Текст книги "Inheritor"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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On the other hand, where didhe invest emotionally? His treatment of the paidhi-successor and his refusal to knuckle under to the head of the State Department meant, effectively, that he couldn’t go home. Meant he would have no more chances to sit by the sea on the other side of this strait. Meant he would have no more breakfasts on his brother’s front porch—and this place, this moment, this associationin an alien government was what he’d traded it all for, in some very real sense: the chance to sit here, in the position he occupied with an alien lord. He had a mother, a brother, an estranged father, and his brother’s family all over there in that haze that obscured the strait, and there was a chance he’d never see his mother again, considering the troubling reports he’d gotten on her health this winter. He was bitter about that penalty his government made him and her pay; he was angry, and he asked himself at odd and very dangerous moments like this one, if it wasn’t psychologically or professionally acceptable for him to build careful little fences around certain atevi in his mind and, one-sidedly, thinkabout liking them, what in hellwas he going to do?

He had a human roommate. He had Jase Graham. There was that.

He could likeJase Graham. That was permitted, psychologically, politically, in every way approved by the State Department; that was permissible.

But he didn’t dare quite turn loose of his suspicion of a man from a human culture centuries divorced from his own, a man who didn’t, on his side, offer deep confidences to him. Geigi had flung his lifeinto Bren’s hands when he welcomed him and the aiji’s Guild members under his roof with every evidence of delight. They’d spent the previous evening and this morning discussing sea shells, architecture, and Geigi’s marriage prospects. Jase, who had lived under the same roof, shared dinners and spent the majority of the last six months with him, had trouble talking about his home or his family or his ship’s whereabouts over the last couple of centuries.

And that seemed a significant reticence.

It takes timeto travel between stars, Jase had said. And, We did our jobs, that’s all.

But where wereyou? he’d asked Jase, and Jase had taken a piece of paper and tried to draw him a diagram of the ship’s location for some significant period of time relative to a star he couldn’t identify, but he’d made no sense of it. Then they’d gotten a bottle of shibei and tried to talk personally, but Jase said, I don’t know, to all questions of how that star where Jase said they’d been sitting for years related to where they were now.

And to, What’s out there? Jase had said to him, It’s just stars. It’s just stars, that’s all.

Well, maybe it wasn’t what a human who’d dreamed of seeing the space station, who’d dedicated his teen-aged years, his romantic hopes and his adult life to the hope of advancing the planet just to the edge of space, wanted to hear from a man who’d been born to it.

Maybe it had turned things just the least bit sour in the relationship that Jase, after all the excitement with which he’d welcomed him to the world, hadn’t had wonders to tell him. He didn’t know why he felt put off by Jase Graham.

But he hadn’t been happy since the world changed and since he’d shared his world with an unhappy, often scared young man. He knew that.

He didn’t like to think about that fact on this pleasant morning when his mind had been intermittently, though they were talked dry by now, trying to manage the intricacies of conversation with an atevi lord he admired but didn’t know all that intimately.

He most of all didn’t like to think about the fact that, while he was on this side of the strait coaching Jase in a language that wasn’t easy to learn, his own mother was suffering phone calls in the middle of the night from crackpots who hated him, crackpots the government over there couldn’t seem to catch.

He didn’t like to think about the fact that his almost-fiancee (whom he wasn’t totally sure he loved, the way he wasn’t totally sure nowadays he likedanything in the world without checking his subconscious) had gotten tired of waiting and tired of his absences. So she said. His belief now was that she’d grown scared of similar midnight phone calls.

But whatever the reason, she’d married a man she didn’t in the least love; and there went another tie he’d once had to Mospheira.

Barb was safe now, off his conscience, and married to Paul Saarinson, who was well-placed in the government. He was sure she didn’t get threatening phone calls nowadays.

His brother, Toby, on the other hand, had no such refuge. His brother had suffered phone threats against his family until his kids were afraid to walk to school in their quiet, tiny town on the north shore of the island, a mostly rural place where behavior like that didn’t happen and people hadn’t been in the habit of locking their doors.

