Foreigner Read online

  The moon-man immediately tried to do what he asked, without a gesture, so the creature had understood a word or two. He gained his feet with the flask tucked under his arm as if he meant to keep it, and kept talking to himself as he went, a thin, uncertain voice, now, lacking all affirmation.

  They were past the stricken grandmother stone. They had left the scarring of the land and they went in tangle-grass that clung to the trousers and about the ankles. There was a stream down the hill, he remembered it at the other side of a steep bank and a stand of fern, a slab of rock. That was what he intended—a cold, clean stream and a moment to rest in a more sheltered place, difficult for the clockwork machines to negotiate.

  “Be careful,” he cautioned the creature, with a tug at the blue sleeve, and it looked around at him, pale, bloody-faced, with a startled expression, after which the moon-man slipped and slid away from him in a rattle of rock and a crashing of fern.

  The creature never cried out. It landed at the bottom half in the water and half on the bank and never moved as he came skidding down to it in fear and fright.

  He thought it might have broken bones in that fall. It lay still, and he could only think that if there had been any niche for ill fortune in their meeting he must just have destroyed himself and the aiji at once—he dreaded even to touch it, but what was he to do, or where else could he find help?

  So he pulled its arm and its shoulder out of the water—and it looked at him with dazed strange eyes and went on looking at him as if its bewilderment was as great, as if its understanding of its universe was devastated and disordered as his own.

  He let it go, then, and it crouched there and bathed its face and washed its neck, while blood ran away in the clean water, an omen of things, he feared as much.

  But he saw clearly that he had driven it beyond any sane or reasonable limit, and how desperate and spent it was, and yet not protesting.

  Overall it seemed a brave creature, and never violent, never anything but willing to comply with everything he asked of it. He found himself glad when it seemed to recover its breath, and not to be badly hurt from its fall. It looked at him then as if expecting to have to go on, crazed as their course had been, and able only to ask with its eyes who he was and what he wanted and where they were going, all the things a sane creature would want to know—would he not? Would not any man ask what he wanted and why should he go?

  Why indeed should he go, when he had every advantage of defense in the strange buildings, and why should he have been alone on the hill, and why should he have run from his own people, this strange moon-man who sat and counted grass stems?

  Perhaps fortune was tending that way and the moon-man had felt it, and given himself up to it.

  And if that was so, if that was so, dared he lose what the auspicious moment had put in his hands, or risk its safety by driving it beyond its strength?

  He spoke to it quietly, he ventured to touch it gently on the knee as he knelt by it on the stream bank, and kept his voice low and calming. “Rest, rest here, catch your breath. It’s all right. Drink.” One supposed it regularly drank ordinary water and not substances of the ether. He shaped a cup with his hand and had a drink from the stream himself, said again, “Drink,” to make the word sure, and the moon-man said it back to him, faint and weak as he was.

  More, the man’s eyes were for a moment clear and unafraid, if he could judge expression on such a face, eloquent of curiosity about him, and even gratitude. “Ian,” the man said, indicating himself, and said it a second time, so he became reasonably sure it was a name. He said his own name, “Manadgi,” in the same way.

  “Ian,” the man said, and put out his hand, as if he was to do the same.

  “Manadgi.” He put forth his own hand, willing to be a fool, and the creature seized on it and shook it vigorously.

  “Ian, Manadgi,” the creature said, and seemed delighted by the discovery. They sat there shaking each other by the hand, fools together, mutually afraid, mutually relieved, mutually bewildered by their differences.

  He had no idea what its native customs or expectations must be. It could have very little idea about his. But it was possible to be civilized, all the same, and he found it possible to be gracious with such a creature, odd as it was—possible, the dizzy concept came to him, to establish associate relations with what was certainly a powerful association of unknown scope, of beings skilled in a most marvelous craft.

  “We shall walk,” he said slowly, miming with his fingers. “We shall walk to the village, Ian and Manadgi, together.”

