms folded, looking down at him as if he were dealing with some feckless child. “ What did you see?”

“I told you. Just a shadow, coming through the curtain.” The emphasis of the question scared him. He might have been dreaming. He might have roused the whole household and alarmed the guards all for a nightmare. In the way of things at the edge of sleep, he no longer knew for sure what he had seen.

But there had been blood. Jago said so. He had shot someone.

“I discharged the gun,” Banichi said. “Get up and wash your hands, nadi. Wash them twice and three times. And keep the garden doors locked.”

“They’re only glass,” he protested. He had felt safe until now. The aiji had given him the gun two weeks ago. The aiji had taught him to use it, the aiji’s doing alone, in the country‑house at Taiben, and no one could have known about it, not even Banichi, least of all, surely, the assassin–if he had not dreamed the intrusion through the curtains, if he had not just shot some innocent neighbor, out for air on a stilling night.

“Nadi,” Banichi said, “go wash your hands.”

He couldn’t move, couldn’t deal with mundane things, or comprehend what had happened–or why, for the gods’ sake, why the aiji had given him such an unprecedented and disturbing present, except a general foreboding, and the guards taking stricter account of passes and rules…

Except Tabini‑aiji had said–‘Keep it close.’ And he had been afraid of his servants finding it in his room.

“Nadi.”

Banichi was angry with him. He got up, naked and shaky as he was, and went across the carpet to the bath, with a queasier and queasier stomach.

The last steps were a desperate, calculated rush for the toilet, scarcely in time to lose everything in his stomach, humiliating himself, but there was nothing he could do–it was three painful spasms before he could get a breath and flush the toilet.

He was ashamed, disgusted with himself. He ran water in the sink and washed and scrubbed and washed, until he no longer smelled the gunpowder on his hands, only the pungency of the soap and astringents. He thought Banichi must have left, or maybe called the night‑servants to clean the bath.

But as he straightened and reached for the towel, he found Banichi’s reflection in the mirror.

“Nadi Bren,” Banichi said solemnly. “We failed you tonight.”

That stung, it truly stung, coming from Banichi, who would never humiliate himself as he had just done. He dried his face and rubbed his dripping hair, then had to look at Banichi face on, Banichi’s black, yellow‑eyed visage as impassive and powerful as a graven god’s.

“You were brave,” Banichi said, again, and Bren Cameron, the descendant of spacefarers, the representative of six generations forcibly earthbound on the world of the atevi, felt it like a slap of Banichi’s massive hand.

“I didn’t get him. Somebody’s loose out there, with a gun or–”

“ We didn’t get him, nadi. It’s not your business, to ‘get him.’ Have you been approached by anyone unusual? Have you seen anything out of order before tonight?”

“No.”

“Where did you get the gun, nadi‑ji?”

Did Banichi think he was lying? “Tabini gave it…”

“From what place did you get the gun? Was this person moving very slowly?”

He saw what Banichi was asking. He wrapped the towel about his shoulders, cold, with the storm wind blowing into the room. He heard the boom of thunder above the city. “From under the mattress. Tabini said keep it close. And I don’t know how fast he was moving, the assassin, I mean. I just saw the shadow and slid off the bed and grabbed the gun.”

Banichi’s brow lifted ever so slightly. “Too much television,” Banichi said with a straight face, and took him by the shoulder. “Go back to bed, nadi.”

“Banichi, what’s happening? Why did Tabini give me a gun? Why did he tell me–?”

The grip tightened. “Go to bed, nadi. No one will disturb you after this. You saw a shadow. You called me. I fired two shots.”

“I could have hit the kitchen!”

“Most probably one shot did. Kindly remember bullets travel, nadi‑ji. Was it not you who taught us ? Here.”

To his stunned surprise, Banichi drew his own gun from the holster and handed it to him.

“Put that under your mattress,” Banichi said, and left him–walked on out of the bedroom and into the hall, pulling the door to behind him.

He heard the lock click as he stood there stark naked, with Banichi’s gun in his hand and wet hair trailing about his shoulders and dripping on the floor.

He went and shoved the gun under the mattress where he had hidden the other one, and, hoping Jago would choose another way in, shut the lattice doors and the glass, stopping the cold wind and the spatter of rain onto the curtains and the carpet.

Thunder rumbled. He was chilled through. He made a desultory attempt to straighten the bedclothes, then dragged a heavy robe out of the armoire to wrap about himself before he turned off the room lights and struggled, wrapped in the bulky robe, under the tangled sheets. He drew himself into a ball, spasmed with shivers.

Why me? he asked himself over and over, and asked himself whether he could conceivably have posed so extreme a problem to anyone that that individual would risk his life to be rid of him. He couldn’t believe he had put himself in a position like that and never once caught a clue of such a complete professional failure.

Perhaps the assassin had thought him the most defenseless dweller in the garden apartments, and his open door had seemed the most convenient way to some other person, perhaps to the inner hallways and Tabini‑aiji himself.

But there were so many guards. That was an insane plan, and assassins were, if hired, not mad and not prone to take such risks.

An assassin might simply have mistaken the room. Someone of importance might be lodged in the guest quarters in the upper terrace of the garden. He hadn’t heard that that was the case, but otherwise the garden court held just the guards, and the secretaries and the chief cook and the master of accounts–and himself–none of whom were controversial in the least.

But Banichi had left him his gun in place of the aiji’s, which he had fired. He understood, clearer‑witted now, why Banichi had taken it with him, and why Banichi had had him wash his hands, in case the chief of general security might not believe the account Banichi would give, and in case the chief of security wanted to question the paidhi and have him through police lab procedures.

He most sincerely hoped to be spared that. And the chief of security had no cause against him that he knew of–had no motive to investigate him , when he was the victim of the crime, and had no reason that he knew of to challenge Banichi’s account, Banichi being in some ways higher than the chief of security himself.

But then… who would want to break into his room? His reasoning looped constantly back to that, and to the chilling fact that Banichi had left him another gun. That was dangerous to do. Someone could decide to question him. Someone could search his room and find the gun, which they could surely then trace to Banichi, with all manner of public uproar. Was it prudent for Banichi to have done that? Was Banichi somehow sacrificing himself, in a way he didn’t want, and for something he might have caused?

It even occurred to him to question Banichi’s integrity–but Banichi and his younger partner Jago were his favorites among Tabini’s personal guards, the ones that took special care of him, while they stood every day next to Tabini, capable of any mischief, if they intended any, to Tabini himself–let alone to a far more replaceable human.

Gods, no, suspecting them was stupid. Banichi wouldn’t see him harmed. Banichi would directly lie for him. So would Jago, for Tabini’s sake–he was the paidhi, the Interpreter, and the aiji needed him, and that was reason enough for either of them. Tabini‑aiji would take it very seriously, what had happened, Tabini would immediately start inquiries, make all kinds of disturbance–

And, dammit, he didn’t want the whole citadel set on its ear over this. He didn’t want notoriety, or to be the center of an atevi feud. Publicity harmed his position among atevi. It completely destroyed his effectiveness, the moment politics crept into his personal influence, and politics would creep into the matter–politics would leap into it, the minute it hit the television news. Everybody would have an opinion, everybody would have a theory, and it could only be destructive to his work.

He huddled under chill covers, trying to get his wits about him, but his empty stomach distracted him and the smell of gunpowder made him queasy. If he called for something to settle his nerves, the night‑staff would bring him whatever he asked, or rouse his own servants at his request, but poor Moni and Taigi had probably been roused out of bed to bewildering questions–Did you shoot at the paidhi? Did you leave his door unlatched?

Security was probably going down the list of employees, calling in the whole night‑staff and everyone he dealt with–as if anyone in this whole wing could be sleeping now. The shots had probably echoed clear downhill and into the city, the phone lines were probably jammed, the rail station would be under tight restrictions, clear into tomorrow’s morning commuter traffic… no flattery to him: he’d seen what resulted when someone set off alarms inside Tabini’s security.

He wanted hot tea and crackers. But he could only make security’s job more difficult by asking for personal errands to be run up and down through halls they were trying to search.

Meanwhile the rain spatted against the glass. And it was less and less likely that they would catch the assassin at all.

Moni and Taigi arrived in the morning with his breakfast cart–and the advisement from staff central that Tabini‑aiji wanted him in early audience.

Small surprise, that was. In anticipation of a call, he had showered and shaved and dressed himself unaided before dawn, as far as his accustomed soft trousers and shirt, at least, and braided his hair back himself. He had had the television on before they arrived, listening to the morning news: he feared the case might be notorious by now, but to his perplexity he heard not so much as a passing mention of any incident, only a report on the storm last night, which had generated hail in Shigi township, and damaged roof tiles in Wingin before it had gone roaring over the open plains.

He was strangely disappointed, even insulted, by the silence. One had assassins invading one’s room and, on one level, despite his earnest desire for obscurity to the outside world, he did hope to hear confirmed that there had been an intruder in the aiji’s estates, the filtered sort of news they might have released–or, better yet, that the intruder was securely in the aiji’s hands, undergoing questioning.

Nothing of the sort–at least by the television news; and Moni and Taigi laid out breakfast with not a question nor a comment about what had happened in the garden court last night, or why there were towels all over the bathroom floor. They simply delivered the message they had had from the staff central office, absorbed every disarrangement of the premises without seeming to notice, and offered not a hint of anything wrong, or any taste of rumors that might be running the halls.

The lord second heir of Talidi province had assassinated a remote relative in the water garden last spring in an argument over an antique firearm, and the halls of the complex had buzzed with it for days.

