Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition) (37 page)

He was rattled. He was tired, after an uneasy night and a nerve-wracking afternoon. He wasn’t, perhaps, making
his best decisions—wasn’t up to cleverness, without knowing more than he did.

His nerves twitched to distant thunder—that also was how tired he was. He could go try to trip alarms—but Banichi and Jago were out in the rain, chasing someone, or worse, chasing someone
inside
the house. His imagination pictured a tank of methane sitting in the basement, someone with explosives—

But they mustn’t deface Malguri. Atevi wouldn’t take that route.
Mishidi
. Awkward. Messy. No
biichi-ji
.

So they wouldn’t explode the place. If anything happened, and a bullet turned up where it shouldn’t, with marks that could trace it to Banichi, he could swear to what had really happened.

Unless he was the corpse in question.

Not a good time to go walking the halls, he decided, or startling his own security, who thought they knew where he was. He’d planned to spend the afternoon reading. He found he had no better or wiser plans. He got his dressing gown for a little extra warmth, went back to the sitting-room fire and picked up his book, back in the histories of Malguri.

About atevi. And loyalty. And expectations that didn’t work out.

Expectations on his side, too—about feelings that just weren’t there. Flat weren’t there, and no use—no
possibility
—of changing anything to do with biology. What could one do? Pour human hormones into atevi bloodstreams, crosswire atevi brains to send impulses atevi brains didn’t have?

And ask how humans had to fail atevi expectations, at what emotional level. There had to be an emotional level.

No. There didn’t have to be. Terracentric thinking again. There was nothing in the laws of the universe that said what let atevi achieve a very respectable society on their own
had
to have human attributes, or respond when humans tried to attach to them in human ways. In a reasonable universe, it didn’t have to happen; more, in a
reasonable universe, it was more reasonable for atevi locomotives to resemble human-built locomotives than for atevi to resemble humans psychologically. Locomotives, designed by whatever species, had tracks for easy rolling, shafts to drive the wheels, steam or diesel, and gears to power the shafts, and a pipe to vent the smoke—that was physics. Airplanes flying through an equal density of air wouldn’t tend to look like locomotives. Rockets wouldn’t resemble refrigerators. Physics had its constraints for machines and structures with one job to do, and physics on old Earth and physics on the earth of the atevi wasn’t a smidge different.

But biology, for intelligent beings with a whole damned lot of jobs to do, with microenvironments, evolutionary pressures, and genetic baroque sifted into the mix—had one hell of a lot of variables in potential makeup.

Not anybody’s fault. Not anybody’s fault they’d come to this star—wormhole, discontinuity of some kind—the physics people had their theories, but no human could prove the cause from where they sat, which was on the far side of God-knew-what galactic disk, for all they knew: no spectrum matched Sol or its neighbors, the pulsars, which the physicists said could peg their location … hadn’t.

They hadn’t known where they were then, and they didn’t know now—as if where they were had any absolute referent when they didn’t know how long it had taken them to get there: hundreds of years in subspace, for all anyone knew—stuck here, able to cobble the station together—

But it was a long, slow haul to the star’s frozen debris belt and back to the life-zone, where they’d built the station: that, the way he’d understood it, had been the real politics, whether to build in the life-zone or at the edge of it; and the life-zone had won out, even knowing it was around a living world, even knowing someday it was going
to mean admitting they were making a dangerous choice on very little data. …

Political compromise. Accepting a someday problem to solve a near-term worry.

Add in the refinery wreck and the solar storms, which no one at the time knew the limit of, and the attractive planet just lying there under their feet, hell—they’d do no damage, they’d get along, the natives already had steam, they were bound to encounter anyway, and why should they risk their precious lives trying to hold together against the odds.

At least, that was how a descendant nine or so generations down reconstructed the decision-making process … the atevi couldn’t be too different. They had locomotives. They had steam mills. They had industry.

They had one hell of a different hard-wiring, but you couldn’t tell that from the physics they used.

