Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition)

by C. J. Cherryh

  But he couldn’t let them use him politically, either—couldn’t make statements for them to edit and twist out of context, not without marks on him to show the world he was under duress.

  And he’d made the television interview—sitting there quite at ease in front of the cameras.

  He’d let Cenedi get his answers on tape, including his damning refusal to attribute the gun. They had all the visuals and sound bites they could want.

  Damn, he thought. He’d screwed it. He’d screwed it beyond any repair. Hanks was in charge, as of now, and damn, he wished there was better, and more imaginative, and somebody to realize Tabini was still the best bet they had.

  Overthrow Tabini, replace him with the humanophobes, and him with Deana Hanks, and watch everything generations had built go to absolute hell. He believed it. And the hard-liners among humans who thought he’d gotten entirely too friendly with Tabini … they weren’t right, he refused to believe they were right; but they’d have their field day saying so.

  The irony was, the hard-liners, the nuke-the-opposition factions, were alike on both sides of the strait. And he couldn’t turn the situation over to them.

  Mistake to have taken himself out of Cenedi’s hands. He believed that now. He had to tough it out somehow, find out if Banichi was involved, or a prisoner, or what—get them to bring Cenedi back in, get the ear of somebody who’d listen to reason.

  Plenty of time for the mind to race over plans and plans and plans.

  But when the cold got into his bones and the muscles started to stiffen and then to hurt—the mind found other things to occupy it besides plans for how to fix what he’d screwed up, the mind found the body was damned uncomfortable, and it hurt, and he might never get out of this cellar if he didn’t give these people everything they wanted.

  But he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, hadn’t done his job half right or he wouldn’t be here, but he wasn’t going to finish it by bringing Tabini down.

  Only hope he had, he kept telling himself. Tabini was a canny son of a bitch when he had to be. Damn him, he’d given up a card he’d known he had to cede—knew humans wouldn’t fight over him; and having not a human bone in his body, didn’t feel what a human would. He’d gotten his television interview. He’d show the world and the humans that Bren Cameron was well-disposed to him—he’d slipped that television crew in neatly as could be and gotten his essential interview just before the other side moved in their agents with their demands on Ilisidi, who was probably fence-sitting and playing neutral.

  Check, and mate.

  Put him in one hell of a position, Tabini had. Thanks a lot, he thought. Thanks a lot, Tabini.

  But we need you. Peace—depends on you staying in power. You know they’ll replace me. Give you a brand new paidhi, a new quantity for the number-counters to figure out and argue over. Switch the dice on them—leave them with a new puzzle and humans not reacting the way atevi would.

  You son of a bitch, Tabini-ji.

  The time seemed to stretch into hours, from terror to pain, to boredom and an acute misery of stiffened muscles, numb spots, cold metal and cold stone. He didn’t hear the thunder anymore. He couldn’t find an angle to put his legs that didn’t hurt his back or his knees or his shoulders, and every try hurt.

  Imagination in the quiet and the dark was no asset at all—too much television, Banichi would tell him.

  But Banichi had either turned coat—which meant Banichi’s man’chi had always been something other than even Tabini thought—or Banichi had landed in the same trouble as he was.

  In his fondest hope, Banichi or Jago would come through that door and cut him free before the opposition put him on their urgent list. Maybe the delay in dealing with him was because they were looking for Banichi and Jago. Maybe Jago’s quick exit when he’d last talked with her, and that com message from Banichi—had been because Banichi knew something, and Banichi had called her, knowing they had to be free in order to do anything to free him.…

  It was a good machimi plot, but it didn’t happen. It wasn’t going to happen. He just hung there and hurt in various sprained places, and finally heard the outer hall door open.

  Footsteps descended the stone steps into the outer room—two sets of footsteps, or three, he wasn’t entirely sure, then decided on three: he heard voices, saying something he couldn’t make out. He reached a certain pitch of panic fear, deciding whatever was going to happen was about to happen. But no one came, so he thought the hell with it and let his head fall forward, which could relieve the ache in his neck for maybe five minutes at a time.

