There was a disturbance at the back of the room. Tano and Algini came to sudden alertness where they stood, at either side of the room, and Bren turned his head, ready to fling himself to the floor.
An elderly ateva had wandered in, in a bathrobe, barefoot, hair in disarray. “The answer,” he said, “the answer, to the dilemma of the philosophers: the universe does not consist in straight lines, and therefore the path of light is not economical.”
“The emeritus,” someone said, and the students rose in respect to the old man. Bren rose more slowly.
“Aha!” the emeritus said, pointing a finger. “The paidhi! Yes, nadi! I have the proof—” The emeritus indeed had a sheaf of papers in his fist and brandished them with enthusiasm. “Proof of the conundrum you pose! Elegant! Most elegant! I thank you, nadi! This is the corroboration I’ve been searching for—I’ve written it in notation—”
“Tea and wafers,” the senior astronomer ordered, and arrived at Bren’s elbow to urge, in a hushed tone: “He’s quite old. He will not remember to eat!”
“By all means,” Bren said, and to the elderly gentleman: “Nand’ emeritus, I’m anxious to know your opinions—I fear I’m no mathematician, nor an astronomer, merely the translator—but—”
“It’s so simple!” the emeritus declared, and descended on him with his sheaf of papers, which he insisted on giving to Bren, and then, with the students and the astronomers crowding around, began to make huge charcoal notes on the standing lectern pad—
The paidhi sat with notepad in hand and copied furiously. So did the senior astronomer, though, thank God, the charcoaled paper simply flipped over the back, as good as computer storage. And the emeritus began to talk about orders of numbers in terms the paidhi had never quite grasped. There were notations he’d never used. There were symbols he’d never met. But he rendered them as best he could, and rapidly decorated his notes with annotated commentary in as quick a hand as he could manage.
A handful of determined local officials were standing on the tarmac in the plane’s lights, a group which faded away into stars as the plane lifted.
Then the paidhi was landing at Malguri Airport, and in the distance his beast wandered over reduced-scale hills, over which other, smaller game fled.
But the subway arrived, a dark figure beckoned and he had to leave his beast; the subway delivered them back to the basement station in the Bu-javid much after supper, and one had to wake the emeritus—to tell him something urgent, and in the dream he said it, but he couldn’t himself hear it, or understand the words.
But Banichi was at hand to meet them, with a handful of the Bu-javid officers, and a handful of passes, which lodged the students and nand’ Grigiji upstairs, wonder of wonders, in the residence of the dean of the university, who proclaimed himself interested in this theory, and they were holding national meetings on the matter.
He himself couldn’t get into the meeting. He’d arrived late, and all the doors were locked. He could see the emeritus standing at the lectern and he could see all the atevi listening, but the paidhi was locked out, able only to see the mathematical notations on the pad, which held symbols that he couldn’t make sense of.
Then he tried to go by another stairway to get in by the back entry to the hall—and lost his way. He tried door after door after door in the hall, and they led to more stairs, and other halls, increasingly dark places that he thought were unguessed levels of the Bu-javid. He was supposed to address the assembled scholars, but he couldn’t find his way back and he knew that he was the only one that could make the symbols on the notepad make sense to the hasdrawad, which otherwise wouldn’t listen to the emeritus.
He wandered into a place with a door that let out into the hall above the lecture hall. But he couldn’t find a stairway down. At every turn he found himself isolated.
He found a lift, finally, and pushed the button for 1, or he thought he’d pushed that button. The car’s light panel developed numbers and symbols he didn’t understand and kept traveling. He knew Banichi and Jago would be angry at him for getting into a car and pushing buttons he didn’t understand. But they’d looked fine when he pushed them.
He called on the emergency phone, and Jago answered, but she said she had an appointment this afternoon, would tomorrow be acceptable? And he said, he didn’t know why he said, that he couldn’t wait, and he was going to get off at the floor where it was going.
