Invader

by C. J. Cherryh

  Then notification via pocket-com came in to Tabini and his security chief about the progress of the search through the lower court, where Hanks had disappeared—nothing encouraging so far, and the paidhi, feeling wobblier and wobblier, could, finally, only ask himself whether they were right in suspecting something against the established order and whether it was not instead the paidhiin’s doings, placing the atevi universe-concept under attack.

  Grigiji’s mathematics.

  His visit to the observatory.

  Ilisidi hadn’t read the paper and then gotten angry: Ilisidi had grown colder and colder, once that paper landed on her table and its implications landed in the delicate equation of atevi politics.

  Which might mean—another perusal of the floor tiles, which had brown squares and brass inclusions in a floral pattern—the paidhi had stuck his good intentions into atevi affairs and atevi debates Ilisidi was already familiar with, come back with a theory that wasn’t as new as he thought, or that was somehow controversial in ways a human didn’t easily twig to.

  Certainly possible when the math came far too esoteric for the paidhi to unravel, when the search after ultimate rationality that atevi had made over thousands of years was bearing atevi results and things proposed to them were going to break down very, very basic beliefs such as—God knew—might set off psychological, political, sociological earthquakes.

  The paidhi could only ask himself in that fight how much else could come undone today, and how much of it he might have caused, and what subtleties he should have long since guessed. All well-meaning, he’d brought that theory of Grigiji’s to the city, he’d let it loose in blind hope that atevi argument might make sense to atevi, and maybe not known enough—as no human was able to know—what other bombshells might lie buried in the document. Hanks had tossed FTL into the dialogue and he’d called her foolish. He’d gone into that meeting to Ilisidi in blind faith in her numerical agnosticism, never once considering that Ilisidi herself might hold some well-concealed articles of faith Grigiji could challenge.

  He kept playing and replaying the breakfast meeting in his mind, how strange it had seemed to him then that Ilisidi hadn’t looked at the papers, that she hadn’t deigned to take them—

  Dammit, he didn’t yet understand Ilisidi’s reaction, except to conclude that she disapproved what he was doing, or distrusted what he was doing—or disapproved unread what he had brought her. He didn’t think Ilisidi herself would flinch from intellectual challenge, but she would take offense if she thought he was being a gullible fool or if his actions indicated he took her for one.

  All of which still left Ilisidi among the suspects. He hadn’t heard Tabini bring up the name, but he suspected she was on Tabini’s short list And failing Ilisidi—

  “Show me,” Damiri said, “show me where these fools attempted, Saidi-ji. I want to see. I’m tired of waiting. We’ve chased them, we’re surely clear by now.”

  “Nandi,” Naidiri began to say.

  “I am not going to cower in the foyer, naiin-ji. This is Atigeini territory, this is my house, and my orders, fact; this is my window that was broken, fact; and my security and the paidhi’s security has things in hand, fact. —So may we quit discussing theory in my house, please, and have a look at fact before we loose the Guild?”

  “May we discuss fact before we rush into the line of fire?” Tabini retorted. “We have too many willing suspects, not all of whom are outside this house.”

  “I suspect nothing! Look to your own relatives!”

  “My relatives? My relatives? Give me an heir, woman, and we’ll discuss our relatives. Meanwhile kindly don’t walk in front of windows.”

  “Heir, heir, heir, of course the heir! Any moment, nai-ji, perhaps tonight, nai-ji, and in the meantime—”

  “In the meantime, take orders like a lady, nai-ji, and make less of a target, fortunate gods, woman!”

  At a certain point one decidedly found the floor tiles preoccupying and, as the paidhi reflected that, while it was an honor to be treated as part of the household, along with security and the servants, he had much rather—

  “Fortunate gods, inform me why I chose an Atigeini!”

  “Intelligence. Resourcefulness. Our distinguished history. My breakfast room, nai-ji, if you please, with my servants, with your security if you’ve such doubts of my relatives.”

  “Gods least favorable, let’s see your damn doors,” Tabini muttered, and waved a gesture toward the recesses of the apartment. “Naidiri! Have a care to the windows, the lot of you. Damn!”