Not this morning. Good morning, nand’ paidhi, how are you feeling, nand’ paidhi? More berries? Tea?

Then, finally, with a downcast glance, from Moni, who seldom had much to say, “We’re very glad you’re all right, nand’ paidhi.”

He swallowed his bite of fruit. Gratified.

Appeased. “Did you hear the commotion last night?”

“The guard waked us,” Taigi said. “That was the first we knew of anything wrong.”

“You didn’t hear anything?”

“No, nand’ paidhi.”

With the lightning and the thunder and the rain coming down, he supposed that the sharp report of the gunshot could have echoed strangely, with the wind swirling about the hill, and with the gun being set off inside the room, rather than outside. The figure in the doorway last night had completely assumed the character of dream to him, a nightmare occurrence in which details both changed and diminished. His servants’ utter silence surrounding the incident had unnerved him, even cast his memory into doubt… not to mention his understanding and expectation of atevi closest to him.

He was glad to hear a reasonable explanation. So the echo of it hadn’t carried to the lower‑floor servants’ court, down on the side of the hill and next the ancient walls. Probably the thunder had covered the echoes. Perhaps there’d been a great peal of it as the storm onset and as the assassin made his try–he’d had his own ears full of the gunshot, which to him had sounded like doom, but it didn’t mean the rest of the world had been that close.

But Moni and Taigi were at least duly concerned, and, perhaps perplexed by his human behaviors, or their expectation of them, they didn’t know quite what else to say, he supposed. It was different, trying to pick up gossip when one was in the center of the trouble. All information, especially in a life‑and‑death crisis, became significant; appearing to know something meant someone official could come asking, and no one close to him reasonably wanted to let rumors loose–as he, personally, didn’t want any speculation going on about him from servants who might be expected to have information.

No more would Moni and Taigi want to hear another knock on their doors, and endure a second round of questions in the night. Classically speaking–treachery and servants were a cliche in atevi dramas. It was too ridiculous–but it didn’t mean they wouldn’t feel the onus of suspicion, or feel the fear he very well understood, of unspecified accusations they had no witnesses to refute.

“I do hope it’s the end of it,” he said to them. “I’m very sorry, nadiin. I trust there won’t be more police. I know you’re honest.”

“We greatly appreciate your confidence,” Moni said, and both of them bowed. “Please be careful.”

“Banichi and Jago are on the case.”

“That’s very good,” Taigi said, and set scrambled eggs in front of him.

So he had his breakfast and put on his best summer coat, the one with the leather collar and leather down the front edges to the knee.

“Please don’t delay in the halls,” Taigi said.

“I assure you,” he said.

“Isn’t there security?” Moni asked. “Let us call security.”

“To walk to the audience hall?” They were worried, he decided, now that the verbal dam had broken. He was further gratified. “I assure you there’s no need. It was probably some complete lunatic, probably hiding in a storage barrel somewhere. They might go after lord Murida in the water garden at high noon–not me. I assure you. With the aiji’s own guards swarming about… not highly likely.” He took his key and slipped it into his trousers. “Just be careful of the locks. The garden side, especially, for the next few days.”

“Nadi,” they said, and bowed again–anxious, he decided, as they’d truly been when they’d arrived, just not advertising their state of mind, which atevi didn’t. Which reminded him that he shouldn’t let his worry reach his face either. He went cheerfully out the door–

Straight into a black uniform and, well above eye‑level, a scowling atevi face.

“Nand’ paidhi,” the guard officer said. “I’m to escort you to the hall.”

“Hardly necessary,” he said. His heart had skipped a dozen beats. He didn’t personally know the man. But the uniform wasn’t one an assassin would dare counterfeit, not on his subsequent life, and he walked with the officer, out into the corridors of the complex, past the ordinary residential guard desk and into the main areas of the building–along the crowded colonnade, where wind gusted, fresh with rain and morning chill.

Ancient stonework took sunlight and shadow, the fortress walls of the Bu‑javid, the citadel and governmental complex, sprawled over its high hill, aloof and separate from the urban sprawl of Shejidan–and down below those walls the hotels and the hostelries would be full to overflowing. The triennial public audience, beginning this morning, brought hundreds of provincial lords and city and township and district officials into town–by subway, by train–all of them trekking the last mile on foot from the hotels that ringed the ancient Bu‑javid, crowds bearing petitions climbing the terraced stone ceremonial road, passing beneath the fortified Gate of the Promise of Justice, and trekking finally up the last broad, flower‑bordered courses to the renowned Ninefold Doors, a steady stream of tall, broad‑shouldered atevi, with their night‑black skins and glossy black braids, some in rich coats bordered in gilt and satin, some in plain, serviceable cloth, but clearly their courtly best. Professional politicians rubbed shoulder to shoulder with ordinary trade folk, lords of the Associations with anxious, unpracticed petitioners, bringing their colorfully ribboned petitions, rolled and bound, and with them, their small bouquets of flowers to lay on the foyer tables, an old custom of the season.

The hall at the end of the open colonnade smelled of recent rain and flowers, and rang with voices–atevi meeting one another, or falling into line to register with the secretaries, on whose desks, set up in the vast lower foyer, the stacks of documents and petitions were growing.

For the courtiers, a human on his way to court business through this milling chaos was an ordinary sight–a pale, smallish figure head and shoulders shorter than the crowds through which he passed, a presence conservative in his simple, unribboned braid and leather trim–the police escort was uncommon, but no one stared, except the country folk and private petitioners.

“Look!” a child cried, and pointed at him.

A mortified parent batted the offending hand down while the echoes rang, high and clear, in the vaulted ceilings. Atevi looked. And pretended not to have seen either him or his guard.

A lord of the provinces went through the halls attended by his own aides and by his own guards and the aiji’s as well, and provoked no rude stares. Bren went with his police escort, in the same pretense of invisibility, a little anxious, since the child’s shout, but confident in the visible presence of the aiji’s guards at every doorway and every turn, ordinary precaution on audience day.

In that near presence, he bade a courteous farewell to his police escort at the small Whispering Port, which, a small section of one of the great ceremonial doors, led discreetly and without official recognition into the back of the audience hall. He slipped through it and softly closed it again, so as not to disturb the advance meetings in progress.

Late, he feared. Moni and Taigi hadn’t advanced the hour of his wake‑up at all, simply shown up at their usual time, lacking other orders and perhaps fearing to do anything unusual, with a police guard standing at his door. He hoped Tabini hadn’t wanted otherwise, and started over to the reception desk to see where he fitted in the hearings.

Banichi was there. Banichi, in the metal‑studded black of the aiji’s personal guard, intercepted him with a touch on his arm.

“Nadi Bren. Did you sleep last night?”

“No,” he confessed. And hoping: “Did you catch him?”

“No, nadi. There was the storm. We were not so fortunate.”

“Does Tabini know what happened?” He cast a glance toward the dais, where Tabini‑aiji was talking to governor Brominandi, one of the invitational private hearings. “I think I’m on the agenda. Does he want to talk with me? What shall I tell him?”

“The truth, only in private. It was his gun–was it not?”

He threw Banichi a worried look. If Banichi doubted his story, he hadn’t left him with that impression last night. “I told you the truth, Banichi.”

“I’m sure you did,” Banichi said, and when he would have gone on to the reception desk, as he had purposed, to give his name to the secretary, Banichi caught his sleeve and held him back. “Nothing official.” Banichi nodded toward the dais, still holding his sleeve, and brought him to the foot of the dais instead.

Brominandi of Entaillan province was finishing his business. Brominandi, whose black hair was shot through with white, whose hands sparkled with rings both ornamental and official, would lull a stone to boredom, and the bystanding guards had as yet found no gracious way to edge the governor off.

Tabini nodded to what Brominandi was saying, nodded a second time, and finally said, “I’ll take it before council.” It sounded dreadfully like the Alujis river rights business again, two upstream provinces against three downstream which relied on its water for irrigation. For fifty years, that pot had been boiling, with suit and counter‑suit. Bren folded his hands in front of him and stood with Banichi, head ducked, making himself as inconspicuous as a human possibly could in the court.

Finally Tabini‑aiji accepted the inevitable petition (or was it counter‑petition?) from Brominandi, a weighty thing of many seals and ribbons, and passed it to his legislative aides.

At which time Bren slid a glance up to Tabini, and received one back, which was the summons to him and to Banichi, up the several steps to the side of the aiji’s chair, in the lull in which the favored early petitioners could mill about and gossip, a dull, echoing murmur in the vaulted, white and gilt hall.

Tabini said, right off, “Do you know who it was, Bren? Do you have any idea?”

“None, aiji‑ma, nothing. I shot at him. I missed. Banichi said I should say he fired the shot.”

A look went past him, to Banichi. Tabini’s yellow eyes were very pale, ghostly in certain lights–frightening, when he was angry. But he didn’t seem to be angry, or assigning blame to either of them.

Banichi said, “It removed questions.”

“No idea the nature of the intrusion.”

“A burglar would be a fool. Assignations…”

“No,” Bren said, uncomfortable in the suggestion, but Tabini knew him, knew that atevi women had a certain curiosity about him, and it was a joke at his expense.

“Not a feminine admirer.”

“No, aiji‑ma.” He certainly hoped not, recalling the blood Jago had found in the first of the rain, out on the terrace.

Tabini‑aiji reached out and touched his arm, apology for the levity. “No one has filed. It’s a serious matter. I take it seriously. Be careful with your locks.”