Which eventually did come, and let out into a gray and brown haze in which he was totally lost. He called Jago on a phone that turned up, and Jago said, sorry, she would be there tomorrow. He’d have to wait. So he kept walking, certain that sitting still here would never get him to the meeting on time. He came to the turn in the lower hallway.
And became aware that his beast was following him, and that it was the hall outside his bedroom in Malguri. He was out of sandwiches. But the beast was hunting small vermin that ran along the edges of the hallway.
It passed him, snuffling for holes in the masonry, and left him in the dark, looking toward the crack of light that came from under his own bedroom door, beckoning him out of the nightmare and into the warmth of the familiar, if he could only get there. He walked and walked, and there always seemed progress, but he couldn’t reach it. The light became the cold light of dawn, and then it was possible, but he had to leave, he had something to do, and couldn’t remember what it was….
Thump.
His head jerked up. He blinked, looked about him in confusion.
“We’re coming in, nand’ paidhi,” Tano said.
He looked out the window, at dark, at the lights of Shejidan, unable for a moment to understand how he’d come here. He moved a foot and felt his document case stowed quite safely where he’d put it.
He watched the city lights, the hills and heights and the city spread out like a carpet, all done with numbers. He had met such a person as the emeritus and he had a case full of papers—and the lights out there were all numbers.
He drifted off again during landing and was back in that hallway, looking for admittance to what he had to do. It was unjust that no one told him how to get inside. He began to be angry, and he went looking for Tabini to tell him things were badly arranged, and the paidhi needed …
But he couldn’t remember what he needed. Things were shredding apart very badly. He was just walking down a hall and the doors were very far apart.
Bump. The wheels were on the ground. He saw the field lights ripping past the window. The paidhi traveled at jet speeds. The paidhi’s mind didn’t.
But he’d had no time. He’d had to get home.
Blink and he was in Malguri. Blink and the plane was slowing for the turn onto the taxiway. Lights going past one another, blue and white and red.
16
It was so troubling a dream he couldn’t shake it, not even at the aiji-dowager’s breakfast table—he sat in the open summer air, with the dawn coming up over the Bergid, applying preserves to a piece of bread and thinking about beasts and bedrooms, astronomers and city lights and mecheiti, until Ilisidi gave him a curious look, rapped the teacup with her knife, and inquired if he were communing with the ship.
“No,” he said quickly. “Your pardon, nand’ dowager.”
“You’re losing weight,” Ilisidi said. “Eat. So nice to see you with that clumsy thing off your arm. Get your health back. Exercise. Eat.”
He had a bite of the toast. Two. He was hungry this morning. And he had had a decent sleep. He had his wits about turn, such as they ever served to fend off Ilisidi’s razor intellect—even if he had spent the night walking hallways in company with a creature whose whole kind might be extinct. It was a very, very old piece of taxidermy. So he’d assumed in Malguri.
“Young man,” Ilisidi said. “Come. Is it business? Or is it another question wandering the paths of intellect?”
“Nand’ dowager,” he said, “I was wondering last night about the staff’s welfare at Malguri. Do you have word on them? Are Djinana and Maigi
well?”
“Quite well,” Ilisidi said.
“I’m very glad.”
“I’ll convey your concern to them. Have the fruit. It’s quite good.”
He remembered Banichi chiding him about salad courses. And Hanks’ damn pregnant calendar.
“So why do you ask?” Ilisidi asked him.
“A human concern. A neurotic wish, perhaps, for one’s good memories to stay undimmed by future events.”
“Or further information?”
“Perhaps.”
The dowager always asked more than she answered. He didn’t press the matter with her, fearing to lose her interest in him.
“And Nokhada? And Babsidi?”
“Perfectly fine. Why should you ask?”
The gardened and tile-roofed interior of the Bu-javid marched away downhill from the balcony, soft-edged with first light, and there was a muttering of thunder, though the sky was clear as far as the Bergid: it presaged clouds in the west, hidden by the roofs.
