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  “I—have no authorization to contact them, aiji-ma, not even to translate, and I would prefer—”

  “You have my authorization, Bren-ji. The Treaty document said, did it not, there shall be one translator between humans and the atevi? Did it not say, the paidhi shall interpret humans to the atevi and atevi to the humans? I take this as the basis of the Treaty, Bren-ji. No matter the division in your Department that sends me two paidhiin, no matter they’re in violation of the Treaty—you will make this contact and render our words honestly to these strangers.”

  “Tabini-ma, I need to think. I can’t think tonight. I can’t promise—”

  “I requested Mospheira to send you back. Surely they aren’t so simple-minded as to believe I wouldn’t use your abilities, Bren-ji. Can you place any other interpretation on it?”

  “But it may not be straightforward. That we do use audio records is going to slow linguistic drift, but the vastly different experience of our populations is going to accelerate it. I can’t be sure I’ll understand all the nuances. Meanings change far more than syntax, and I’ve no wish to—”

  “Bren-ji, linguistics is your concern. The Association is in crisis. There must be some action, some assertion of the legitimate human authority. Every day you spend preparing—we may lose lives. Don’t tell me about your problems. Mine generate casualty figures.”

  It was true. He knew what delay cost. He tried not to think too much on it—when worry only slowed the process. The human brain could only take so much. “Tabini-ma,” he said. “Give me tomorrow to get my wits about me. Get me the transmissions.”

  “Bren-ji, understand, there’s nothing in the world more dangerous than politics running without information. I have heads of security, heads of committees, clamoring at my doors. There’s a meeting of committee heads going on right now—”

  “Aiji-ma,” he began.

  “Bren-ji, tonight, before this can go further in rumor-making conjecture, at least go down and address that meeting, only briefly. This woman—this Deana Hanks—has created speculations, panic, angers, suspicion. Be patient, I say, wait for Bren-paidhi. And they’re waiting, but the rumors are already running the corridors. I know you’re in pain. But tonight, if at all possible, at least assure these people I haven’t deceived them.”

  He’d thought he’d finished his duty. He thought he was going within the next few moments to his borrowed apartment and to his borrowed bed. The arm hurt. The tape around his ribs was its own special, knife-edged misery, growing more acute by the minute, and he couldn’t do what Tabini wanted of him. He couldn’t face it.

  But Tabini was right about people dying while experts split semantic hairs; and God knew what rumors could be loose, or what Hanks could have said.

  “Paidhi-ji, lives are at issue. The stability of the Association is at issue. The aiji of Shejidan can’t ask help of his associates. It would insult them. But so the paidhi understands, across the difficulty of our association—” Tabini couldn’t imply his associates didn’t share his needs—without implying they were traitors; Tabini was doing the paidhi’s job again.

  “I understand that,” he said. “But I don’t think I can walk far, aiji-ma.” His voice wobbled. He felt irrationally close to tears. The shock of bombs in Malguri was still jolting through his nerves, the spatter of a close hit: not just dirt and rock chips, but fragments of a decent man he’d grown to like—

  “It’s just downstairs,” Tabini said. “Just down the lift.”

  “I’ll try,” he said. He didn’t even know how he was going to get to his feet. But Tabini stood up, and ignoring the pinch of tape around his ribs, Bren made it.

  To do a job. To make sense of the incomprehensible, when the paidhi hardly conceived of the situation himself.

  4

  A cable lift existed in the guarded back corridors of the aiji’s apartment, a creaky thing, an antique of brass filigree and an alarming little bounce in the cables; but Bren rated it far, far better than a long walk. He went down with Tabini, with Banichi and with Tabini’s senior personal guard, Naidiri, a two-floor descent into the constantly manned security post below, and out a series of doors which gave out onto a hall not available to the public.

  By that back passage, one came to a small guard station with a choice of three other doors that were the secure access to separate meeting rooms which had, each, one outside general access. It was the closed route the Bu-javid residents used to reach the area where atevi commons and atevi lords met elbow to elbow, with all the vigorous give and take the legislatures employed.

  On this route the lords of the Association, who held court at other appointed times, could reach their meetings safe from jostling by crowds and random, improper petitioners—and on this route one comparatively fragile and battered human could feel less threatened by collision in the halls.

  More, the walk from the lift to the committee rooms was quite short, the room being, in this case, the small Blue Hall, which the Judiciary and Commerce Committees regularly used.

  Jago and Tabini’s second-rank security had preceded them down, were already at the doors, and briskly opened them on a noisy debate in progress among the twenty or so lords and people’s representatives—the Minister of Finance shouting at the lord Minister of Transport with enough passion to jar the nerves of a weary, aching, and somewhat queasy human.

  Perhaps they’d rather shout and finish the business they clearly had under consideration; and if he asked Tabini very nicely they might get him to his bed where he could fall unconscious.

  But the debate died in mid-sentence, a quiet fell over the room, and lords and representatives of the Western Association bowed not just once to Tabini, but again to the paidhi, very clearly directing that courtesy at him.

  Bren was taken quite aback—bowed before he thought clearly, and doubted then in muzzy embarrassment whether the second courtesy could be possibly aimed at him at all.