Couldn’t tell that meeting an atevi. Hello, how are you, how’s the weather?
Nice
people. Arrange a little trade, a little tech for an out-of-season game animal or two …

Right bang into the cultural rift.

Try to settle it—make it right with the local leaders: right into the cultural whirlpool.

Count the ways the first settlement had screwed it up. Count the ways they’d gotten good and deep into the interface before they’d begun to figure out betrayal wasn’t betrayal and murder wasn’t murder and that you couldn’t promote one local aiji and fight another one without involving a continent-spanning Association with
everything
that conflict dragged into it. You didn’t
expect
a steam-powered civilization to have world government …

But, then, if you were an early human colonist, maybe you didn’t expect anyone to behave in any way you wouldn’t.

Fifty years and two paidhiin ago, Mospheira had taken a collective deep breath and thrown satellite communications and rocket science onto the table, with the fervent hope that by hooking it to advanced communications,
biichi-ji
and
kabiu
together would keep some enterprising atevi entity from combining the explosive with the propellant technology and blowing their rivals to hell.

Because they thought now they’d gotten to know the atevi.

God help fools and tourists.

He flipped an unread page of the history, realized he hadn’t read it, and flipped it back again, trying to concentrate on the doings of aijiin and councillors long since drifting on the Malguri winds, washed into its soil with the rains, down to the sea from Lake Maidingi rather more rapidly in this season than in fall.

He was bitterly angry and his mind was wandering, back and forth inside known limits, like a caged creature, when the real answers had to lie outside the bars of his understanding.

Maybe it was a point all paidhiin got to. Maybe he was the most naive, maybe because he’d gone into a relationship with the most friendly of aijiin, and it was so damned easy to ignore the warnings in every text he’d ever studied and fall right into the same trap as the first humans on the planet … expecting atevi to be human. Expecting atevi to do what one naturally expected nice, sane human people to do and, God help him twice, what he
wanted
atevi to do, what he emotionally
needed
atevi to do, instead of himself waking up, paying attention to danger signals, and doing the job he’d been sent here for.

He
should
have made that phone call, back in Shejidan, if he’d had to make it with Bu-javid guards battering down the door. He shouldn’t be thinking, even at this hour, that Tabini was under some sort of pressure and desperately
needed
him back in Shejidan, because if that was the case, then the television network Tabini tightly managed wouldn’t be looking for interviews to prove the paidhi was a nice, easy-going friendly fellow, not some shadow-villain plotting world domination or contriving death-rays to level cities.

I will
not
betray you, Bren-ji?

What in hell did that mean, before Jago lit out the door and down the hall at the next thing to a dead run?

And where’s the gun, Jago? Where is Banichi’s gun?

The logs burned down and fell, showering sparks up the flue. He put on another, and settled back to his book.

Not a word back from Banichi or Jago about what was wrong out there—whether someone had breached the security perimeter, or whether someone odd had simply arrived at the airport or whether they’d had some dire word from Tabini.

He flipped the page, figured out he’d stopped reading the second time somewhere in the middle of it, and turned it back, with a dogged effort to concentrate on the text, in atevi directions, and to make sense out of the antique, ornate type style.

The lights went on again, out again.

Damn, he thought, and looked at the window. The rain was down to spatters now, gray cloud and a scattering of bright drops on the glass. The candles cast a golden glow. White light came from the window, as if the clouds were finally thinning up there.

He laid the book down, got up with the intention of having a look at the weather—heard someone in his bedroom and saw Djinana coming through from the back hall.

“The transformer or a bad wire?” he asked Djinana conversationally.

“One hopes, a wire,” Djinana said, and bowed, at the door. “Nadi, a message for you.”

Message? In this place of no telephones?

Djinana offered him a tiny scroll—Ilisidi’s seal and ribbon, he judged before he even looked, because the red and black was Tabini’s house. He opened it with his thumbnail, wondering was it something to do with the after-breakfast engagement. A cancellation, perhaps, or postponement due to the weather.

I need to speak with you immediately
, it said.
I’ll meet you in the downstairs hall.