“The garden door is only glass,” Banichi said. “Alterations would be conspicuous.”

“A wire isn’t,” Tabini said,

Bren was dismayed. The aiji’s doors and windows might have such lethal protections. He had extreme reservations about the matter.

“I’ll see to it,” Banichi said.

“I might walk into it,” Bren said.

“You won’t,” Tabini said. And to Banichi: “See to it. This morning. One on either door. His key to disarm. Change the locks.”

“Aiji,” Bren began to say.

“I have a long list today,” Tabini said, meaning shut up and sit down, and when Tabini‑aiji took that tone about a matter, there was no quarrel with it. They left the top of the dais. Bren stopped at the fourth step, which was his ordinary post.

“You stay here,” Banichi said. “I’ll bring you the new key.”

“Banichi, is anybody after me?”

“It would seem so, wouldn’t it? I do doubt it was a lover.”

“Do you know anything I don’t?”

“Many things. Which interests you?”

“My life .”

“Watch the wire. The garden side will activate with a key, too. I’m moving your bed from in front of the door.”

“It’s summer. It’s hot.”

“We all have our inconveniences.”

“I wish someone would tell me what’s going on!”

“You shouldn’t turn down the ladies. Some take it badly.”

“You’re not serious.”

No, Banichi wasn’t. Banichi was evading the question again. Banichi damned well knew something. He stood in frustration as Banichi went cheerfully to turn his room into a death‑trap, mats in front of doors, lethal wires to complete the circuit if a foolish, sleepy human forgot and hurried to shut his own garden door in a sudden rainstorm.

He had been scared of the events last night. Now he was mad, furiously angry at the disruption of his life, his quarters, his freedom to come and go in the city–he foresaw guards, restrictions, threats… without a damned reason, except some lunatic who possibly, for whatever reason, didn’t like humans. That was the only conclusion he could come to.

He sat down on the step where the paidhi‑aiji was entitled to sit, and listened through the last pre‑audience audience with the notion that he might hear something to give him a clue, at least, whether there was some wider, more political reason to worry, but the way Banichi seemed to be holding information from him, and Tabini’s silence, when Tabini himself probably knew something he wasn’t saying, all began to add up to him to an atevi with a grudge.

No licensed assassin was going to file on a human who was an essential, treatied presence in the aiji’s household–a presence without the right to carry arms, but all the same, a court official and a personal intimate of the aiji of the Western Association. No professional in his right mind would take that on.

Which left some random fool attacking him as a symbol, perhaps, or someone mad at technology or at some equally remote grievance, who could know? Who could track such a thing?

The only comforting thought was that, if it wasn’t a licensed assassin, it was the lunatic himself or an amateur who couldn’t get a license–the sort that might mow down bystanders by mistake, true, dangerous in that regard.

But Banichi, unlike the majority of the aiji’s guards, had a license. You didn’t take him on. You didn’t take on Jago, either. The rain last night had been a piece of luck for the intruder–who had either counted on the rain wiping out his tracks on the gravel and cement of the garden walkways, or he’d been stupid, and lucky.

Now the assassin wasn’t lucky. Banichi was looking for him. And if he’d left a footprint in a flower bed or a fingerprint anywhere, that man–assuming it was a man–was in trouble.

He daren’t go to a licensed doctor, for one thing. There had been blood on the terrace. Bren personally hoped he’d made life uncomfortable for the assassin, who clearly hadn’t expected the reception he’d met. Most of all he hoped, considering Banichi’s taking on the case, that life would become uncomfortable for the assassin’s employer, if any, enough for the employer to withdraw the contract.

The doors opened. The guards and marshals let the crowd in, and the secretary accepted from the Day Marshal the towering stack of ribboned, sealed petitions and affidavits and filings.

There were some odd interfaces in the dealings of atevi and humans. One couldn’t blame the atevi for clinging to traditional procedures, clumsy as the stacks were, and there was a computer record. The secretaries in the foyer created it.

But ask the atevi to use citizen numbers or case numbers? Convince them first that their computer‑assigned personal numbers were auspicious in concert with their other numerologies. Convince them that changing those numbers caused chaos and lost records–because if things started going wrong, an ateva faulted his number and wanted it changed, immediately.

Create codes for the provinces, simply to facilitate computer sorting? Were those numbers auspicious, or was it some malevolent attempt of the aiji’s court in Shejidan to diminish their importance and their power?

Then, of course, there was the dire rumor that typing the names in still produced numbers in the computers, numbers of devious and doubtless malevolent intent on the part of the aiji, conspiring, of course, with the humans who had brought the insidious device to earth.

Not all that humans brought to earth was anathema, of course. Television was an addiction. Flight was an increasingly essential convenience, practiced as see‑and‑avoid by frighteningly determined provincials, although the aiji had laid down the law within his domains, requiring flight plans, after the famous Weinathi Bridge crash.

Thank the atevi gods Tabini‑aiji was a completely irreligious man.

The matters before the aiji had one turn of the glass apiece–a summation, by the petitioner. Most were rural matters, some involved trade, a few regarded public works projects–highways and dams and bridges, harbors and hunting and fishing rights which involved the rights of the Associations united under the aiji’s influence. Originating projects and specific details of allocation and budget involved the two houses of the legislature, the hasdrawad and the tashrid–such bills were not the aiji’s to initiate, only to approve or disapprove. But so much, so incredibly much, still needed the aiji’s personal seal and personal hearing.

For chief example, there were the feuds to register, two in number, one a wife against an ex‑husband, over illegal conversion of her property.

“It’s better to go to court,” Tabini said plainly. “You could get the money back, in installments, from his income.”

“I’d rather kill him,” the wife said, and Tabini said, “Record it,” waved his hand and went on to the next case.

That was why humans preferred their enclave on Mospheira. Mospheira was an island, it was under human administration, computers had undisputed numbers, and laws didn’t have bloodfeud as an alternative.

It did, however, mean that for all the sixty so‑called provinces and conservatively three hundred million people under the aiji’s hand, there was a single jail, which generally held less than fifty individuals awaiting trial or hearing, who could not be released on their own recognizance. There were a number of mental hospitals for those who needed them. There were four labor‑prisons, for the incorrigibly antisocial–the sort, for instance, who took the assassins’ function into their own hands, after refusal by a guild who did truly refuse unwarranted solicitation.

Sane, law‑abiding atevi simply avoided argumentative people. One tried to have polite divorces. One tried not to antagonize or embarrass one’s natural opponents. Thank God atevi generally did prefer negotiation or, as a last reasonable resort before filing feud, a physical, unarmed confrontation–equally to be avoided. Tall, strong humans still stood more than a head shorter and massed a third less than the average atevi, male or female–the other reason humans preferred their own jurisdiction.

He’d clearly annoyed somebody who hadn’t followed the rules. His mind kept going back to that. No one had filed a feud. They had to notify him, that was one of the stringent requirements of the filing, but no one had even indicated casual irritation with him–and now Tabini was putting lethal defenses into his quarters.

The shock of the incident last night was still reverberating through his thinking, readjusting everything, until he had suddenly to realize he really wasn’t entirely safe walking the halls out there. Professional assassins avoided publicity and preferred their faces not to become famous–but there were instances of the knife appearing out of the faceless crowd, the push on the stairs.

And in no few of the lords’ staffs there were licensed assassins he daily rubbed shoulders with and never thought about it–until now.

An elderly gentleman brought the forty‑sixth case, which regarded, in sum, a request for the aiji’s attendance at a regional conference on urban development. That went onto the stack, for archive.

One day, he’d told the aiji himself, and he knew his predecessors had said it, one day the archives would collapse under the weight of seats, ribbons, and paper, all ten stories of the block‑long building going down in a billow of dust. But this had to be the last petition for the session. The secretary called no more names. The reception table looked empty.

But, no, not the last one. Tabini called the secretary, who brought an uncommonly elaborate paper, burdened with the red and black ribbons of high nobility.

“A filing of Intent,” Tabini said, rising, and startling the aides and assembled witnesses, and the secretary held up the document and read: “Tabini‑aiji against persons unknown, who, without filing Intent, invaded the peace of my house and brought a threat of harm against the person of the paidhi‑aiji, Bren Cameron. If harm results henceforth to any guest or person of my household by this agency or by any other agency intending harm to the paidhi‑aiji, I personally declare Intent to file feud, because of the offense to the safety of my roof, with Banichi of Dajoshu township of Talidi province as my registered and licensed agent. I publish it and cause it to be published, and place it in public records with its seals and its signatures and sigils.”

Bren was thoroughly shocked. He felt altogether conspicuous in the turning heads and the murmur of comment and question that followed as Tabini‑aiji left the dais and walked past him, with:

“Be prudent, nadi Bren.”

“Aiji‑ma,” he murmured, and bowed a profound bow, to cover his confusion. The audience was over. Jago was quick to fall in with Tabini, along with a detachment of the household and personal guard, as Tabini cut a swath through the crowd on his way to the side doors and the inner halls.

Bren started away on his own, dreading the course through the halls, wondering if the attempted assassin or his employer was in the room and whether the police escort would still be waiting out there.

But Banichi turned up in his path, and fell in with him, escorting him through the Whispering Port and into the public halls.

“Tabini declared Intent,” he said to Banichi, wondering if Banichi had known in advance what Tabini had drafted.

“I’m not surprised,” Banichi said.

“I ought to take the next plane to Mospheira.”

“Highly foolish.”

