Foreigner Page 10

  “Mind the wire, nadi Bren.”

  “Gin,” Jago said.

  Bren sighed, laid his cards down, glad there wasn’t money involved.

  “Forgive me,” Jago said. “You said I should say that. Unseemly gloating was far from—”

  “No, no, no. It’s entirely the custom.”

  “One isn’t sure,” Jago said. “Am I to be sure?”

  He had embarrassed Jago. He had been mishidi—awkward. He held out his palm, the gesture of conciliation. “You’re to be sure.” God, one couldn’t walk without tripping over sensitivities. “It’s actually courteous to tell me you’ve won.”

  “You don’t count the cards?”

  Atevi memory was, especially regarding numbers, hard to shake, no matter that Jago was not the fanatic number-adder you found in the surrounding city. And no, he hadn’t adequately counted the cards. Never play numbers with an atevi.

  “I would perhaps have done better, nadi Jago, if I weren’t distracted by the situation. I’m afraid it’s a little more personal to me.”

  “I assure you we’ve staked our personal reputations on your safety. We’d never be less than committed to our effort.”

  He had the impulse to rest his head on his hand and resign the whole conversation. Jago would take that as evidence of offense, too.

  “I wouldn’t expect otherwise, nadi Jago, and it’s not your capacity I doubt, not in the least. I could only wish my own faculties were operating at their fullest, or I should not have embarrassed myself just now, by seeming to doubt you.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “I’ll be far brighter when I’ve slept. Please regard my mistakes as confusion.”

  Jago’s flat black face and vivid yellow eyes held more intense expression than they were wont—not offense, he thought, but curiosity.

  “I confess myself uneasy,” she said, brow furrowed. “You declare absolutely you aren’t offended.”

  “No.” One rarely touched atevi. But her manner invited it. He patted her hand where it rested on the table. “I understand you.” It seemed not quite to carry the point, and, looking her in the eyes, he flung his honest thoughts after it. “I wish you understood me on this. It’s a human thought.”

  “Are you able to explain?”

  She wasn’t asking Bren Cameron: she didn’t know Bren Cameron. She was asking the paidhi, the interpreter to her people. That was all she could do, Bren thought, regarding the individual she was assigned by the aiji to protect, since the incident last night—an individual who didn’t seem in her eyes to take the threat seriously enough, or to take her seriously … and how was she to know anything about him? How was she to guess, with the paidhi giving her erratic clues? Will you explain? she asked, when he wished aloud that she understood him.

  “If it were easy,” he said, trying with all his wits to make sense of it to her—or to divert her thinking away from it, “there wouldn’t need to be a paidhi at all. —But I wouldn’t be human, then, and you wouldn’t be atevi, and nobody would need me anyway, would they?”

  It didn’t explain anything at all. He only tried to make the confusion less important than it was. Jago could surely read that much. She worried about it and thought about it. He could see it in her eyes.

  “Where’s Banichi gone?” he asked, feeling things between them slipping further and further from his control. “Is he planning to come back here tonight?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, still frowning. Then he decided, in the convolutions of his exhausted and increasingly disjointed thoughts, that even that might have sounded as if he wanted Banichi instead of her.

  Which he did. But not for any reason of her incompetency. Dealing with a shopkeeper with a distrust of computers was one thing. He was not faring well at all in dealing with Jago, he could not put out of his mind Banichi’s advisement that she liked his hair, and he decided on distraction.

  “I want my mail.”

  “I can call him and ask him to bring it.”

  He had forgotten about the pocket-com. “Please do that,” he said, and Jago tried.

  And tried. “I can’t reach him,” Jago said.

  “Is he all right?” The matter of the mail diminished in importance, but not, he feared, in significance. Too much had gone on that wasn’t ordinary.

  “I’m sure he is.” Jago gathered up the cards. “Do you want to play again?”

  “What if someone broke in here and you needed help? Where do you suppose he is?”

  Jago’s broad nostrils flared. “I have resources, nadi Bren.”