  I

  The air moved sluggishly through the open garden lattice, heavy with the perfume of the night-blooming vines outside the bedroom. An o’oi-ana went click-click, and called again, the harbinger of rain, while Bren lay awake, thinking that if he were wise, he would get up and close the lattice and the doors before he fell asleep. The wind would shift. The sea air would come and cool the room. The vents were enough to let it in. But it was a lethargic, muggy night, and he waited for that nightly reverse of the wind from the east to the west, waited as the first flickers of lightning cast the shadow of the lattice on the stirring gauze of the curtain.

  The lattice panels had the shapes of Fortune and Chance, baji and naji. The shadow of the vines outside moved with the breeze that, finally, finally, flared the curtain with the promise of relief from the heat.

  The next flicker lit an atevi shadow, like a statue suddenly transplanted to the terrace outside. Bren’s heart skipped a beat as he saw it on that pale billowing of gauze, on a terrace where no one properly belonged. He froze an instant, then slithered over the side of the bed.

  The next flash showed him the lattice folding further back, and the intruder entering his room.

  He slid a hand beneath the mattress and drew out the pistol he had hidden there—braced his arms across the mattress in the way the aiji had taught him, and pulled the trigger, to a shock that numbed his hands and a flash that blinded him to the night and the intruder. He fired a second time, for sheer terror, into the blind dark and ringing silence.

  He couldn’t move after that. He couldn’t get his breath. He hadn’t heard anyone fall. He thought he had missed. The white, flimsy draperies blew in the cooling wind that scoured through his bedroom.

  His hands were numb, bracing the gun on the mattress. His ears were deaf to sounds fainter than the thunder, fainter than the rattle of the latch of his bedroom door—the guards using their key, he thought.

  But it might not be. He rolled his back to the bedside and braced his straight arms between his knees, barrel trained on the middle of the doorway as the inner door banged open and light and shadow struck him in the face.

  The aiji’s guards spared not a word for questions. One ran to the lattice doors, and out into the courtyard and the beginning rain. The other, a faceless metal-sparked darkness, loomed over him and pried the gun from his fingers.

  Other guards came; while Banichi—it was Banichi’s voice from above him—Banichi had taken the gun.

  “Search the premises!” Banichi ordered them. “See to the aiji!”

  “Is Tabini all right?” Bren asked, overwhelmed, and shaking. “Is he all right, Banichi?”

  But Banichi was talking on the pocket-com, giving other orders, deaf to his question. The aiji must be all right, Bren told himself, or Banichi would not be standing here, talking so calmly, so assuredly to the guards outside. He heard Banichi give orders, and heard the answering voice say nothing had gotten to the roof.

  He was scared. He knew the gun was contraband. Banichi knew it, and Banichi could arrest him—he feared he might; but when Banichi was through with the radio, Banichi seized him by the bare arms and set him on the side of the bed.

  The other guard came back through the garden doors—it was Jago. She always worked with Banichi, “There’s blood, I’ve alerted the gates.”

  So he’d shot someone. He began to shiver as Jago ducked out again. Banichi turned the lights on and cam
e back, atevi, black, smooth-skinned, his yellow eyes narrowed and his heavy jaw set in a thunderous scowl.

  “The aiji gave me the gun,” Bren said before Banichi could accuse him. Banichi stood there staring at him and finally said,

  “This is my gun.”

  He was confused. He sat there with his skin gone to gooseflesh and finally moved to pull a blanket into his lap. He heard commotion in the garden, Jago yelling at other guards.

  “This is my gun,” Banichi said forcefully. “Can there be any question this is my gun? A noise waked you. I lay in wait for the assassin. I fired. What did you see?”

