Inheritor (2 page)

So with Shawn and every living soul in the Foreign Office who actually knew the atevi seeming not to have power to prevent such folly, the paidhi, Bren Cameron, loyal to the previous regime, but damned sure not to the present one, conceived it as his personal duty to stay in his post on the mainland and
not
to come home.

The paidhi counted himself lucky to be sitting on this balcony, in that consideration.

The paidhi reflected soberly that humans and atevi alike were extremely lucky that the situation, touchy as it occasionally became, had never quite surpassed the ability of sensible humans and sensible atevi to reason with one another.

The fact was, their two species
had
reached a technological level where they had a common ground for understanding. It was possible that the threatened economic and social destabilization was no longer a justifiable fear. The trouble was — it was a deceptively common ground. Or a commonly deceptive ground — again, that interface was the paidhi's department.

Fortunately, too, the essential interests of both species were not incompatible, meaning that both of them could adapt to space — and it had been the aim of both species and the better-thinking members of both governments to get there some time this century, even before the ship reentered the picture.

But the common ground was treacherous in the extreme. There had already been moments of extreme risk: a particularly nasty moment when he lay senseless in a Mospheiran hospital, when conservative political interests on Mospheira, led by Secretary of State Hampton Durant, had sent in the paidhi-successor to replace him, hoping to make irrevocable changes while their opposition in the government was having a crisis.

And they'd nearly succeeded.

Deana Hanks, dear Deana, daughter of a prominent conservative on Mospheira, had within one week man-a*ged to founder two hundred years of cooperation when she'd used the simple words faster-than-light to lord Geigi of Sarini province.

The same lord Geigi with whom and on whose balcony Bren shared breakfast.

Simple word, FTL. Base-level concept — to human minds. Not so for atevi. Through petty malice or towering folly, Deana had managed in a single phrase to threaten the power structure which governed in this province and the sizeable surrounding territory, which in turn held together the Western Association, the Treaty, and the entire industrialized world — because FTL threatened the very essence of atevi psychology and belief.

The atevi brain, steered by the principal atevi language (a chicken or the egg situation), was
ever
so much more clever than the human brain at handling anything to do with numbers. The atevi language required calculation simply to avoid infelicitous numbers in casual utterance.

Math? Atevi cut their teeth on it. And questions abounded. There could not be paradox in the orderly universe on which atevi philosophy depended.

Fortunately, an atevi astronomer, a despised class of scientists since their failure to predict the human Landing, had been able to find a mathematical logic in the FTL paradox that the philosophical Determinists of the peninsula could accept. Vital reputations had been salvaged, the paidhi-successor had been bounced the hell back across the strait where she could lecture to conservative human heritage groups to her heart's content and harm no one.

But as a result of Deana's brief foray onto the continent, and thanks to the publicity that had flown about atevi society on what had otherwise been a quietly academic question, the FTL concept had leapt into atevi popular culture last fall.

He'd had to explain to the atevi populace on national television that the human ship which had come to their world had entered their
solar system
and come from
another sun
, which was what all those stars were they saw in their skies at night, and about which most atevi had never wondered overmuch. Yes, humans had fallen down to earth on the petal sails of legend (there were even primitive photographs) and no, humans were not originally from the moon. But the difference between a solar system and a galaxy and the dilemma of the origin of humans, until now shrouded in secrecy from atevi, was up for question.

Yes, he'd said, there were other suns, and no, such suns weren't in this solar system, and yes, there were many, many other stars but not all of them had life.

So now the atevi, who had been building a heavy lift rocket launch system, in an undeclared space race with Mospheira, were building an earth-to-orbit spacecraft that would land like an airplane, thanks to the information the ship in the heavens had released to them. That spacecraft under construction was what his entire trip to this province was about.

