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 amlooking 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.
Joinedthe station,
Oh, my God, my God—
XI
« ^ »
Transmissions 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, someship—”
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 youcall 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? Tellme 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.”
“Many of us think many more things,” Ilisidi said, “nand’ paidhi. What do you suppose they’re saying… this supposed ship… and your people across the strait? Do you suppose we figure in these conversations at all?”
He shivered and looked at the sky again, thinking, It’s impossible—
And looked at Ilisidi, a darkness in the dawn, except only the silver in her hair and the liquid anger in her eyes.
“Aiji-mai, I don’tunderstand. I didn’t know this was happening. No one expected it. No one told me.”
“Oh, this is a little incredible, paidhi-ji, that no one knew, that this appearance in our skies is so totally, utterly a surprise to you.”
“Please.” His legs were going. The blood was cut off to his hands. For what he knew, the dowager would have the guards pitch him off the edge from here, a gesture of atevi defiance, in a war the world couldn’t win, a war the paidhiin were supposed to prevent. “Nand’ dowager, I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t expect this. But I know why they’re here. I know the things you want to know.”
“Do you, now. And the paidhiin are only interpreters.”
“And human, aiji-mai. I know what’s going on up there, the way I know what humans did in the past and what they want for the future—nothing in their plans is to your detriment.”
“As the station wasn’t. As your coming here wasn’t. As your interference in our affairs wasn’t, and your domination of our trade, our invention, our governance of ourselves wasn’t. You led us to the technology youwanted, you lent us the industry youneeded, you perverted our needs to your programs, you pushed us into a future of television and computers and satellites, all of which we grow to love, oh, to rely on—and forget every aspect of our own past, our own laws, our own course that wewould have followed to use our own resources. We are notso stupid, nand’ paidhi, notso stupid as to have destroyed ourselves as you kept counseling us we would do without your lordly help, we are notso stupid as to believe we weren’t supplying you with materials for which you had your own uses, in an agenda we hadn’t set. Tabini placed great confidence in you—too damned muchconfidence in you. When he knew what had happened he sent you to me, as someone with her wits still about her, someone who hasn’t spent her life in Shejidan watching television and growing complacent. So tell meyour truth, nand’ paidhi! Give meyour assurances! Tell me why all the other lies are justified and why the truth in our skies this morning is good for us!”