“We have different laws. And on Mospheira an ateva stands out. Find me the assassin in this crowd.”

“You don’t even know it was one of us.”

“Then it was the broadest damn human I ever saw.–Forgive me.” One didn’t swear, if one was the paidhi‑aiji, not, at least, in the public hall. “It wasn’t a human. I know that.”

“You know who came to your room. You don’t know, however, who might have hired him. There is some smuggling on Mospheira, as the paidhi is aware. Connections we don’t know exist are a very dangerous possibility.”

The language had common pronouns that didn’t specify gender. Him or her, that meant. And politicians and the aiji’s staff used that pronoun habitually.

“I know where I’m safer.”

“Tabini needs you here.”

“For what ?” That the aiji was undertaking anything but routine business was news to him. He hadn’t heard. Banichi was telling him something no one else had.

And a handful of weeks ago Tabini had found unprecedented whimsy in arming him and giving him two hours of personal instruction at his personal retreat. They had joked, and shot melons on poles, and had supper together, and Tabini had had all the time he could possibly want to warn him if something was coming up besides the routine councils and committee meetings that involved the paidhi.

They turned the corner. Banichi, he did not fail to note, hadn’t noticed his question. They walked out onto the colonnade, with the walls of the ancient Bu‑javid pale and regular beyond them, the traffic flow on the steps reversed, now, downward bound. Atevi who had filed for hearing had their numbers, and the aiji would receive them in their established order.

But when they walked into the untrafficked hall that led toward the garden apartments, Banichi gave him two keys. “These are the only valid ones,” Banichi said. “Kindly don’t mix them up with your old ones. The old ones work. They just don’t turn off the wires.”

He gave Banichi a disturbed stare–which, also, Banichi didn’t seem to notice. “Can’t you just shock the bastard? Scare him? He’s not a professional. There’s been no notice…”

“I’m within my license,” Banichi said. “The Intent is filed. Didn’t you say so? The intruder would be very foolish to try again.”

A queasy feeling was in his stomach. “Banichi, damn it… ”

“I’ve advised the servants. Honest and wise servants, capable of serving in this house, will request admission henceforth. Your apartment is no different than mine, now. Or Jago’s. I change my own sheets.”

As well as he knew Jago and Banichi, he had had no idea of such hazards in their quarters. It made sense in their case or in Tabini’s. It didn’t, in his.

“I trust,” Banichi said, “you’ve no duplicate keys circulating. No ladies. No–hem–other connections. You’ve not been gambling, have you?”

“No!” Banichi knew him, too, knew he had female connections on Mospheira, one and two not averse to what Banichi would call a one‑candle night. The paidhi‑aiji hadn’t time for a social life, otherwise. Or for long romantic maneuverings or hurt feelings, lingering hellos or good‑byes–most of all, not for the peddling of influence or attempts to push this or that point on him. His friends didn’t ask questions. Or want more than a bouquet of flowers, a phone call, and a night at the theater.

“Just mind, if you’ve given any keys away.”

“I’m not such a fool.”

“Fools of that kind abound in the Bu‑javid. I’ve spoken severely to the aiji.”

Give atevi a piece of tech and sometimes they put it together in ways humans hadn’t, in their own history–inventors, out of their own social framework, connected ideas in ways you didn’t expect, and never intended, either in social consequence, or in technical ramifications. The wire was one. Figure that atevi had a propensity for inventions regarding personal protection, figure that atevi law didn’t forbid lethal devices, and ask how far they’d taken other items and to what uses they didn’t advertise.

The paidhi tried to keep ahead of it. The paidhi tried to keep abreast of every technology and every piece of vocabulary in the known universe, but bits and tags perpetually got away and it was accelerating–the escape of knowledge, the recombination of items into things utterly out of human control.

Most of all, atevi weren’t incapable of making technological discoveries completely on their own… and had no trouble keeping them prudently under wraps. They were not a communicative people.

They reached the door. He used the key Banichi had given him. The door opened. Neither the mat nor the wire was in evidence.

“Ankle high and black,” Banichi said. “But it’s down and disarmed. You did use the right key.”

“ Your key.” He didn’t favor Banichi’s jokes. “I don’t see the mat.”

“Under the carpet. Don’t walk on it barefoot. You’d bleed. The wire is an easy step in. You can walk on it while it’s off. Just don’t do that barefoot, either.”

He could scarcely see it. He walked across the mat. Banichi stayed the other side of it.

“It cuts its own way through insulation,” Banichi said.

“And through boot leather, paidhi‑ji, if it’s live. Don’t touch it, even when it’s dead. Lock the door and don’t wander the halls.”

“I have an energy council meeting this afternoon.”

“You’ll want to change coats, nadi. Wait here for Jago. She’ll escort you.”

“What is this? I’m to have an escort everywhere I go? I’m to be leapt upon by the minister of Works? Assaulted by the head of Water Management?”

“Prudence, prudence, nadi Bren. Jago’s witty company. She’s fascinated by your brown hair.”

He was outraged. “You’re enjoying this. It’s not funny, Banichi.”

“Forgive me.” Banichi was unfailingly solemn. “But humor her. Escort is so damned boring.”

II

« ^ »

I t was the old argument, highway transport versus rail, bringing intense lobbying pressure from the highway transport operators, who wanted road expansion into the hill towns, versus the rail industry, who wanted the highspeed research money and the eventual extensions into the highlands. Versus commercial air freight, and versus the general taxpayers who didn’t want their taxes raised. The provincial governor wanted a highway instead of a rail spur, and advanced arguments, putting considerable influence to bear on the minister of Works.

Computer at his elbow, the screen long since gone to rest, Bren listened through the argument he’d heard in various guises–this was a repainted, replastered version–and on a notepad on the table in front of him, sketched interlocked circles that might be psychologically significant.

Far more interesting a pastime than listening to the minister’s delivery. Jago was outside, probably enjoying a soft drink, while the paidhi‑aiji was running out of ice water.

The Minister of Works had a numbing, sing‑song rhythm in his voice. But the paidhi‑aiji was obliged to listen, in case of action on the proposal. The paidhi‑aiji had no vote, of course, if the highway came to a vote today at all, which didn’t look likely. He had no right even to speak uninvited, unless he decided to impose his one real power, his outright veto over a council recommendation to the upper house, the tashrid–a veto which was good until the tashrid met to consider it. He had used his veto twice in the research and development council, never with this minister of Works, although his predecessor had done it a record eighteen times on the never‑completed Trans‑montane Highway, which was now, since the rail link, a moot point.

One hoped.

There was the whole of human history in the library on Mospheira, all the records of their predecessors, or all that they could still access–records which suggested, with the wisdom of hindsight, that consuming the planet’s petrochemicals in a vast orgy of private transport wasn’t the best long‑range choice for the environment or the quality of life. The paidhi’s advice might go counter to local ambitions. In the case of the highway system, the advice had gone counter, indeed it had. But atevi had made enormous advances, and the air above the Bergid range still sparkled. The paidhi took a certain pride in that–in the name of nearly two hundred years of paidhiin before him.

The atevi hadn’t quite mastered steam when humans had arrived on their planet uninvited and unwilling.

Atevi had seen the tech, atevi had been, like humans, eager for profit and progress–but unlike humans, they tended to see profit much more in terms of power accruing to their interlocked relationships. It was some thing about their hardwiring, human theorists said; since the inclination seemed to transcend cultural lines; a scholarly speculation useful for the theorists sitting safe on Mospheira, not for the paidhi‑aiji, who had to make practical sense to the aiji of the Ragi atevi in the city of Shejidan, in Mospheira’s nearest neighboring Association and long‑term ally–

Without which, there might be a second ugly test of human technology versus atevi haroniin , a concept for which there was no human word or even complete translation. Say that atevi patience had its limits, that assassination was essential to the way atevi kept their social balance, and haroniin meant something like ‘accumulated stresses on the system, justifying adjustment.’ Like all the other approximations: aiji wasn’t quite ‘duke’ it certainly wasn’t ‘king,’ and the atevi concept of countries, borders and boundaries of authority had things in common with their concept of flight plans.

No, it wasn’t a good idea to develop highways and independent transport, decentralizing what was an effective tax‑supported system of public works, which supported the various aijiin throughout the continent in their offices, which in turn supported Tabini‑aiji and the system at Shejidan.

No, it wasn’t a good idea to encourage systems in which entrepreneurs might start making a lot of money, spreading other entrepreneurial settlement along roadways and forming human‑style corporations.

Not in a system where assassination was an ordinary and legal social adjustment.

Damn, it was disturbing, that attempt on his apartment, more so the more time distanced him from the physical fear. In the convolutions of thinking one necessarily was drawn into, being the paidhi–studying and competing for years to be the paidhi, and becoming, in sum, fluent in a language in which human words and human thought didn’t neatly translate… bits and pieces of connections had started bobbing to the surface of the very dark waters of atevi mentality as he understood it. Bits and pieces had been doing that since last night, just random bits of worrisome thought drifting up out of that interface between atevi ideas and human ones.

Worrisome thoughts that said that attacking the paidhi‑aiji, the supposedly inoffensive, neutral and discreetly silent paidhi‑aiji… was, if not a product of lunacy, a premeditated attack on some sort of system, meaning any point of what was .

He tried to make himself the most apolitical, quiet presence in Tabini’s court. He pursued no contact with the political process except sitting silently in court or in the corner of some technological or sociological impact council–and occasionally, very occasionally presenting a paper. Having public attention called to him as Tabini had just done… was contrary to all the established policy of his office.