  He couldn’t keep from offending her.

  “Or what if he was in trouble? What if they ambushed him in the halls? We might not know.”

  “You’re very full of worries tonight.”

  He was. He was drowning in what was atevi; and that failure to understand, in a sudden moment of panic, led him to doubt his own fitness to be where he was. It made him wonder whether the lack of perception he had shown with Jago had been far more general, all along—if it had not, with some person, led to the threat he was under.

  Or, on the other hand, whether he was letting himself be spooked by his guards’ zealousness because of some threat of a threat that would never, ever rematerialize.

  “Worries about what, paidhi?”

  He blinked, and looked by accident up into Jago’s yellow, unflinching gaze. Don’t you know? he thought. Is it a challenge, that question? Is it distrust of me? Why these questions?

  But you couldn’t quite say ‘trust’ in Jago’s language, either, not in the terms a human understood. Every house, every province, belonged to a dozen associations, that made webs of association all through the country, whose border provinces made associations across the putative borders into the neighbor associations, an endless fuzzy interlink of boundaries that weren’t boundaries, both geographical and interest-defined—’trust,’ would you say? Say man’chi—’central association,’ the one association that defined a specific individual.

  “Man’china aijiia nai’am,” he said, to which Jago blinked a third time. I’m the aiji’s associate, foremost. “Nai’danei man’chini somai Banichi?” Whose associate are you and Banichi, foremost of all?

  “Tabini-aijiia, hei.” But atevi would lie to anyone but their central associate.

  “Not each other’s?” he asked. “I thought you were very close, you and Banichi.”

  “We have the same man’chi.”

  “And to each other?”

  He saw what might be truth leap through her expression—and the inevitable frown followed.

  “The paidhi knows the harm in such a question,” Jago said.

  “The paidhi-aiji,” he said, “knows what he asks. He finds it his duty to ask, nadi.”

  Jago got up from the table, walked across the room and said nothing for a while. She went to look out the garden doors, near the armed wire—it made him nervous, but he thought he ought not to warn her, just be ready to remind her. Jago was touchy enough. He hadn’t quite insulted her. But he’d asked into a matter intensely personal and private.

  “The Interpreter should know he won’t get an honest answer,” she’d implied, and he’d said, plain as plain to her politically sensitive ears, “The Interpreter serves the aiji by questioning the true hierarchy of your intimate alignments.”

  Freely translated—Faced with betraying someone, the aiji or Banichi, … which one would you betray, Jago?

  Which have you?

  Fool to ask such a question, when he was alone in a room with her?

  But he was alone in the whole country, for that matter, one human alone with three hundred million atevi, and billions around the world, and he was obliged to ask questions—with more intelligence and cleverness than he had just used, granted; but he was tired enough now, and crazed enough, to want to be sure of at least three of them, of Tabini, Banichi, and Jago, before he went any further down the paved and pleasant road of belief. There was too much harm he could do to his ow
n species, believing a lie, going too far down a false path, granting too much truth to the wrong people—

  Because he wasn’t just the aiji’s interpreter. He had a primary association that outranked it, an association that was stamped on his skin and his face—and that was the one atevi couldn’t help seeing, every time they looked at him.

  He waited for Jago to think his question through—perhaps even to ask herself the questions about her own loyalties that atevi might prefer not to ask. Perhaps atevi minds, like human ones, held hundreds of contradictory compartments, the doors of which one dared not open wholesale and look into. He didn’t know. It was, perhaps, too much to ask, too personal and too dangerous. Perhaps questioning the loyalty atevi felt as a group inherently questioned a tenet of belief—and perhaps their man’chi concept was, at bottom, as false as humans had always wished it was, longing at an emotional level for atevi to be and think and hold individual, interpersonal values like themselves.

  The paidhi couldn’t believe that. The paidhi daren’t believe that deadliest and most dangerous of illusions. He was off the emotional edge.