  Forthwith there began an expedition, Saidin in the lead, along with Algini, a crowd of security and police, even certain of the servants, to let Damiri assess the damage to the doors and the breakfast room.

  The paidhi found nothing quite graceful to do but tag along as, at least, a witness to the destruction. He hoped for a chance along the way past his bedroom to duck in and put the gun away; but there was security before and behind, and no lingering invited. Someone at least had closed the inner shutters in the study as they passed, and the servants who lined the way were all very quiet, very subdued and worried, bowing like grass in the storm of Damiri’s passage and doubtless staring at their backs after they’d gone.

  Lights were on throughout the apartment, now; they passed scattered police, scattered security guards, especially in the area of the breakfast room.

  And the damage there proved appallingly worse than Bren had feared: not only shattered glass from the doors, but shattered wall tiles where the shots had raked the walls and splintered antique porcelain reliefs that one only hoped restorers could repair. He felt a physical shock, realizing the small size of the fragments where porcelain had met high-powered bullets—some of it might be the dust on his clothing, and he asked himself if they could possibly recover enough chips of porcelain to reassemble or recreate the bas relief of flowers and vines—

  “Gods damn them!” Damiri said.

  Saidin—Saidin looked absolutely devastated.

  “Damiri-daja,” Bren felt it incumbent on him to say, perhaps foolishly, seeing the thunderous frown on Damiri’s face, “Nand’ Saidin—I am inexpressibly sorry. I wish—I wish—if I was the target—I’d stood somewhere far less delicate.”

  Damiri whirled on him so suddenly he feared she meant to hit him. But all the violence in her scowl and the lock of her arms, one in the other, scarcely reached her voice. “Nand’ paidhi,” she said, “this affront to my house will have an answer. This attack on my guest and my staff will have a severe answer. This willful destruction will have blood. There are those who will carry that answer with or without the Guild, with or without other Atigeini approval.”

  “’Miri-ji,” Tabini said reprovingly.

  “Don’t caution me! This is intolerable! Our human guest can express his shock—so wherein can civilized atevi accept such goings-on? I do not, I do not, aiji-ma! Fire at random into the premises? Shoot the servants wholesale along with the target? Naidiri, Sagimi, is this Guild work or is it not?”

  “It is not,” a man said, and Naidiri echoed, “Not possibly.”

  Certainly not Cenedi, Bren thought, then, finally finding a landing place for the doubt that had been buzzing around his brain. Not Cenedi. Not any of the men who worked for Ilisidi. He wanted desperately to believe that that was the truth, and on that thought, he wanted to know for certain that Ilisidi was safe.

  Not to mention Jago and Tano and his own household.

  He listened to the arrangements for restorationists to come in to assess the damage, without, Damiri said, disturbance to the paidhi.

  “I will not,” Damiri declared, still hot, “let this insult happen and not retaliate. They have me to deal with, if they trust in your forbearance, nai-ji. They hope to provoke my uncle. They hope to send a signal. Well, they’ve certainly sent one.” She bent and picked up a shattered flower, a three-petaled lily. “Look, look at this destruction. I want my uncle to see this, aiji-ma. I want the whole world to see
it, I want it sent out to the news services, along with the advisement the paidhi is quite well and undisturbed by this foolishness. He can sleep in my own bedroom and have breakfast with my staff and with me in this breakfast room. I tell you I will not be intimidated.”

  “No, no, no, ’Miri-ji,” Tabini said softly. “I’d rather far less publicity until we find them and eliminate this problem. Then use the television, yes, and all the pictures. On the other hand—if you wish to send the image of this handiwork to your uncle—”

  Damiri cast Tabini a silent, sidelong look.

  “Send him a piece of the porcelain,” Tabini said. “The lily … would do quite well. One believes possibly someone exceeded orders. On the other hand, perhaps they wished to signal their contempt of Atigeini claims to command by using this as a diversion.”

  There was a positively fierce enjoyment in Damiri’s eyes. “Your plane.”

