Текст книги "Invader"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Or they wanted words from Deana that might inflame popular feeling against Tabini. God, he knew the position Hanks had gotten herself into. He felt it, personally, in the pain that nagged at his shoulder and his ribs.

Behind his eyes, another pain, a stinging, angry pain, that a man in his job shouldn't feel, shouldn't entertain – not – not regret for Ilisidi's behavior. Attaching affections to atevi was a foolish, personally and professionally dangerous mistake.

One could be like Wilson. One could forget how to love anyone. One could stop doing it.

Or one could take the pain, and try to stand it, and steadfastly, professionally, refuse to be surprised or self-accusatory when atevi answered to their own urges and ran roughshod over human sentiment.

"Thank you," he said to Banichi. "Did I say thank you? I meant to."

"My —"

"– job. Yes, dammit. I know that. But prefer me just adequately, Banichi-ji, to Hanks-paidhi."

"Fervently so, Bren-ji."

"Still too little," he said. "Still too little, Banichi. I'd have let you shoot me before I took a chance it wasn't you tonight. Does that reassure you?"

"Far from it."

"Then you worry about it, Banichi-ji. I'm far too tired to."

"It's my job," Banichi said, infallibly, reliably numb to human feelings, missing the point. "You're quite right. We should keep you better informed."

The knot in his throat didn't go down. But there wasn't a solution. There wasn't a translation. Not in the paidhi's vocabulary. Not in the dictionary.

Banichi turned out the lights with, "If there are alarms tonight, trust I'll answer them, Bren-ji. And stay in bed."

Atevi asked what hecouldn't feel, either. He supposed it might bother them just as much. Atevi hadn't a word for lonely.

There was something like orphan.

There was something like renegade.

Otherwise they couldn't bealone – and knew, better than humans, he supposed, why they did things. Psychiatry was a science they hadn't practiced, and still didn't, possibly because no atevi would confide outside his man'chi, possibly because, among them, there was just pathology.

And, ever popular, solving all possible mental health problems – bloodfeud.

Or whatever atevi actually felt that answered to that ancient human word.

Possibly he'd troubled Banichi's sleep tonight. Possibly he'd made Banichi ask himself questions for which Banichi had fewer words than he did. If there was indeed some secret atevi dictionary of human language, Banichi might be consulting it tonight and asking himself what the paidhi had meant.

He'd kept after Banichi until he knew not only that everyone he cared for was safe – but as far as he could, until he knew to his satisfaction, wherethey were; which possibly wasn't love, just a neurotic desire to have them all in a predictable place for the night so he could shut his eyes.

But he couldn't shake the punched-in-the-gut feeling he'd felt when he and Banichi started talking about loyalties, and he'd seen how far he'd gone from safety in his dealings, how much, God help him, he needed, and kept telling himself wasn't – ever – going to be there for him. He'd known it when he'd gone into the job, and he'd known in the unscarred, unmuddied wisdom of youth that he'd one day meet the emotional wall, of whatever nature, in whatever remote time of his career, and remember where he'd been heading and why.

Needwas such a seductive, dangerous word. Needwas the vacancies. Needwasn't, dammit, love, not in any sense. If love was giving, it was the opposite of love, it drank love dry, it sucked logic after it, and it didn't ever output. Barb was need. She'd tried to become hisneed, and he'd seen that shipwreck coming.

Then he'd gotten himself the possibility of a backup in Graham, if Graham made it down safely. And the shaky character of his dealings with Banichi, who knew how to forgive him, at least, told him he hadto pull himself together or hand Jase Graham the keys to his soul, which Jase might not be good enough or benign enough not to use. Jago touched him, not in an unknowing way, and he hadn't, in small idle seconds, forgotten the feeling of her hands, the sensation that shivered through his nerves and said… he needed. He wanted not to have been responsible. He wanted Jago to have ignored warnings and gone ahead with… whatever atevi did with their lovers, which had become in his thoughts a burning curiosity.

Jago… and Ilisidi. He'd made a place in his human affections for the woman with all her edges and all her secrets – he'd ignored all the rules, even given her a piece of human loyalty that must have, in some intrusive way, taken Ilisidi herself by surprise and sent her judgment of him skittering off at angles no ateva could figure, as if he'd touched on man'chiand given a chivalrously honorable – aristocratically possessive? – old ateva a real quandary of the spirit. Like Tabini, he suspected, she'd tried to figure him, adjusted her behavior to fit her conceptions of hisaction, and gone off into that same unmapped territory of mutually altered behavior that he and Tabini wandered.

