Foreigner

by C. J. Cherryh

  But if Tabini for some reason closed off communications tighter than they were, the last information his office might have to work with was an advisement that someone had tried to kill him—leaving Hanks de facto in charge. And Hanks was a take charge and go ahead type, a damned hothead, was the sorry truth, apt to take measures to breach Tabini’s silence, which might not be the wisest course in a delicate atevi political situation. He had confidence in Tabini—Hanks under those circumstances wouldn’t, and might do something to undermine Tabini … or play right into the hands of Tabini’s enemies.

  Damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. Tabini’s silence was uncharacteristic. The situation had too many variables. He was on-site and he didn’t have enough information to act on—Hanks would have far less if she had to come in here, and she would feel more pressed, in the total absence of information, to do something to get him back if there was no corpse … a very real fear from the first days, that some aiji in Shejidan or elsewhere might get tired of having the paidhi dole out technological information bit at a time.

  Something about the mythical goose and the source of golden eggs—a parable the first paidhiin had been very forward to inject into atevi culture, so that now atevi were certain there was such a thing as a goose, although there was not a bona fide bird in the world, and that it was a foreign but surely atevi fable.

  That was the way the game went. Given patience—given time—given small moves instead of wide ones, humans got what they wanted, and Tabini-aiji did.

  Goseniin and golden eggs.

  III

  Banichi arrived with breakfast, with an armload of mail, the predictable ads for vacations, new products, and ordinary goods. It was quite as boring as he’d expected it to be, and a chilly, unseasonal morning made him glad of the hot tea the two substitute servants brought. He had his light breakfast—now he wanted his television.

  “Are the channels out all over the city, or what?” he asked Banichi, and Banichi shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”

  At least there was the weather channel, reporting rain in the mountains east, and unseasonal cool weather along the western seaboard. No swimming on the Mospheira beaches. He kept thinking of home—kept thinking of the white beaches of Mospheira, and tall mountains, still patched with snow in the shadowy spots, kept thinking of human faces, and human crowds.

  He’d dreamed of home last night, in the two hours of sleep he seemed to have gotten—he’d dreamed of the kitchen at home, and early mornings, and his mother and Toby at breakfast, the way it had been. His mother wrote to him regularly. Toby wasn’t inclined to write, but Toby got the news, when his letters did get home, and Toby sent word back through their mother, what he was up to, how he was faring.

  His mother had taken the community allotment he’d left when he’d won the paidhi’s place and had no more need for his birthright: she’d combined it with her savings from her teaching job, and lent his family-bound and utterly respectable brother the funds to start a medical practice on the north shore.

  Toby had the thoroughly ordinary and prosperous life their mother had wanted for herself or her children, with the appropriately adorable and available grandchildren. She was happy. Bren didn’t write her with things like, Hello, Mother, someone tried to shoot me in my bed. Hello, Mother, they won’t let me fly out of here. It was always, Hello, Mother, things are fine. How are you? They keep me busy. It’s very interesting. I wish I could say more than that …

  “Not that coat,” Banichi said, as he took his plain one from the armoire. Banichi reached past him, and took the audience coat from the hanger.

  “For the space council?” he protested, but he knew, he knew, then, without Banichi saying a word, that Tabini had called him.

  “The council’s been postponed.” Banichi shook the coat out and held it for him, preempting the new servants’ offices. “The ratios in the slosh baffles will have to wait at least a few days.”

  He slipped his arms into the coat, flipped his braid over the collar and settled it on with a deep breath. The weight wasn’t uncomfortable this crisp morning.

  “So what does Tabini want?” he muttered. But both the servants were in the room, and he didn’t expect Banichi to answer. Jago hadn’t been there when he waked. Just Tano and his glum partner, bringing in his breakfast. He hadn’t had enough sleep, for two nights now. His eyes stung with exhaustion. And he had to look presentable and have his wits about him.

  “Tabini is concerned,” Banichi said. “Hence the postponement. He wishes you to travel to the country this afternoon. A security team is going over the premises.”

