There were bunkers in the high center of Mospheira, places fenced off from hikers and guarded by people with guns, which citizens accepted — you didn't go there. You didn't mess with those perimeters. They were antiquated, increasingly so, in an increasingly peaceful world — at least — the idea of air raid shelters seemed antiquated, in his generation. But there'd been fear of atevi landings on the beaches before there'd been aircraft.
There'd been fear of atevi air attacks, when they'd given atevi aviation, and situated aircraft manufacturing on the mainland. The bunkers were supposed to be nerve centers, critical command posts, things to make sure no attack ever drove humans to the brink of extinction again.
They saidthey were command posts. Nothing about how deep they were, how extensive they were — or what they contained. And ifthey contained what he'd been asked about, if there were stockpiles the President of Mospheira could use to deal with the ship —
Mospheira couldn'tcall the aiji's bluff. He couldn'thave set Tabini up to make a threat of boycott and have Mospheira go around the obstacle with some damned antique storage dump.
But it was supply. Even if it existed — it didn't manufacture itself. The manufacturing plants that did exist on Mospheira couldn't be converted at a snap of the fingers to do what they hadn't been designed to do —
But Mospheira didn't educate the paidhiin in what the Defense Department did, or had, or wanted: it was specifically excluded, that area of inquiry. And when the government and State specifically cleared some plastics factory on the East Frontage for ecological impact — you trusted they were making domestic-use articles.
The Department sent the paidhiin into the field not knowing that for an absolute, examined fact. The paidhiin knew there were no death rays. He knew that as an article of faith. There were no nuclear installations. There were no truly exotic sites: the colonists hadn't had those kind of weapons and hadn't given atevi a nuclear capability… yet.
But this talk of stockpiles made a chill down his back, and told him the paidhi might for once in a career of mandated consultations before moving truly need to consult — and might now, if his current actions hadn't set the Defense Department on its ear and sent the Secretary of Defense straight to the President's door with a reckoning of exactly how far and with what offer to the spacefarers they could call Tabini's hand and defy a boycott.
Dammit, he couldn't trust his files regarding a history he had no idea whether the censor Seekers had reached, or not reached — he couldn't trust what he'd been told. How did the paidhi even trust that his own education hadn't censored or even lied about vital facts? Once censorship was at issue — how did anyone, any official trust how far it would go, when it would have begun, whose information it would have censored, or what it would have constructed as a substitute for the truth? Humans had come close to annihilation. They hadn'thad weapons. Atevi in the early days couldn't trade them aluminum or titanium or any space-age material. Mospheirans could get plastics, they could get anything vegetable fiber could produce, anything they could get from limited drilling along the North Shore; they had solar energy and electricity, but they hadn't been set up to realize a need two centuries along and slip enough into storage to hold out against the interlinking of the Mospheiran/atevi economies —
Mospheirans hadn't, all along, been that damn canny, that damn persistent, or that damned concerned about their future — the radicals might wish they'd been, the radicals might have a fantasy they'd been, and maybe something did exist in stockpiles, but it didn't translate to real capacity to hold against an atevi cutoff of supplies —
— or to anticipate some traitorous paidhi cutting a deal with Phoenixand trying to exclude Mospheira, all for the planetary good. They couldn'thave him boxed in. Neversay to atevi at large that the aiji had made a threat he couldn't back or a promise that made him look foolish. Blood could flow in the streets if that happened. Blood was ready to flow in the streets, if he made such a mistake.
He wrote, Aiji-ma, regarding the most recent ship conversations with Mospheira, the expected behind the doors negotiations have proposed human stockpiles of materials I have proposed you threaten to withhold. My hope based on experience living on and traveling on the island is that they're small, not containing everything a space program needs, and that they might be used for bargaining and for attempting to attract the ship to their point of view, and that the Mospheiran government might exaggerate their size in an attempt to get a better agreement.
This, however, does not guarantee I am right about their size. If they should be larger, I have advised you badly, and you must take whatever measures you deem appropriate.
On the other hand, the ship can determine even buried reserves from orbit, as well as the character of factories. It is my hope that factories are not sufficient even if such stockpiles exist, and that they cannot be built in a timely enough fashion to satisfy the ship's leaders.
Further, we have presented the ship extensive political reasons to accept your conditions.
But I am dismayed to know now that I was asked about this matter in Malguri and did not at the time realize its impori, nor recall it in preparing my estimates and advisements to you. I am completely to blame for any negative result. I have erred once today in estimating the dowager's response, as I believe Banichi will have told you. At the reading of the enclosed transcript you may judge I have erred repeatedly and egregiously. If this is so, I urge you not to listen to me further, and to take my advice as that of an underinformed official to whom his own government has not confided sufficient truth to rely upon.
I feel I have no recourse now but to write the dowager, and I have given a firm pledge to do so. But I shall delay my response and take the disgrace on myself for doing so, in hopes that events or greater wisdom than mine will find a means for you to secure your own interests in advance of my fulfilling a rash promise that may have placed me in a position incompatible with your best interests. If I were placed under arrest, I could not send such a message, aiji-ma.
Please believe, as I have in profound embarrassment urged upon llisidi, that I wished to do good for her and for you, and that it is not through hostile intent or orders of my government that I have done what I have done.
It was not a cheerful message to have to write. He appended the transcript. He sent the message, via his remote, to the aiji's fax, rather than using courier, if for nothing else, that propriety mattered less than speed of getting that message next door.
He sat staring at the blowing curtains and asking himself, with a certain tightness in the throat, how far he could impose on atevi patience.
Or how far he could even believe in his own increasingly remote attenuation of logic.
He knew what interests he was fighting on Mospheira. He hadn't been utterly sure until Shawn's message turned up — but that confirmed he'd guessed right, that far, once the ship was in the equation, exactly where the pressure would come from and who would apply it. He just —
— had reached the end of his personal credit, his personal ability, his personal strength, and he'd made a couple of mistakes in his sudden downhill rush to get the landing finalized that had cost him, personally, cost Tabini, personally, cost Ilisidi, and might cost political credit and lives across an entire atevi and human world before the shock waves settled.