  “A shadow. A shadow coming in through the curtains.” Another shiver took him. He knew how foolish he had been, firing straight across and through the doors. The bullet might have kept going across the garden, into the kitchens. It could have ricocheted off a wall and hit someone asleep in another apartment. The shock persisted in his hands and in his ears, strong as the smell of gunpowder in the air, that didn’t belong with him, in his room. …

  The rain started with a vengeance. Banichi used his pocket-com to talk to the searchers, and to headquarters, lying to them, saying he’d fired the shot, seeing the intruder headed for the paidhi’s room, and, no, the paidhi hadn’t been hurt, only frightened, and the aiji shouldn’t be wakened, if he hadn’t heard the shots. But the guard should be doubled, and the search taken to the south gates, before, Banichi said, the rain wiped out the tracks.

  Banichi signed off.

  “Why did they come here?” Bren asked. Assassins, he understood; but that any ordinary assassin should come into the residential compound, where there were guards throughout, where the aiji slept surrounded by hundreds of willing defenders—nobody in their right mind would do that.

  And to assassinate him, Bren Cameron, with the aiji at the height of all power and with the nai’aijiin all confirmed in their houses and supportive—where was the sense in it? Where was the gain to anyone at all sane?

  “Nadi Bren.” Banichi stood over him with his huge arms folded, looking down at him as if he were dealing with some feckless child. “What did you see?”

  “I told you. Just a shadow, coming through the curtain.” The emphasis of the question scared him. He might have been dreaming. He might have roused the whole household and alarmed the guards all for a nightmare. In the way of things at the edge of sleep, he no longer knew for sure what he had seen.

  But there had been blood. Jago said so. He had shot someone.

  “I discharged the gun,” Banichi said. “Get up and wash your hands, nadi. Wash them twice and three times. And keep the garden doors locked.”

  “They’re only glass,” he protested. He had felt safe until now. The aiji had given him the gun two weeks ago. The aiji had taught him to use it, the aiji’s doing alone, in the country-house at Taiben, and no one could have known about it, not even Banichi, least of all, surely, the assassin—if he had not dreamed the intrusion through the curtains, if he had not just shot some innocent neighbor, out for air on a stifling night.

  “Nadi,” Banichi said, “go wash your hands.”

  He couldn’t move, couldn’t deal with mundane things, or comprehend what had happened—or why, for the gods’ sake, why the aiji had given him such an unprecedented and disturbing present, except a general foreboding, and the guards taking stricter account of passes and rules …

  Except Tabini-aiji had said—’Keep it close.’ And he had been afraid of his servants finding it in his room.

  “Nadi.”

  Banichi was angry with him. He got up, naked and shaky as he was, and went across the carpet to the bath, with a queasier and queasier stomach.

  The last steps were a desperate, calculated rush for the toilet, scarcely in time to lose everything in his stomach, humiliating himself, but there was nothing he could do—it was three painful spasms before he could get a breath and flush the toilet.

  He was ashamed, disgusted with himself. He ran water in the sink and washed and scrubbed and washed, until he no longer smelled the gunpowder on his hands, only the pungency of the soap and astringents. He thought Banichi must have left, or maybe called the night-servants to clean the bath.

  But as he straightened and reached for the towel, he found Banichi’s reflection in the mirror.

  “Nadi Bren,” Banichi said solemnly. “We failed you tonight.”

  That stung, it truly stung, coming from Banichi, who would never humiliate himself as he had just done. He dried his face and rubbed his dripping hair, then had to look at Banichi face on, Banichi’s black, yellow-eyed visage as impassive and powerful as a graven god’s.

  “You were brave,” Banichi said, again, and Bren Cameron, the descendant of spacefarers, the representative of six generations forcibly earthbound on the world of the atevi, felt it like a slap of Banichi’s massive hand.

  “I didn’t get him. Somebody’s loose out there, with a gun or—”

  “We didn’t get him, nadi. It’s not your business, to ‘get him.’ Have you been approached by anyone unusual? Have you seen anything out of order before tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you get the gun, nadi-ji?”

  Did Banichi think he was lying? “Tabini gave it …”

  “From what place did you get the gun? Was this person moving very slowly?”

