He felt, in the aftermath of that realization this morning, somewhat shaky in returning to the apartment. And lost. Jago and Tano, at least, wouldn’t betray him. Last of all, they’d betray his …
Trust. Which didn’t, dammit, exist for an outsider among atevi. He wasn’t in their man’chi, their group, beyond loyalty, all the way over to identity, except as he was Tabini’s …
Property.
He felt a crashing, plummeting depression, then: one of those glum moods that came of too much vaulting back and forth between the cultures.
Or too much medication. He couldn’t afford any medications with depressive side effects, not doing what he did, and whenever he was on medication he distrusted such mood swings. God, he didn’t need this on top of the workload he’d been handed.
“Nadi, go do those things,” Jago said to Tano, and Tano agreed and quietly left, while he unfastened the cuff tab that secured his coat sleeve and began to try to get out of his coat, since he wasn’t, after all, going anywhere.
He wanted to go sit down and not think and not deal with his well-meaning guards for a moment. But he ought to be making a couple of critical phone calls.
He ought to go look at his medical records and find out what he was taking, and make absolutely sure it was only antibiotics. He let Jago help him off with his coat, which she did very carefully.
“I’m terribly embarrassed,” he said. Sometimes it seemed to be the only way to make cross-species amends. “Forgive me, Jago-ji. I’m tired. My ribs hurt.”
She eased his coat sleeve free. Easy to evade her eyes, easy to glance down when she stood so much taller.
But not when she touched his good shoulder and wanted his attention.
“The distress is ours,” Jago said. That plural again. The group. The collective to which he was always biologically external.
He’d been inside at Malguri, briefly. Inside, in all senses, the one glimpse he’d ever had of what he couldn’t have, couldn’t be. That was what Ilisidi and Cenedi had touched.
Barb had fairly well finished the human attachment he had, but he couldn’t replace it with Jago or Banichi.
Certainly not much of an emotional life, he had to admit. Clearly Barb had found it pretty thin fare, enough that Paul Saarinson had looked to her like a far better bet. Barb had gotten the signals: youth ending, the rest of her life starting—at twenty-whatever, five?—and no prospect of his coming home, not only soon, but ever—because he valued the job, he valued things he couldn’t talk about to her.
He valued relationships he couldn’t have, with atevi he couldn’t talk to, either, but at least—at least he was where he could do some good, with knowledge that could do some good, and people who at least wanted to listen to him.
He gave a sigh, that was what his emotional storm was worth, now it had found its real and honest grounds: he hadn’t any right to Barb’s life, he’d gone into the job with his eyes open, and he was tolerably well armored, once he got his sense of perspective adjusted.
So he could ask Jago for his computer and for access to the Bu-javid phone system, and sit down at the security station desk, which had the same relation to this foyer as Tabini’s small sitting-room, next door. It was a comfortable little nook, with the phone, and, God, stacks and stacks of little unrolled message scrolls, all flattened with the ornate lead weights atevi kept for such troublesome but traditional duty.
Six stacks of message scrolls, sorted, he imagined glumly, into categories of criticality—assassination threats, suicide threats, committee complaints, school project requests; God, he didn’t know, but he felt acutely sorry for his outburst in Tano’s vicinity. The man was doing his absolute damnedest on a job he wasn’t even trained to do, and without staff. He could explain to Jago, who’d at least gotten used to the paidhi’s occasional frayed nerves, and to Banichi, who’d likely ask him what he wanted done about the sky falling; but poor Tano just sat and handled things, and the paidhi thanked his efforts by throwing a fit.
He set up his computer on the desk, with Jago’s patient help, made the phone connection and let computers talk to each other for a moment until his call and its authorizations had rung through the Bu-javid board, the provincial board, the Mospheiran entry board, the Capitol board, and all the way to the Foreign Office.
Then:
“This is Bren Cameron,” he said, and a voice on the other end said:
“Mr. Cameron, the Foreign Secretary is very anxious to talk to you. Please hold.”
Another sigh. Damned right the Foreign Secretary was anxious to talk to him.
“Quite,” he said, and hardly a breath later, had the Secretary himself.
“Bren. Bren, this is Shawn. Are you all right?”
“Doing well, thank you.” He chose to misunderstand Shawn Tyers’ concern as health related. “You may know the situation here’s been rather dicey, but we’re just fine, with one complication. What’s going on with Hanks’ visa? She’s expired, she’s still sitting here, violating Treaty law. Our hosts are extremely miffed, and she’s used my seal without my permission. Could we have a clarification of her position?”
“Bren, you may know there’s some disturbance in the upstairs Department, both about your address to the legislatures last night and the shooting.”
“Not surprised. Very high feelings on the mainland, I assure you. Hanks isn’t helping.”
“How’s business otherwise?”
Right past his question. Meaning was Tabini solidly in power. But definitely ignoring his question. “Thriving. In spite of the weather. Listen, Shawn, other matters aside, can you find me an answer about my redundancy here?”
“That’s a wait. You’re sawing off limbs, Bren.”