And he had to admit he was far less worried about the spacecraft and its materials documentation dumping unconsidered tech wholesale into the atevi economy (although a year ago the proposed import of a digital clock had — justifiably — raised storms of concern in the Foreign Office) than he was about the work of the gentle, slightly daft atevi astronomer who'd come up with that mathematical construct that let them translate FTL into atevi understanding.

The elderly astronomer, Grigiji, who might be the most dangerous man to come out of those mountains since the last atevi conqueror, had been the guest of lordly choice throughout the winter social season, feted and dined, wined and elevated to legend among the amateur philosophers and mathematicians who were the hangers-on of any lordly house — Grigiji, the gentle, the kindly professor, had taught any hearer who would listen (and the respect accorded him approached religious fervor in atevi minds) his quietly posed and philosophically wandering views.

Now Grigiji was back in his mountain observatory confusing his graduate students. And the paidhi, who had survived the social shocks of the paidhi-successor's adventurous offering of faster-than-light, didn't even want to
imagine
what was going on in atevi universities all over the continent in the last several months, as that faster-than-light concept, along with the mathematics that supported it, hit the lecture halls and the ever fertile minds of those same atevi students, who were neither hangers-on nor amateurish.

Considering the excitement the old man had raised, and considering the ability of atevi to take any mathematical model and elaborate on it, the paidhi on certain bad nights lay awake imagining atevi simply, airily declaring at year's end they'd discovered a physics that didn't
need
a launch vehicle
or
a starship to convey them to the stars, and, oh, by the way, they didn't truly need humans, either.

The paidhi, who thought he'd had a very adequate mathematics education in his preparation for his office, thank you, had had six very short months to study up on a branch of mathematics outright
omitted
from the Mospheiran university curriculum for security reasons — mathematical concepts now spreading limbs and branches in other areas of atevi academe besides the lately fashionable astronomers.

And all this brain-bending study he did only so he, the paidhi, who was not a mathematical genius, could laboriously translate the documents of atevi who
were
mathematical geniuses — to humans on the island and on the ship who didn't half suspect the danger they were in from a species they thought dependent on them.

He hoped at least to keep well enough abreast of matters mathematical so that conceptual translation remained possible between two languages, and two (or counting the ship's officers,
three)
governments; he also had to translate between what was formerly two, but definitely now three, sets of scientists and engineers, all of whom were flinging concepts at each other with a rapidity that numbed the sensibilities.

Now humans who had never met atevi face to face — the crew of that ship — were proposing to bring atevi into space and to hand atevi the kind of power that, by what he understood, couldn't be let loose on a planet.

Only last year the University advisory committee on Mospheira, who did know something of atevi, had maintained that nuclear energy, like digital clocks and the concept of time more finely reportable than atevi numerologists were accustomed to reckon it, was still far too dangerous to put into atevi hands. And humans up there proposed to bring the technology of a stardrive into atevi awareness.

What the humans on that ship still had difficulty getting through their heads was that it hadn't been just a bad day on which the space age humans who had landed on the planet had legitimately
lost
the war they'd fought with the then steam age atevi. Humans had really, militarily
lost
the war, so that, indeed, and by the resulting Treaty, Mospheira had been surrendering their technology a step at a time to the atevi of the Western Association — Treaty mandate, not a voluntary choice.

And in all those years, a process mediated by two centuries of paidhiin, technological change had been deliberately slowed and managed so that atevi and humans could achieve technological parity without ever again destabilizing
atevi
society and starting another
atevi
war.

The ship, by the conversations he'd had with its captain, and with Jason Graham, with whom he shared quarters back in the capital, seemed convinced atevi would adapt.

He hoped they were right. He was by no means convinced.

As it was, certain factions within the Western Association of the atevi were viewing with considerable suspicion the flood of knowledge and engineering pouring down on them from the sky, knowledge and space age science that could be turned — very easily — against them, in their regional and historical quarrels with the capital of the Association, situated at Shejidan.