  “At your disposal. But I want it back by morning. And it doesn’t refuel there. —Bren-ji, you’re quite safe, one assures you, in whatever bedroom you choose tonight. Don’t let ’Miri-daja bully you. It’s a damn stiff mattress.”

  One could well blush. “Tabini-ma.” The ache in the shoulder made his teeth hurt, he had never yet found the chance to be rid of the gun, and he tried consistently to keep that side and that pocket away from atevi eyes. Especially those of the Bu-javid police. “I only, earnestly, regret that I attracted such difficulty to this house, and I’m quite content with my bedroom.”

  “The paidhi is very gracious,” Damiri said, and offered her hand, expecting his: he gave it, perforce, compelled to look up to a straightforwardly curious stare, a very solid handclasp. “Scandal, scandal, scandal. I think it’s a very nice, a very honest face, myself, and my aunt can swallow her salacious and doubtless entirely envious suspicions. —You’re so exquisitely polite, nand’ paidhi.”

  “I—hope to be, daja-ma.”

  “I may never get my staff back. They’re quite besotted.”

  “I—hope I’ve done nothing improper, daja-ma.”

  “Bren-paidhi. They dream nightly of you doing something improper. I’ve heard the reports.”

  “Daja-ma—”

  Tabini rescued his arm and his hand and walked him a little distance away. “Atigeini internal politics be damned, the lily porcelains are not the question, Hanks-paidhi is. The attack on your residence might have been quite serious, but I doubt they expected to succeed: it was likely intended as a diversion from the real objective, and my prospective wife’s relatives will not take this lightly, not the attack, certainly not the collateral damage, least of all the slight of such damage being a mere diversion, no matter how they’ve regarded your tenancy here on other principles. Have you any personal suspects in the kidnaping of Hanks-paidhi, Bren-ji?”

  “I—no, aiji-ma, discounting that it was anyone of the Guild, no, all my suspects vanish. Except—someone who wanted revenge. Or someone who—” the thought nudged its way to the center of his apprehensions “—who wanted both: her in their hands and me dead—leaving no paidhi between you and Mospheira at this juncture. For whatever reason.”

  “If they could achieve that. Which they surely don’t expect.”

  “I would not say,” Damiri interjected, having overtaken them, “that this attempt evidences great intellect. Desperation. But not great intellect.”

  “Or carelessness of Atigeini disposition.”

  “Stupidity,” Damiri said. “Aiji-ma.”

  “The fact that one doesn’t care what your uncle thinks is not necessarily evidence of stupidity. —Daja-ji.”

  “The fact I regard the lilies as my holding and the artist however dead as in my man’chi should have them sleepless at night. If my uncle demurs, I demand satisfaction!”

  “One will have it, lily-daja, but the paidhi’s safety is in my own, and you will not initiate actions that jeopardize Bren or that disagreeable woman whose life I foolishly agreed to protect.”

  “One has no wish to jeopardize Bren in any way.” Damiri laid a hand on Bren’s sore shoulder: a very gentle hand, of which he was glad. “Have I ever shown such an inclination?”

  What did one do? Flinch from under the aiji’s lady’s hand? One stood still, aware of the double entendre, and said, solemnly, “By no means, nai-ma.”

  “Aiji-ma.” It was Algini in the doorway, bidding for Tabini’s attention, with: “The ship is asking for Bren-paidhi. Forgive the intrusion.”

  The mind—wasn’t ready for one more extraneity, not for Mosphei’, Mospheiran politics, or foreign negotiations. The mind was on shattered porcelain, Damiri’s not-entirely joking threats, and the intricacies of atevi association: that, and Ilisidi, and the Guisi, and politics and the disappearance of Hanks-paidhi, which, outside its atevi impact, was going to play very badly in certain Mospheiran circles—let alone aboard a ship contemplating sending personnel down to them.

  The ship mustn’t find out. The associations within the Association had already absorbed all the strain the bonds of man’chi would bear. Tabini could not bear any reneging on the landing, no matter the reason for caution.

  “If I could guess,” Algini said, as he headed for the doorway, “it’s a young man, nadi-ma.”

  “Jase,” he said.

