Destroyer

by C. J. Cherryh

  From that point on they made one party as they traveled upward to the core, a lift-passage in which gravity increasingly left them and the air grew increasingly burning-cold and dry. Their hand-baggage would come adrift if nudged—but no one nudged it. Eight-year-old Cajeiri stayed as grimly fixed to the handhold as he had been on the way down into the station, staring into space, occasionally casting glances at his elders, or darting a suspicious look at some particularly loud clang or thump. He took his cues from his great-grandmother, however, and refused to flinch.

  It was a wretched birthday, and Bren earnestly wished there was some cheer to offer a boy who had been, in one day, advised his parents’ survival was in doubt and that he must leave his agemates and companions, perhaps forever, embarking on a voyage that scared the hell out of sensible, experienced crew.

  Being a boy of eight years, however, Cajeiri seemed to have run entirely out of questions and objections. At such an age, thwarted and upset at every turn, he clung grimly to the safety bar, sunk in his own thoughts, without breadth enough to his horizons to give him an adult-sized hope or fear to work on. Adults had done this, he might be thinking. Adults would fix it. Adults had better fix it, if they knew what was good for them.

  This adult just hoped the shuttle got down onto the planet in one piece, for starters.

  “We have our course laid,” Ilisidi said, breath frosting in the bitter cold of the car, “and we trust the Presidenta will attend the other details in our rapid departure, nandi.”

  “Supportive, aiji-ma,” Bren said. “Entirely supportive, I have no doubt of that. We will doubtless have lodging as long as we wish near the landing strip. I have left the transportation arrangements for crossing the straits until after we are down—for security in communications, aiji-ma.”

  “Likely wise,” Ilisidi said, and about then the lift stopped, requiring all aboard to resist inertia. The door gasped open, making a puff of ice crystals in floodlit dark. The burning dry cold of the dark core itself hit the lungs like a knife, making conversation, even coherent movement of muscles, a difficult, conscious effort.

  No one was disposed to linger in the least. They made as rapid a transit as possible, along hand-lines rigged to take them to the appropriate entry port, through the weightless dark. Breath froze, making smaller clouds in the spotlights. Parka-clad atevi shuttle crew, spotlighted in a flood, emerged at the other end of that line to assure their safety, to take their small items of hand baggage from cold-stiffened hands, and to see them into the shuttle airlock, which itself showed as a patch of white and brilliant inner light in an otherwise enveloping dark.

  “Other baggage is coming, nadiin,” Tano informed the crew, “in the next lift, with Lord Geigi’s staff.”

  As the bright light inside challenged their eyes and warm, ordinarily humid air met the lungs, it made both seeing and steady breathing difficult for a moment. The station shuttle dock had had numerous improvements on the drawing board, a pressurized tube planned, first of all, to make the transit to shuttles easier and safer, but clearly none of those things had happened, as so much had not happened in the last two years.

  But in the faces of the shuttle crew, the only functional atevi shuttle crew, was an absolute commitment, a joy, even, in seeing them—a fervent hope of their situation set to rights, an absolute confidence that they were carrying the necessary answer back to a waiting world.

  Bren wasn’t personally that confident.

  Not this time.

  4

  “W elcome home, nandiin,” the atevi crew bade them over the intercom, just before their launch away from the station—an auspicious launch, Bren hoped, all considering. The baji-naji emblem, that portrayal of the motive principles of the universe, chance and fortune, still decorated the bulkhead of the shuttle, still reminded them the universe, always in delicate balance, had its odd moments and was subject to forces no one could restrain—that the most secure situation and the most impossible alike could fall suddenly into chaos . . . but must exit that chaos into order, the eternal swing between the two states.

  Some optimist among the crew or the techs had arranged flowers in a well-secured vase on a well-secured shelf below that emblem—life and welcome, that arrangement meant; but one blossom came askew during undock, leaving good fortune momentarily adrift.