  “What, at the estate?”

  “Stone by stone. Tano and Algini will pack for you, if necessary.”

  What could he ask, when he knew Banichi wouldn’t answer—couldn’t answer a question Tabini hadn’t authorized him to answer? He took a deep breath, adjusted his collar, and looked in the mirror. His eyes showed the want of sleep—showed a modicum of panic, truth be known, because the decision not to call Mospheira was fast becoming an irrevocable one, with decreasing opportunities to change his mind on that score without making a major, noisy opposition to people whose polite maneuvering—if that was what he perceived around him—might not be profitable to challenge.

  Maybe it was paralysis of will. Maybe it was instinct saying Be still—don’t defy the only friend humanity has on this planet.

  Paidhiin are expendable. Mospheira isn’t. We can’t stand against the whole world. This time they have aircraft. And radar. And all the technological resources.

  They’re very close to not needing us any more.

  In the room behind him the door opened and Jago came in, he assumed to supervise the two servants, whose words to him had consisted in controversies like: “Preserves, nadi?” and “Sugar in the tea?”

  Moni and Taigi had known answers like that without asking him at every turn. He missed them already. He feared they wouldn’t be back, that they’d already been reassigned—he hoped to a stable, influential, thoroughly normal atevi. He hoped they weren’t in the hands of the police, undergoing close questions about him, and humans in general.

  Banichi opened the door a second time, for them to leave for the audience, and he went out with Banichi, feeling more like a prisoner than the object of so much official concern.

  “Aiji-ma.” Bren made the courteous bow, hands on knees. Tabini was in shirt and trousers, not yet at his formal best, sitting in the sunlight in front of the open doors—Tabini’s doors, high in the great mass of the Bujavid, faced not the garden, but the open sky, the descending terraces of the ancient walls, and the City that was the fortress’ skirt, a geometry of tile roofs, hazed and softened by the morning mist to faintest reds, roofs auspiciously aligned in their relationship to each other and in the city’s accommodation to the river. Beyond that, the Bergid range, riding above a haze of distance, far across the plains—a glorious view, a cool, breathless dawn.

  The table was set in the light, half onto the balcony, against that prospect. And Tabini was having breakfast.

  Tabini made a hand-sign to his servants, who instantly procured two more cups, and drew out from the table the two other chairs.

  So they were completely informal. He and Banichi sat down at the offered places, with the Bergid range a misty blue and the City spread out in faint tile reds below the balcony railing.

  “I trust there’s been no repetition of the incident,” Tabini said.

  “No, aiji-ma,” Banichi answered, adding sugar.

  “I’m very distressed by this incident,” Tabini said. A sip of tea. “Distressed also that you should be the object of public speculation, Bren-paidhi. I was obliged to take a position. I could not let that pass. —Has anyone approached you in the meetings?”

  “No,” Bren said. “But I do fear I was less than observant yesterday. I’m not used to this idea.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Disturbed.” He wasn’t sure, himself, what he felt. “Di
sturbed that I’ve been the cause of so much disarrangement, when I’m here for your convenience.”

  “That’s the politic answer.”

  “—And I’m very angry, aiji-ma.”

  “Angry?”

  “That I can’t go where I like and do what I like.”

  “But can the paidhi ever do that? You never go to the City without an escort. You don’t travel, you don’t hold entertainments, which, surely, accounts for what Banichi would counsel you as habits of the greatest hazard.”

  “This is my home, aiji-ma. I’m not accustomed to slinking past my own doors or wondering if some poor servant’s going to walk through the door on my old key. … I do hope someone’s warned them.”

  “Someone has,” Banichi said.

  “I worry,” he said, across the teacup. “Forgive me, aiji-ma.”

  “No, no, no, I did ask. These are legitimate concerns and legitimate complaints. And no need for you to suffer them. I think it would be a good thing for you to go to Malguri for a little while.”

