That was the way things went when lords met.
When the Guild met — other things resulted, and he wouldn't throw Banichi and Jago up against Cenedi and others of Ilisidi's household, not for any urging and not for any cause that he could prevent. Not that he lacked confidence Banichi and Jago would deal with the situation. And Cenedi. Who would be equally determined, at Ilisidi's order, though they'd fought together, cooperated, shared all the struggle at Malguri. In some ways, he suspected, humans who thought they had a monopoly on sensitivity couldn't imagine the feelings atevi had when some damned fool or some lord's ambition threw them into a conflict they didn't want and weren't going to win — in any personal sense.
So he was quite glad notto find any delegation from Cenedi waiting for them once they were on the ground; he was exceedingly glad that a quick security mate-up with personnel Tabini had had the foresight to send in last night in the dark had already ascertained that there was no bomb, no ambush and no accidental derailment to worry about on their route to Taiben. Everyone worried, at least aloud, about the paidhi's physical comfort, and asked how the flight had been, and the paidhi smiled and said it had been very pleasant.
More pleasant than security, who'd had to dislodge Ilisidi from the premises last night, damned sure; security who'd gotten no sleep whatsoever last night and, looking a little less crisp than the wont of Tabini's personal guard, undoubtedly hoped that they could get some rest very soon, now. So he asked no questions whatsoever of his own and boarded the rail for a rattling, slightly antiquated train ride to the south.
It took a winding long time getting there — no one who came to Taiben was supposed to be in a hurry —
Thinking about the lander, and the drop out of space; and the fact that the trip to push the lander into the atmosphere was actually underway by now, if he remotely understood the distance the station sat from the world, or the speed of the craft shoving the lander into final descent.
Thinking about Deana Hanks, and his having listened to her explanations, and halfway believing her — that was what made him angry: he'd askedfor her help, given her the looseness in contacting atevi sources which she'd probably used to get two good men killed —
He was mad, he was damned mad. And feeling betrayed, in a very personal sense, in his own judgment of another human being — he'd have thought instinct was worth something; and he'd argued with Banichi that she'd been upset at the attack, she'd tried to warn her guards —
One of them was a fool. Again. He'd fallen for her line about searching for him because it was noble, because it was what he'd have done — the search for him was herdamn excuse for contacting what Tabini called unacceptable persons, for going outside the lines; God, she'd had a field day in the atevi opposition, and not a theoretical opposition. She'd dropped FTL into the mix, all right, and maybe that had been a mistake, but she'd also damned near fractured a province and damned near taken out Geigi's influence — Geigi was one of the most scientifically literate lords in the tashrid andin the scientific committees. Geigi had fallen into her arguments, and so had he — refused to maintain his intellectual conviction that she could possibly be the ideologue he'd thought and still do a credible job — he'd held out in the contact they'd had, because at the back of his mind had been the fear of being alone, the need for somebody human to check with, to haveher contrary but human train of thought to consider. He'd needed her.
But right now, if something happened in the landing and the ship concluded atevi weren't civilized enough to deal with directly, that would suit her and her friends on Mospheira andher friends in the tashrid. They wanted something to go wrong. The radicals of both nations had found common cause. And he'd seen it possible — but he'd not seen it coming from the angle it had. He'd counted on Deana slowly gaining an understanding of atevi — God, how did you work that closely with them and still maintain humans had to have absolute dominance?
And how did atevi lords not see what she espoused — if not that it was so damned uniquely human?
He thought about aijiin, and antiquity, and how, yes, humans had studied the Padi Valley origins of the Western Association, but in the way of humans not hardwired for such understandings, humans hadn't known instinctively, as would have been obvious to atevi, that that formerly powerful association would never turn the participants loose, not so long as they retained any territorial holdings here, not so long as they remotely had interests here — The hierarchies would still operate and the rivalries would still exist.
(Mecheiti on the hillside, shoving each other dangerously for position, because there was just one mecheit'aiji, one leader, and there was a rival, and there were almost-rivals — and those far enough down the order of things they didn't contend.)
Humans concentrated on the competitions of economics and never saw the opposition of the tashrid to Tabini as significant. They saw atevi adopting a human pattern, democratization following a rise in the middle class.
Wrong.
Very damn wrong. Democratization had happened beforethe economic rise of the middle class, democratization in order to secure the rise of a middle class, maybe because the first paidhi, in his need to communicate about human decision process, had let slip something to his aiji as disturbing in its day as FTL to Geigi's philosophy.
There wasn't such a thing as a solitary creature in all the world. The wi'itkitiin perhaps came closest. But even they nested in associations. If there was one — there'd be others. Crawling their way uphill from their brief flights, doggedly, determined in their courses, they got back to their cliffs, those that survived the predators. Damned stubborn. As atevi were. As mecheiti were. They didn't give up on a project. They didn't give up on an effort. Lords didn't give up. It could go thousands of years; they didn't give up, the way, perhaps, wi'itikiin didn't give up their ancestral nests on ancestral relative heights on ancestral cliffs. Atevi wrote downtheir purposes, and told them to their children, so they never damned well forgot.
Very bad enemies, he thought, watching the valley unwind in front of them, watching the distant brown tile roofs of Taiben appear in the distance above the trees.
Humans who didn't know that, didn't know the atevi. Not their good points nor their bad. Deana didn't know what she'd tied into. Deana was still operating — he was willing, in the face of all other misjudgments he'd made, to bet on this one as truth — on the theory that what one saw in atevi now had always been true; that the opposition to Tabini was a political and not a biological impulse; that economics drove atevi to the same extent and in the same way as it drove Mospheiran humans.
Naturally. It was her specialty. What was her paper? Economic determinism?
It wasn't his field, but he knew the premise: that industrial society ultimately produced like social institutions.
No need for Deana to struggle with nuances of the language — atevi would grow more and more like humans. She'd just deal with the atevi that agreed with her position. Her friends in the Heritage Party didn't want to understand atevi — just deal with them. Just the way it was when Wilson was in office.
Right, Deana. No arguing with success.
CHAPTER 21
The servants were waiting on the rustic back porch of the lodge as the train pulled in to the platform. They insisted on snatching his bags and they chattered at him about the accommodations.