As clear a warning as the Secretary could give. So Hanks’ presence and continued presence in a critical situation went above the paidhi’s office, and went above the Foreign Secretary’s office. He knew where, right down to the fancy wood door. Durant was the name, Secretary of State Hampton Durant, possibly Elton’s office, possibly higher than that.
“Advisedly,” he said to Shawn’s warning. “But the tree’s overcrowded. Somebody has to. Send me what you can.”
“What I can,” the Secretary said; and Bren said, the all’s-well sign-off, “See you.”
But he didn’t at the moment think so. Ever. He had a slightly sick-at-the-stomach feeling about that conversation, in which the Foreign Office, his office, couldn’t give the paidhi in the field any remote assurance it could get Hanks unassigned, even with all the signals he’d flashed about atevi displeasure.
Freely translated, the State Department, in charge of the Foreign Office, doesn’t give a damn what atevi think.
He called through to the Bu-javid telegraph, said, “This is Bren Cameron, nadi, from the third floor. Ring Hanks-paidhi, please, wherever she’s lodged.”
The phone call went out. And rang. Someone picked up.
“Deana?” he asked.
The receiver slammed down. Bang!
He took several deep breaths. Professional behavior. The dignity of the paidhiin. The appearance of human unity.
He signaled the operator. “This is Bren-paidhi again. Ring again.”
“Was this incorrect, nand’ paidhi?”
“Just ring.”
More rings. And rings.
And rings.
“Nand’ paidhi, I have no answer.”
“Operator, kindly ring until she answers. One long four shorts two longs. Until she picks up and talks.”
“Yes, nadi.”
He sat. And sat. And put the constant ringing on speaker, and sat, and called up the text program and wrote the necessary letter to Foreign Secretary Shawn Tyers, that said, in code, “Hanks has met with dissidents against the government and offered them such unauthorized concepts as FTL, the repercussions of which I will have to handle among the devout of lord Geigi’s province. She has made unauthorized and unsubstantiated offers of trade, which may have been apprehended as a
bribe. Hanks refuses my phone calls. She refuses my order to withdraw. She has revealed classified information, ignored atevi law, and alienated atevi across completely opposite political lines, endangering her life and mine. I do not know how to characterize her actions except in the strongest terms: not only dangerous to the peace, but incompetent even among atevi whom she would probably wish to have on her side. She is in personal danger. She has offended atevi of very high rank and unlimited resources, and shows no disposition to make amends to them or to listen to advice from me. I urge you to seek clearance for her immediate withdrawal from the field.”
He didn’t send, however. He stored the damning message to file, and sat, and sat, and waited. And waited.
He heard the line pop again, then bang, with a receiver slammed down.
He shook his head, restraining his own temper, unable to understand—remotely to conceive of—the stupidity of the island-bound, island-educated, culturally insular mentality that ran the Department, that ran so well at its lower levels—unable to conceive of the mentality that abandoned concern so far that political ideologues could toss the job he’d traded his whole human life for into the hands of an arrant, politically motivated, opinionated, and prejudiced fool.
He didn’t believe it. He refused to believe the powers actually in charge, sitting above a university that, most of the time, knew what it was doing and what it was advising, were that damnably ignorant of the critically dangerous differences of atevi culture, atevi life, atevi politics.
But the ones with the power over Mospheira itself didn’t give a damn. The people they put in charge of the upper echelons of the State Department didn’t give an effectual damn. They had their position, they had their power, they had their access to the President, they called it State Department business when they opened an appliance factory on the North Shore, and they were wined and dined by the company execs, also in their social set, for the petty approvals and the official stamps and the environmental clearances and the power-brokering that shepherded projects through what in atevi terms ought to be the Ministry of Works and the Ministry of Commerce.
But, no, among humans it was the business of the State Department, because some human official just after the war had seen the development of Mospheira as an internationally sensitive matter that had to go through somebody who presumably understood the impact it was going to have on atevi relations and the window it was going to provide for atevi to figure out (atevi being clever) what humans had and could deliver to reproduce on the mainland. And somebody else had said they should be appointed by the President.
The result was a Department whose highest officers knew a lot more about political patronage than they knew about factory effluents—whose highest officers rarely exercised their power at operational or foreign office levels, but they sat as a political, contribution-courting roadblock to every railroad, every highway, every item of new commerce and every extrapolation of Mospheiran domestic technology. They knew a damn sight less about atevi policy: they shunted incomprehensible intellectual problems like atevi affairs and atevi grants of technology and atevi cultural and environmental impact studies off to the university Foreign Service Study Program and that far-down-the-hall office of the lowly Foreign Secretary, who didn’t contribute to their party’s campaign and therefore didn’t have to be bothered except occasionally.
Which meant neither the paidhi in the field nor the Foreign Secretary had the easy, routine access to the President that the Secretary of State had.