His fault and not hers. Ilisidi was angry with him. Jago, thanks only to Jago, could take care of herself. Jago hadtaken care of herself and walked out when he warned her. And Banichi knew. Banichi found everything out.

Or Jago had outright told him. Whatever that meant, in a relationship Bren had never puzzled out.

Damned fool, he said to himself. He heard people move about in the apartment, up and down the hall outside his bedroom. But he knew that Banichi knew who they were, and that no one moved there who Banichi didn't approve. So that was all right.

He heard the door open and close, very distantly. But, again, he expected comings and goings. He hoped it was good news. Or at least that bad news of whatever nature was being handled as well as it could be.

He had the damn code. Shawn or somebody had risked a great deal to get him a code that he didn't, on sober reflection, believe he'd gathered in his computer when he'd plugged in and sent out his Seeker.

He had a sure knowledge that Hanks' computer was in unauthorized hands, on Tabini's side or the opposition's. And that code Shawn had gone to great lengths to give him could, if it was what it seemed, blast through Mospheira's electronic obstructions and get at least one message to the right channels in the Foreign Office.

He had the remote unit plugged in. He could send that warning here, from his bedroom, without any need for lines, without tipping off more than the massive security he was sure Tabini mounted on his phone lines, that he had been in direct communication with Mospheira after the attack. But Tabini gave him all the latitude he wanted – an enviable position for a potential spy.

If that spy wanted to act, tipping off Mospheira that violence had happened in the Bu-javid, that Hanks was in foreign hands, possibly being interrogated, possibly being coerced to breach Mospheira's electronic defenses.

The aforesaid spy could also expect that Mospheira would lose no time relaying the information to the ship, who might delay the landing, or change the landing site, just the same as if he'd admitted on the phone that he was standing in the aftermath of a double murder and the kidnaping of a human representative.

In which light – he didn't send the warning to Mospheira. The aforesaid potential spy and employee of the Mospheiran government had to lie abed and not make a move more than he had, letting whatever happened to Deana happen, because Mospheira couldn't do a damned thing. His own security and Tabini's was the only chance Deana had for rescue, and if he made that call, as Shawn and other people pinning their careers on him might not understand in its emotional or logical context, Tabini could lose his gambit with the ship and Deana —

If they let her live, Deana could find herself in the position of paidhi to the opposition to Tabini, dammit.

Exactly the position she'd courted, if she lived to have the honor, if her bones held out – atevi didn't always exercise due caution – and if she could use her head.

God, she might callMospheira and say she'd been kidnaped with precisely the idea of aborting the landing. She might, in fact, work for the opposition. It might serve Mospheira very well.

On that thought his eyes came open again, staring into an answerless dark. He asked himself how he'd gotten into this position, except one good intention at a time; asked himself, too, how he'd gotten so much invested in betraying his president, his government and every democratic process on Mospheira that said one man didn't make decisions like this.

Step by step and on understandings of the situation Mospheira's government didn't have: it wasn't the kind of answer a good government servant gave to his government —

But, dammit, the officials ofhis government backed Hanks, who might still be able to reach Mospheira, with the conspirators' full permission, for all he knew – and blow everything.

He wasn't thinking clearly. He wasn't reasoning in a way that came up with answers – just – the arrangement he'd worked out led to atevi being dealt in on the development; Shawn might stand by him, a handful of the FO might stand by him, even in notusing that code, and letting the landing go ahead – at least Deana couldn't use the big dish. Not without relay to Mospheira.

Which might tell the ship folk something, too.

That was the only thought that let him finally settle toward sleep.

CHAPTER 20

The plane's engines were running as they boarded, not surprising since the plane had flown two trips during the night before their own, at dawn, and refueled. Of baggage, there was a mysterious lot already going on board that had Tabini's red-and-black seals on the bags, nothing to do with his own small bags, all for cabin storage, which were simply clothes enough to last until the lander came down, to last until they came back to the Bu-javid.

There were at least thirty cases out there on the baggage ramp.