He didn’t like to think about the fact that if he did go home for a visit and to try to defuse the political situation via consultation with the State Department and the President, he might find himself arrested right at the airport.

Oh, he didn’t think the Mospheiran government could hold him, for one thing because the aiji in She-jidan would threaten global war to get him back, and for another because Tabini-aiji definitely would not accept Deana Hanks as his replacement. He reckoned either one was a sufficiently powerful incentive for the government of Mospheira to behave itself on that surface level, and had toyed with the idea of a few hours’ visit to try to straighten matters out.

Over all, however, he wasn’t willing to bet his life or world peace on his own government’s common sense the way he bet it right now on Geigi’s cook’s choice of teas.

Trust that he was safe on this exposed balcony, drinking this tea maybe seventy miles from an atevi resort area overlooked by radar installations looking for illicit human airplanes? Yes. Crazy as the world had become, he did trust that he was safe here. An ateva who’d conspired against him and then changed his mind had changed his mind not because of the law (which allowed assassination as an alternative to lawsuits) but because it was no longer in Geigi’s interests to do him harm.

A human enemy on Mospheira, especially a crazy one, was another matter entirely; and the members of his own species who’d started calling his brother and his mother at three in the morning to threaten them because of actions he took on the mainland were liable to do anything.

So if he did have to visit Mospheira before they got a ship into space and made all issues moot, who knew? Certainly there was reason that chief presidential advisor George Barralin and others high in the administration would feel the heat of their under-the-table, bribe-passing supporters if they found him within their reach and had to yield him back not only to the mainland but back to hold the paidhi’s office again, bowing to atevi pressure. They’d done that already, sending him back here straight off the operating table six months ago. But, then, that was no surprise. George and the President were good at bending to pressure. That was why their supporters put them in office.

So, round one, they’d tried firing him. That was what the Deana Hanks affair had been.

Round two, Deana had tried to build her own power base among atevi by (against all carefully considered law and State Department regulation) contacting atevi opposed to Tabini.

Her ignominious return to the island had left George and the President in rather an embarrassing mess, because while they hadto talk to atevi to keep the industrial raw goods flowing, there was no paidhi-successor but Deana who wasn’t either older and rooted to Mospheira, or so junior as to be collegiate. A replacement for him even if completely qualified would be no more acceptable to the atevi than Deana Hanks had been, because hewas the one Tabini insisted on having. And if the atevi bounced their choice back at them again, it just wouldn’t inspire confidence among the Mospheiran electorate that the Mospheiran government was in control of things.

The President of Mospheira, elected with the support of various business interests, including Gaylord Hanks, father of Deana Hanks, got his advice from his advisor George Barrulin and the Secretary of State, Hampton Durant.

The Foreign Office, why, that was a mere bureau within the Department of State. It always hadbeen a mere bureau, run by the Foreign Secretary, presently Shawn Tyers, who couldn’t get a phone call through to his officer in the field.

So his was the only advice that might come to the President from anyone talking to the atevi. And good old George wouldn’t pass it on to the President if it didn’t serve the interests of George.

Well, lord Geigi at least had ceased to think that he ought to be shot. And lord Geigi had far more class than to allude to that old business.

The paidhi, for all his other grief, won a point, occasionally. He had to be content with that.

“If only you had another day here,” lord Geigi remarked on a deep sigh, “one might arrange a day of fishing. The yellowtail are running at this season, or will. Absolutely a thrill, when they begin jumping. I had one land on the deck of the boat. It was a veryexciting moment.”

“One doesn’t doubt so,” Bren said, and laughed. “A grown one?” It was his impression they were a large species.

“The deck crew couldn’t decide whether they wanted the beast in the water or in the locker. He escaped through the rail and probably to this day laughs at us as he swims past. I think he would have been a record. But I wasn’t measuring, nand’ paidhi, I assure you.”