  Then voices he’d decided were going to stay in the next room became noises in the hall; and when he looked up, a shadow walked in—someone in guard uniform, he couldn’t see against the light, but he could see the sparks of metal off the shadows that filled his field of vision.

  “Good evening,” he said to his visitor. “Or is it the middle of the night?”

  The shadow left him, and nerves ratcheted to the point of pain began a series of tremors that he decided must be the stage before paralysis set into his legs, like that in his fingers. He didn’t want that. He hoped maybe that was just a guard checking on him, and they’d go away.

  The steps came back. He was supposed to be scared by this silent coming and going, he decided—and that, with the pain, made him mad. He’d hoped to get to mad … he always found a state of temper more comforting than a state of terror.

  But this time more arrived, bringing a wooden chair from somewhere, and a tape recorder—all of them shadows casting other shadows in the light from the doorway. The recorder cast a shadow, too, and a red light glowed on it when one of them bent and pressed the button.

  “Live, on tape,” he said. He saw no reason to forbear anything, and he stayed angry, now, though on the edge of terror. He’d not deserved this, he told himself—not deserved it of Tabini, or Cenedi, or Ilisidi. “So who are you? What do you want, nadi? Anything reasonable? I’m sure not.”

  “No fear at all?” the shadow asked him. “No remorse, no regret?”

  “What should I regret, nadi? Relying on the dowager’s hospitality? If I’ve passed my welcome here, I apologize, and I’d like to—leave—”

  One shadow separated itself from the others, picked up the chair, turned it quietly face about and sat down, arms folded on the low back.

  “Where did you get the gun?” this shadow asked, a stranger’s voice.

  “I didn’t have a gun. Banichi fired. I didn’t.”

  “Why would Banichi involve himself? And why did it turn up in your bed?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Has Banichi ever gone with you to Mospheira?”

  “No.”

  “Gone to Mospheira at all?”

  “No. No ateva has, in my lifetime.”

  “You’re lying about the gun, aren’t you?”

  “No,” he said.

  The tic in his left leg started again. He tried to stay calm and to think, while the questions came one after the other and periodically circled back to the business of the gun.

  The tape ran out, and he watched them replace it. The tic never let up. Another one threatened, in his right arm, and he tried to change position to relieve it.

  “What do you project,” the next question was, on a new tape, “on future raw metals shipments to Mospheira? Why the increase?”

  “Because Mospheira’s infrastructure is wearing out.” It was the pat answer, the simplistic answer. “We need the raw metals. We have our own processing requirements.”

  “And your own launch site?”

  Wasn’t the same question. His heart skipped a beat. He knew he took too long. “What launch site?”

  “We know. You gave us satellites. Shouldn’t we know?”

  “Don’t launch from Mospheira latitude. Can’t. Not practical.”

  “Possible. Practical, if that’s the site you have. Or do any boats leave Mospheira that don’t have to do with fishing?”


  What damned boats? he asked himself. If there was anything, he didn’t know it, and he didn’t rule that out. “We’re not building any launch site, nadi, I swear to you. If we are, the paidhi isn’t aware of it.”

  “You slip numbers into the dataflow. You encourage sectarian debates to delay us. Most clearly you’re stockpiling metals. You increase your demands for steel, for gold—you give us industries, and you trade us micro-circuits for graphite, for titanium, aluminum, palladium, elements we didn’t know existed a hundred years ago and, thanks to you, now we have a use for. Now you import them, minerals that don’t exist on Mospheira. For what? For what do you use these things, if not the same things you’ve taught us to use them for, for light-lift aircraft you don’t fly, for—”

  “I’m not an engineer. I’m not expert in our manufacturing. I know we use these things in electronics, in high-strength steel for industry—”

  “And light-lift aircraft? High-velocity fan blades for jets you don’t manufacture?”