It had
Cenedi’s
signature.

D
ownstairs all the oil lamps were lit and a fire burned in the hearth. The outer hall, with its ancient weapons and its trophy heads and its faded, antique banners, was all golds and browns and faded reds. The upward stairs and the retreating hall below them were cast in shadow, interrupted by circles of lamplight from upstairs and down. Power was still out. Power looked to stay out, this time, and Bren regretted not wearing his coat downstairs. Someone must have had the front door open recently. The whole lower hall was cold.

But he expected no long meeting, no formality, and the fire moderated the chill. He stood warming his hands, waiting—heard someone coming from Ilisidi’s part of the house, and cast a glance toward that recessed, main-floor hallway.

It was indeed Cenedi, dark-uniformed, with sparks of metal about his person, epitome of the Guild-licensed personal bodyguard. He thought that Cenedi would come as far as the fire, and that Cenedi would deliver him some private word and then let him go back to his supper—but Cenedi walked only far enough to catch his eye and beckoned for him to follow.

Follow him—where? Bren asked himself, not as easy about this little shadow-play as about the simple summons downstairs—as difficult to refuse as the rest of Ilisidi’s invitations.

But in this turn of events he had a moment’s impulse to excuse himself upstairs on the pretext of getting his coat,
and to send Djinana to find Banichi or Jago—which he knew now he should already have done. Dammit, he said to himself, if he had been half thinking upstairs …

But he no longer knew which side of many sides was dealing in truth tonight—no longer knew for certain how many sides there were. The gun was missing. Someone had it … possibly Cenedi, possibly Banichi. Possibly Banichi had taken it to keep Cenedi from finding it: the chances were too convoluted to figure. If Djinana and Maighi had discovered it and taken it to Cenedi, he believed in his heart of hearts that Djinana could not have faced him without some visible sign of guilt. Not every atevi was as self-controlled as Banichi or Jago.

But while his guards were out and about on whatever business they were pursuing, he had been making his own decisions this far and come to no grief, and if Cenedi did want to talk to him about the gun, best not try to bluff about it and make Cenedi doubt his truthfulness, bottom line. He could take responsibility on himself for it being there. Cenedi had no way of knowing he hadn’t packed the luggage himself. If the paidhi had to leave office in scandal … God knew, it was better than seeing Tabini implicated, and the Association weakened. It was his own mess. He might have to face the consequences of it.

But if Cenedi had the gun and the serial number, surely the aiji-dowager’s personal guard had the means to contact the police and have that gun traced through records—
by
the very computers the paidhi had hoped to make a universal convenience. And a lie trying to cover Banichi could make matters worse.

There were just too damn many things out of place: Banichi’s behavior, Jago’s rushing off like that, this man, dead in the driveway, being some old schoolmate of Banichi’s … or whatever licensed assassins called their fellows.

Cenedi at least had missed opportunity after opportunity to fling the paidhi off the mountainside with no one the wiser. The near-fatal tea could have been stronger. If
there was something sinister going on within the household, if Tabini had sent him here simply to get Banichi and Jago inside Ilisidi’s defenses—that was his own nightmare scenario—the paidhi was square in the middle of it; he
liked
Ilisidi, dammit, Cenedi had never done him any harm, and what in the name of God had he gotten himself into, coming down here to talk to Cenedi in private? He could lie with an absolutely innocent face when he had an official, canned line to hand out. But he couldn’t lie effectively about things like guns, and whether Banichi was up to anything … he didn’t know any answers, either, but he couldn’t deal with the questions without showing an anxiety that an ateva would read as extreme.

He walked through the circles of lamplight, back and back into the mid-hall where Cenedi stood waiting for him, a tall shadow against the lamplight from an open door, a shadow that disappeared inside before he reached the door.

He expected only Cenedi. Another of Ilisidi’s guards was in the office, a man he’d ridden with that morning. He couldn’t remember the name, and he didn’t know at first, panicked thought what that man should have to do with him.