Some said the fact that Maganuri had died and that the three local lords (who had been very forward to hire construction agencies within their associations) failed to affix their names to the building ought to be a warning.
Some said that old Maganuri himself haunted the office building on stormy nights, looking for Shimaji, Sonsini, and Burati, the contractors in question, to put them to haunting the building in his place.
So the paidhi was definitely glad not to be down there, in a building some were seriously talking about demolishing before it was fully occupied. As it was, he needed only go to the lower tiers of the Bu-javid complex and, via the security access, walk into his premises, never having broken a sweat.
Secretaries scrambled out of their chairs, rose and bowed as he and Banichi walked in, and nand’ Dasibi, the chief of his clerical staff, came hurrying from his office to bow and receive the paidhi’s personal inquiry into office affairs.
While he was listening to Dasibi’s running commentary, Dasibi walking beside him with his notebook the while, the paidhi took his usual tour down the aisles of the clerical desks, pausing here and there for a word to the clericals who answered his mail, the first line of defense between the paidhi and his more interesting correspondence.
He routinely scanned that, too, or at least the prize pieces. Nand’ Dasibi had established a board on the south wall in which the staff delighted. It recorded, Bren had discovered, the tally of death threats versus marriage proposals, choice crank letters, some proposing how to protect the earth’s atmosphere against pollution from passing spacecraft and one, his favorite, from a husband and wife in the East, regarding the invention of a ray that would convert the ether of space into breathable atmosphere so that airplanes could fly to the station.
The paidhi through his staff had suggested that the proposed spacecraft did have wings for atmospheric operation, so that, if the gentleman and his wife could perfect the conversion ray, it would be perfectly compatible with the current design.
So far there was no news from that province of such a development.
And there was the board devoted to children’s letters: the staff tallied those, too, mostly sweet, occasionally clever, sometimes fearful of half-heard adult conversations. The staff passed on to him the best of the children’s letters and the letters which seemed to represent a trend, and occasionally gave him copies of the really good crank letters and marriage proposals. His security handled the death threats.
But mostly these clericals dealt with the flood of general correspondence, which would have inundated him and taken all his time. They also transcribed his tapes and cleaned up his rough and informal notes into the language most appropriate for the occasion. That small service alone saved him an immense amount of dictionary-searching—not that he didn’t know the words, but he was never sure there wasn’t a better one and never, on an important report, dared trust that the word that popped into his head didn’t have infelicitous connotations that he had no wish to set onto paper. A written mistake might fall into the hands of news services interested in catching the paidhi in such an infelicity. The press daren’t take on the aiji, mustn’t, in fact; but a lord of the Association was a fair target; and in less than a year he’d become such a person—protected, still, in certain ways, but increasingly fair game if he made a blunder that saw print.
Besides, his dictionary was one humans had compiled, of necessity, to equate human words—and sometimes one could make an unthinking glitch on the numbers because counting didn’tcome naturally and even atevi made mistakes. These experienced governmental clericals would, like his experienced governmental security, fling their knowledge between the paidhi and the dedicated number-counters who sometimes sent letters specifically designed to entrap the paidhi into numerically infelicitous statements, which they, in the perverse self-importance of such experts, could then term significant.
As a minor court official, again, he’d been immune from such public relations assassinations. As a major player in affairs of state, he, like the aiji, wasa target of such manipulators, and his strike in return was a standing order for commendations to any clerical who by handwriting, postal mark, or other clues, identified one of these nuisances by name, handwriting, and residence and posted them to others in the pool. The staff shared information with the aiji’s staff and, in a considerable network, with various lords’ staffs: ’counters could be a plague and a pest, and the clericals detested and hunted them as zealously as the Guild hunted armed lunatics.
It made him feel a certain disconnection from the job he’d used to do himself, however, and he feared that he was in danger of losing touch with ordinary atevi as fast as his increased notoriety and importance had gained him the ability to know them. He likedthe atevi he’d met, the elderly couple at Malguri, his former servants in the Bu-javid, the astronomy students at Saigiadi—most of all, people of various staffs he’d dealt with.
And he couldn’t stay in touch with them, and couldn’t allow himself the human softness, either, to reserve a spot for them in that inner limbo where lost and strayed acquaintances dwelled. They were outside his man’chi. They weren’t his. He couldn’t expect them to become his.
And in that one simple example he saw why humans could become so disruptive of atevi society in so short a time, just by existing, and dragging into their likingpersons who really, never, ever should be associatedwith them in the atevi sense.
Humans had created havoc without knowing the social destruction they were wreaking on the foundations of society where people could be badly bent out of their comfortable associations, in that region where man’chi could become totally complex.
In some wisdom the aiji had set himup in the rarified air where man’chi could flow safely upto him—but sometimes he looked with great trepidation at the day when, their mutual goal, atevi might be working side by side with humans on the space station they were diverting the economy of a nation to reach.
In such moments he asked himself what potentially disastrous and crazy idea he’d given his life to serve.
He deliberately didn’t think too deeply into the changes in his personal status he’d encouraged or accepted—or a part of his brain was working on it, but it wasn’t a part that worked well if someone turned on the lights in that dark closet.
Stupid choice, Bren, he sometimes said to himself, when he realized how high he’d climbed and how he’d set himself up as a target. Deadly stupid, Bren Cameron, he’d say, on cold and lonely nights—or standing as he was in the middle of the atevi clerical establishment that, with great dedication to him, for emotional reasons he couldn’t reciprocate, continually and routinely saved him from making a fool of himself.
He could afford at least the question of what in hell was he doing and what did it all mean and where was he leading these people who approached him with the kind of devotion they ordinarily spent on the aiji, who wasworth their devotion.