  “Nadiin,” he murmured, confused and dizzy from the exertion, hoping only to make this short and not to have to answer more than a few questions.

  Aides and pages hastened to draw out chairs and to settle him at the table, a flurry of courtesy, he thought, unaccustomed to the solicitousness and the attention, as if the paidhi looked to be apt to die on the spot.

  Death wasn’t an option, he thought, drawing a breath and feeling pain shoot through the shoulder, the wind from the air ducts cold on his perspiring face. But fainting dead away—that, he might do. Voices came to him distantly, surreal and alternate with the beating of his heart.

  “Nadiin,” Tabini said quietly, having sat down at the other end of the table, “Bren-paidhi is straight from surgery and a long plane flight. Don’t be too urgent with him. He’s taxed himself just to walk down here.”

  Came then a murmur of sympathy and appreciation, the tall, black-skinned lords and representatives who set a lone, pale human at a childlike scale. A small tray with water and a small pot of hot tea arrived at Bren’s place, as at every seat, then a small be-ribboned folder that would be, like the other such folders, the agenda of the meeting. He opened it, perfunctory courtesy. He wanted the water, but having settled at a relatively pain-free angle, didn’t want to lean forward to get it.

  “We were hearing the tape,” lord Sigiadi said, the Minister of Commerce. “Does the paidhi have some notion, some least inkling, what the dialogue is between the island and the ship?”

  “I haven’t heard the tapes, nand’ Minister. I’m promised to have them tomorrow.”

  “Would the paidhi listen briefly and tell us?”

  The whole assembly murmured a quick agreement to that suggestion. “Yes,” they said. “Play the tape.”

  At which point the paidhi suddenly knew, by the suspicious lack of special ceremony to Tabini’s arrival, and by the equally elaborate courtesy to the paidhi, that the committee had almost certainly seen Tabini earlier in the same session.

  And that the paidhi had just been, by a master of the art, sa
ndbagged.

  But it was a relief to sit still, at least, after a long day’s jostling about. Even in the brief spell of sitting he’d had in Tabini’s apartment, he’d exhausted himself, and the Council of Committees demanded nothing of him more than to sit in this late-night session and listen to the week’s worth of tapes he urgently wanted to hear and get the gist of.

  Which made it necessary to keep every reaction off his face, while men and women of the Western Association, themselves minimally expressive and capable of reading the little expression which high-ranking atevi did show in public, were watching his every twitch, shift of posture, and blink.

  So he sat propped at his least painful angle, chin on hand, facial nerves deliberately disengaged—the paidhi had learned that atevi art early in his tenure—listening to the numeric blip and beep that atevi surveillance had picked up from Mospheira communications to the abandoned space station, machine talking to machine, the same as every week before the ship had arrived out of nowhere.

  “This is computers talking,” he murmured to the committee heads. “Either stored data exchange or one computer trying to find the protocols of another. I leave the numbers therein to the experts, to tell if there’s anything unusual. If the technician could go directly to the discernible voices—”

  Then, with a hiccup of the running tape: “Ground Station Alpha, this is Phoenix. Please respond.”

  Even expecting it to happen, that thin voice hit human nerves—a voice from space, talking to a long-dead outpost, exactly as it would have done all those centuries ago.

  But it was real, it was contemporary. It was the ship-dwelling presence orbiting the planet—a presence expecting all manner of things to be true that hadn’t been true for longer than anyone alive could reckon.

  “They’re asking for an answer from the old landing site,” he said, trying to look as blasé as possible, while his pulse was doing otherwise. “They’ve no idea it’s been dead for nearly two hundred years.”

  On that ship might even be—his scant expertise in relativity hinted at such—crew that remembered that site. The thought gave him gooseflesh as he listened through the brief squeal and blip, computers talking again: as he judged now, searching frequencies and sites for response from what optics had to tell the ship was an extensive settlement. He was about to indicate to the aide in charge of the tape to increase the playback rate.

  “What of the numbers?” Judiciary asked. Loaded question.

  “I believe they have to do with date, time, authorizations. That’s the usual content.”

  Then he heard an obscure communications officer in charge of the all but defunct ground-station link answer that inquiry. “Say again?”

  Which he rendered, and rare laughter touched the solemn faces about the table—surprise-reaction as humor being one of those few congruent points of atevi-human psychology; he was very glad of that reaction. It was an overwhelmingly important point to make with them, that humans had been as surprised as atevi; he hoped he’d scored it hard enough to get that fact told around.

  That recorded call skipped rapidly through an increasingly high-ranking series of phone patches until he was experiencing the events, he was waiting with those confused technicians—recovering the moments he’d missed while he was tucked away in remote places of the continent, and which, with Hanks sitting idle and unconsulted, atevi had had to experience without knowing what humans were saying.

  After the first few exchanges, the realization that the contact was no hoax must have rocketed clear to the executive wing in less than an hour, because in a very scant chain of calls, the President of Mospheira was talking directly to the ship’s captain.