“Oh, you do tempt me.” It had been an eight-day series of cities and plants and labs. He hadn’t rested in Guild-sanctioned hotels anywhere as well as he’d slept last night, not even on the luxury-equipped plane. And possibly Tabini could spare him a day. Possibly, too, it wasn’t a peninsular plot to fling him overboard. Possibly he could convince Tano and Algini that their protection of him during a day’s actual vacation was much easier if he was surrounded by all that wonderful blue water.

But most probably he should fly back to the capital this afternoon, and work on the plane while he did so. He had a towering lot of notes to enter, some export lists to glance over and approve, and a handful of quality control questions which had to be translated for the lab technicians in the last two facilities.

“Yellowtail,” lord Geigi said wickedly, “cooked over the coals. Nothing finer.”

“Lord Geigi, if you go on you will surely corrupt me, and I haveto be back in the capital tomorrow. If I don’t get my work done the stack of paper may reach orbital height before our ship does. I so wish I could accept.”

He took a chance—he hadn’t even realized he’d taken it. It was absolutely against Departmental policy to make a joke with strangers of rank, the language was that chancy even for him. But he did it with his guards and he did it routinely with Tabini, of all people: the aiji of Shejidan, whose displeasure was far more to fear.

Still, a lord in his province, touchy about his dignity, facing a human representative of the aiji of Shejidan, who had status of very indeterminate sort, was worthy of fear, too.

Geigi was amused. Geigi seemed mollified at the turn-down, even seemed pleased at the paidhi’s assumption of intimacy.

So he had done exactly correctly when Geigi had made his rather stunning overture of a local and rustic pleasure to a human guest and a guest of state at that. It was yet one more of those small moments of triumph that the paidhi treasured unto himself, as part of his job—and a part he couldn’t report nowadays, to a State Department convinced he was a fool as well as a turncoat.

And he couldn’t explain to anyone else in the world, not even the man from the ship who shared his quarters, why it pleased him. Except it was the real job he’d signed on to do, and it was occasionally nice to have those little operational checks to prove to himself that yes, the larger civilization-threatening decisions he was taking routinely on himself were possibly founded on a more microscopic-level understanding of the people.

“Well, well,” Geigi said, “the sun waits not even for the aiji, so I suppose it won’t wait for us. We should be on our way.”

That signaled that the breakfast was done. Security and servants moved in about their separate business. As Geigi rose from the table, Bren did, and accepted the formal, many-buttoned coat from the junior security (his own) who had had custody of it. He allowed the young woman to hold it for him to put on, and let her deftly adjust his braid to the outside of the fashionable stiff collar as he did so. He hadn’t realized he’d been chilled through the shirt, but it was the case. Spring had offered the chance to sit on the balcony, had offered sea air and that marvelous view, and he’d said yes in an instant, never thinking that atevi called brisk what humans called bitter.

He bowed, Geigi inclined his head. Everyone was relaxed and polite. He had to visit his room on the way out and gather up his papers, in the custody of yet another junior security agent, also of the Guild. The luggage would make its way separately to the plane and be waiting for him.

But in all maneuvers of this sort, Tano and Algini never took their eyes off him, and insisted on having a car provided by the Assassins’ Guild (oddly enough it was the one way, just as the Guild certified certain hotels, to be absolutely certain a vehicle was safe) to transport him while he was in the province and outside the ordinary security precautions that surrounded the aiji’s household in Shejidan.

It was an official visit designed not just to showcase Patinandi Aerospace, the most important industrial complex in Sarini Province, but to allow the paidhi to talk directly to the engineers at this and at other facilities in recent days. He had allotted the morning to the former aircraft assembly plant, not enough time, but he would exit with a load of paper notes and a wallet full of computer files.