  “The landing,” Tabini said, tagging him close. “Possibly.”

  “Very possibly,” he said, on his double train of thought, trying to gather up the lost threads of the Jase Graham affair: like why the ship hadn’t called the mainland for two days, and what Mospheira had been trying to argue with the ship, latest, in the meantime, and what he had to say as a contingency to the ship trying to back out for reasons that might have nothing whatsoever to do with assassination attempts.

  At least one answer to matters held in suspension—or news that another deal was collapsing—was waiting for him on the phone.

  19

  “Hello?” Jase’s voice was cheerful, perhaps, Bren thought, to put the best face on a change of mind. “Bren? Is that you?”

  He refused to be seduced. But answered the tone. “It better be, since nobody else here can talk to you. How are things up there?”

  “Doing fine, actually. How are things below?”

  “Oh, fine.” He was taking the call in Damiri’s office, standing, because otherwise the crowd overwhelmed him: Tabini, Damiri, Banichi, Naidiri, Saidin and two of Naidiri’s aides. Which fairly well accounted for the wall space and all the standing room except the small area by the desk that he maintained, holding the phone. “Just kind of waiting for your call.”

  “Well, sorry about that. Things just proceeded slower than I thought. I hope I didn’t worry anybody, but just getting through the notes you sent up and talking to the captains—meetings, chain-reaction meetings, I suppose it’s no different where you are.”

  “No, no, unfortunately not. One of those things that seems to go with air-breathing biology. —So how’s the process running?” He didn’t want to sound short of breath, he tried to keep his voice cheerful and light, and all of a sudden his hands were shaking so he feared he couldn’t keep the tremor out of his voice, either. “Sorry. A little out of breath. Had a bit of rush to get here down the hall. Are we agreeing or disagreeing?”

  “Agreeing, actually, pretty well. We’ve picked Taiben for a landing. What’s your assessment?”

  He cast a look across at Tabini before it dawned on his shock-numbed brain that Tabini didn’t understand. “Taiben,” he echoed, and looked in vain for a reaction. “It’s convenient, easy to get to and from. Has a jet-port, wide, wide flat with no trees, no likely complications, at least.” He got a sign from Tabini, finally, that told him that Tabini understood the choice and accepted it. “Fine with us.”

  “I’ve been practicing. How’s Dai ghiyi-ma, aigi’ta amath-aiji, an Jase Graham?”

  “Hamatha-aijijin, but that’s real good.” Ears around him had gone quite attentive, and he hoped Jase tried nothing with infelicitous variants. “I’m impressed. You
puzzled that out of notes.”

  “I’m anxious for this to work. They don’t just shoot, do they, if they don’t recognize you? The island’s been saying there’s a chance of attacks. But Taiben is the aiji’s estate.”

  “Public land, actually, in the way atevi reckon. But the people on the land are the aiji’s staff. And, no, atevi don’t go shooting at the aiji’s invited visitors. They’re trying to scare you.”

  “That’s not difficult at this point. Tell me again the chute’s going to open and this is all going to go without a glitch-up.”

  “Ninety-nine point nine percent of the pods worked.” He’d no idea of the real statistic, but statistical accuracy wasn’t the reassurance Jase was asking for. “The second that chute takes hold, you’re all right, and I imagine you’ll feel it; that’s what they say in the old accounts. How’s the pod look to your experts? That’s the important question.”

  “They’ve substituted the heat shield. On your advice and our discussing it in committee, they didn’t ever unpack the parachute. They’re just providing a second one. If the drop—I really hate that word—doesn’t slow after the original chute should have deployed, the second chute’s supposed to blow open automatically. If they put the canister together right.”

  “The first one won’t fail. You damn sure won’t lose two. You’re sure of your coming down where you want. They’ve got that figured. Just don’t use the old targeting. You’ll land on Mospheira for sure.”

  Another nervous laugh. “I’ll be right on the mark, if the parachute opens. If we go to the backup chute, well, I’ll fax you the charts and figures. Can you receive those where you are?”

  “No trouble. Just use the protocols I gave you, and I’ll walk down the hall and get it.”