Invader

by C. J. Cherryh

  In which light—he didn’t send the warning to Mospheira. The aforesaid potential spy and employee of the Mospheiran government had to lie abed and not make a move more than he had, letting whatever happened to Deana happen, because Mospheira couldn’t do a damned thing. His own security and Tabini’s was the only chance Deana had for rescue, and if he made that call, as Shawn and other people pinning their careers on him might not understand in its emotional or logical context, Tabini could lose his gambit with the ship and Deana—

  If they let her live, Deana could find herself in the position of paidhi to the opposition to Tabini, dammit.

  Exactly the position she’d courted, if she lived to have the honor, if her bones held out—atevi didn’t always exercise due caution—and if she could use her head.

  God, she might call Mospheira and say she’d been kidnaped with precisely the idea of aborting the landing. She might, in fact, work for the opposition. It might serve Mospheira very well.

  On that thought his eyes came open again, staring into an answerless dark. He asked himself how he’d gotten into this position, except one good intention at a time; asked himself, too, how he’d gotten so much invested in betraying his president, his government and every democratic process on Mospheira that said one man didn’t make decisions like this.

  Step by step and on understandings of the situation Mospheira’s government didn’t have: it wasn’t the kind of answer a good government servant gave to his government—

  But, dammit, the officials of his government backed Hanks, who might still be able to reach Mospheira, with the conspirators’ full permission, for all he knew—and blow everything.

  He wasn’t thinking clearly. He wasn’t reasoning in a way that came up with answers—just—the arrangement he’d worked out led to atevi being dealt in on the development; Shawn might stand by him, a handful of the FO might stand by him, even in not using that code, and letting the landing go ahead—at least Deana couldn’t use the big dish. Not without relay to Mospheira.

  Which might tell the ship folk something, too.

  That was the only thought that let him finally settle toward sleep.

  20

  The plane’s engines were running as they boarded, not surprising since the plane had flown two trips during the night before their own, at dawn, and refueled. Of baggage, there was a mysterious lot already going on board that had Tabini’s red-and-black seals on the bags, nothing to do with his own small bags, all for cabin storage, which were simply clothes enough to last until the lander came down, to last until they came back to the Bu-javid.

  There were at least thirty cases out there on the baggage ramp.

  There were—persistent since he’d waked with a bowlful of urgent personal messages in the foyer and, as he left, bouquets standing in the hall outside—well-wishes from officials and others to whom the event was not as secret as he wished.

  Now as he looked out the window a van pulled up, the driver argued with security, there was waving and pointing toward his window, the driver peered up at him, and understanding his presence was in question, Bren gave a tentative wave.

  After which the driver and an assistant set more bouquets out in view of his window, in the vicinity of the plane, that being as close as his nervous security would let the deliveries come.

  It wasn’t the last van. Two more pulled up, with more flowers, until it looked like a funeral or a wedding. And the cards at least reached him, carried up by boarding crew, and security, even by the crew who carried the carefully inspected galley load aboard. The bouquets were from committee heads. They were from the serving staff. They were from the clericals, lately begun in their jobs, one of which said,

  Nand’ paidhi, this is my first job. I am rereading all the mail I did in hopes that the threat against you was nothing I missed.

  And another:

  Nand’ paidhi, please be very careful. Don’t let there be a war.

  And one in elaborate court calligraphy from the gentleman of Tano’s acquaintance, the manager who’d come out of retirement, who said, more expansively, Nand’ paidhi, I have all confidence in your security. Please accept my wishes for your long life and the wishes of all my house for the continued benefit of your good counsel to the aiji and his house, long may he direct the Association.