  And, perhaps recognizing that the paidhi was off the edge, Jago declined to answer him. She used the pocket-corn again, asking Banichi if he was receiving—and still didn’t look at him.

  Banichi still didn’t answer.

  Frowning, then, perhaps for a different reason, Jago called headquarters, asking where Banichi was, or if anyone knew where he was—and, no, headquarters didn’t know.

  Maybe Banichi was with some woman, Bren thought, although he decided he should keep that idea to himself, figuring Jago was capable of thinking of it for herself if it was at all likely. He wasn’t sure whether Banichi and Jago slept with each other. He had never been completely certain what the relationship was between them, except a close, years-long professional partnership.

  He saw the frown deepen on Jago’s face. “Someone find out where he is,” she said into the com.

  There were verbal codes; he knew that and he couldn’t tell whether the answer he overheard was one: “Lab-work,” HQ said, but Jago didn’t seem to like the answer. “Tell him contact me when he’s through,” Jago said to HQ, not seeming pleased, and shut the contact off on the affirmative.

  “You had no sleep last night,” she said, in her smoother, professional tones, and, evading the wire, she slid the glass garden doors open on the lattice. “Please rest, nadi Bren.”

  He was exhausted. But he had rather plain answers. And he was far from sure he wanted his garden doors open. Maybe they were setting up a trap. He was in no mood tonight to be the sleeping bait.

  “Nadi,” he said, “have you forgotten my question?”

  “No, paidhi-ji.”

  “But you don’t intend to answer.”

  Jago fixed him with a yellow, lucent stare. “Do they ask such questions on Mospheira?”

  “Always.”

  “Not among us,” Jago said, and crossed the room to the door.

  “Jago, say you’re not angry.”

  Again that stare. She had stopped just short of the deadly square on the carpet, turned it off, and looked back at him. “Why ask such a futile question? You wouldn’t believe either answer.”

  It set him back. And made him foreign and deliberate in his own reply.

  “But I’m human, nadi.”

  “So your man’chi isn’t with Tabini, after all.”

  Dangerous question. Deadly question. “Of course it is. —But what if you had two … two very strong man’chiin?”

  “We call it a test of character.” Jago said, and opened the door.

  “So do we, nadi Jago.”

  He had caught her attention. Black, wide, imposing, she stood against that bar of whiter hall light. She stood there as if she wanted to say something.

  But the pocket-com beeped, demanding attention. She spoke briefly with headquarters, regarding Banichi’s whereabouts, and HQ said that he was out of the lab, but in conference, asking not to be disturbed.

  “Thank you,” she said to the com. “Relay my message.” And to him: “The wires will both be live. Go to bed, paidhi Bren. I’ll be outside if you need me.”

  “All night?”

  There was a moment of silence. “Don’t walk in the garden, nand’ paidhi. Don’t stand in front of the doors. Be prudent and go to bed.”

  She shut the door then. The wire rearmed itself—he supposed. It came up when the door locked.

  And did it need all of that—Jago and the wire, to secure his sleep?

  Or where was Banichi and what was that exchange of questions, this talk about loyalties? He couldn’t remember who’d started it.

  Jago could have forgone an argument with him, at the edge of sleep, when he most wanted a tranquil mind—but he wasn’t even certain now who’d started it and who’d pressed it, or with what intention. He hadn’t done well. The whole evening with Banichi and then Jago had had a stressed, on the edge quality, as if—

  In retrospect, it seemed that Jago had been fishing as hard as he had been to find out something, all along—pressing every opportunity, challenging him, or ready to take offense and put the worst construction on matters. It might be Jago’s inexperience with him—he’d dealt mostly with Banichi and relied on Banichi to interpret to her. But he couldn’t figure out why Banichi had deserted him tonight—except the obvious answer, that Banichi as the senior of the pair had had matters on his mind more important to the aiji than the paidhi was.

