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? Nicepeople. 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 everythingthat conflict dragged into it. You didn’t expecta 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-jiand kabiutogether 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 wantedatevi to do, what he emotionally neededatevi to do, instead of himself waking up, paying attention to danger signals, and doing the job he’d been sent here for.
He shouldhave 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 neededhim 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 notbetray 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’ssignature.
IX