  “Malguri?” That was the lake estate, at Lake Maidingi—Tabini’s retreat in early autumn, when the legislature was out of session, when he was regularly on vacation himself. He had never been so far into the interior of the continent. When he thought of it—no human had. “Are you going, aiji-ma?”

  “No.” Tabini’s cup was empty. A servant poured another. Tabini studiously dropped in two sugar lumps and stirred. “My grandmother is in residence. You’ve not encountered her, personally, have you? I don’t recall you’ve had that adventure.”

  “No.” He held the prospect of the aiji-dowager more unnerving than assassins. Ilisidi hadn’t won election in the successions. Thank God. “Aren’t you—forgive me—sending me to a zone of somewhat more hazard?”

  Tabini laughed, a wrinkling of his nose. “She does enjoy an argument. But she’s quite retiring now. She says she’s dying.”

  “She’s said so for five years,” Banichi muttered. “Aiji-ma.”

  “You’ll do fine,” Tabini said. “You’re a diplomat. You can deal with it.”

  “I could just as easily go to Mospheira and absent myself from the situation, if that’s what’s useful. A great deal more useful, actually, to me. There’s a load of personal business I’ve had waiting. My mother has a cabin on the north coast.…”

  Tabini’s yellow stare was completely void, completely implacable. “But I can’t guarantee her security. I’d be extremely remiss to bring danger on your relatives.”

  “No ateva can get onto Mospheira without a visa.”

  “An old man in a rowboat can get onto Mospheira,” Banichi muttered. “And ask me if I could find your mother’s cabin.”

  The old man in a rowboat would not get onto Mospheira unnoticed. He was willing to challenge Banichi on that. But he wasn’t willing to own that fact to Tabini or Banichi for free.

  “You’ll be far better off,” Banichi said, “at Malguri.”

  “A fool tried my bedroom door! For all I know it was my next door neighbor coming home drunk through the garden, probably terrified he could be named an attempted assassin, and now we have wires on my doors!” One didn’t shout in Tabini’s presence. And Tabini had supported Banichi in the matter of the wires. He remembered his place and hid his consternation behind his teacup.

  Tabini sipped his own and set the cup down as Banichi set his aside. “Still,” Tabini said. “The investigation is making progress which doesn’t need your help. Rely on my judgment in this. Have I ever done anything to your harm?”

  “No, aiji-ma.”

  Tabini rose and reached out his hand, not an atevi custom. Tabini had done it the first time ever they met, and at rare moments since. He stood up and took it, and shook it solemnly.

  “I hold you as a major asset to my administration,” Tabini said. “Please believe that what I do is out of that estimation, even this exile.”

  “What have I done?” he asked, his hand still prisoner in Tabini’s larger one. “Have I, personally, done something I should have done differently? How can I do better, if no one advises me?”

  “We’re pursuing the investigation,” Tabini said quietly. “My private plane is fueling at this moment. Please don’t cross my grandmother.”

  “How can I escape it? I don’t know what I did to bring this about, Tabini-aiji. How can I behave any more wisely than I have?”

  A pressure of Tabini’s fingers, and a release of his hand. “Did one say it was your fault, Bren-paidhi? Give my respects to my grandmother.”

  “Aiji-ma.” Surrender was all Tabini left him. He only dared the most indirect rebellion. “May I have my mail routed there?”

  “There should be no difficulty,” Banichi said, “if it’s sent through the security office.”

  “We don’t want to announce your destination,” Tabini said. “But, yes, security does have to know. Take care. Take every precaution. You’ll go straight to the airport. Is it taken care of, Banichi?”

  “No difficulty,” Banichi said. What ‘it’ was, Bren had no idea. But there was nothing left him but to take his formal leave.

  ‘Straight to the airport,’ meant exactly that, evidently, straight downstairs, in the Bu-javid, to the lowest, inner level, where a rail station connected with the rail systems all over the continent.

  It was a well-securitied place, this station deep in the Bu-javid’s heart, a station which only the mai’aijiin and the aiji himself and his staff might use—there was another for common traffic, a little down the hill.