There were – persistent since he'd waked with a bowlful of urgent personal messages in the foyer and, as he left, bouquets standing in the hall outside – well-wishes from officials and others to whom the event was not as secret as he wished.

Now as he looked out the window a van pulled up, the driver argued with security, there was waving and pointing toward his window, the driver peered up at him, and understanding his presence was in question, Bren gave a tentative wave.

After which the driver and an assistant set more bouquets out in view of his window, in the vicinity of the plane, that being as close as his nervous security would let the deliveries come.

It wasn't the last van. Two more pulled up, with more flowers, until it looked like a funeral or a wedding. And the cards at least reached him, carried up by boarding crew, and security, even by the crew who carried the carefully inspected galley load aboard. The bouquets were from committee heads. They were from the serving staff.

They were from the clericals, lately begun in their jobs, one of which said,

Nand' paidhi, this is my first job. I am rereading all the mail I did in hopes that the threat against you was nothing I missed.

And another:

Nand' paidhi, please be very careful. Don't let there be a war.

And one in elaborate court calligraphy from the gentleman of Tano's acquaintance, the manager who'd come out of retirement, who said, more expansively, Nand' paidhi, I have all confidence in your security. Please accept my wishes for your long life and the wishes of all my house for the continued benefit of your good counsel to the aiji and his house, long may he direct the Association.

The latest delivery people understood their restrictions and simply laid the bouquets within sight of his window, a mass of pastel color in the grayed and cloudy dawn. He felt walled off from his well-wishers, lonely, seeing the bouquets abandoned to the weather and the wind from the engines, comforted by the gesture, though, and also appalled, thinking how expensive some of those bouquets were, from clericals who didn't make all that lot of money. He tucked the cards one and all into his document case, the ones with plain citizen ribbons, the ones with heavy noble seals, to answer when he could. He vowed to send at least a small floral recognition along with each one of them to the clericals, who, he was confident, hadn't missed any warning. No, dammit, not a blossom or two – real bouquets, and put it on the paidhi's florist bill, which went right to the State Department, with notations to bounce it back to him if State balked.

Another van. Another bouquet arrived, a huge, extravagant one. The delivery agency wished vehemently to board with it. He watched the argument through the window. But his security was adamant, called Banichi, and Banichi himself brought the card aboard and gave it to him, clearly the price of the agreement.

"An importunate well-wisher," Banichi said, and the first glance determined that it and the bouquet were lord Geigi's.

Nand' paidhi, it said, wiser heads than I are studying the answer which you have returned in regard to my question, at unanticipated personal effort. I deeply regret that your absence in pursuit of this answer may have given opportunity or motive to some person or persons to attack the paidhiin, an action in which I realize that I am necessarily suspect, but which I personally deplore. I have written under separate seal to Tabini-aiji, and hope that you will also confirm my good wishes to your associates of whatever degree. I also hope for the safety of Hanks-paidhi and will bend whatever efforts I and my staff can make to assure that no harm comes to her.

"Do you believe this gesture?" he asked Banichi.

Banichi took the card, read it, lifted a brow. "One would never question." And added: "Nor accept the bouquet from this source under one's roof."

"Surely it doesn't contain bombs. They've been fueling out there. The truck —"

"One doesn't know what it doesn't contain. Gambling is not a passion with me. I'll convey your politic appreciation. I've already suggested they move the fuel truck, and pull us away from the area ahead of schedule."

"Jago isn't aboard."

"Jago is coming," Banichi said, "at all possible speed. If she should miss us, she'll come out this afternoon with Tano and Algini. I agree with you. I increasingly dislike this accumulation of good wishes near our fuel tanks. Especially the latest."

"Have you any word yet on Hanks?"

"They're still looking."

"Jago —" He could see, past Banichi's shoulder, the aiji's other security preparing to shut the door.

And a running figure coming from the building and headed for the steps.

The men inside evidently saw her, too. They waited. In a moment more Jago was through the door, the door shut, and the crew outside was pulling the ramp back.

"Have they found anything?" he asked as Jago, smoothing her uniform to its usual impeccable state, came down the aisle to join them.

"One doubts. Would you care for a snack after takeoff?"

"Just word on Hanks."

"None. Are you sure? I'll be having fruit juice, myself."