  And in that extremity, young Cajeiri undertook a zero-g mission, on permission from his great-grandmother to chase it and restore it to its proper and fortunate place in the arrangement. It gave a too-well-behaved young lad at the bitter end of his patience a chance to be up and moving, now that the shuttle was out and away. He succeeded quickly, a triumph, then took his time returning to relative safety in the seats, to everyone’s relief. Cajeiri’s spirits had risen, at least enough for him to become a modest worry to his elders.

  The steward then began to serve tea, a fussy, acrobatic operation, unusually early service insofar as anything in the shuttle passenger program had had time to become usual. And once they had had their tea, up front in the cockpit, the pilots greatly yearned, one was coyly informed by said steward, to hear any information they were willing to give them about their voyage to the stars.

  “There were foreigners!” Cajeiri exclaimed immediately, brightening, by no means a report designed to settle the crew’s curiosity, and breaching security at a stroke. Baji-naji, from order to potential chaos, in the person of a young boy. “They were nearly as tall as we are! And huge around!”

  The steward was, of course, entranced, and at once had a thousand questions more—information for the pilots, of course.

  So Ilisidi’s second-senior bodyguard went forward to the shuttle cockpit to regale the whole crew with the details, by the dowager’s personal dispensation, all with, of course, personal cautions against spreading the gossip. In this elite and security-conscious crew it was even foreseeable that the information would stay contained—and Ilisidi’s young man remained up there for some time, doubtless questioned and requestioned until he was hoarse, and very likely enjoying his hero’s status, the shuttle crew with their yearning for information on their voyage and everything that was out there, and the young Assassin just as anxious to understand the shuttle’s workings and to find out in some detail how the space program had survived the troubles on the planet . . .

  And whether they had allies still in any position of authority—such, at least, were the questions Bren himself was sure he would ask, and might yet ask, if the young man didn’t come back with the answers. Certainly information flowed both ways up there, and meanwhile Banichi and Jago, with their own electronics, became very quiet, staring straight ahead of them, of course following all of it from their seats, and absorbing everything.

  The details of the shuttle’s operation, however, were not among the things Bren needed to ask anyone. Having translated the shuttle plans and most of the flight operations manual, with the assistance of his staff, and having trained the translators who had mediated the finer details of the actual operations, he knew the facts down to the length of the Jackson runway; he knew that it was 20 feet shorter than the original plan, he knew the names of the grafting bastards responsible, and he really had not rather think about that old issue right now.

  He decided to divert himself with his computer, with, eventually, a nap, at least as well as a sane man could sleep on a vessel hurtling deeper and deeper into the gravitational grip of a very unforgiving planet toward a runway that wasn’t quite what they’d designed.

  A shuttle with all its fail-safes was still better than parachutes, he reminded himself. He had, at least, never landed the way Jase had, and the way his ancestors had landed on Mospheira in the first place—by parachute, in a little tin-can capsule. For their ancestors it had been a one-way trip, when they’d rebelled against the iron rule of the old Pilots’ Guild and decided to commit themselves to an inhabited planet, since by then it had been well-established the ship was not going to find its way back home at all. Phoenix, the same ship on which
they had just voyaged, had dropped into some anomaly of space-time, or suffered some never-revealed malfunction, and popped a station-building expedition out first of all at a deadly white star. They’d gotten away from that by the skin of their teeth, only to be told, by the ship’s masters, that they had to refuel and commit to more voyages, after which, they began to comprehend, their use was to refuel the ship again and again—living a graceless, gray existence under the rule of a band of men who’d, yes, somehow survived the previous disasters, men who’d somehow not volunteered to sacrifice a thing when the better elements of the crew had given their very lives to get them free and out to this lovely green world and safer sun.

  The colonists, finding there was an alternative where they’d arrived, had desperately flung themselves onto an innocent planet whose steam-age civilization naively assumed they’d arrived from their moon . . . had assumed, assumed, assumed, until they went to war with each other and every human still alive ended up in an isolated enclave on the island of Mospheira.

