Different Senses (17 page)

“Their money’s as good as
anyone else’s. Possibly an interesting case.” I shrugged. “Nothing
else was coming up.”

“
Yes, but it’s not going
to do your reputation any good, is it? To be the
banis
detective. I mean, it’s hard enough with the....” She
twirled her finger vaguely beside her ear.

“Madness?”

She hit me with a cushion.
“Empathy, you dork. Your family makes you respectable, but you
should be careful. I wouldn’t hire a detective who specialised in
working for those people.”

“Are you planning to spy on me,
beloved?” Yashi asked sweetly and was whacked in turn.

“
What difference does it
make?” I asked her. “Working for them doesn’t make me
banis
any
more than hunting criminals made me one.”

“
I know.” I sensed her
discomfort at my questioning. “But your work’s all about trust,
isn’t it? People want to know you understand them, sympathise with
them. The
banis
don’t like us.”

Her kameez had a row of
geometric shapes around the hem. I wondered if they were
banis
religious symbols. “We colonised them,” I said.

“
I don’t know why they
can’t get over it,” she said, pulling a face. “First colonisation
was three hundred years ago. Plenty of their people live well away
from us. If the ones here in Medele hate us that much, why don’t
they just move back to Garle? They’ve got a whole country there to
themselves—a whole continent. If they want to live like primitives,
there’s always Hoshan, though I don’t know how
anyone
can live like
that.”

“
I guess they’d say we’re
the interlopers, so why don’t we go back to Kelon? They
were
here
first, after all.”

“But we signed a treaty with
them fair and square. No land was taken by force, everything was
done strictly by the law, theirs and ours.”

“I know, Tara,” I said. “I
don’t really understand it myself. But you have to admit we’re the
ones who did best out of the deal.”

“
That’s not our fault.
It’s like they like to wallow in history, looking for reasons to be
offended. My principal wrote to a
banis
community leader to ask
them to send someone along to the school to talk about their
culture, and she got the rudest letter back. They don’t even want
to help us understand them.”

“
Did you know
‘
banis
’ is a term of abuse?”

She blinked at me, genuinely
surprised. “The biracial children at the school call each other
that.”

“It’s still rude, apparently. I
didn’t know it either. I thought it was interchangeable with
‘Nihani’.”

“I don’t see how they can be
offended if we don’t even know,” Yashi said. “They could have
said.”

“Maybe they did.”

“
This is what I meant.”
Tara’s voice grew sharp. “You take on a
banis
client and now
suddenly you’re criticising us for things we don’t even know about.
If you make people uncomfortable, they won’t hire you, Javen. No
one likes to be accused of things they can’t help, or didn’t
mean.”

“I wasn’t accusing—” My brother
gave me a look, annoyance rolling off him, and I shut up. “Sorry. I
had a conversation today and it gave me a lot to think about.”

“
More wine?” Yashi asked,
and I didn’t need my empathy to know he wanted the subject changed.
He brought up a case from his veterinary practice, and Tara
gratefully seized on the story. I let them talk, throwing in a
comment here and there, but my mind was elsewhere. On Grandma, to
tell the truth. She’d died when I was three, and I had no memories
of her. Pictures showed a handsome middle-aged woman with nothing
in her features or colouring to indicate
banis
heritage. None of our
family looked anything but pure Kelon. Finding I carried the gene
for empathy—a strictly
banis
trait—had triggered some
ugly recriminations between my parents and my grandfather, who’d
been completely unaware his wife was not all she’d seemed. But
Grandma might not have known. The link could have been generations
ago.

My curiosity was exactly what
Shardul had scorned, but what was the harm? I wasn’t planning to
tie my hair into braids, or wear purple lungi, or light candles at
midyear and hang them up in trees. I just wanted to know about my
family. If I had to live with the consequences in the form of my
empathy, which had lost me my job and barred me from others, then
at least I was entitled to know where it had come from.

By the time I had ordered my
first cup of chai in my usual haunt, Shardul had loaded up my
account with links and images about his culture and Nihani cultural
artefacts. “Names, I’ll give you in person,” he said in a voice
message. “Come to my aunt’s house at two. Do not be late.”

Did he seriously expect
me to read all this before then? I skimmed it. All of it was by
Kelon researchers. I wondered if the
banis
only wrote about their
culture in Nihani, or whether there was some religious reason for
them not to.

Flicking through the
images, I recognised many shapes and patterns incorporated into
consumer goods Kelons on Uterden used every day. Decorations in
bars, used to give atmosphere. Even this chai house had light
catchers in the windows that I now realised were inspired by
udawatha
meeting house windows.

I didn’t understand this
obsession with
banis
imagery. It wasn’t as if indigenous culture or
the religion was admired. The Kelon planetary government wasn’t as
militantly secular as it had been after the Wars of Religion
seventy-five years ago, but I hardly knew anyone here in Medele who
wasn’t a Scientific Rationalist, and religious groups on Kelon were
small and powerless. The
banis
might suspect mockery in
the way their religion had been appropriated for trivial
decoration, but I was pretty sure most Kelons didn’t give the
matter that level of thought. They didn’t pay any more attention to
the beliefs of Reformed Deists than they did to the
udawathei
.

I presented myself at the house
in Tockta Street at one minute to two, and almost laughed at the
irritated disappointment I sensed from Shardul. He’d been hoping to
tell me off for being late.

“Did you read what I sent
you?”

“Yes. All of it, and I have a
list of questions as well.”

More disappointment. I hid my
grin as I followed him up the stairs. Nice arse. Very nice.

He knelt when he entered his
aunt’s rooms, and I imitated him, though I didn’t know the reason
for the unusual respect. “Thank you for having me back again,
Roshni-ji.”