  He shook his head, childhood habit. It meant nothing to atevi. He was in dire trouble, and he couldn’t tell anybody who urgently needed to know the kind of suspicions atevi were entertaining. He feared he wouldn’t have the chance to tell anybody outside this room if he didn’t come up with plausible, cooperative answers for this man.

  “I’ve no doubt—no doubt there are experimental aircraft. We haven’t anything but diagrams of what used to exist. We build test vehicles. Models. We test what we think we understand before we give advice that will let some ateva blow himself to bits, nadi, we know the dangers of these propellants and these flight systems—”

  “Concern for us.”

  “Nadi, I assure you, we don’t want some ateva blowing up a laboratory or falling out of the sky and everybody saying it was our fault. People find fault with the programs. There are enough people blaming us for planes that don’t file flight plans and city streets piled full of grain because the agriculture minister thought the computer was making up the numbers—damned right we have test programs. We try to prevent disasters before we ask you to risk your necks—it’s not a conspiracy, it’s public relations!”

  “It’s more than tests,” the interrogator said. “The aiji is well aware. Is he not?”

  “He’s not aware. I’m not aware. There is no launch site. There’s nothing we’re holding back, there’s nothing we’re hiding. If they’re building planes, it’s a test program.”

  “Who gave you the gun, nadi?”

  “Nobody gave me a gun. I didn’t even know it was under my mattress. Ask Cenedi how it got there.”

  “Who gave it to you, nadi-ji? Just give us an answer. Say, The aiji gave it to me, and you can go back to bed and not be concerned in this.”

  “I don’t know. I said I don’t know.”

  The man nearest drew a gun. He saw the sheen on the barrel in the almost dark. The man moved closer and he felt the cold metal against his face. Well, he thought, That’s what we want, isn’t it? No more questions.

  “Nand’ paidhi,” the interrogator said. “You say Banichi fired the shots at the intruder in your quarters. Is that true?”

  Past a certain point, to hell with the game. He shut his eyes and thought about the snow and the sky around winter slopes. About the wind, and nobody else in sight.

  Told him something, that did, that it wasn’t Barb his mind went to. If it mattered. It was, however, a curious, painful discovery.

  “Isn’t that true, nand’ paidhi?”

  He declined to answer. The gun barrel went away. A powerful hand pulled his head up and banged it against the wall.

  “Nand’ paidhi. Tabini-aiji has renounced you. He’s given your disposition into our hands. You’ve read the letter. Have you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is our politics to you? —Let him go, nadi. Let go. All of you, wait outside.”

  The man let him go. They changed the rules of a sudden. The rest of them filed out the door, letting light past, so that he could see at least the outlined edges of the interrogator’s face, but he didn’t think he knew the man. He only wondered what the last-ditch proposition was going to be, or what the man had to offer him he wasn’t going to say with the others there. He wasn’t expecting to like it.

  The interrogator reached down and cut off the recorder. It was very quiet in the cell, then, for a long, long wait.

  “Do you think,” the man said finally, “that we dare release you now, nand’ paidhi, to go back to Mospheira? On the other hand, if you provided the aiji-dowager the necessary evidence to remove the aiji, if you became a resource useful on our side—we’d be fools to turn you over to more radical factions of our association.”

  “Cenedi said the same thing. And sent me here.”

  “We support the aiji-dowager. We’d keep you alive and quite comfortable, nand’ paidhi. You could go back to Shejidan. Nothing essential would change in the relations of the association with Mospheira—except the party in power. If you’re telling the truth, and you don’t know the other information we’d like to have, we’re reasonable. We can accept that, so long as you’re willing to provide us statements that serve our point of view. It costs you nothing. It maintains you in office, nand’ paidhi. All for a simple answer. What do you say?” The interrogator bent, complete shadow again, and turned the tape recorder back on. “Who provided you the gun, nand’ paidhi?”

  “I never had a gun,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The interrogator cut off the tape recorder, picked it up, got up, and left him.