He hadn’t called Hanks on his return. He wasn’t in a charitable mood for Hanks’ illusions, or gifted with enough concentration for Hanks’ economics report, in any form.
He still couldn’t get a call through to his mother. He’d tried, and the notoriously political phone service was having difficulties this morning. Could he possibly wonder that the gremlins manifested only on the link to the mainland?
The note the Foreign Office had slipped him declared nothing helpful, just that his suspicions were correct: nothing was being decided where it had a damn chance to be sane, in the normal course of advisory councils and university personnel who actually knew history and knew atevi; everything was being decided behind closed doors and in secret meetings of people who weren’t elected, hadn’t the will of the people, and were going to, he’d bet his life on it, maneuver to cast everything into the hands of the ship, the station, and those willing to relocate there.
And, worrisome small matter, Jase Graham hadn’t called back.
“So?” Ilisidi asked. “You’ve talked with these ship folk. And now they land.”
“Two of them. You’ve gotten my translations.”
“To be sure. But they don’t answer questions well, do they? Who are they? What do they want? Why did they come back? And why should we care?”
“Well, for one most critical thing, aiji-ma, they’ve been to places the Determinists have staked a great deal can’t exist, they want to export labor off the planet, they want atevi to sell them the materials to make them masters of the universe, and they probably think they can get it cheap because humans on Mospheira weren’t talking as if atevi have any say in the business.”
“Too bad,” Ilisidi said, dicing an egg onto her toast. “So? What does the paidhi advise us? Shall we all rush to arms? Perhaps sell vacation homes on Malguri grounds, for visiting humans?”
“The hell with that,” he said, and saw Ilisidi’s mouth quirk.
“So?” Ilisidi said, not, after all, preoccupied with her breakfast.
“I have some hope in this notion of paidhiin from the ship. I think it’s a very good idea. I can have direct influence at least on Graham, and he seems a sensible, safety-concerned individual. If nothing else, maybe I can scare hell out of him—or her—and have more common sense than I’m hearing out of Mospheira.”
“Scare hell out of Hanks-paidhi,” Ilisidi said. “That’s a beginning.”
“I wish I could. I’ve tried. She’s new. She’s quite possibly competent in economics—”
“And she has powerful backers.”
“I have freely admitted to it.”
“Amazing.” Ilisidi held her cup out for her servant to refill. “Tea, nand’ paidhi?”
He took the offering. “Thank you. —Dowager-ma, may a presumptuous human ask your opinion?”
“Mine? Now what should my opinion sway? Affairs of state?”
“Lord Geigi. I’m concerned for him.”
“For that melon-headed man?”
“Who—nevertheless occupies a sensitive and conservative position. Whom—a pretender to my office has needlessly upset.”
“Melon-heads all. Full of seeds and pulp. The universe of stars is boundless. Or it is not. Certainly it doesn’t consult us.”
“That sums up the argument.”
“Do humans in their wisdom know the universe of stars?”
“I—don’t know.” He wasn’t ready to tread in that territory. Not for any lure. “I know there are humans who study such things. I’d be surprised if anyone definitively knew the universe.”
“Oh, but it’s simple to Geigi. Things add. They have it all summed and totaled, these Determinists.”
“Does the dowager chance to have access to Determinists?” Many of the lords paid mathematicians and counters of every ilk, never to be surprised by controversy.
Certainly Tabini’s house had a fair sampling of such experts, and he’d bet his retirement that Ilisidi had.
“Now what would the paidhi want with Determinists? To illumine their darkness? To mend their fallacious ways?”
“Hanks-paidhi made an injudicious comment, relative to numbers exceeding the light constant. I know you must have certain numerological experts on your staff, skilled people—”
More toast arrived at Ilisidi’s elbow. And slid onto her plate to an accompaniment of sausages. “Skilled damned nonsense. Limiting the illimitable is folly.”