“You’re welcome, Sri Ythen. I’m
so pleased you’ve agreed to help.”

Today she was in purple and
crimson, her white hair just as carefully braided as the day
before. She asked me to sit and sent Shardul out for the chai.

“Before we start, I’d like to
apologise for my unintended rudeness yesterday in using your
incorrect name, and the name for your people. I’ve come to realise
there’s a lot I don’t know.”

She smiled. “Most people’s
ignorance is vast, Sri Ythen.”

“Please call me ‘Javen’?”

“
Very well, Javen.
Acknowledging one’s lack of knowledge is the first step to
repairing it. You have other questions, don’t you? About the
monuwel
...or about me?”

“
Both, actually. I know
you’re reluctant to tell me, but I really do need to know what
the
monuwel
is to your community, and what your role
is.”

“I can’t tell you that,
Javen.”

“I know you don’t want—”

A crash of glass and
metal interrupted. “She said she
can’t
tell you. Not ‘won’t’.
Stupid
guko
.” Shardul glared, his pale cheeks red with anger.
“She
can’t
tell you.”

“Who can? I’m not asking for
idle reasons.”

Roshni-ji shifted, anguish and
anxiety coming off her in almost visible waves. She stared at her
nephew. “I can’t,” she whispered.

“
Please,
muor
,
don’t be upset. Ythen, we can’t tell you.”

“All right. Can I make some
guesses and you tell me if I’m hot or cold?”

She nodded jerkily. Shardul
growled, then brought the chai tray over and set it down with
another crash. “Show respect,” he growled.

“I’m trying to. Roshni-ji, are
you some kind of priestess?”

“No. We have no priests or
priestesses. Only the guardian of the Seeker’s house, our scholars
and those souls who feel the need to commune with the Spirit more
deeply and regularly, and spend their days studying the Seeker’s
words for the sake of their own inner peace.”

“
Okay. Losing the
monuwel
damages your religion in some way?”

“Ye...es. That’s a way to put
it. Please don’t ask me how.”

“
I won’t. And your role
as...protector...gives you so much status in the community,
no
udawatha
would violate your home?”

She sagged with relief. “Yes.
Is that enough?”

“Yes.” For now, at least.
“Shardul, I thought of a better cover story. I have a great aunt
back on Kelon who’s more than a little crazy, and who collects all
kinds of things. She’s actually so ga-ga no one in my family’s had
a conversation with her in years, but I can use her as a cover
story. I can say she has a few high quality Nihani artefacts which
her family want sold for the best price, and that I’ve been engaged
to make enquiries here on Uterden. I’ve messaged her daughter and
got her assurance to field any enquiries that come her mother’s
way. If necessary, I’ll mention my empathy, say my aunt’s interest
was piqued by that.”

“Is that likely?” he asked.

“No, but no one needs to know
that. My great aunt’s never been to Uterden, and even if anyone
asks my family and they don’t know anything about it, I can explain
it by their prejudice against your people. Which is real,
unfortunately. Sorry to offend you, Roshni-ji.”

“I am seventy years old, Javen.
There is very little that surprises me any more. Your people don’t
understand mine, and what you don’t understand, you fear.”

“They make no effort to
understand,” Shardul snapped.

“My sister-in-law says you
don’t make any effort to teach. She works in a primary school and a
request to the community centre here to come to the school and talk
about your culture was rudely turned down, she says.”

“
Oh yes? And how was it
addressed? How was it framed? As a request or an order? I’ve seen
these ‘requests’, Ythen, and all too often the assumption is that
the
chuma
are entitled to our time, for which we have no better use,
and that your people are doing us a massive favour by putting us to
the inconvenience of teaching them things they’ve already been told
and promptly forgotten. Stupid
guko
,” he spat.

I expected his aunt to
reprimand him for his rudeness, but she only nodded.

“You’ve experienced this,
Roshni-ji?”

“All too often, Javen. We would
happily help your children understand us, but we don’t like being
asked to perform, and Shardul is right. We have better uses for our
resources than to teach the unwilling.”

Somehow I doubted Tara would
like me to repeat this explanation. “I understand. Sorry I have to
ask you to teach me, but I need to understand what I’m talking
about. I have some more questions, if you don’t mind.”

I pulled out my reader to make
notes and the two of them took turns in explaining. Though
Roshni-ji was much more polite than Shardul, her anger over the way
their important cultural artefacts had ended up being traded back
and forth between rich Kelons was easily as great as his. After an
hour, I closed down the conversation. “I’m sorry this is so
distressing to you.”

She came back to herself. “Ah,
I shouldn’t let it upset me. They are only things, after all, and
in the Great Spirit, lifeless objects aren’t important.”

“But the living make the
objects to record your history and beliefs.”

“Yes.” She took a deep breath,
and became a little calmer. “What hurts most is how the market in
our possessions goes so completely against the teachings of the
Seeker and his wisdom. Greed, avarice, the desire to keep another
from owning something, are contrary to our culture and our beliefs.
It pains me greatly to know the gifts of the Spirit are being used
in this way.”

“
What’s even worse, these
stupid
chuma
thieves believed the artefacts have magical
properties, when the Seeker very firmly teaches there is no magic,
only natural laws and their working. Claiming magical powers is a
very great sin,” Shardul said, his voice oddly reverent, as his
aunt’s had been.

“
The
monuwel
...to someone
who thought that way...would be considered more magical than most
things?”

“Probably. I don’t pretend to
understand the gullible and greedy.”

But I did. It was my job.

“I’ll need some images of
suitably tempting objects. You have a list of people I should talk
to?”