  The latest delivery people understood their restrictions and simply laid the bouquets within sight of his window, a mass of pastel color in the grayed and cloudy dawn. He felt walled off from his well-wishers, lonely, seeing the bouquets abandoned to the weather and the wind from the engines, comforted by the gesture, though, and also appalled, thinking how expensive some of those bouquets were, from clericals who didn’t make all that lot of money. He tucked the cards one and all into his document case, the ones with plain citizen ribbons, the ones with heavy noble seals, to answer when he could. He vowed to send at least a small floral recognition along with each one of them to the clericals, who, he was confident, hadn’t missed any warning. No, dammit, not a blossom or two—real bouquets, and put it on the paidhi’s florist bill, which went right to the State Department, with notations to bounce it back to him if State balked.

  Another van. Another bouquet arrived, a huge, extravagant one. The delivery agency wished vehemently to board with it. He watched the argument through the window. But his security was adamant, called Banichi, and Banichi himself brought the card aboard and gave it to him, clearly the price of the agreement.

  “An importunate well-wisher,” Banichi said, and the first glance determined that it and the bouquet were lord Geigi’s.

  Nand’ paidhi, it said, wiser heads than I are studying the answer which you have returned in regard to my question, at unanticipated personal effort. I deeply regret that your absence in pursuit of this answer may have given opportunity or motive to some person or persons to attack the paidhiin, an action in which I realize that I am necessarily suspect, but which I personally deplore. I have written under separate seal to Tabini-aiji, and hope that you will also confirm my good wishes to your associates of whatever degree. I also hope for the safety of Hanks-paidhi and will bend whatever efforts I and my staff can make to assure that no harm comes to her.

  “Do you believe this gesture?” he asked Banichi.

  Banichi took the card, read it, lifted a brow. “One would never question.” And added: “Nor accept the bouquet from this source under one’s roof.”

  “Surely it doesn’t contain bombs. They’ve been fueling out there. The truck—”

  “One doesn’t know what it doesn’t contain. Gambling is not a passion with me. I’ll convey your politic appreciation. I’ve already suggested they move the fuel truck, and pull us away from the area ahead of schedule.”

  “Jago isn’t aboard.”

  “Jago is coming,” Banichi said, “at all possible speed. If she should miss us, she’ll come out this afternoon with Tano and Algini. I agree with you. I increasingly dislike this accumulation of good wishes near our fuel tanks. Especially the latest.”

  “Have you any word yet on Hanks?”

  “They’re still looking.”

  “Jago—” He could see, past Banichi’s shoulder, the aiji’s other security preparing to shut the door.

  And a running figure coming from the building and headed for the steps.

  The men inside evidently saw her, too. They waited. In a moment more Jago was through the door, the door shut, and the crew outside was pulling the ramp back.

  “Have they found anything?” he asked as Jago, smoothing her uniform to its usual impeccable state, came down the aisle to join them.

  “One doubts. Would you care for a snack after takeoff?”

  “Just word on Hanks.”

  “None. Are you sure? I’ll be having fruit juice, myself.”

  “The same, then. Thank you.” He cast a look at Banichi as Jago passed him down the aisle. “I thought the new policy was to tell the paidhi the truth.”

  “No. One resolved to brief the paid
hi on matters regarding his safety. Not on operations.”

  “Dammit, Banichi!”

  “Information which might tempt him to assist. Or make impossible his innocent reaction to other information. You have such an expressive face, Bren-ji.”

  The engines grew louder. The flowers and the fueling truck passed out of view as the plane turned and moved out toward the runway.

  Banichi and Jago sat down with him and belted in. Other security moved from the door to the cluster of six other security agents at the rear, men and women who talked together in voices that didn’t carry above the engines and held no humor at all. The servants had gone on the last flight, before daylight; servants in the number that Saidin had determined as fortunate.

  Saidin. Damiri’s security. Tabini had directly suggested Saidin do the picking, knowing, as the paidhi hadn’t known at the time, Saidin’s nature. It had been a direct invitation to Saidin, a challenge to Saidin, to put one of her people on the Taiben staff—for good or for ill.