"The same, then. Thank you." He cast a look at Banichi as Jago passed him down the aisle. "I thought the new policy was to tell the paidhi the truth."

"No. One resolved to brief the paidhi on matters regarding his safety. Not on operations."

"Dammit, Banichi!"

"Information which might tempt him to assist. Or make impossible his innocent reaction to other information. You have such an expressive face, Bren-ji."

The engines grew louder. The flowers and the fueling truck passed out of view as the plane turned and moved out toward the runway.

Banichi and Jago sat down with him and belted in. Other security moved from the door to the cluster of six other security agents at the rear, men and women who talked together in voices that didn't carry above the engines and held no humor at all. The servants had gone on the last flight, before daylight; servants in the number that Saidin had determined as fortunate.

Saidin. Damiri's security. Tabini had directly suggested Saidin do the picking, knowing, as the paidhi hadn't known at the time, Saidin's nature. It had been a direct invitation to Saidin, a challenge to Saidin, to put one of her people on the Taiben staff – for good or for ill.

The paidhi had been so stupidly blind on that point, knowing, intellectually, that security necessarily went in such places – but he'd come in drug-fogged, had formed his subconscious, subsequently unquestioned opinions on the staff, catalogued Saidin as an elder matron, and never, dammit, asked himself the obvious. He'd gotten fond of Saidin – and Saidin might have assumed he knew what she was; which might, Banichi was right, have changed his reactions, his expressions, his levels of caution, if he'd known what he should have known, what any atevi would have known —

He must have perplexed Saidin no end. And, dammit, he still liked the woman.

There seemed a quality to people the Assassins' Guild let in and licensed. He didn't know why. He didn't know what they had in common, except perhaps an integrity that touched chords in his shades-of-gray soul, a feeling, maybe, that one could do things that rattled one's conscience to the walls and foundations and still – still own a sense of equilibrium.

Banichi was going to teach him about doors. It wasn't what he wanted to learn from Banichi. What he wanted to understand was something far more basic.

When he and Jago had almost – almost – gone over the line, and he'd panicked, maybe it was that integrity he'd felt shaken. That very inhuman integrity. That more than human sense of morality.

That Jago hadn't given a damn about.

Which didn't fit with her character.

If one took her as human. And Mospheiran, at that. Which she wasn't.

She was – whatever atevi were in that department. In that sense he trustedJago not to have put him in a difficult position.

And, dammit, he was thinking about it again. Which had absolutely no place in considerations that ought to be occupying his mind.

They swung around for the runway. The wheels thumped down the pavement and cleared the ground. The familiar roofs slipped under the wings and the noise of one more outgoing jet probably disturbed sleep across Shejidan, making ordinary atevi ask themselves what in hell was going on that took so many doubtless official and unscheduled flights to and from the capital —

They might well ask. And – in the light of recent crises – guess that it involved the paidhi, the foreigner ship, the aiji, and a great deal of security and government interest.

Atevi added very well.

The plane climbed above that altitude regularly jeopardized by atevi small aircraft and into a magnificent view of sunrise above the cloud deck – doubtless the better view was from the other set of windows, where the Bergid would thrust above those clouds, but the paidhi hadn't the energy or the heart to get out of his seat to take a look. He wasn't in the mood for beautiful sunrises. The one he did see jarred his sense of reality. The gray below the clouds had better suited his mood. The unseemly sheen of pink and gold made hope far too easy when so much was uncertain.

But the security personnel began to stir about at the rear of the aircraft, and Jago went back, she said, after fruit juice.

"Biscuits," Bren said, before she escaped. Maybe it was the sunrise, but he began to decide he wanted them – having rushed off before breakfast, into a chancy situation.

And in not too long Jago was back with biscuits, a hot and fragrant pile of them, adequate for healthy atevi appetites, oneof which was sufficient for a human stomach, along with tea and juice he knew was safe.

"Thanks," Bren pronounced, on diplomatic autopilot. He took his biscuit, he took the tea, he took the fruit juice, and reflected that he finally had what he'd wanted all along: hispeople safely gathered for breakfast, well, except Tano and Algini, who were still chasing about the local investigation. They proposed, Banichi had said, to take another cycle of the same aircraft out to Taiben this afternoon.