He wished Tabini hadn’t made his filing of Intent–but clearly Tabini had had to do something severe about the invasion of the Bu‑javid, most particularly the employer of the assassin’s failure to file feud before doing it.

No matter that assassination was legal and accepted–you didn’t, in atevi terms, proceed without filing, you didn’t proceed without license, and you didn’t order wholesale bloodbaths. You removed the minimal individual that would solve a problem. Biichi‑gi , the atevi called it. Humans translated it… ‘finesse.’

Finesse was certainly what the attempt lacked–give or take the would‑be assassin hadn’t expected the paidhi to have a gun that humans weren’t supposed to have, this side of the Mospheira straits.

A gun that Tabini had given him very recently.

And Banichi and Jago insisted they couldn’t find a clue.

Damned disturbing.

Attack on some system? The paidhi‑aiji might find himself identified as belonging to any number of systems… like being human, like being the paidhi‑aiji at all, like advising the aiji that the rail system was, for long‑range ecological considerations, better than highway transport… but who ever absolutely knew the reason or the offense, but the party who’d decided to ‘finesse’ a matter?

The paidhi‑aiji hadn’t historically been a target. Personally, his whole tenure had been the collection of words, the maintenance of the dictionary, the observation and reporting of social change. The advice he gave Tabini was far from solely his idea: everything he did and said came from hundreds of experts and advisers on Mospheira, telling him in detail what to say, what to offer, what to admit to–so finessing him out of the picture might send a certain message of displeasure with humans, but it would hardly hasten highways into existence.

Tabini had felt something in the wind, and armed him.

And he hadn’t reported that fact to Mospheira, second point to consider: Tabini had asked him not to tell anyone about the gun, he had always respected certain few private exchanges between himself and the aiji, and he had extended that discretion to keeping it out of his official reports. He’d worried about it, but Tabini’s confidences had flattered him, personally and professionally–there at the hunting lodge, in Taiben, where all kinds of court rules were suspended and everyone was on holiday. Marksmanship was an atevi sport, an atevi passion–and Tabini, a champion marksman with a pistol, had, apparently on whim, violated a specific Treaty provision to provide the paidhi, as had seemed then, a rare week of personal closeness with him, a rare gesture of–if not friendship, at least as close as atevi came, an abrogation of all the formalities that surrounded and constrained him and Tabini alike.

It had immensely increased his status in the eyes of certain staff. Tabini had seemed pleased that he took to the lessons, and giving him the gun as a present had seemed a moment of extravagant rebellion. Tabini had insisted he ‘keep it close,’ while his mind racketed wildly between the absolute, unprecedented, and possibly policy changing warmth of Tabini’s gesture toward a human, and an immediate guilty panic considering his official position and his obligation to report to his own superiors.

He’d immediately worried what he was going to do with it on the plane home, and how or if he was going to dispose of it–or report it, when it might be a test Tabini posed him, to see if he had a personal dimension, or personal discretion, in the rules his superiors imposed on him.

And then, after he was safely on the plane home, the gun and the ammunition a terrifying secret in the personal bag at his feet, he had sat watching the landscape pass and adding up how tight security had gotten around Tabini in the last few weeks.

Then he’d gotten scared. Then he’d known he had gotten himself into something he didn’t know how to get out of–that he ought to report, and didn’t, because nobody on Mospheira could read the situation in Tabini’s court the way he could on a realtime basis. He knew that some danger might be in the offing, but his assessment of the situation might not have critical bits of data, and he didn’t want orders from his superiors until he could figure out what the undercurrents were in the capital.

That was why he had put the gun under the mattress, which his servants didn’t ordinarily disturb, rather than hiding it in the drawers, which they sometimes did rearrange.

That was why, when a shadow came through his bedroom door, he hadn’t wasted a second going after it and not a second more in firing. He’d lived in the Bu‑javid long enough to know at a very basic level that atevi didn’t walk through people’s doors uninvited, not in a society where everyone was armed and assassination was legal. The assassin had surely been confident the paidhi wouldn’t have a weapon–and gotten the surprise of his life.

If it hadn’t been a trial designed to catch him with the gun. Which didn’t say why–

He was woolgathering. They were proposing a vote next meeting. He had lost the minister’s last remarks. If the paidhi let something slip unchallenged through the council, he could end up losing a point two hundred years of his predecessors had battled to hold on to. There were points past which even Tabini couldn’t undo a council recommendation–points past which Tabini wouldn’t undertake a fight that might not be in Tabini’s interest, once he’d set Tabini in a convenient position to deny his advice, Tabini being, understandably, on the atevi side of any questionable call.

“I’ll want a transcript,” he said, as the meeting broke up, and gathered a roomful of shocked stares.

Which probably alarmed everyone unnecessarily–they might take his glum mood for anger and the postponement and request for a transcript as a forewarning that the paidhi was disposed to veto.

And against what interest? He saw the frown gather on the minister’s face, wondering if the paidhi was taking a position they didn’t understand–and confusion wasn’t a good thing to generate in an ateva. Action bred action. He had enough troubles without scaring anyone needlessly.

The Minister of Works could even conclude he blamed someone in his office for an attack that was surely reported coast to coast of the continent by now, in which case the minister and his interests might think they should protect themselves, or secure themselves allies they believed he would fear.

Say, I wasn’t listening during the speech? Insult the gentle and long‑winded Minister of Works directly in the sorest point of his vanity? Insult the entire council, as if their business bored him?

Damn, damn, a little disturbance in atevi affairs led to so much consequence. Moving at all was so cursed delicate. And they didn’t understand people who let every passing emotion show on their faces. He took his computer. He walked out into the hall, remembering to bow and be polite to the atevi he might have distressed.

Jago was at his elbow instantly, prim Jago, not so tall as the atevi around her, but purposeful, deliberate, dangerous in a degree that had to make everyone around him reassess the position he held and the resources he had.

Resources the aiji had, more to the point, if, a moment ago, they had entertained any uneasiness about him.

There was another turn of atevi thinking–that said that if a person had power like that, and hadn’t used it, he wouldn’t do so as long as the status quo maintained itself intact.

“Any findings?” he asked Jago, when they had a space of the hall to themselves.

“We’re watching,” Jago said. “That’s all. The trail’s cold.”

“Mospheira would be safer for me.”

“But Tabini needs you.”

“Banichi said so. For what? I’ve no advisements to give him. I’ve been handed no inquiry that I’ve heard of, unless something turns up in the energy transcript. I’m sorry. My mind hasn’t been on business.”

“Get some sleep tonight.”

With death‑traps at both doors. He had nothing to say to that suggestion. He took the turn toward the post office to pick up his mail, hoping for something pleasant. A letter from home. Magazines, pictures to look at that had human faces, articles that depended on human language and human logic, for a few hours after supper to let go of thoughts that were going to haunt his sleep a second night. It was one of those days he wanted to tell Barb to get on the plane, fly in here, just twenty‑four human hours…

With lethal wires on his bedroom doors?

He took out his mail‑slot key, he reached for the door, and Jago caught his arm. “The attendant can get it.”

From behind the wall, she meant–because someone was trying to kill him, and Jago didn’t want him reaching into the box after the mail.

“That’s extreme,” he said.

“So might your enemies be.”

“I thought the word was finesse. Blowing up a mail slot?”

“Or inserting a needle in a piece of mail.” She took his key and pocketed it. “The paidhi’s mail, nadi‑ji.”

The attendant went. And came back.

“Nothing,” the attendant said.

“There’s always something,” Bren said. “Forgive my persistence, nadi, but my mailbox is never empty. It’s never in my tenure here been empty. Please be sure.”

“I couldn’t mistake you, nand’ paidhi.” The attendant spread his hands. “I’ve never seen the box empty either. Perhaps there’s holiday.”

“Not on any recent date.”

“Perhaps someone picked it up for you.”

“Not by my authorization.”

“I’m sorry, nand’ paidhi. There’s just nothing there.”

“Thank you.” He bowed, there being nothing else to say, and nowhere else to look. “Thank you for your trouble.” And quietly to Jago, in perplexity and distress: “Someone’s been at my mail.”

“Banichi probably picked it up.”

“It’s very kind of him to take the trouble, Jago, but I can pick up my mail.”

“Perhaps he thought to save you bother.”

He sighed and shook his head, and walked away, Jago right with him, from the first step down the hall. “His office, do you think?”

“I don’t think he’s there. He said something about a meeting.”

“He’s taken my mail to a meeting.”

“Possibly, nadi Bren.”

Maybe Banichi would bring it to the room. Then he could read himself to sleep, or write letters, before he forgot human language. Failing that, maybe there’d be a machimi play on television. A little revenge, a little humor, light entertainment.

They took the back halls to reach the main lower corridor, walked to his room. He used his key–opened the door and saw his bed relocated to the other end of the room. The television was sitting where his bed had been. Everything felt wrong‑handed.

He avoided the downed wire, dead though it was supposed to be. Jago stepped over it too, and went into his bathroom without a please or may I? and went all around the room with a bug‑finder.

He picked up the remote and turned on the television. Changed channels. The news channel was off the air. All the general channels were off the air. The weather channel worked. One entertainment channel did.

“Half the channels are off.”

Jago looked at him, bent over, examining the box that held one end of the wire. “The storm last night, perhaps.”

“They were working this morning.”

“I don’t know, nadi Bren. Maybe they’re doing repairs.”

He flung the remote down on the bed. “We have a saying. One of those days.”