  The paidhi had been so stupidly blind on that point, knowing, intellectually, that security necessarily went in such places—but he’d come in drug-fogged, had formed his subconscious, subsequently unquestioned opinions on the staff, catalogued Saidin as an elder matron, and never, dammit, asked himself the obvious. He’d gotten fond of Saidin—and Saidin might have assumed he knew what she was; which might, Banichi was right, have changed his reactions, his expressions, his levels of caution, if he’d known what he should have known, what any ateva would have known—

  He must have perplexed Saidin no end. And, dammit, he still liked the woman.

  There seemed a quality to people the Assassins’ Guild let in and licensed. He didn’t know why. He didn’t know what they had in common, except perhaps an integrity that touched chords in his shades-of-gray soul, a feeling, maybe, that one could do things that rattled one’s conscience to the walls and foundations and still—still own a sense of equilibrium.

  Banichi was going to teach him about doors. It wasn’t what he wanted to learn from Banichi. What he wanted to understand was something far more basic.

  When he and Jago had almost—almost—gone over the line, and he’d panicked, maybe it was that integrity he’d felt shaken. That very inhuman integrity. That more than human sense of morality.

  That Jago hadn’t given a damn about.

  Which didn’t fit with her character.

  If one took her as human. And Mospheiran, at that. Which she wasn’t.

  She was—whatever atevi were in that department. In that sense he trusted Jago not to have put him in a difficult position.

  And, dammit, he was thinking about it again. Which had absolutely no place in considerations that ought to be occupying his mind.

  They swung around for the runway. The wheels thumped down the pavement and cleared the ground. The familiar roofs slipped under the wings and the noise of one more outgoing jet probably disturbed sleep across Shejidan, making ordinary atevi ask themselves what in hell was going on that took so many doubtless official and unscheduled flights to and from the capital—

  They might well ask. And—in the light of recent crises—guess that it involved the paidhi, the foreigner ship, the aiji, and a great deal of security and government interest.

  Atevi added very well.

  The plane climbed above that altitude regularly jeopardized by atevi small aircraft and into a magnificent view of sunrise above the cloud deck—doubtless the better view was from the other set of windows, where the Bergid would thrust above those clouds, but the paidhi hadn’t the energy or the heart to get out of his seat to take a look. He wasn’t in the mood for beautiful sunrises. The one he did see jarred his sense of reality. The gray below the clouds had better suited his mood. The unseemly sheen of pink and gold made hope far too easy when so much was uncertain.

  But the security personnel began to stir about at the rear of the aircraft, and Jago went back, she said, after fruit juice.

  “Biscuits,” Bren said, before she escaped. Maybe it was the sunrise, but he began to decide he wanted them—having rushed off before breakfast, into a chancy situation.

  And in not too long Jago was back with biscuits, a hot and fragrant pile of them, adequate for healthy atevi appetites, one of which was sufficient for a human stomach, along with tea and juice he knew was safe.

  “Thanks,” Bren pronounced, on diplomatic autopilot. He took his biscuit, he took the tea, he took the fruit juice, and reflected that he finally had what he’d wanted all along: his people safely gathered for breakfast, well, except Tano and Algini, who were still chasing about the local investigation. They proposed, Banichi had said, to take another cycle of the same aircraft out to Taiben this afternoon.

  But he couldn’t get Hanks out of his head, and couldn’t convince himself yet that things were in hand. One didn’t attack the aiji’s guest in the Bu-javid and carry her off as of minor consequence to the welfare of the Association. A lot of firepower had gone out to Taiben. Tabini’s arrival out there was still to come—if it came. Tabini was stationing security out there in numbers that could repel real force.

  And in the excess of feeling that had suddenly, after this assassination attempt but not the other, prompted a deluge of flowers and well-wishes from associates, one had the notion that ordinary atevi took this attempt far more seriously than they took the actions of a single irate man in the legislature.

  This attempt smelled to them like serious business.

  It smelled that way to the paidhi, too.

  “Have you heard?” he asked. “Have you any current notion whether the troublemakers will make an attempt on the landing itself?”