But he couldn't get Hanks out of his head, and couldn't convince himself yet that things were in hand. One didn't attack the aiji's guest in the Bu-javid and carry her off as of minor consequence to the welfare of the Association. A lot of firepower had gone out to Taiben. Tabini's arrival out there was still to come – if it came. Tabini was stationing security out there in numbers that could repel real force.

And in the excess of feeling that had suddenly, after this assassination attempt but not the other, prompted a deluge of flowers and well-wishes from associates, one had the notion that ordinary atevi took this attempt far more seriously than they took the actions of a single irate man in the legislature.

Thisattempt smelled to them like serious business.

It smelled that way to the paidhi, too.

"Have you heard?" he asked. "Have you any current notion whether the troublemakers will make an attempt on the landing itself?"

"No doubt they'd like any means to make the aiji look weak," Jago said. "An attack on Taiben is fully possible."

"Aimed at Tabini? Or at the whole idea of human contact?"

"One certainly wishes the ship had chosen some other site than that near and convenient to the city," Jago said. "It makes logistics for the conspirators far easier. Direiso andTatiseigi are both in the region."

"Meaning anywhere but Taiben would have been preferable. Then why for God's sake was it on the list?"

"It has its advantages. Access is equally easy for us. And we sit close to the neighbors' operations, which means more readily knowing what they're doing."

"But there're more than nonspecific reasons to worry?"

"There's a suspect association," Jago said. "Local. But powerful."

"Localized geographically?" One neverknew the full reach and complexity of atevi association. Atevi themselves didn't admit the extent or the nature of them, God help the university on Mospheira trying to track them.

"Understand, nand' paidhi, Taiben is one estate of a very ancient area, of very old, very noble habitation – very old households, adjacent, of longstanding uneasiness of relations."

"Meaning historic feud." It was the Padi Valley. It was an old area. Historic.

"No, not feud," Banichi said, "but along this ancestral division of lands – the paidhi may be aware – one has thousands of years of history, among very ancient houses each of whom have powerful modern associations."

Not to say borders. Division of lands. There was a difference.

"An easy neighborhood in good times," Jago said. "But many unsettled issues. In chancy times, very easily upset."

"Meaning," Bren said quietly, "if there was a conspiracy a thousand leagues away, it would most easily nest here, next to Taiben, because of these houses."

"Five households," Jago said. "Before there were humans in the world, there were five principle landholders in the Padi Valley. Historically, all the aijiin of the Ragi have come from these five. The Association at large would hardly be able to settle on any aiji who didn'tcome from this small association. They're all the Ragi families who have everheld power."

"But Tabini's house settled the Treaty. By donating its lands to the refugees, from the war." That was answer number one anytime the primer students heard the question. Unquestionably there was more involved. There was the intricacy of the atevi election process. "They brokered the Treaty."

"Keeping only the estate at Taiben – not alone for its nearness to Shejidan, on the Alujis. Clearly association by residence. But also by nobility. The hunting association. And, very clearly, the association of ancestral wealth."

"And the Atigeini have holdings fairly close to Taiben."

"Thirty minutes by air," Banichi said.

"You think there'll be trouble from them? Is that what you're saying?"

"The relationship with the Atigeini may become clear before sundown. Old Tatiseigi is still the chief question."

"And Ilisidi," Jago said,

"What about Ilisidi? Where isshe? Does anyone know where she went?"

"Oh, Taiben. But Tabini moved her out last night. Now – we think she's guesting upland at Masiri, with the Atigeini. With Tatiseigi himself."

"Damn," he said quietly. But what he felt gathering about him was disaster.

"Tabini, of course, knew where she would go," Banichi said.

"And proceeded," Jago said. "He will not be pushed, at Taiben. Thatsmall association is historically sensitive."

"Challenging his enemies?"

"Collecting them, perhaps, under one roof."

He had an increasingly uneasy feeling. But it was empty air outside the window. He was wrapped about by atevi purpose, atevi direction, atevi mission. A trap – a conspiracy, a – God knew what. He'd called down a landing from the ship into the thick of atevi politics, arguing them out of trusting Mospheira.