  Guards were everywhere, nothing unusual in any time he’d been down here. He supposed they maintained a constant watch over the tracks and the cars that rested here—the authorities in charge could have no idea when someone might take the notion to use them, or when someone else might take the notion to compromise them.

  What looked like a freight car was waiting. The inbound tram would sweep it up on its way below—and it would travel looking exactly like a freight car, mixed in with the ordinary traffic, down to its painted and, one understood, constantly changed, numbers.

  It was Tabini’s—cushioned luxury inside, a council-room on wheels. That was where Banichi took him.

  “Someone has checked it out,” he said to Banichi. He’d used this particular car himself—but only once annually on his own business, on his regular departure to the airport, and never when there was any active feud in question. The whole proceedings had a surreal feeling.

  “Destined for the airport,” Banichi said, checking papers, “no question. Don’t be nervous, nadi Bren. I assure you we won’t misplace you with the luggage.”

  Banichi was joking with him. He was scared. He’d been nervous walking down here, was nervous on the platform, but he walked to the back of the windowless car and sat down on the soft cushions of a chair, unable to see anything but the luxury around him, and a single televised image of the stationside with its hurrying workers. He was overwhelmed with the feeling of being swallowed alive, swept away to where no one human would ever hear of him. He hadn’t advised anyone where he was going, he hadn’t gotten off that phone call to Hanks or a letter home—he had no absolute confidence now that Banichi would deliver it if he wrote it this instant and entrusted it to him to take outside.

  “Are you going with me?” he asked Banichi.

  “Of course.” Banichi was standing, looking at the monitor. “Ah. There she is.”

  A cart had appeared from a lift, a cart piled high with white plastic boxes. Jago was behind it, pushing it toward the car. It arrived, real and stuck on the uneven threshold, and Jago shoved and swore as Banichi moved to lend a hand. Bren got up to offer his efforts, but at that moment it came across, as Tano turned up, shoving from the other side, bound inside, too.

  The cart and the baggage had to mass everything he had had in the apartment, Bren thought in dismay, unless three-quarters of that was Banichi’s and Jago’s luggage. They didn’t take the luggage from the cart: they secured the whole cart against the
forward wall, with webbing belts.

  Protests did no good. Questions at this point only annoyed those trying to launch them with critical things they needed. Bren sat down and stayed still while Banichi and Jago went outside, never entirely leaving the threshold, and signed something or talked with other guards.

  In a little while, they both came back into the car, saying that the train was on its way, and would couple them on in a few minutes. Tano meanwhile offered him a soft drink, which he took listlessly, and Algini arrived with a final paper for Banichi to sign.

  What? Bren asked himself. Concerning what? His commitment to Malguri, might it be?

  To the aiji-dowager’s prison, where she was dying—this notorious, bitter woman, twice passed over for aiji.

  One wondered if she had had a choice in lodgings, or whether the rumors about her were true … that, having offended Tabini, she had very little choice left.

  The jet made a quick rise above the urban sprawl of Shejidan—one could pick out the three or four major central buildings among the tiled roofs, the public Registry, the Agricultural Association, the long complex of Shejidan Steel, the spire of Western Mining and Industry, the administrative offices of Patanadi Aerospace. A final turn onto their course swept the Bu-javid past the aircraft’s wing-tip, a sweep of fortified hill, interlocked squares of terraces and gardens—Bren imagined he could see the very court where he had lived … and wondered in a moment of panic if he would ever see his apartment again.

  They reached cruising altitude—above the likely capability of random private operators. A drink appeared. Tano’s efficiency. Tano’s proper concern. Bren sulked, not wanting to like Tano, who’d replaced the servants he very much liked, who had had their jobs with him since he’d taken up residence in Shejidan, and who probably had been transferred by a faceless bureaucracy without so much as an explanation. It wasn’t fair to them. It wasn’t fair to him. He liked them, even if they probably wouldn’t understand that idea. He was used to them and they were gone.