“What, one of those days?”

“When nothing works.”

“A day now or a day to come?” Jago was rightside up now. Atevi verbs had necessary time‑distinctions. Banichi spoke a little Mosphei’. Jago was a little more language‑bound.

“Nadi Jago. What are you looking for?”

“The entry counter.”

“It counts entries.”

“In a very special way, nadi Bren. If it should be a professional, one can’t suppose there aren’t countermeasures.”

“It won’t be any professional. They’re required to file. Aren’t they?”

“People are required to behave well. Do they always? We have to assume the extreme.”

One could expect the aiji’s assassins to be thorough, and to take precautions no one else would take–simply because they knew the utmost possibilities of their trade. He should be glad, he told himself, that he had them looking out for him.

God, he hoped nobody broke in tonight. He didn’t want to wake up and find some body burning on his carpet.

He didn’t want to find himself shot or knifed in his bed, either. An ateva who’d made one attempt undetected might lose his nerve and desist. If he was a professional, his employer, losing his nerve, might recall him.

Might.

You didn’t count on it. You didn’t ever quite count on it–you could just get a little easier as the days passed and hope the bastard wasn’t just awaiting a better window of opportunity.

“A professional would have made it good,” he said to Jago.

“We don’t lose many that we track,” Jago said.

“It was raining.”

“All the same,” Jago said.

He wished she hadn’t said that.

Banichi came back at supper, arrived with two new servants, and a cart with three suppers. Algini and Tano, Banichi called the pair, in introduction. Algini and Tano bowed with that degree of coolness that said they were high hall servants, thank you, and accustomed to fancier apartments.

“I trusted Taigi and Moni,” Bren muttered, after the servants had left the cart.

“Algini and Tano have clearances,” Banichi said.

“Clearances.–Did you get my mail? Someone got my mail.”

“I left it at the office. Forgive me.”

He could ask Banichi to go back after it. He could insist that Banichi go back after it. But Banichi’s supper would be cold–Banichi having invited himself and Jago to supper in his apartment.

He sighed and fetched an extra chair. Jago brought another from the side of the room. Banichi set up the leaves of the serving table and set out the dishes, mostly cooked fruit, heavily spiced, game from the reserve at Nanjiran. Atevi didn’t keep animals for slaughter, not the Ragi atevi, at any rate. Mospheira traded with the tropics, with the Nisebi, down south, for processed meat, preserved meat, which didn’t have to be sliced thin enough to admit daylight–a commerce which Tabini‑aiji called disgraceful, and which Bren had reluctantly promised to try to discourage, the paidhi being obliged to exert bidirectional influence, although without any veto power over human habits.

So even on Mospheira it wasn’t politic for the paidhi to eat anything but game, and that in appropriate season. To preserve meat was commercial, and commercialism regarding an animal life taken was not kabiu , not ‘in the spirit of good example.’ The aiji’s household had to be kabiu. Very kabiu .

And observing this point of refinement was, Tabini had pointed out to him with particular satisfaction in turning the tables, ecologically sound harvesting practice. Which the paidhi must, of course, support with the same enthusiasm when it came from atevi.

Down in the city market you could get a choice of meats. Frozen, canned, and air‑dried.

“Aren’t you hungry, nadi?”

“Not my favorite season.” He was graceless this evening. And unhappy. “Nobody knows anything. Nobody tells me anything. I appreciate the aiji’s concern. And yours. But is there some particular reason I can’t fly home for a day or two?”

‘The aiji–“

“Needs me. But no one knows why. You wouldn’t mislead me, would you, Jago?”

“It’s my profession, nadi Bren.”

“To lie to me.”

There was an awkward silence at the table. He’d intended his bluntness as bitter humor. It had come out at the wrong moment, into the wrong mood, into their honest and probably frustrated efforts to find answers. Of all humans, he was educated not to make mistakes with them.

“Forgive me,” he said,

“His culture will lie,” Banichi said plainly to Jago. “But admitting one has done so insults the victim.”

Jago took on a puzzled look.

“Forgive me,” Bren said again. “It was a joke, nadi Jago.”

Jago still looked puzzled, and frowned, but not angrily. “We take this threat very seriously.”

“I didn’t. I’m beginning to.” He thought: Where’s my mail, Banichi? But he had a mouthful of soup instead. Making too much haste with atevi was not, not productive. “I’m grateful. I’m sure you had other plans this evening.”

“No,” said Jago.

“Still,” he said, wondering if they’d fixed the television outage yet, and what he was going to say to Banichi and Jago for small talk for the rest of the evening. Maybe there was a play on the entertainment channel. It seemed they might stay the night.

And in whose bed would they sleep, he asked himself.–Or would they sleep? They didn’t show the effects of last night at all.

“Do you play cards?”

“Cards?” Jago asked, and Banichi shoved his chair back and said he should teach her.

“What are cards?” Jago asked, when what Bren wanted to ask Banichi involved his mail. But Banichi probably had far more important things on his mind–like checking with security, and being sure surveillance items were working.

“It’s a numerical game,” Bren said, wishing Banichi wasn’t deserting him to Jago–he hoped not for the night. When are you leaving? wasn’t a politic question. He was still trying to figure how to ask it of Banichi, or what he should say if Banichi said Jago was staying… when Banichi went out the door, with, “Mind the wire, nadi Bren.”

“Gin,” Jago said.

Bren sighed, laid his cards down, glad there wasn’t money involved.

“Forgive me,” Jago said. “You said I should say that. Unseemly gloating was far from–”

“No, no, no. It’s entirely the custom.”

“One isn’t sure,” Jago said. “Am I to be sure?”

He had embarrassed Jago. He had been mishidi –awkward. He held out his palm, the gesture of conciliation. “You’re to be sure.” God, one couldn’t walk without tripping over sensitivities. “It’s actually courteous to tell me you’ve won.”

“You don’t count the cards?”

Atevi memory was, especially regarding numbers, hard to shake, no matter that Jago was not the fanatic number‑adder you found in the surrounding city. And no, he hadn’t adequately counted the cards. Never play numbers with an atevi.

“I would perhaps have done better, nadi Jago, if I weren’t distracted by the situation. I’m afraid it’s a little more personal to me.”

“I assure you we’ve staked our personal reputations on your safety. We’d never be less than committed to our effort.”

He had the impulse to rest his head on his hand and resign the whole conversation. Jago would take that as evidence of offense, too.

“I wouldn’t expect otherwise, nadi Jago, and it’s not your capacity I doubt, not in the least. I could only wish my own faculties were operating at their fullest, or I should not have embarrassed myself just now, by seeming to doubt you.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“I’ll be far brighter when I’ve slept. Please regard my mistakes as confusion.”

Jago’s flat black face and vivid yellow eyes held more intense expression than they were wont–not offense, he thought, but curiosity.

“I confess myself uneasy,” she said, brow furrowed. “You declare absolutely you aren’t offended.”

“No.” One rarely touched atevi. But her manner invited it. He patted her hand where it rested on the table. “I understand you.” It seemed not quite to carry the point, and, looking her in the eyes, he flung his honest thoughts after it. “I wish you understood me on this. It’s a human thought.”

“Are you able to explain?”

She wasn’t asking Bren Cameron: she didn’t know Bren Cameron. She was asking the paidhi, the interpreter to her people. That was all she could do, Bren thought, regarding the individual she was assigned by the aiji to protect, since the incident last night–an individual who didn’t seem in her eyes to take the threat seriously enough, or to take her seriously… and how was she to know anything about him? How was she to guess, with the paidhi giving her erratic clues? Will you explain? she asked, when he wished aloud that she understood him.

“If it were easy,” he said, trying with all his wits to make sense of it to her–or to divert her thinking away from it, “there wouldn’t need to be a paidhi at all.–But I wouldn’t be human, then, and you wouldn’t be atevi, and nobody would need me anyway, would they?”

It didn’t explain anything at all. He only tried to make the confusion less important than it was. Jago could surely read that much. She worried about it and thought about it. He could see it in her eyes.

“Where’s Banichi gone?” he asked, feeling things between them slipping further and further from his control. “Is he planning to come back here tonight?”

“I don’t know,” she said, still frowning. Then he decided, in the convolutions of his exhausted and increasingly disjointed thoughts, that even that might have sounded as if he wanted Banichi instead of her.

Which he did. But not for any reason of her incompetency. Dealing with a shopkeeper with a distrust of computers was one thing. He was not faring well at all in dealing with Jago, he could not put out of his mind Banichi’s advisement that she liked his hair, and he decided on distraction.

“I want my mail.”

“I can call him and ask him to bring it.”

He had forgotten about the pocket‑com. “Please do that,” he said, and Jago tried.

And tried. “I can’t reach him,” Jago said.

“Is he all right?” The matter of the mail diminished in importance, but not, he feared, in significance. Too much had gone on that wasn’t ordinary.

“I’m sure he is.” Jago gathered up the cards. “Do you want to play again?”

“What if someone broke in here and you needed help? Where do you suppose he is?”

Jago’s broad nostrils flared, “I have resources, nadi Bren.”

He couldn’t keep from offending her.

“Or what if he was in trouble? What if they ambushed him in the halls? We might not know.”

“You’re very full of worries tonight.”

He was. He was drowning in what was atevi; and that failure to understand, in a sudden moment of panic, led him to doubt his own fitness to be where he was. It made him wonder whether the lack of perception he had shown with Jago had been far more general, all along–if it had not, with some person, led to the threat he was under.