“Skilled people,” Bren reprised, refusing diversion, “to explain how a ship can get from one place to another faster than light travels—which classic physics says—”
“Oh, posh, posh, classic folly. Such extraneous things you humans entrain. I could have lived quite content without these ridiculous numbers. Or, I will tell you, lord Geigi’s despondent messages.”
“Despondent?”
“Desperate, rather. Shall I confide the damage that woman has done? He’s trying to borrow money secretly. He’s quite terrified, perceiving that he’s consulted a person of infelicitous numbers, a person, moreover, who let her proposals and his finances become too public—he’s quite, quite exposed. Folly. Absolute folly.”
“I’m distressed for him.”
“Oh, none more distressed than his creditors, who thought him stable enough to be a long-term risk as aiji of his province; now they perceive him as a short-term and very high risk, with his credit and his potential for paying his debts sinking by the hour. The man is up for sale. It’s widely known. It’s very shameful. Probably I shall help him. But I dislike to trade in loyalties and cash.”
“I quite understand that. But I find him a brave man—and possibly trying to protect others in his man’chi.”
“Posh, what do you understand? You’ve no atevi sensibilities.”
“I can help him. I think I can help him, dowager-ji. I think I’ve found a way to explain Hanks’ remark … if I had very wise mathematicians, correct mathematicians from the Determinists’ point of view….”
“Are you asking me to find such people?”
“I fear none of that philosophy have cast their lot with your grandson. You, on the other hand …”
“Tabini asks me to rescue this foolish man.”
“I ask you. Personally. Tabini knows nothing about it. Rescue him. Don’t buy him. Don’t take a public posture. Don’t say that I suggested it. Surely he could never accept it.”
“Why?” Ilisidi asked. “Is this the mysterious trip to the north?”
“I’d be astonished if I ever achieved mystery to you, nand’ dowager.”
“Impudent rascal. So you were out there rescuing Geigi the melon?”
“Yes.”
“Why, in the name of the felicitous gods?”
He couldn’t say in terms he knew she couldn’t misapprehend. He looked out toward the Bergid, where dawn was turning the sky faintly blue. “There’s no value,” he discovered himself saying, finally, “in the collapse of any part of the present order of things. The world has achieved a certain h
armony. Stability favors atevi interests. Yours, your grandson’s. Everyone’s. Stability even favors Mospheira, if certain Mospheirans weren’t acting like fools.”
“This woman is a wonder,” Ilisidi said. “She should have sought me out. But she had no notion she should.”
“She’s harmless on Mospheira. Where I’d like to send her. But in moments of fright, my government freezes solid. This is such a moment. Let me tell you, dowager-ji, one secret truth of humans: we have self-interests, and truly selfish and wicked humans can be far more selfish than atevi psychology can readily comprehend.”
“Ah. And are atevi immune?”
“Far more loyal to certain interests. Humans can be thorough rebels, acting alone and in total self-interest.”
“So can atevi be great fools. And if Geigi believed this woman, still I wonder why you took this very long, very urgent excursion, and sought advice of such eccentrics.”
“A brilliant old man, nand’ dowager. I recommend him to your attention.”
“An astronomer,” Ilisidi said with scorn.
“Possibly a brilliant man, aiji-ma. I’d almost have brought him back to court, aiji-ma, but I feared court was too fierce a place for him. His name is Grigiji. He’s spent a long life looking for a reconciliation of human science and atevi numbers. His colleagues at the observatory have devoted themselves to recovering the respectability of atevi astronomers. They want to create an atevi science that uses atevi numerical concepts to look past human approximations … approximations which I will assure you humans do use, from time to time … to an integration of very vast numbers with the numbers of daily life.”
He said what he said with calculation, in hope of catching Ilisidi’s interest in things atevi, and in atevi tradition. And he saw the dowager paying more than casual interest for that one instant, the mask of indifference set aside.
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