  He saw what Banichi was asking. He wrapped the towel about his shoulders, cold, with the storm wind blowing into the room. He heard the boom of thunder above the city. “From under the mattress. Tabini said keep it close. And I don’t know how fast he was moving, the assassin, I mean. I just saw the shadow and slid off the bed and grabbed the gun.”

  Banichi’s brow lifted ever so slightly. “Too much television,” Banichi said with a straight face, and took him by the shoulder. “Go back to bed, nadi.”

  “Banichi, what’s happening? Why did Tabini give me a gun? Why did he tell me—?”

  The grip tightened. “Go to bed, nadi. No one will disturb you after this. You saw a shadow. You called me. I fired two shots.”

  “I could have hit the kitchen!”

  “Most probably one shot did. Kindly remember bullets travel, nadi-ji. Was it not you who taught us? Here.”

  To his stunned surprise, Banichi drew his own gun from the holster and handed it to him.

  “Put that under your mattress,” Banichi said, and left him—walked on out of the bedroom and into the hall, pulling the door to behind him.

  He heard the lock click as he stood there stark naked, with Banichi’s gun in his hand and wet hair trailing about his shoulders and dripping on the floor.

  He went and shoved the gun under the mattress where he had hidden the other one, and, hoping Jago would choose another way in, shut the lattice doors and the glass, stopping the cold wind and the spatter of rain onto the curtains and the carpet.

  Thunder rumbled. He was chilled through. He made a desultory attempt to straighten the bedclothes, then dragged a heavy robe out of the armoire to wrap about himself before he turned off the room lights and struggled, wrapped in the bulky robe, under the tangled sheets. He drew himself into a ball, spasmed with shivers.

  Why me? he asked himself over and over, and asked himself whether he could conceivably have posed so extreme a problem to anyone that that individual would risk his life to be rid of him. He couldn’t believe he had put himself in a position like that and never once caught a clue of such a complete professional failure.

  Perhaps the assassin had thought him the most defenseless dweller in the garden apartments, and his open door had seemed the most convenient way to some other person, perhaps to the inner hallways and Tabini-aiji himself.

  But there were so many guards. That was an insane plan, and assassins were, if hired, not mad and not prone to take such risks.

  An assassin might simply have mistaken the room. Someone of importance might be lodged in the guest quarters in the upper terrace of the garden. He hadn’t heard that that was the case, but o
therwise the garden court held just the guards, and the secretaries and the chief cook and the master of accounts—and himself—none of whom were controversial in the least.

  But Banichi had left him his gun in place of the aiji’s, which he had fired. He understood, clearer-witted now, why Banichi had taken it with him, and why Banichi had had him wash his hands, in case the chief of general security might not believe the account Banichi would give, and in case the chief of security wanted to question the paidhi and have him through police lab procedures.

  He most sincerely hoped to be spared that. And the chief of security had no cause against him that he knew of—had no motive to investigate him, when he was the victim of the crime, and had no reason that he knew of to challenge Banichi’s account, Banichi being in some ways higher than the chief of security himself.

  But then … who would want to break into his room? His reasoning looped constantly back to that, and to the chilling fact that Banichi had left him another gun. That was dangerous to do. Someone could decide to question him. Someone could search his room and find the gun, which they could surely then trace to Banichi, with all manner of public uproar. Was it prudent for Banichi to have done that? Was Banichi somehow sacrificing himself, in a way he didn’t want, and for something he might have caused?

  It even occurred to him to question Banichi’s integrity—but Banichi’s and his younger partner Jago were his favorites among Tabini’s personal guards, the ones that took special care of him, while they stood every day next to Tabini, capable of any mischief, if they intended any, to Tabini himself—let alone to a far more replaceable human.

  Gods, no, suspecting them was stupid. Banichi wouldn’t see him harmed. Banichi would directly lie for him. So would Jago, for Tabini’s sake—he was the paidhi, the Interpreter, and the aiji needed him, and that was reason enough for either of them. Tabini-aiji would take it very seriously, what had happened, Tabini would immediately start inquiries, make all kinds of disturbance—