Or, on the other hand, whether he was letting himself be spooked by his guards’ zealousness because of some threat of a threat that would never, ever rematerialize.

“Worries about what, paidhi?”

He blinked, and looked by accident up into Jago’s yellow, unflinching gaze. Don’t you know? he thought. Is it a challenge, that question? Is it distrust of me? Why these questions?

But you couldn’t quite say ‘trust’ in Jago’s language, either, not in the terms a human understood. Every house, every province, belonged to a dozen associations, that made webs of association all through the country, whose border provinces made associations across the putative borders into the neighbor associations, an endless fuzzy interlink of boundaries that weren’t boundaries, both geographical and interest‑defined–‘trust,’ would you say? Say man’chi – ‘central association,’ the one association that defined a specific individual.

“ Man’china aijiia nai’am ,” he said, to which Jago blinked a third time. I’m the aiji’s associate, foremost. “ Nai’danei man’chini somai Banichi ?” Whose associate are you and Banichi, foremost of all?

“ Tabini‑aijiia, hei .” But atevi would lie to anyone but their central associate.

“Not each other’s?” he asked. “I thought you were very close, you and Banichi.”

“We have the same man’chi .”

“And to each other?”

He saw what might be truth leap through her expression–and the inevitable frown followed.

“The paidhi knows the harm in such a question,” Jago said.

“The paidhi‑aiji,” he said, “knows what he asks. He finds it his duty to ask, nadi.”

Jago got up from the table, walked across the room and said nothing for a while. She went to look out the garden doors, near the armed wire–it made him nervous, but he thought he ought not to warn her, just be ready to remind her. Jago was touchy enough. He hadn’t quite insulted her. But he’d asked into a matter intensely personal and private.

“The Interpreter should know he won’t get an honest answer,” she’d implied, and he’d said, plain as plain to her politically sensitive ears, “The Interpreter serves the aiji by questioning the true hierarchy of your intimate alignments.”

Freely translated–Faced with betraying someone, the aiji or Banichi… which one would you betray, Jago?

Which have you?

Fool to ask such a question, when he was alone in a room with her?

But he was alone in the whole country, for that matter, one human alone with three hundred million atevi, and billions around the world, and he was obliged to ask questions–with more intelligence and cleverness than he had just used, granted; but he was tired enough now, and crazed enough, to want to be sure of at least three of them, of Tabini, Banichi, and Jago, before he went any further down the paved and pleasant road of belief. There was too much harm he could do to his own species, believing a lie, going too far down a false path, granting too much truth to the wrong people–

Because he wasn’t just the aiji’s interpreter. He had a primary association that outranked it, an association that was stamped on his skin and his face–and that was the one atevi couldn’t help seeing, every time they looked at him.

He waited for Jago to think his question through–perhaps even to ask herself the questions about her own loyalties that atevi might prefer not to ask. Perhaps atevi minds, like human ones, held hundreds of contradictory compartments, the doors of which one dared not open wholesale and look into. He didn’t know. It was , perhaps, too much to ask, too personal and too dangerous. Perhaps questioning the loyalty atevi felt as a group inherently questioned a tenet of belief–and perhaps their man’chi concept was, at bottom, as false as humans had always wished it was, longing at an emotional level for atevi to be and think and hold individual, interpersonal values like themselves.

The paidhi couldn’t believe that. The paidhi daren’t believe that deadliest and most dangerous of illusions. He was off the emotional edge.

And, perhaps recognizing that the paidhi was off the edge, Jago declined to answer him. She used the pocket‑com again, asking Banichi if he was receiving–and still didn’t look at him.

Banichi still didn’t answer.

Frowning, then, perhaps for a different reason, Jago called headquarters, asking where Banichi was, or if anyone knew where he was–and, no, headquarters didn’t know.

Maybe Banichi was with some woman, Bren thought, although he decided he should keep that idea to himself, figuring Jago was capable of thinking of it for herself if it was at all likely. He wasn’t sure whether Banichi and Jago slept with each other. He had never been completely certain what the relationship was between them, except a close, years‑long professional partnership.

He saw the frown deepen on Jago’s face. “Someone find out where he is,” she said into the com.

There were verbal codes; he knew that and he couldn’t tell whether the answer he overheard was one: “ Lab‑work , ” HQ said, but Jago didn’t seem to like the answer, “Tell him contact me when he’s through,” Jago said to HQ, not seeming pleased, and shut the contact off on the affirmative.

“You had no sleep last night,” she said, in her smoother, professional tones, and, evading the wire, she slid the glass garden doors open on the lattice, “Please rest, nadi Bren.”

He was exhausted. But he had rather plain answers. And he was far from sure he wanted his garden doors open. Maybe they were setting up a trap. He was in no mood tonight to be the sleeping bait.

“Nadi,” he said, “have you forgotten my question?”

“No, paidhi‑ji.”

“But you don’t intend to answer.”

Jago fixed him with a yellow, lucent stare. “Do they ask such questions on Mospheira?”

“Always.”

“Not among us,” Jago said, and crossed the room to the door.

“Jago, say you’re not angry.”

Again that stare. She had stopped just short of the deadly square on the carpet, turned it off, and looked back at him. “Why ask such a futile question? You wouldn’t believe either answer.”

It set him back. And made him foreign and deliberate in his own reply.

“But I’m human, nadi.”

“So your man’chi isn’t with Tabini, after all.”

Dangerous question. Deadly question. “Of course it is.–But what if you had two… two very strong man’chiin ?”

“We call it a test of character.” Jago said, and opened the door.

“So do we , nadi Jago.”

He had caught her attention. Black, wide, imposing, she stood against that bar of whiter hall light. She stood there as if she wanted to say something.

But the pocket‑com beeped, demanding attention. She spoke briefly with headquarters, regarding Banichi’s whereabouts, and HQ said that he was out of the lab, but in conference, asking not to be disturbed.

“Thank you,” she said to the com. “Relay my message.” And to him: “The wires will both be live. Go to bed, paidhi Bren. I’ll be outside if you need me.”

“All night?”

There was a moment of silence. “Don’t walk in the garden, nand’ paidhi. Don’t stand in front of the doors. Be prudent and go to bed.”

She shut the door then. The wire rearmed itself–he supposed. It came up when the door locked.

And did it need all of that–Jago and the wire, to secure his sleep?

Or where was Banichi and what was that exchange of questions, this talk about loyalties? He couldn’t remember who’d started it.

Jago could have forgone an argument with him, at the edge of sleep, when he most wanted a tranquil mind–but he wasn’t even certain now who’d started it and who’d pressed it, or with what intention. He hadn’t done well. The whole evening with Banichi and then Jago had had a stressed, on the edge quality, as if–

In retrospect, it seemed that Jago had been fishing as hard as he had been to find out something, all along–pressing every opportunity, challenging him, or ready to take offense and put the worst construction on matters. It might be Jago’s inexperience with him–he’d dealt mostly with Banichi and relied on Banichi to interpret to her. But he couldn’t figure out why Banichi had deserted him tonight–except the obvious answer, that Banichi as the senior of the pair had had matters on his mind more important to the aiji than the paidhi was.

And so far as he could tell, neither he nor Jago had completely gotten the advantage, neither of them had come away with anything useful that he could figure out–only a mutual reminder how profound the differences were and how dangerous the interface between atevi and human could still turn, on a moment’s notice.

He couldn’t even get his points across to one well‑educated and unsuperstitious woman with every reason to listen to him. How could he transmit anything, via his prepared statements to the various councils, make any headway with the population at large, who, after two centuries of peace, agreed it was a very good thing for humans to stay on Mospheira and grudgingly conceded that computers might have numbers, the way tables might have definite sizes and objects definite height, but, God, even arranging the furniture in a room meant considering ratios and measurements, and felicitous and infelicitous combinations that the atevi called agingi’ai , ‘felicitous numerical harmony.’

Beauty flowed from that, in atevi thinking. The infelicitous could not be beautiful. The infelicitous could not be reasoned with. Right numbers had to add up, and an even division in a simple flower arrangement was a communication of hostility.

God knew what he had communicated to Jago that he hadn’t meant to say.

He undressed, he turned out the light and cast an apprehensive look at the curtains, which showed no hint of the deadly wire and no shadow of any lurking assassin. He put himself to bed–at the wrong end of the room–where the ventilation was not directly from the lattice doors.

Where the breeze was too weak to reach.

He was not going to sleep until the wind shifted. He could watch television. If it worked. He doubted it would. The outages usually stayed through the shift, when they happened. He watched the curtain, he tried to think about the council business… but his mind kept circling back to the hall this morning, Tabini making that damnable announcement of feud, which he didn’t want–certainly didn’t want public.

And the damned gun–had they transferred that, when they moved his bed?

He couldn’t bear wondering if anyone had found it. He got up and felt under the mattress.

It was there. He let go a slow breath, put a knee on the mattress and slid back under the sheets, to stare at the darkened ceiling.

Many a moment in the small hours of the morning he doubted what he knew. Close as he was to Tabini in certain functions, he doubted he had ever made Tabini understand anything Tabini hadn’t learned from his predecessor in office. He did his linguistic research. The paper that had gotten him on the track to the paidhi’s office was a respectable work: an analysis of set‑plurals in the Ragi atevi dialect, of which he was proud, but it was no breakthrough, just a conclusion to which he’d been unable to add, since, thanks to Tabini’s patient and irreligious analysis.