  “No doubt they’d like any means to make the aiji look weak,” Jago said. “An attack on Taiben is fully possible.”

  “Aimed at Tabini? Or at the whole idea of human contact?”

  “One certainly wishes the ship had chosen some other site than that near and convenient to the city,” Jago said. “It makes logistics for the conspirators far easier. Direiso and Tatiseigi are both in the region.”

  “Meaning anywhere but Taiben would have been preferable. Then why for God’s sake was it on the list?”

  “It has its advantages. Access is equally easy for us. And we sit close to the neighbors’ operations, which means more readily knowing what they’re doing.”

  “But there’re more than nonspecific reasons to worry?”

  “There’s a suspect association,” Jago said. “Local. But powerful.”

  “Localized geographically?” One never knew the full reach and complexity of atevi association. Atevi themselves didn’t admit the extent or the nature of them, God help the university on Mospheira trying to track them.

  “Understand, nand’ paidhi, Taiben is one estate of a very ancient area, of very old, very noble habitation—very old households, adjacent, of longstanding uneasiness of relations.”

  “Meaning historic feud.” It was the Padi Valley. It was an old area. Historic.

  “No, not feud,” Banichi said, “but along this ancestral division of lands—the paidhi may be aware—one has thousands of years of history, among very ancient houses each of whom have powerful modern associations.”

  Not to say borders. Division of lands. There was a difference.

  “An easy neighborhood in good times,” Jago said. “But many unsettled issues. In chancy times, very easily upset.”

  “Meaning,” Bren said quietly, “if there was a conspiracy a thousand leagues away, it would most easily nest here, next to Taiben, because of these houses.”

  “Five households,” Jago said. “Before there were humans in the world, there were five principle landholders in the Padi Valley. Historically, all the aijiin of the Ragi have come from these five. The Association at large would hardly be able to settle on any aiji who didn’t come from this small association. They’re all the Ragi families who have ever held power.”

  “But Tabini’s house settled the Treaty. By donating it
s lands to the refugees, from the war.” That was answer number one anytime the primer students heard the question. Unquestionably there was more involved. There was the intricacy of the atevi election process. “They brokered the Treaty.”

  “Keeping only the estate at Taiben—not alone for its nearness to Shejidan, on the Alujis. Clearly association by residence. But also by nobility. The hunting association. And, very clearly, the association of ancestral wealth.”

  “And the Atigeini have holdings fairly close to Taiben.”

  “Thirty minutes by air,” Banichi said.

  “You think there’ll be trouble from them? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “The relationship with the Atigeini may become clear before sundown. Old Tatiseigi is still the chief question.”

  “And Ilisidi,” Jago said.

  “What about Ilisidi? Where is she? Does anyone know where she went?”

  “Oh, Taiben. But Tabini moved her out last night. Now—we think she’s guesting upland at Masiri, with the Atigeini. With Tatiseigi himself.”

  “Damn,” he said quietly. But what he felt gathering about him was disaster.

  “Tabini, of course, knew where she would go,” Banichi said.

  “And proceeded,” Jago said. “He will not be pushed, at Taiben. That small association is historically sensitive.”

  “Challenging his enemies?”

  “Collecting them, perhaps, under one roof.”

  He had an increasingly uneasy feeling. But it was empty air outside the window. He was wrapped about by atevi purpose, atevi direction, atevi mission. A trap—a conspiracy, a—God knew what. He’d called down a landing from the ship into the thick of atevi politics, arguing them out of trusting Mospheira.

  And the atevi he most trusted—one of those words any paidhi should, of course, flag immediately in his thinking—had let him propose Taiben among the other sites he’d offered to the ship, and hadn’t mentioned until now the web of associational relationships around Taiben, which—God, was it only a couple of weeks ago?—hadn’t mattered once upon a time in his tenure. He’d no more wondered about local associations before the arrival of the human ship threw everything into uncertainty than he’d asked himself with daily urgency about the geography of the sea bottom.