  “He’s telling the ship’s captain that he is in charge of the human community on Mospheira. The captain asks what that means, and the President answers that Mospheira is the island, that he is in charge …”

  He lost a little of it then, or didn’t lose it, just whited out on a wave of acute discomfort. He caught himself with a tightness around the mouth, and knew he had to keep his face calm. “Back the tape, please, just a little. The shoulder’s hurting.”

  “If the paidhi is too ill—” Finance said; but stern, suspicious Judiciary broke in: “This is what we most need to hear, nand’ paidhi. If you possibly can, one would like to hear.”

  “Replay,” he said. The paidhi survived at times on theater. If you had points with atevi you used them, and going on in evident pain did get points, while the pain might excuse any frown. He listened, as the President maintained indeed he was the head of state on an exclusively human-populated island—

  God. It already hit sensitive topics. He was no longer sure of his own judgment in going on when he’d had a chance to stop and think; he thought wildly now of falling from his chair in a faint, and feared his face was dead white. But pain was still a better excuse than he’d have later.

  “The captain asks about the President’s authority. The President says, ‘Mospheira is a sovereign nation, the station is still under Mospheiran governance.’ The ship’s captain then asks, ‘Mr. President, where is the station crew?’—he’s found the station abandoned—and then the President asks, ‘Why—”’ He tried not to let his face change as he played the question through and through his head in the space of a few seconds, trying not to lose the thread that was continuing on the tape.

  “What, nand’ paidhi?” the Minister of Transportation asked quietly, and Bren lifted his hand for silence, not quite venturing to silence an atevi lord, but Tabini himself moved a cautioning hand as the tape kept running.

  “The President of Mospheira complains of the ship’s abandonment of the colony. The ship’s captain suggested that the humans on Mospheira had a duty to maintain the station.”

  And after several more uneasy exchanges, in which he knew he’d gotten well over his head in this translation, came the conclusion from the ship: “Then you don’t have a space capability.”

  Bluntly put.

  He rendered it: “The ship’s captain asks whether Mospheira has manned launch capability.” But he understood something far more ominous, and there seemed suddenly to be a draft in the room, as if someone elsewhere had opened a door. He sat and listened to the end of that conversation, feeling small chills jolt through him—maybe lack of sleep, maybe recent anesthetic, he wasn’t sure.

  No. Mospheira didn’t have a space capability. Atevi didn’t have, either. Not to equal that ship. And there was clear apprehension on atevi faces, expression allowed to surface; these heads of committee were steeped in atevi suspicion of each other—in a society where assassins were a legal recourse.

  Damn, he thought, damn. He didn’t know what he could do. The ship was not flinging out open arms to its lost brethren. The Foreign Office had called the exchanges touchy, and they were clearly that. His expression couldn’t be auspicious or reassuring at the moment, and he hoped they attributed it to the pain.

  “Cut the tape off,” he said, “please, nadi. I think we have the essential position they’re taking. The two leaders are signing off. I’ll give you a full transcript as soon as tomorrow, I’m just—” His voice wobbled. “Very shaky right now.”

  “So,” Tabini said in the silence that followed. “What does the paidhi think?”

  The paidhi’s mind was whited out in thought after tumbling thought. He rested his elbow on the chair, chin on his hand, in the one comfortable position he’d discovered, and took a moment answering.

  “Aiji-ma, nadiin-ji, give me one day and the rest of the tapes. I can tell you … there is no agreement between the ship and Mospheira on the abandonment of the station. It seems an angry issue.” Set the hook. Convince the committee heads they were getting the real story. Make them value their information from the paidhi, not Hanks and not the rumor mill. “Please understand,” he said in a very deep, very profound silence, “that I haven’t heard the full text, and that the bridge between the atevi and human languages is very difficult on some topics such as confidence
or nonconfidence, for biological reasons. Even after my years of study I’ve discovered immense difference in what I thought versus what I now realize of atevi understanding. Words I’ve always been told are direct equivalents have turned out not to be equivalent at all. But that I do understand gives me hope, even if—” he laid a hand on the sling “—it was a painful acquisition—that if my brain can make the adjustment to your way of thinking, then there must be words; and if I can find the words I can deal with this. Believe me, tonight, that what I hear on that tape disturbs me, but does not alarm me. I hear no threat of war, rather typical posturing and position-taking, preface to negotiation, not to conflict.”

  “Have they, nadi, not mentioned atevi?” The question, coldly posed, came from the conservative Minister of Defense. “Am I mistaken that that word occurs?”

  “Only insofar as, nandi, in the discussion of territory, Mospheira asserted its sovereignty over humans.”

  “Sovereignty,” Judiciary repeated.

  Loaded word. Very.

  “Sovereignty over humans was the phrase, nand’ Minister. Remember, please, the President can’t use the atevi word ‘association’ to them and make the ship’s captain understand it. He has to use words—as do I in translation—which carry inconvenient historical baggage. We don’t have a perfect translation for every thought. This is why the paidhi exists, and I will be very sure the President understands his Treaty obligations and that he’s sensitive to implications in translation. The Treaty will stand.”

  Suspicions remained evident, but tempers were settling, judgment at least deferred. The shoulder ached, muscle tension, perhaps, and he tried to relax—impossible thought, when he was beginning to shiver in the draft from the doorway.