But at times he didn’t understand, not Tabini, not Taigi and Moni, God knew what he would figure about the glum‑faced servants Banichi and Jago foisted off on him, but that was going to be another long effort. He was in a damned mess, was what he’d made for himself–he didn’t catch the nuances, he’d gotten involved in something he didn’t understand. He was in danger of failing. He’d imagined once he had the talent to have done what the first paidhi had done: breach the linguistic gap from conceptual dead zero and in the heart of war…

In the years when humans had first come down here, few at first, then in greater and greater numbers as it seemed so easy… they’d been equally confident they understood the atevi–until one spring day, twenty‑one years into the landings, with humans venturing peacefully onto the continent, when that illusion had–suddenly and for reasons candidates for his job still argued among themselves–blown up in their faces.

Short and nasty, what atevi called the War of the Landing–all the advanced technology on the human side, and vast numbers and an uncanny determination on the part of the atevi, who had, in that one year, driven humans from Ragi coastal land and back onto Mospheira, attacked them even in the valley the bewildered survivors held as their secure territory. Humanity on this world had come that close to extinction, until Tabini‑aiji’s fourth‑removed predecessor had agreed, having met face‑to‑face with the man who would be the first paidhi, to cede Mospheira and let humans separate themselves from atevi completely, on an island where they’d be safe and isolated.

Mospheira and a cease‑fire, in exchange for the technology the atevi wanted. Tabini’s fourth‑removed predecessor, being no fool, had seen a clear choice staring him in the face: either strike a deal with humanity and become indispensable to them, or see his own allies make his lands a battlefield over the technology his rivals hoped to lay their hands on, killing every last human and potentially destroying the source of the knowledge in the process.

Hence the Treaty which meant the creation of the paidhi’s office, and the orderly surrender of human technology to the atevi Western Association, at a rate–neither Tabini’s ancestor nor the first paidhi had been fools–that would maintain the atevi economy and the relative power of the aijiin of various Associations in the existing balance.

Meaning, all of the rivals, the humans and the technology securely in the hands of Tabini’s ancestor. The War had stopped… Mospheira’s atevi had resettled on the Ragi aiji’s coastal estate‑lands, richer than their own fields by far, a sacrifice of vast wealth for the Ragi aiji, but a wise, wise maneuver that secured the peace–and every damned thing the Mospheira atevi and the Ragi atevi wanted.

Humans weren’t under this sun by choice. And (the constant and unmentioned truth) humans to this day didn’t deal with the atevi by choice or at advantage. Humans had lost the War: few in numbers, stranded, their station soon in decay, their numbers dwindling above and below… descent to the planet was their final, desperate choice.

Impossible to conceal their foreignness, impossible to trust a species that couldn’t translate friendship , impossible to admit what humans really wanted out of the agreement, because atevi in general didn’t–that foreign word– trust people foolish enough to land without a by‑your‑leave and possessing secrets they hadn’t yet turned over.

The paidhi didn’t tell everything he knew–but he was treaty‑bound to the slow surrender of everything humans owned, to pay the rent on Mospheira–and to empower the only human‑friendly government on the planet to keep humanity’s most implacable enemies under his thumb. The aiji of that day had wanted high‑powered guns–the atevi had had muzzle‑loading rifles and cumbersome cannon, and took to high‑velocity bullets with–terrible turn of speech–an absolute vengeance.

Fastest piece of talking a paidhi had ever done, pressed with the aiji’s request for designs that would put a terrifying arsenal in Ragi hands, Bretano had pointed out that such weapons would surely reach Ragi rivals as well, and that the Ragi already had the upper hand. Did they want to tip the balance?

Pressed for advanced industrial techniques, Bretano had objected the ecological cost to the planet, and the whole committee behind him, and his successors, had begun the slow, centuries‑long business of steering atevi science steadily into ecological awareness–

And toward material production resources that would serve human needs.

The one tactic, the ecological philosophy… hoped to get war out of the atevi mindset, to build experimental rockets instead of missiles, rails instead of cannon, to consider what happened to a river downstream when a little garbage went in upstream, to consider what happened when toxic chemicals blew through forests or poisons got into the groundwater–thank God, the atevi had taken to the idea, which had touched some cultural bent already in the Ragi mentality, at least. It had locked onto successive generations so firmly that little children in this half‑century learned rhymes about clean rivers–while human tacticians on Mospheira–safe on Mospheira, unlike the paidhi–deliberated what industry they dared promote, and what humans needed the atevi to develop in order for humans to get launch facilities and the vehicle they needed.

The unspoken, two hundred‑year‑agenda, the one every human knew and the paidhi walked about scared out of his mind because he knew–because even if atevi guessed by now that getting themselves a space program meant developing materials as useful to humans as to themselves, even if he could sit in the space council meetings and surmise that every atevi in the room knew what they developed had that potential, it was a question he never brought up, not with them, not with atevi he knew the best–because it was one of those impenetrable thickets in atevi mindset, how they’d take the knowledge if it became impossible to ignore it. He’d certainly no idea at all how it would play outside Tabini’s court, out across the country–when popular novels still cast human villains, and they appeared in shadow, in nebai , in the machimi plays– nebai , because they couldn’t get human actors…

Humans were the monsters in the closet, the creatures under the bed… in a culture constantly on its guard against real dangers from real assassins, in a culture where children learned from television a paranoid fear of strangers.

What were humans really up to on Mospheira? What dark technological secrets was Tabini‑aiji keeping for himself? What was in the telemetry that flowed between the station in space and the island an hour by air off Tabini’s shores?

And why did some loon want to kill the paidhi?

He had a space council meeting tomorrow–nothing he considered controversial, a small paper with technical information the council had asked and he’d translated out of the library on Mospheira.

No controversy in that. None in the satellite launch upcoming, either. Communications weren’t controversial. Weather forecast wasn’t controversial.

There was the finance question, whether to add or subtract a million from the appropriation to make the unmanned launch budget add up to an auspicious number–but a million didn’t seem, against six billion already committed to the program, to be a critical or acerbic issue, over which assassins would swarm to his bedroom.

There was, occasionally smoldering, the whole, sensitive manned versus unmanned debate–whether atevi should attempt to recover the human space station, which was in increasing disrepair, with its tanks empty now, in its slow drift out of stable orbit.

The human policy wasn’t to scare anyone by bringing up the remote possibility of infall in a populated area. Officially, statistically, the station debris would come down in the vast open oceans, in, oh, another five hundred years, give or take a solar storm or so–he couldn’t personally swear to any of it, since astrophysics wasn’t his forte, but the experts said that was what he should say, and he’d said it.

He’d advanced his modest paper on the topic of mission goals at his inaugural meeting with the space council, proposing the far from astonishing concept that lifting metal to orbit was expensive, and that letting what was already orbiting burn up was not economical, and that they should do something with the dead, abandoned station before they sank large resources into unmanned missions.

Manned space advocates of course agreed immediately, with celebration. Astronomers and certain anti‑human lobbies disagreed passionately. Which put the question into the background, while council members consulted numerologists on truly important issues such as (the currently raging question) whether the launch dates were auspicious or not, and how many dates it was auspicious to approve in reserve–which got into another debate between several competing (and ethnically significant) schools of numerology, on whether the current date should be in the calculation or whether one counted the birthdate of the whole program or of the project or of the date the launch table was devised.

Never mind the debate over whether the fuel chamber baffle in the heavy lift booster could be four‑partitioned without affecting the carefully chosen harmonious numbers of the tank design.

The truly dangerous issues that he could think of, lying here flat on his back, waiting for assassins, were all the quiet ones–the utilization of the station as an atevi mission goal was one item of some controversy he’d strenuously advocated, now that he began to add up the supporters, some of them less reasonable, behind the genteel voices of the council.

And always factor into any space debate the continual exchange of telemetry and instructions between Mospheira and the station, which had gone on for two hundred years and was still going.

A certain radical element among atevi maintained there were weapons hidden aboard the abandoned station. The devoted lunatics of the radical fringe were convinced the station’s slow infall was no accident of physics, but a carefully calculated approach, perhaps in the hands of humans secretly left aboard, or instructions secretly relayed from Mospheira, now that they knew about computer controls, which would end with the station descending in a blazing course across the skies, ‘disturbing the ethers to disharmony and violence,’ and creating hurricanes and tidal waves, as its weapons rained fire down on atevi civilization and placed atevi forever under human domination.

Forgive them, Tabini was wont to say dryly. They also anticipate the moon to influence their financial ventures and the space launches to disturb the weather.

Foreign aijiin from outside Tabini’s Association actually funded offices in Shejidan to analyze those telemetry transcripts on which Shejidan eavesdropped–the numerologists these foreign aijiin employed suspecting secret assignments of infelicitous codes, affecting the weather, or agriculture, or the fortunes of Tabini’s rivals… and one daren’t call such beliefs silly.

Actually Tabini did call them exactly that, to his intimates, but in public he was very kabiu , very observant, and employed batteries of number‑counters and geometricians of various persuasions to study every utterance and every bit of intercepted transmission, just as seriously–to refute what the conservatives came up with, to be sure.

From time to time–it was worth a grin, even in the dark–Tabini would come to the paidhi and say, Transmit this. And he would phone Mospheira with a segment of code that, transmitted to the station, would be complete nonsense to the computers, so the technicians assured him–they just dropped it into some Remark string, and transmitted it solely for the benefit of the eavesdroppers, and that fixed that, as Barb would say. Numbers would then turn up in the transmission sequences that burst some doomsayer’s bubble before he could go public with his theory.