Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition) (42 page)

“Cenedi said the same thing. And sent me here.”

“We support the aiji-dowager. We’d keep you alive and quite comfortable, nand’ paidhi. You could go back to Shejidan. Nothing essential would change in the relations of the association with Mospheira—except the party in power. If you’re telling the truth, and you don’t know the other information we’d like to have, we’re reasonable. We can accept that, so long as you’re willing to provide us statements that serve our point of view. It costs you nothing. It maintains you in office, nand’ paidhi. All for a simple answer. What do you say?” The interrogator bent, complete shadow again, and turned the tape recorder back on. “Who provided you the gun, nand’ paidhi?”

“I never had a gun,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The interrogator cut off the tape recorder, picked it up, got up, and left him.

He hung against the bar, shaking, telling himself he’d just been a complete fool, telling himself Tabini didn’t deserve a favor that size, if there was a real chance that he could get himself out of this alive, stay in office, and go back to dealing with Mospheira, business as usual—

The hell they’d let him. Trust was a word you couldn’t translate. But atevi had fourteen words for betrayal.

He expected the guards would come back, maybe shoot him, maybe take him somewhere else, to the less reasonable people the man had talked about. If you had a potential informer, you didn’t turn him over to rival factions. No. It was all Cenedi. It was all the dowager. All the same game, no matter the strategy. It just got rougher. Cenedi had warned him that people didn’t hold out.

He heard someone go out of the room down the hall, heard the doors shut, and in the long, long silence asked himself how bad it could get—and had ugly, ugly answers out of the machimi. He didn’t like to think about that. Breathing hurt, now, but he couldn’t feel his legs.

A long while later the outer room door opened. Again the footsteps, descending the stone steps—he listened to them, drawing quick, shallow breaths that didn’t give him enough oxygen, watched the shadows come down the darker corridor, and tried to keep his wits about him—find a point of negotiation, he said to himself. Engage the bastards, just to get them talking—stall for time in which Hanks or Tabini or somebody could
do
something.

The guards walked in. —Cenedi’s, he was damned sure, now.

“Tell Cenedi I’ve decided,” he said, as matter of factly as if it was his office and they’d shown up to collect the message. “Maybe we can find an agreement. I need to talk to him. I’d rather talk to him.”

“That’s not our business,” one said—and he recognized the attitude, the official hand-washing, the atevi official who’d taken a position, broken off negotiations, and told his subordinates to stonewall attempts, officially. Cenedi might have given orders not to hear about the methods.
He didn’t take Cenedi for that sort. He thought Cenedi would insist to know what his subordinates did.

“There’s an intermediate position,” he said. “Tell him there’s a way to solve this.” Anything to get Cenedi to send for him.

But the guards had other orders. They started untying his arms. Going to take him somewhere else, then. Inside Malguri, please God.

Four of them to handle him. Ludicrous. But his legs weren’t working well. One foot was asleep. His hands wouldn’t work. He tried to get up before they found a way of their own, and two of them dragged him up and locked arms behind him to hold him on his feet, although one of them could have carried him. “Sorry,” he said, with the foot collapsing at every other step as they took him out the door, and he felt the fool for opening his mouth—he was so damned used to courtesies, and they seemed so damned useless now. “Just
tell
Cenedi,” he said as they were going down the corridor. “Where are we going?”

“Nand’ paidhi, just walk. We’re ordered not to answer you.”

Which meant they wouldn’t. They owed him nothing. That they gave him back courtesy was comforting, at least indicating that they didn’t personally hold a grudge, but it didn’t mean a thing beyond that.
Man’chi
was everything—wherever theirs was, you couldn’t argue that.

At least they took him up the steps, into the hall. He held out a hope they might pass Cenedi’s office, and they did—but that door was shut, and no light showed under it. Damn, he thought, one more hope gone to nothing—it shook him, ever so small a shaking of his remaining understanding, but the thoughts kept wanting to scatter to what was happening, what might happen, whose these men were—and that wasn’t important, because he couldn’t
do
anything about it. He could sort through the questions they’d asked, and try to figure what they
would
ask—that … that was the only thing that would do any
good; and he couldn’t trust that the persistent question about the gun was even the important one—it might be what they wanted him to focus on while they chipped away at what he did know … while they figured out where the limits of his knowledge were and how useful he was likely to be to them.