  And so far as he could tell, neither he nor Jago had completely gotten the advantage, neither of them had come away with anything useful that he could figure out—only a mutual reminder how profound the differences were and how dangerous the interface between atevi and human could still turn, on a moment’s notice.

  He couldn’t even get his points across to one well-educated and unsuperstitious woman with every reason to listen to him. How could he transmit anything, via his prepared statements to the various councils, make any headway with the population at large, who, after two centuries of peace, agreed it was a very good thing for humans to stay on Mospheira and grudgingly conceded that computers might have numbers, the way tables might have definite sizes and objects definite height, but, God, even arranging the furniture in a room meant considering ratios and measurements, and felicitous and infelicitous combinations that the atevi called agingi’ai, ‘felicitous numerical harmony.’

  Beauty flowed from that, in atevi thinking. The infelicitous could not be beautiful. The infelicitous could not be reasoned with. Right numbers had to add up, and an even division in a simple flower arrangement was a communication of hostility.

  God knew what he had communicated to Jago that he hadn’t meant to say.

  He undressed, he turned out the light and cast an apprehensive look at the curtains, which showed no hint of the deadly wire and no shadow of any lurking assassin. He put himself to bed—at the wrong end of the room—where the ventilation was not directly from the lattice doors.

  Where the breeze was too weak to reach.

  He was not going to sleep until the wind shifted. He could watch television. If it worked. He doubted it would. The outages usually stayed through the shift, when they happened. He watched the curtain, he tried to think about the council business … but his mind kept circling back to the hall this morning, Tabini making that damnable announcement of feud, which he didn’t want—certainly didn’t want public.

  And the damned gun—had they transferred that, when they moved his bed?

  He couldn’t bear wondering if anyone had found it. He got up and felt under the mattress.

  It was there. He let go a slow breath, put a knee on the mattress and slid back under the sheets, to stare at the darkened ceiling.

  Many a moment in the small hours of the morning he doubted what he knew. Close as he was to Tabini in certain functions, he doubted he had ever made Tabini understand anything Tabini hadn’t learned from his predecessor in office. He did his linguistic research. T
he paper that had gotten him on the track to the paidhi’s office was a respectable work: an analysis of set-plurals in the Ragi atevi dialect, of which he was proud, but it was no breakthrough, just a conclusion to which he’d been able to add, since, thanks to Tabini’s patient and irreligious analysis.

  But at times he didn’t understand, not Tabini, not Taigi and Moni, God knew what he would figure about the glum-faced servants Banichi and Jago foisted off on him, but that was going to be another long effort. He was in a damned mess, was what he’d made for himself—he didn’t catch the nuances, he’d gotten involved in something he didn’t understand. He was in danger of failing. He’d imagined once he had the talent to have done what the first paidhi had done: breach the linguistic gap from conceptual dead zero and in the heart of war …

  In the years when humans had first come down here, few at first, then in greater and greater numbers as it seemed so easy … they’d been equally confident they understood the atevi—until one spring day, twenty-one years into the landings, with humans venturing peacefully onto the continent, when that illusion had—suddenly and for reasons candidates for his job still argued among themselves—blown up in their faces.

  Short and nasty, what atevi called the War of the Landing—all the advanced technology on the human side, and vast numbers and an uncanny determination on the the part of the atevi, who had, in that one year, driven humans from Ragi coastal land and back onto Mospheira, attacked them even in the valley the bewildered survivors held as their secure territory. Humanity on this world had come that close to extinction, until Tabini-aiji’s fourth-removed predecessor had agreed, having met face-to-face with the man who would be the first paidhi, to cede Mospheira and let humans separate themselves from atevi completely, on an island where they’d be safe and isolated.

  Mospheira and a cease-fire, in exchange for the technology the atevi wanted. Tabini’s fourth-removed predecessor, being no fool, had seen a clear choice staring him in the face: either strike a deal with humanity and become indispensable to them, or see his own allies make his lands a battlefield over the technology his rivals hoped to lay their hands on, killing every last human and potentially destroying the source of the knowledge in the process.