There was some humor in the statement. Narani was exceedingly set in his devotion, but it was not an outrageous sentiment, in the atevi mind-set.
“By no means has he failed,” Bren murmured. “These are not atevi. And for the two of you, for Tano and Algini, too, I understand their manners; I give way to them more than I ought, perhaps, but I still believe we will gain what we need.”
“We defer to your judgment.”
“Tell the staff. I would willingly place Narani or Kandana in charge here, with the understanding this area must remain sacrosanct. Jase may come here. Or Yolanda.”
“One wishes Jase were available now,” Jago said.
“They still refuse me contact with him. I intend to see him before we go down.”
“So the paidhi, too, doesn’t trust implicitly.”
“I don’t trust. I find out.”
Banichi gave a wry smile. “We saw two captains,” Banichi said, accurately nailing one of his apprehensions, with all the psychological infelicity that expressed. Never… never in atevi management of a situation would there be fourcaptains in charge over anything, and two, by no means.
“They don’t see the difficulty,” Bren said.
“Yet even on the earth we have dealt with the same two aloft. We never hear from the others. Should we be concerned?”
“Two captains,” Jago added, “two days until a second meeting…”
“It’s natural to them, these twos. They don’t find infelicity in the number. They don’t think it insulting or ominous.”
“They have not sought to discover our opinions, either,” Jago said.
“Baji-naji,” Banichi added in a low voice, which was to say that there wasa duality in the atevi mythos, the dice throw of chance and fortune, that black-and-white duality that governed gamblers, computers, and the reach into space. Twos allowed division. Twowas implicit in the dual presence, and dual absence.
“Baji-naji,” Bren echoed, thinking, in fact, of the old troubles with the Guild. Ramirez on every point was far better than their fears of the Guild… thus far. Ramirez had made negotiation possible, was, indeed, consistently the one they dealt with by radio; a handful of times with Ogun, a few with Sabin, very few words with Tamun.
Ramirez saidthat Guild agreement was a foregone conclusion… and it certainly would be hard to find disadvantage to the ship in having all their requests met, the same way the shuttle had leaped into production, the same way those files were going down.
But Banichi and Jago remained uneasy, in the strangeness of the culture… in the lack of relaxation, and the infelicity of numbers. Could atevi ignore that, psychologically?
And Jago was right. Might they not have thought of that, and tried to amend it? Three years in contact with the world might have taught them something.
Hecouldn’t ignore the duality, for all of those reasons: the Pilots’ Guild was in some senses an autocracy, but it was an autocracy on a twenty-four-hour, four-watch schedule, with fourcaptains who shared absolute power on a time clock; and they’d consistently heard from the two seniormost… on the surface that was good; but in the subsurface, Jago was right, and Banichi was. It did raise questions.
“We’ve agreed for three years,” Bren said. “Most compelling, they have reason to deal with us, the best reason… supposing they’re telling the truth, supposing Jase is telling the truth, which I do believe: they at least haven’t time to start a war here. And they are sending down the very large files. I’ve heard from the Messengers, and they confirm it. The local communications post says I can access the files here, just as Ramirez said.”
“And we shall be building that second ship for them,” Banichi said. “Do we understand that is still agreed?”
“Yes.” There wasn’t a thing yet the atevi hadn’t pried apart and learned, not least of it the mathematics, not least of it computers, which they were taking in their own direction. “I have the commission from the aiji to agree to this, nadihi; I don’t say I’m without misgivings.” One couldn’t say, of all things, half have agreedin the atevi language: it came out an oxymoron, agreement meaning agreement. “We haven’t seen all of the captains; we assume their agreement. Let them teach us how to build a starship. Atevi have something as great to teach them, Nadiin-ji. If they’ve started a war with strangers, then we and the Mospheirans have very important things to teach them. The Mospheiran economy and the mainland economy… both have things to teach them about how to build. We can’t be the same as these ship-humans, but we don’t need to be. We won’t be.” He caught himself using we, as he used it in his thoughts. “Atevi don’t need to be. And atevi won’t be.”
They listened to him very soberly, and remained silent a moment after.
Then Jago said, “So, this starship. Shall we have one, too?”
“If the aiji wills,” he said. That was the answer to all official policy; and he knew what Jago asked: separate command, on the station, was a problem. Establish another aiji and there was a potential rivalry within the aishidi’tat, an unsettling of the balance of power. “But with atevi, every outpost, every separated community must find honest aijiin who can agree with the aiji in Shejidan for good and logical reasons; as we may have to find an honest lord to command a starship. A hundred, two hundred, a thousand years from now, who knows what will be possible for any of us?”
“Perhaps we’ll all be so virtuous there’ll hardly be aijiin, or presidents,” Jago said.
“One doubts it,” Banichi said.
“More than starships, Nadiin-ji, far more than starships is the skill to absorb change, and atevi do excel at that. Atevi managed the resolution of the War. We, Mospheirans and atevi, wrote the Treaty of Mospheira, and the atevi economy every year makes technology transfer an asset, not a detriment. It’s taken two hundred years to refine the economy to do that. Now we absorb an immense rate of change without social upheaval.”
“Without much social upheaval,” Banichi said.
“Give or take what happened three years ago. But to accomplish what atevi and Mospheirans have done, Nadiin-ji, welding together two completely different economies, peacefully, prosperously, that’s no small thing.”
“No,” Banichi said, “nor managed by fools, as delicate as it is.”
The mathematical gift of atevi was prodigious. They hadn’t needed computers at the start of the relationship, and in the last few decades of this two-century partnership, the University and the Foreign Office on Mospheira had stalled… very, very fearful of releasing computers into the information pipeline.
They had done it, truth be told, because atevi knew aboutcomputers and had begun to understand them as more than an aid for humans. As trade proliferated, the economy expanded, the population bloomed, and—second truth—the Mospheiran economy could no longer fine-tune itself fast enough to sustain its more advanced industries once atevi competed with them, unless there was closer contact. Atevi, who made a rug or a vase to stay in the economy for centuries, had discovered a use for fast food and ephemeral gains… as a blunt-force weapon in an economic war and as a useful communal experience in an ethnically diverse province.
Highways had once started wars. Trains were the appropriate answer.
Computers had helped atevi understand how humans perceived the universe. Atevi were reinventing them, hand over fist.
But dared one think of a space station and a starship as the equivalent of a provincial fast food chain, feeding a carefully-modulated interprovincial money flow?
They sipped their liqueur, and he had his misgivings.
The banking system, with its new computers, was set up to do that kind of calculation down to the small exchanges. Coinage as such was one of those imports from the human side of the straits, more token than intrinsically valued.