A Secretary of State with his technocrat cronies who hadn’t waked up from fairyland since Tabini came to power, except for his cocktail parties, his influence-trading, his shepherding of special bills through the legislature and his social schedule and his attendance at the soccer nationals and—oh, yes, oh, God, yes—the opening of the Space Research Center, where the Heritage Redevelopment Society, also with an officership populated mostly by wealthy conservatives, consumed enough alcohol to power an airliner into orbit and lamented humanity’s losses in the historic war. The HRS annually commemorated the departure of the ship, listened to engineers talk about revitalizing the space station and consistently refused to put speakers from International Studies on the program, even when they wrote papers that directly impacted proposals that the HRS was going to come out with in the next session of the legislature. He’d personally tried, this last spring, being invited by a handful of the Foreign Office and some junior members of the HRS who wanted to get someone of stature to make their point in favor of the trade cities project: the higher echelons of the HRS had politely lost his application and failed to review his paper, which meant he could come and attend, if he could get the time, if he wanted to pay the conference fee, but he wasn’t on the agenda.
Deana Hanks had gone to the conference as a guest speaker. Deana Hanks had sat in the meetings and, on personal request of the conference chair who said the conference wanted to acknowledge the paidhi’s office, made a polite little speech about human advancement to space and human retention of human cultural heritage.
God, he wanted to kill somebody. Filing Intent on Deana Hanks definitely came to mind. On this side of the strait, total fools didn’t last long.
He sat a little longer, then rang the Bu-javid operator again. “This is Bren Cameron. Are we still ringing Hanks-paidhi?”
“One will, Bren-paidhi. Yes.”
“Thank you.”
He punched in the speaker and heard the repeated ring.
A second time the phone was picked up and slammed down.
“Operator?”
“Nand’ paidhi?”
“Do this constantly until I advise you I’ve had a satisfactory answer. Pass the instruction to the next shift when it comes on. I will have an answer eventually.”
“I am so very regretful of the difficulty, nand’ paidhi.”
“Please account it to human sense of humor, nadi, and thank you so much.”
8
He composed his further messages and answers in the sitting room, while Tano, armed with the paidhi’s own message cylinders and seal, answered the simple and the routine.
He expressed the wish for a simple, in-house lunch, and settled down to Tano’s summation of the clerical situation: three of Damiri’s staff were perfectly competent—more competent, serving in a noble house—at etiquette to answer routine inquiries, with Tano to handle the substance and himself to catch the odd or difficult ones.
A telegram, from a primer-school class in Jackson City, requesting the paidhi to assure them that there wouldn’t be a war. No, he said. Atevi are quite as anxious as humans to keep the peace.
Too damn much television.
He asked the staff to scour up a tape of the news coverage. He made a note to send Ilisidi the translation transcripts.
He wrote a note to Tabini that said, Aiji-ma, I am doing well today. Thank you for your kind intervention last night. I hope for your success in all undertakings.
Meaning grandmother hadn’t served up the wrong tea, Tano hadn’t broken his ribs last night, and he was waiting, hoping for information.
Hanks, meanwhile, hadn’t cracked. Wasn’t home, contrary to security’s expectations. Or had flung herself on security wires rather than listen to the ringing.
He sent his brief message to Tabini; and the one damning Hanks to diplomatic hell to the Foreign Office.
He had his sandwich: the Bu-javid was always kabiu, strictly proper, and the game allowable in the season was by no means his favorite: that left fish and eggs, the allowable alternatives, as his diet until the midpoint of this month, which was, thankfully, almost on them.
The Bu-javid, relatively modern among atevi antiquities, but shared by various atevi philosophical schools, was more meticulously kabiu than Malguri, in fact, where wise chefs put by a cooked roast or two of this and that. Atevi never shot game out of season, one never trafficked in—unthinkable—domestic meat and never sold meat out of season, but Malguri cannily managed to have left
overs enough to stretch through the less palatable months. A civilized solution, in his reckoning and, one suspected, the original custom of which the strict kabiu of the Bu-javid was the rigid, entrenched rule, probably more to do with early lack of refrigeration than any ceremonial reason—but the paidhi wasn’t about to suggest such a solution to the very kabiu Atigeini chef. The paidhi had enough controversy on his hands, thank you, and such a suggestion might set him on the side of some provincial philosophical sect bloodily opposed to some other one critical to the union the Bu-javid represented.
He took to the afternoon reports, wondering now where Jago had gone. She’d just not turned up in the to-do with the office. Add that to Banichi, who wasn’t here.
Tano, meanwhile, God help him—coped.
Someone arrived at the door; he hoped it was Jago or Banichi, if only to have the important parts of his household in one place and within his understanding.
But a trip to the door proved it to be another batch of messages—one from the installation at Mogari-nai, which received the transmissions from the ship, which he was anxious to get. That transmissions existed showed, for one thing, that the ship was talking again, and offered a possibility that something might have budged. So he took the tape from Tano, walked back to the study where he had the recorders set up, put it in and set it to play.
The usual chatter of machines talking to machines.
And past that exchange of machine protocols, more chatter, involving, this time, the transmission of documents or images—he wasn’t sure, but it was digital, and he was sure the atevi machinery could spit it out, the same as atevi documents ended up intercepted by Mospheira, where there was a listening station: spying on each other was a full-time, well-funded operation, an absolute guarantee of employment for the practitioners.
Tano came in bearing a stack of paper: more correspondence, he thought. But Tano said, quietly:
“I think this must go with the tape, nadi Bren.”
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