The current aiji, Tabini, the atevi president, whose capital was at Shejidan, was ethnically Ragi, a distinction the ship didn't understand. Tabini-aiji, whose position was both elective and to some meaningful degree hereditary, was also clever, and bent on taking every bit of power he could get into the atevi central government, for good and foresighted reasons, by Bren's estimation; but tell that to the provinces whose ancestral rights were being taken away by this increased centralization.

And in that light, damned right the atevi of the Peninsula had a reason to worry about the space program in the hands of the Ragi atevi; most of the atevi of the Peninsula weren't Ragi — they were Edi, who had been conquered by the Ragi five hundred odd years ago.

While lord Geigi, across the table from him, likewise sipping his tea in a dawn wind, wasn't even Edi: he was Maschi, which was a complete history unto itself, but he was an Edi lord. And, to add to the puzzle — which neither the ship nor his roommate would understand — until lately, last year, in fact, Geigi had been in a very uncomfortable position, trying to do well economically and legislatively for his district, trying to be a moderate in a region of well-armed hotheads who were almost-but-not-quite his ethnic relatives, while trying not to lose what humans might call his soul in dealings with Tabini, who headed the Ragi atevi, the Western Association, and the civilized world.

Tabini, even before the advent of the ship, had been dealing with Mospheira hand over fist for every piece of human tech he could get his hands on. Now Tabini dealt with the ship instead, wanting whatever technical diagrams and materials information the ship would send down to the great dish at Mogari-nai and into his control. Tabini was hell-bent on new tech, and all it implied about central power and respect for the traditional mathematical philosophies which still constituted the atevi view of the universe.

Geigi had been the one provincial lord who, thanks to his unique position as technologically and mathematically educated,
and
a Lord of the larger Ragi Association,
and
a philosophical Determinist (as the peninsular atevi generally were), suddenly had had to find honest answers to the FTL paradox that Deana Hanks had posed.

FTL was a devastating challenge (via a mathematics implied in its new universe-view) to the philosophy by which lord Geigi and all his Edi neighbors lived and conducted their affairs: if something could move faster than light, science, which thought it had understood the universe, was wrong and the peninsular philosophers and all the Edi who had been part of a philosophical rebellion against Absolutist number theory had been made to look like fools.

Yet Geigi, tottering on the brink of public embarrassment and a loss of respect that could collapse his financial dealings, had sought the truth face to face, had challenged Bren-paidhi to answer for him the mathematical questions Deana-paidhi had raised.

The support and resources Bren-paidhi had gotten from Tabini himself had enabled him to answer that question, and that answer had undoubtedly saved Geigi's reputation and probably his life, counting the financial and political chaos that would have erupted in the province.

Bren rather
liked
the plump and studious lord, this man who posed courageous questions of his universe because if it killed him, lord Geigi wanted the truth: baji-naji, as atevi put it, turn the world upside down, lord Geigi didn't want some surface assurance that would let him ignore the universe. No, he
was
a scientifically educated man, not because an atevi lord had to be, but because he wanted to embrace the universe, understand it, see it in all its mathematical beauty.

Understand the human side of the universe — maybe Geigi could even approach that.

But lord Geigi would not, on a gut level, understand being
liked
, his language having no such word and his atevi heart feeling no such emotion. What went on inside Geigi was equally complex, it might produce the same results, but it was not human; and that was the first understanding of all understandings the paidhi had to accept in dealing with atevi.

As a human, he
liked
lord Geigi; he also
respected
Geigi's courage and good sense, and that latter sentiment Geigi
could
understand, at least closely enough to say there was congruence enough between their viewpoints for association (a very atevi word) of Geigi's interests and his — in the way atevi looked at things. Geigi also seemed to respect him, the paidhi, as the one official of Tabini's predominantly Ragi household ironically most able to understand the tightrope Geigi walked as a Maschi in an Edi district in a Ragi nation. That was another point on which they were
associated
, that atevi word of such emotionally charged relationship.