  Hence his job, when he wasn’t being Lord of the Heavens. Hence the paidhiin came into being, the translators appointed to interpret not only words, but psychology—to prevent two species who’d originally thought it was easy to understand one another from pouring their technology and their concepts into each other’s heads until the system fractured.

  One of a long line of paidhiin who’d served the system, trickling humanity’s advanced technology into atevi hands at a sane pace, trying to make humans live lightly on the planet and not offend atevi beliefs and traditions—he’d tried, at least, to keep the faith.

  But had he?

  Therein lay the guilt . . . guilt that in recent hours burrowed itself a wider and wider residency under his heart, laying its foundations the moment he’d heard Tabini had gone down, and growing to a whole suite of rooms when he’d heard Geigi lay out the reasons for Tabini’s downfall. Too much tech and too much change too fast had brought—not war with humans, this time—but an internal calamity to atevi, the fall of the aiji who’d pushed, lifelong, for more tech, more tech, more tech . . . and made too-quick changes in the atevi way of life to take advantage of it. At some point the paidhi was supposed to have said no, and not to have been so accommodating. That had been his job, for God’s sake. It was why all prior paidhiin had not been so snugglyclose with the atevi leadership. Tabini had had the notion of making his people the technological equals of humans in their island enclave—a technological equality they’d all conceptualized as a good rail system, air traffic crossing the continent, maybe even a computer revolution, in his lifetime.

  But then long-lost Phoenix had shown up from deep space, and ownership of the abandoned space station had become an issue. Tabini had been determined to secure it for his own people, entirely understandable, and he had been convinced that if humans got it up and running first they’d never relinquish it to atevi, no matter the justice of their claims. He’d had to move fast to take over leadership not only of the space station . . . but of the crisis humans confessed they’d precipitated out in deep space.

  Step by step, Tabini had waded into hotter and hotter water, all for the sake of protecting his people from the changes humans brought, and the paidhi, who should have said no, wait—stop—

  To this hour the paidhi just couldn’t figure what else he could have done.

  Average atevi, who, like Banichi, had only just figured out the earth went around the sun, or why they should care, had suddenly become critical to the planetary effort to get back into space. The mainland had the mineral resources and the manufacturing resources to do what the ship could not: supply raw materials and workers to get the space station operating again . . . and, most critically, the planet had the pilots to fly in atmosphere, an art the spacefarers had flatly forgotten and had no time to relearn.

  Atevi had been able to get their manufacturing geared up to handle the crisis. The island enclave of Mospheira had still been debating the matter when the atevi’s first spacecraft lifted off the runway and blasted roof tiles off the eaves of Shejidan.

  Change, change, and not just change—change proceeding at breakneck speed through every aspect of atevi life. Mines and factories were opened, sudden wealth created for some districts, with shortages of critical materials and extravagant plenty of new luxuries: Mospheiran society, wrangling over regional advantage and company prerogatives, hadn’t been able to do it, even with the technological advantage. Atevi society, where a strong leader could dictate where new plants were to be built, could balance the economy of regions against regions, equalize the supply and demand—and in so doing, created new values, new economy, new emphasis on manufacturing instead of handcrafting of objects valued for centuries, not even to mention such radical notions as preserved food, instead of food auspiciously and respectfully offered in season, with awareness of one’s debt to the natural world . . .

  Cultural change, religious change, upheaval in the relative importance of provinces and districts, not according to history but according to the mineral wealth and the siting of some new critical facility, partly by the aiji’s grace, partly by the questions of where nature had put the resources. It had all worked. It had been a toboggan ride to a brave new tomorrow, and Tabini’s brilliance had kept everyone prosperous, kept himself in charge, abandoned not a shred of his power and put down every attempt to unseat him . . .

