Outside security having access to house equipment had been one major sticking point of discussions downstairs. In the paidhi’s staff’s case, certain things they had were unique on the planet, a matter they had not entirely explained to the Atageini; anything that had come in from outside was better than what existed here. The Atageini lord was upset with the implications, his servants were all indignant, and the Guild security employed by the Atageini were in a particularly glum mood, having lost members of their staff due to deficiencies they themselves had doubtless pointed out to their old-fashioned lord long since. No, no, no, their lord would say: he bought quality to defend his house and his province. Quality items once purchased ought to be good for decades if not the next generation—Lord Tatiseigi had no understanding at all of how radically the advent of electronics and computers had changed that basic precept of atevi economy. Quality things lasted for generations, did they not? One bought the most expensive and it was clearly going to last for decades.
And, oh, emphatically, one could never trust security outside one’s own man’chi, one’s own loyalty. That was a principle to which the Atageini had adhered for centuries. It had preserved their power, their autonomy, even within the aishidi’tat. It had guaranteed the aiji had a refuge when things came to crisis. Lord Tatiseigi would very tactfully suggest so. Did it not prove his case?
Never mind that a little support from Tatiseigi would have meant joining the detested Taibeni in passing certain bills in the legislature, and made the whole Kadagidi defection more difficult.
Things had gotten damned hot downstairs, once history came under discussion, and that had diverted the discussion into details unrelated to Lord Tatiseigi’s antique defenses.
But Tabini-aiji had, aside from the argument, insisted, guest that he was under this roof, and Lord Tatiseigi had quietly and very reluctantly agreed to supplement his own leaky surveillance equipment. Or at least most of it. So the scene downstairs had ended, an hour ago, discussion having gotten around to old pieces of failed legislation, and the Taibeni-Atageini feud, which the aiji outright insisted had to be buried.
The particular source of the near-disaster in the last two days, the item that had cost staff lives, had been Lord Tatiseigi’s communications units. It had turned out they might just as well have phoned the neighboring Kadagidi province outright and advised them that the paidhi and his staff had gone out chasing Tabini’s eight-year-old heir halfway to Taiben, who were being asked in to aid their old enemies. The Kadagidi could have no doubt now that Taiben had responded, and that they were all, including the heir, the aiji-dowager, and the aiji himself with his Atageini-born consort, reinstalled in Lord Tatiseigi’s house, a growing nucleus of the old adminstration reconstituting itself apace, a threat to the Kadagidi’s theft of authority.
The latter details had doubtless leaked far and wide among the Padi Valley clans before Tabini’s staff had gotten the last die-hard user of the compromised system to shut down transmissions and quit gossiping on the network. The fact of the dowager’s and Tabini’s presence in Lord Tatiseigi’s house was likely on the morning news in Shejidan, for that matter, because reports of the disaster, the attack, the resistence, and the advent of former administration into the Atageini province had all flowed back and forth on that compromised network.
The first result of the gossip had turned up this morning, as ordinary Atageini provincials, shopkeepers, farmers, and town laborers en masse, all linked into that network, had rolled onto the estate grounds to join their threatened lord’s defense against what they perceived as an assault against their sovereign rights. An untidy host of town buses and farm-to-market trucks had pulled up on the formal cobbled drive in front of the house, and no few armed farmers had turned up with tractors and small earthmovers, very truculent and martial arrivals in the lower hall. Hearing that someone wanted to shut down their lord’s communication system, they had involved themselves and their outraged civil liberties in the dispute about the safety of the system, a matter of local pride.
They had backed down only because they had finally gotten it through their heads that the apparent Guildsman in black was not an Atageini security officer, but Tabini-aiji himself, arguing with their lord, and proposing to improve local communications, if they could only shut down the core of it for a certain number of hours.
The whole matter of the civil protest had started because Taibeni rangers, of that hated neighboring clan, had set up some sort of competing communications installation in their camp on the manicured front lawn, a much more state-of-the-art system about which the Taibeni were as secretive and defensive as the Atageini were about their own network. Lord Tatiseigi had demanded that rival network be shut down, claiming the Taibeni were spying on his defenses—the Taibeni being older enemies than the Kadagidi themselves. That ancient feud had boiled on under the whole debate, and the presence of the farmers and heavy equipment operators had provoked a haughty delegation from the Taibeni leadership, arriving to support Tabini-aiji against Tatiseigi’s provincials. That had been the point at which the paidhi-aiji had decided to retire quietly.
But argumentative as all sides were, and no matter the simmering feuds between Taiben and the Atageini, the presence of those lowland farmers and those high forest rangers alike guaranteed that the Kadagidi would meet more opposition today than had already sent them packing back to their own province last night. The line of buses and trucks out there might give the Kadagidi pause, politically as well as tactically. At least for the daylight hours.
“One has no idea how long it may be, nadiin, before anyone downstairs has time to consider domestic requests,” Bren said. “But at the earliest, I should be very obliged if I can persuade our host to let me connect to a printerc granted we can disconnect from the network.”
The household computers had become an object of extreme contention in the communications issue too. But all he wanted was a computer with available backup, a printer, and a considerable lot of paper to put information out that, in his own opinion, someone needed to hear. It was a report, a document which itself might not be prudent to produce in a house likely to be assaulted tonight; but he was down here to make that report, and if it got out, even into the hands of the opposition, it would create gossip and questions—but it was far more useful to get it into Tabini’s hands, ammunition against such arguments as proceeded downstairs, if only he could persuade Tabini to hear him on the topic.
“One is reliably informed the aiji has come upstairs, insisting on a bath,” Banichi said, pausing in his careful examination of bullet holes in the walls. “We should all be safe for a few hours, Bren-ji, and the aiji has retired, perhaps for the rest of the day. The debate has doubtless exhausted everyone.”
Banichi knew his frustration. And knew the importance of what he wanted to print.
“If one might hand the report to his staffc if one could gain access to one isolated machinec”
“The aiji’s staff indicates to us that he will rest after his bath,”
Jago said, and the subterranean text was that his own staff had tried to get the audience he had asked for—tried, and gotten nothing. The aiji had rebuffed that approach as he had deflected all other attempts. The paidhi’s influence had been a major grievance behind the coup. He knew it. He had not gotten his own audience, his staff met opposition: It was a standoff. But even if it made Tabini angrier than he was, he still had to get that document into Tabini’s hands and get him to read it.