And the atevi he most trusted – one of those words any paidhi should, of course, flag immediately in his thinking – had let him propose Taiben among the other sites he'd offered to the ship, and hadn't mentioned until now the web of associational relationships around Taiben, which – God, was it only a couple of weeks ago? – hadn't mattered once upon a time in his tenure. He'd no more wondered about local associations before the arrival of the human ship threw everything into uncertainty than he'd asked himself with daily urgency about the geography of the sea bottom.

Atevi associations in the microcosm, which atevi tracked in all their complexities back hundreds of years, weren't something the paidhi could politely ask about, weren't, something the paidhi was well enough informed on to involve himself in, and he didn't. The larger Association was stable. He'd not questioned it. He wasn't even supposed to question it. It had been ironclad Foreign Affairs policy that the paidhiin dealt only with the central Association and kept their noses out of the smaller ones. Reports the paidhiin could get were laced with misinformation and gossip, recrimination, feud histories and threats —

But ask how Taiben's neighboring estates had stood with each other in prehuman times – and, damn, of coursethe Padi Valley associations must be among the oldest: take it for that if only because archaeologists – a new science, a contagion from humans – had established several digs there, looking for truths earlier aijiin might not have tolerated finding.

"There were many wars there," Jago said, "many wars. Not of fortresses like Malguri. The Ragi always prided themselves that they needed no walls."

"Association would always happen among those leaders, though," Banichi said. "And Taiben belonged to Tabini's father-line. The mother-line, two generations ago, was from the Eastern Provinces."

"Hence Malguri," Jago said.

"Which," Banichi said, "to condense a great deal of bloody history, then united with the Padi Valley to marry Tabini's grandfather. Which had one effect: Tabini's line is the only Padi Valley line not wholly concentrated in the Padi Valley – or wholly dependent on Padi Valley families. An advantage."

"So if a new leader tried to come out of the Padi Valley now, he or she couldn't hold the East. Is that what you're saying?"

"There's obviously one who could," Banichi said.

"Disidi."

"She failed election in the hasdrawad because the commons don't trust her," Banichi said. "The tashrid would be altogether another story. Unfortunately for Ilisidi, the tashrid isn't where the successor is named – a profound reform, Bren-ji, the most profound reform. The commons choose. The fire and thunder of the debate was over the Treaty and the refugee settlement, all the lords struggling for advantage – but that one change was the knife in the dark. The commons always took orders how to vote."

"Until," Jago said, "the Treaty brought economic changes, and the commons became very independent. And will not vote against the interests of the commons. The Padi lords used to be the source of aijiin. Now they can't get a private rail line built – without the favor of the hasdrawad andTabini-aiji."

"It's certainly," Banichi said, "been a bitter swallow for them. But productive of circumspection and political modesty – and quiet, most of the time. The commons simply won't elect anyone with that old baggage on his back."

"The Atigeini?" he asked. It wasn't a conversation, it was a rapid-fire briefing, leading to something Tabini wanted him to know – or that his security thought he'd better know – fast. "Does Damiri tie him back to them? The paidhi, nadiin-ji, wishes he had information that helped him be more astute. I suddenly don't follow what Tabini intends in this alliance."

"An heir."

"And an alliance with someone from these families? These very old families? I don't know what you're trying to tell me."

"No other aiji has the history with the commons that Tabini's line has," Jago said, "Tabini-aiji was elected by it; naturally the aiji whose line it favors wishes to keep the democratic system. Certain of the other lords, of course, might wish to change it back. But they'll never secure election. A coup, on the other hand —"

"Overthrow of the hasdrawad itself?" Suddenly he didn'tlike the train of logic. "Change back to the tashrid as electors?"

"Such are the stresses in the government," Banichi said. "One certainly hopes it hasn't a chance of happening. But that Damiri-daja, of the Padi Valley Atigeini, suddenly came into the open as Tabini's lover – was directly related to the appearance of the ship, and to yoursafe return from Malguri."

Stars and galaxies might not be in Banichi's venue. But Banichi was a Guild assassin and very far up the ranks of such people: depend on it, Banichi knew the intricacies of systems and motives that caused people to file Intent.

" Myreturn."

"It meant," Banichi said, "ostensibly that she felt Tabini-aiji was likely to be strengthened by this event in the heavens – not overthrown. That the longtime Atigeini ambition to rule in the Bu-javid was best achieved in the bedchamber, not the battlefield."