  He hung against the bar, shaking, telling himself he’d just been a complete fool, telling himself Tabini didn’t deserve a favor that size, if there was a real chance that he could get himself out of this alive, stay in office, and go back to dealing with Mospheira, business as usual—

  The hell they’d let him. Trust was a word you couldn’t translate. But atevi had fourteen words for betrayal.

  He expected the guards would come back, maybe shoot him, maybe take him somewhere else, to the less reasonable people the man had talked about. If you had a potential informer, you didn’t turn him over to rival factions. No. It was all Cenedi. It was all the dowager. All the same game, no matter the strategy. It just got rougher. Cenedi had warned him that people didn’t hold out.

  He heard someone go out of the room down the hall, heard the doors shut, and in the long, long silence asked himself how bad it could get—and had ugly, ugly answers out of the machimi. He didn’t like to think about that. Breathing hurt, now, but he couldn’t feel his legs.

  A long while later the outer room door opened. Again the footsteps, descending the stone steps—he listened to them, drawing quick, shallow breaths that didn’t give him enough oxygen, watched the shadows come down the darker corridor, and tried to keep his wits about him—find a point of negotiation, he said to himself. Engage the bastards, just to get them talking—stall for time in which Hanks or Tabini or somebody could do something.

  The guards walked in. —Cenedi’s, he was damned sure, now.

  “Tell Cenedi I’ve decided,” he said, as matter of factly as if it was his office and they’d shown up to collect the message. “Maybe we can find an agreement. I need to talk to him. I’d rather talk to him.”

  “That’s not our business,” one said—and he recognized the attitude, the official hand-washing, the atevi official who’d taken a position, broken off negotiations, and told his subordinates to stonewall attempts, officially. Cenedi might have given orders not to hear about the methods. He didn’t take Cenedi for that sort. He thought Cenedi would insist to know what his subordinates did.

  “There’s an intermediate position,” he said. “Tell him there’s a way to solve this.” Anything to get Cenedi to send for him.

  But the guards had other orders. They started untying his arms. Going to take him somewhere else, then. Inside Malguri, please God.

  Four of them to handle him. Ludicro
us. But his legs weren’t working well. One foot was asleep. His hands wouldn’t work. He tried to get up before they found a way of their own, and two of them dragged him up and locked arms behind him to hold him on his feet, although one of them could have carried him. “Sorry,” he said, with the foot collapsing at every other step as they took him out the door, and he felt the fool for opening his mouth—he was so damned used to courtesies, and they seemed so damned useless now. “Just tell Cenedi,” he said as they were going down the corridor. “Where are we going?”

  “Nand’ paidhi, just walk. We’re ordered not to answer you.”

  Which meant they wouldn’t. They owed him nothing. That they gave him back courtesy was comforting, at least indicating that they didn’t personally hold a grudge, but it didn’t mean a thing beyond that. Man’chi was everything—wherever theirs was, you couldn’t argue that.

  At least they took him up the steps, into the hall. He held out a hope they might pass Cenedi’s office, and they did—but that door was shut, and no light showed under it. Damn, he thought, one more hope gone to nothing—it shook him, ever so small a shaking of his remaining understanding, but the thoughts kept wanting to scatter to what was happening, what might happen, whose these men were—and that wasn’t important, because he couldn’t do anything about it. He could sort through the questions they’d asked, and try to figure what they would ask—that … that was the only thing that would do any good; and he couldn’t trust that the persistent question about the gun was even the important one—it might be what they wanted him to focus on while they chipped away at what he did know … while they figured out where the limits of his knowledge were and how useful he was likely to be to them.

  There wasn’t any damned launch facility—that was the scariest question, and they were wrong about that, they had to be wrong about that: he couldn’t make it true by any stretch of the imagination. But the stockpiling—they had the trade figures. He couldn’t lie about that. Atevi had finally gotten the lesson humans had taught, knew they were accumulating materials useful in certain kinds of development, and he could tell them far too much, if they asked the right questions and used the right drugs. Cenedi had said the same thing his own administrators had said: he wasn’t going to be any hero, unless he could think of a better lie than he’d thought of, impromptu, already … and build on what he’d said.