There wasn’t any damned launch facility—that was the scariest question, and they were wrong about that, they had to be wrong about that: he couldn’t make it true by any stretch of the imagination. But the stockpiling—they had the trade figures. He couldn’t lie about that. Atevi had finally gotten the lesson humans had taught, knew they were accumulating materials useful in certain kinds of development, and he could tell them far too much, if they asked the right questions and used the right drugs. Cenedi had said the same thing his own administrators had said: he wasn’t going to be any hero, unless he could think of a better lie than he’d thought of, impromptu, already … and build on what he’d said.

God, only
hope
tying the gun to Tabini was their immediate objective, and not the rest of it—they hadn’t beaten Tabini, couldn’t have, and still be asking what they were asking—

But he couldn’t give them any more on that score.

Couldn’t. Daren’t. Couldn’t play the game down that dangerous path. He needed to use his head, and his head wasn’t all that clear at the moment—he hurt, and the thoughts went tumbling and skittering at every distraction, into what might happen and what he could do and daren’t do and how much choice he might have.

They brought him around by the kitchens, and down the corridor to the stairs he’d once suspected might be wired—Ilisidi’s back stairs, her apartment, and her wing of the fortress, completely away from the rest of Malguri.

“Banichi!” he yelled as they began that climb—and his guards took a numbing, tighter grip on him. “Banichi! Tano! Help!” He shoved to pitch them all down the stairs—grabbed the railing with one hand and couldn’t
hold on to it. One guard got an arm around him, tore him loose and squeezed the breath out of him as his partner recovered his balance.

“Banichi!” he yelled till his throat cracked; but he wasn’t strong enough to throw them once they were on their guard. They carried him upstairs between them, and down the upstairs hall, and through the massive doors to Ilisidi’s apartments.

Thick doors. Soundproof doors, once they shut. Ilisidi’s premises smelled of floral scent, of wood fire, of lamp oil. There was no more point in fighting them. He caught his breath and went on his own feet as best he could—he’d done his best and his worst: he let them steer him without violence, now that they were out of hearing of help—across polished wooden floors and antique carpets, past delicate furniture and priceless art and, as everywhere in Malguri, the heads of dead animals—some extinct, hunted out of existence.

A gasping breath caught the clean, cold scent of rain-washed air. Windows or balcony doors were open somewhere, wafting a breeze through the rooms, the next of which were in shadow, lamps unlit, air colder and colder as they went, finally through a dark drawing room he remembered, and toward the open-air chill of the balcony.

A table was set there, in the dark—a dark figure, hair streaked with white, sat having tea and toast, wrapped in robes against the cold. Ilisidi looked up at their intrusion on her before-dawn breakfast and, quite, quite madly, to his eyes, waved a gesture toward the empty chair, while icy gusts whipped at the lace table-covering.

“Good morning,” she said, “nand’ paidhi. Sit. What lovely hair you have. Does it curl on its own?”

He fell into the chair as the guards deposited him there. His braid had come completely undone. His hair flew in the wind that whipped the steam off Ilisidi’s cup. Guards stood behind his chair while the dowager’s servant poured him a cup. The wind took that steam, too, chilling him to the bone as it skirled in off the shadowed lake, out
of the mountains. The faintest redness of dawn showed in the lowest notches.

“It’s the hour for ghosts,” Ilisidi said. “Do you believe in them?”

He caught a quick, cold breath—caught up the pieces of his sanity … and engaged.

“I believe in unrewarded duty, nand’ dowager. I believe in treachery, and invitations one shouldn’t take at face value. —Come aboard my ship, said the lady to the fisherman.” He picked up the teacup in a shaking hand. Tea spilled, scalding his fingers, but he carried it to his lips and sipped it. He tasted only sweet. “Not Cenedi’s brew. What effect does this one have?”

“Such a prideful lad. I heard you enjoyed sweets. —Hear the bell?”

He did. The buoy bell, he supposed, far out in the lake.