  And had the paidhi objected? He’d superintended Tabini’s rush to modernize, confident Tabini’s management of the economy was going to preserve the traditions as well as create new professions, new Guilds. He’d known he was riding the avalanche, and he’d thought he’d steered Tabini to safety. When the crisis came that called them out to Reunion, he’d left Tabini never more powerful, the Association never more prosperous, the atevi economically and politically equal to humans in every regard, even in relation to the ship-humans on the station. He’d left a people possessed of shuttlecraft and every functioning facility to land and service spacecraft, even building a starship of their own, while Mospheiran humans, across the straits from the mainland, dithered and debated and never had accomplished more than those modifications to the airport at Jackson that would serve as a reserve landing site in emergency . . . give or take the twenty feet of runway that couldn’t get past certain special interests and the Jackson Municipal Golf Course.

  Humans on Mospheira had continued to have mixed feelings about the space station, that was the problem underlying Mospheiran politics. Some were extremely enthusiastic about going back to space, but more were suspicious and resentful of their cousins on the ship. And like the atevi, Mospheirans had mixed feelings, too, about the changes, the haste to turn the entire economy into a space-based push for technological equality with the ship-folk, the trampling of, well, fairly old, if not ancient traditions of Mospheiran life.

  He’d foreseen all the objections. He’d hoped both Shawn Tyers, the President of Mospheira, and Tabini-aiji, head of the aishidi’tat, the atevi government, would weather all the storms of discontent at least until they’d been able to get back from their mission to Reunion and report that all this sacrifice and striving had produced a result worth having.

  He seemed to have won the bet in the case of his old friend Shawn Tyers, though Shawn’s political survival when he had left had seemed more precarious. Shawn was still in office, despite the volatile politics of the island and all the pressures bearing on him.

  He had been disastrously wrong, however, about the atevi side of the equation. Tabini had seemed unassailable, delicately and deftly manuvering around difficulties, as he always had, having secured the help of such unlikely individuals as his own grandmother, the aiji-dowager, a unifying power of the far east, who might have threatened his reign. He’d begotten an heir, Cajeiri, with an Atageini woman, the Atageini, historically speaking, posing one of the greatest threats to the stability of the aishidi’tat. He’d gotten the crochety, traditionalist head of the Atageini clan on his side. He’d put down one ba
d bit of trouble arising in the seafaring south and west, and engaged the gadget-loving western Lord Geigi firmly on his side, in the process, Geigi’s influence being a firm bulwark against trouble in all that curve of western coast. What more could he need than those several allies? Nothing had looked remotely likely to shake Tabini from power.

  But Geigi had gone up to orbit, managing the atevi side of the station, while the son of a conspirator, allowed to prosper—Tabini, lately influenced by strong Mospheiran hints that it wasn’t proper or civilized to assassinate the relatives of people who’d tried to kill him—repaid Tabini with treachery.

  Spare Murini, he’d asked Tabini. Take the chance. He’d been sensitive to the international, interspecies situation—been sensitive to any perception on the part of Mospheiran or spacefaring humans that atevi were less civilized or in any way threatening to humans. Attached to the atevi court, he’d begun to take such accusations of atevi barbarism personally; he’d begun, hadn’t he, to want his atevi to have the respect of his species?

  There had been a danger point, if he’d only seen it. But he hadn’t read the winds. He had committed the oldest mistake of joint civilization on the planet—getting distracted by one issue, modernizing too fast, worst of all ignoring atevi hardwiring and ignoring the point that what humans might call barbarism was part and parcel of atevi problem-solving.

  What had he tried to promote among atevi? Tolerance of out-clan powers. Therefore tolerance of foreigners. How could an enlightened ruler kill the son of a traitor, simply because of his relatives?

  And now that unenlightened son of a rebel, driven, perhaps, by that emotion of man’chi which humans weren’t wired to understand on a gut level, had quite naturally, from an atevi view, turned on the aiji who had spared him.