Destroyer (15 page)

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 bad 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.

How much of the
aishidi’tat
had fractured when that happened? How much pent-up tension in the power structure had just snapped? Classic, absolutely classic atevi behavior.

And what could a human do to mend the damage, when the human in question had made the critical mistakes in the first place, and given his atevi superiors bad advice?

Ilisidi might, with some justification, ask for transport for herself and Tabini’s heir back to her homeland, bidding the paidhi to stay the hell on the island. She might justly tell the paidhi to give her no more advice, certainly not of the quality he’d given Tabini. She hadn’t yet mentioned the word blame, but he was sure she knew a certain amount of this situation was indeed his fault.

And there were no few atevi on the mainland who’d like to explain to him all the mistakes he’d made, he was quite sure of it. By now many of his loyal staff, maybe even Banichi and Jago themselves, were quietly questioning moves he’d made, things they’d accepted.

Now that he had an enforced time to sit and think, not even tea sat easily on his stomach, and sleep, as tired as he was, did not come, no matter how he tried, so the hours stretched on and on, in blacker and blacker thoughts. He ate a bite or two of his supper and found no desire for the rest. He drifted, belted to his seat, in a cabin never quiet—the shuttle had too many fans and pings and beeps for that—but that held a kind of a white, shapeless sound, and permitted far too much calculation.

“Bren-ji, you have not eaten,” Jago observed, loose from her seat for the moment, drifting close to him.

“Later, Jago-ji,” he said. “I shall have it later.”

At the moment he wasn’t sure he could keep another bite down.

But self-blame was a state of indulgence he could not afford. Until Ilisidi did, for well-thought reasons, tell him go to hell, he had to get his wits working and do something constructive, if he could only figure what that was.

So he decided he had best shake the vapors, satisfy Jago, and eat the damned sandwich, bite by bite. Deal with the situation at hand, avoid paralyzing doubt, and try to think of first things first. Try to learn from the mistakes. That was the truly unique view he could bring to the situation. At least he’d had experience in mistakes. He had a very good view, from the bottom of this mental pit, of what they had been, and what not to do twice.

Dry bite of tasteless sandwich. One after the other.

If atevi affairs were to get fixed, the fix had to start from the top of the hierarchy. That was the very point of man’chi. He had to find out what had happened to Tabini, the foremost atevi who’d trusted him, and set things right in that regard, if he had to shoot Murini with his own hand.

There
was an ambition worth having. Too late to utterly undo the damage, but at least, if he took Murini out of the picture, as should have been done in the first place, he could free the people of a leader completely undeserving of man’chi, of anyone’s man’chi—in his own admittedly human estimation.

He hadn’t asked himself, in those fast-moving days when the space program had been his only focus,
why
humans felt guilty if they didn’t spare their enemies, but, more importantly, he hadn’t asked himself why atevi had generally felt extremely guilty if they did. He’d been feeling all warm and smug in his accomplishments in those days, too warm and smug and convinced of his own righteousness ever to ask himself that question . . . like . . . do atevi have an expectation of certain behavior on all sides, that might be worth considering?

The human word gratitude had always translated into Ragi, the dictionary blithely said so, as
kurdi, root from kur, debt.
But what did it mean, derived from the word debt? A feeling of debt for an undue kindness? Good debt or bad debt?

And how was
that
to translate into atevi actions not within, but
across
the barriers of man’chi? There was the problem.

And translators previous to him had never questioned whether application of gratitude across man’chi lines was possible—had never taken any within-and-outside-man’chi applications into account because translators before him had never been in a position to see atevi cross those boundaries. Translators before him had never dealt with an aiji as extraordinary as Tabini, whose
ambitions
had crossed those boundaries and placed him into situations where inside and outside man’chi critically mattered. He hadn’t seen it. Bang! Right in the face, and he hadn’t seen it. None of his predecessors had suggested there might be a problem with the word, that concept, that assumption.

Welcome home, Bren Cameron. Welcome home, on the day all the mistakes suddenly made a difference. Bring the computer up, open the dictionary paidhiin had spent centuries building, and put a significant question mark not only beside that word
kurdi,
but add a note that every emotional and relational word in the dictionary deserved a number one and a number two entry, an inside meaning and an outside meaning.

He’d let his dictionary-making duties slip, thinking they didn’t matter so much as his flashier, newer ones. Lord of the Heavens, he’d become. But where was the clue to his problems? Lurking, as always, in the dictionary, right where he’d begun.

 

The shuttle made its insertion into atmosphere on a route they’d never used before, so everything was tense. The station confirmed they had clearance from their landing site at Jackson, and from Mospheiran air traffic control in general—it was another worry, that some lunatic Mospheiran with an airplane might take exception to their landing or just, in great admiration, take the unprecedented chance to see a shuttle landing. Both sides of the strait had their patented craziness, and a man who wanted to think about such things could fret himself into deeper and deeper indigestion.

Jago noticed it, and inquired again: “Are you ill, Bren-ji?”

She
had put away a fair amount of the offered pre-landing snack, and for answer, he simply gave her his dessert, a prettily wrapped bit of cake. “Would you, Jago-ji? I fear I may weigh my stomach down.”

She knew him. She knew he was worrying. She likely knew he was scared spitless. She floated across the aisle and back a row and shared her acquired pastry with Banichi. Then the two of them gave him analytical looks, and put their heads together and conferred.

The conference drifted up the aisle—literally, as Banichi and Jago floated forward—to Cenedi. Dared one wonder—or worry—that his anxiety might then drift over to the dowager, and reach the eight-year-old heir?