“When the wind blows, it carries it,” Ilisidi said, wrapped in her robes, and wrapping them closer. “Warning of rocks. We had the idea long before you came bringing gifts.”

“I’ve no doubt. Atevi had found so much before us.”

“Shipwrecked, were you? Is that still the story? No buoy bells?”

“Too far from our ordinary routes,” he said, and took another, warming sip, while the wind cut through his shirt and trousers. Shivers made him spill scalding liquid on his fingers as he set the cup down. “Off our charts. Too far to see the stars we knew.”

“But close enough for this one.”

“Eventually. When we were desperate.” The ringing came and went by turns, on the tricks of the wind. “We never meant to harm anyone, nand’ dowager. That’s still the truth.”

“Is it?”

“When Tabini sent me to you—he said I’d need all my diplomacy. I didn’t understand, then. I understood his grandmother was simply difficult.”

Ilisidi gave him no expression, none that human eyes
could see in the dim morning. But she might have been amused. Ilisidi was frequently amused at such odd points. The cold had penetrated all the way to his brain, maybe, or it was the tea: he found no particular terror left, with her.

“Do you mind telling me,” he asked her above the wind, “what you’re after? Launch sites on Mospheira is a piece of nonsense. Wrong latitude. Ships leaving for other places is the same. So, is arresting me just politics, or what?”

“My eyes aren’t what they were. When I was your age I could see your orbiting station. Can you, from here?”

He turned his head toward the sun, toward the mountains, searching above the peaks for a star that didn’t twinkle, a star shining with reflected sunlight.

His vision blurred on him. He saw it distorted, and he looked instead for dimmer, neighboring stars. He had no trouble seeing them, the sky was still so dark, without electric lights to haze the dawn with city-glow.

And when he looked fixedly at the station he could still see its deformation, as if—he feared at first thought—it had yawed out of its habitual plane, making a minute exaggeration of its round into an ellipse.

Was it possibly the central mast coming into view? The station tilted radically out of plane?

Logical explanations chased through his head—the station further along to deterioration than they had reckoned, a solar storm, maybe—and Mospheira might be transmitting like mad, trying to salvage it. It would engage atevi notice: they had perfectly adequate optics.

Maybe it was some solar panel come loose from the station and catching the sun. The station rotated once every so many minutes. If it was something loose, it ought to go away and come back.

“Well, nand’ paidhi?”

He got up from his chair and stared at it, trying not to blink, trying until his eyes hurt in the gusts that blasted cold through his clothing.

But it didn’t do those things—didn’t dim, or change. It remained a steady, minute irregularity that stayed on the same side of a station that was supposed to be spinning on its axis … slower and slower over the centuries, as entropy had its way, but—

But, he thought, my God, not in my lifetime, the station wasn’t supposed to break apart, barring total, astronomical calamity. …

And it wouldn’t just hang there like that—unless I
am
looking at the mast. …

He took a step toward the balcony. Atevi hands moved to stop him, and held his arms, but it wasn’t flinging himself off the side of Malguri that he had in mind, it was insulation from the very faint light still reaching them from the farther rooms. He still couldn’t resolve it. His brain kept trying to make sense out of the configuration.

“Eight days ago,” Ilisidi said, “this—appeared and joined the station.”

Appeared.

Joined
the station.

Oh, my God, my God—

“T
ransmissions between Mospheira and the station have been frequent,” Ilisidi said. “An explanation, nand’ paidhi. What do you see?”

“It’s the ship. Our ship—at least,
some
ship—”

He was speaking his own language. His legs were numb. He couldn’t trust himself to walk—it was a good thing the guards caught his arms and steered him back to safety at the table.

But they didn’t let him sit. They faced him toward Ilisidi, and held him there.

“Some call it treachery, nand’ paidhi. What do
you
call it?”

Eight days ago. The emergency return, bringing him and Tabini back from Taiben. The cut-off of his mail. Banichi and Jago with him constantly.

“Nand’ paidhi?
Tell
me what you see.”

“A ship,” he managed to say in their language—he was bone-cold, incapable of standing, except for the atevi hands holding him. He was almost incapable of speaking, the breath was so short in his chest. “It’s the ship that left us here, aiji-mai, that’s all I can think.”