And thatwould go to the staff in Shejidan, the paidhi’s now quite extensive clerical and technical staff. He had to go over his notes for the event, which he should be able to do in the car. Lord Geigi was coming too, but he had his own entourage. Once at the plant, he had a briefing and, he was sure, a similar set of pamphlets and papers would come from the company officials, even including personal requests just to be carriedto the capital and left with the aiji’s staff, a courtesy which official visitors had performed on trips to the capital from ages ago when the mails didn’t come in at all reliably.

The collection of data and the succession of meetings and presentations was down to a foreseeable routine. He had, among the security personnel, one hard-pressed member of his secretarial staff who on receiving the news that he was going with the paidhi on this tour had acted as if he were being offered a government-paid holiday.

Possibly the young man washaving the time of his young life just seeing the interiors of the Guild-approved hotels, usually luxurious, and the views from the Guild-escorted tours, and even just looking out over the land from the windows of the airplane; but the last he’d seen of him, the young man was collating the papers from the last stop on the tour and trying to bring sense out of them, with hisbreakfast a cold roll and a cup of tea in the downstairs of Geigi’s stately home.

He did trust the papers would be in order before the next set was added to the stack: the young man—Surieji was his name—hadn’t let him down yet. And as late as this morning was still cheerful.

2

The structures didn’t look much like a spacecraft yet, either from the ground floor of the immense hangar or from the ladders of the catwalk that ascended to a dizzy height above, in a building with very small windows and spotlights high in the rafters. The structural elements which were the very beginnings of the space-frame were cradled in supports, there, and there, and there. Some elements were forms on which the fuselage would take shape, in composites and ceramics. He saw elements of the wings which he was told were real and ready for their control surfaces. Atevi workers moved among such shapes, dwarfed by the scale.

One could grow dangerously hypnotized by the shifting sizes, and by the heights. A human did grow accustomed to a slightly larger scale of things, living on the mainland and among atevi, whose steps and chairs and door-handles were always a little off a human’s estimation of where steps and chair seats and door handles reasonably ought to be. He was tall, on Mospheira, but he stood about the height of an atevi nine-year-old, and he wisely and constantly minded his step when he clambered about an atevi-designed catwalk, or as he paused for an atevi official to point out the huge autoclave that was a major step in the composite technology.

“Unique to this plant,” the man said proudly, a statement which might as well have been, The only one in the world, although the atevi supervisor might not have been aware that Mospheira’s prototype autoclave had died the death of No Replacement Seals a decade ago.

It was more than the pitch of the steps he watched. He walked cautiously for other reasons, moving through this crowd of black-skinned, golden-eyed gods, expressionless and implacable in manner, all with local and some with national agendas, men and women all distinguished by colors of rank, of post, of heritage and association.

His security disliked this part of the tours. On invitation of the Director he climbed to a catwalk exposed to the view of no less than seven hundred strangers below, any one of whom—or their relatives admitted to the plant for the occasion—could turn out to be a threat to his life. Such would be unregistered and unlicensed operators, of course, of which the Assassins’ Guild and the law took a dim, equally lethal view; but still there was a threat, and he chose to put it at the back of his mind.

One of the lords constantly near him was, of course, lord Geigi, who outranked the lot, and who had already had his chance to do the paidhi harm; but there were lesser lords, and provincial elected representatives, and various secretaries and aides, all of whom had their small window of opportunity for whatever reason, including a deranged mind, to try to sabotage the atevi chance at space.

He was (while watching the crowd, the lords, the directors, and his step) negotiating dark, unfamiliar ladders above increasingly dizzy heights, occasionally with spotlights glaring in his eyes. He kept his hand at all times on the rail and refused to be hurried until, in this largest of all assembly buildings, he had a view of the whole floor.

He had no fear of heights. He skied. Or, well, he had skied, before the trips home had become an impossibility for him; and he lacked opportunity to reach the snowy Bergid, where atevi attempted the sport on new and chancily maintained runs. During this winter, he had grown accustomed instead to such catwalks and ladders, to echoing machine plants and clean-suited laboratories, to small spaces of structural elements that were diagrams on his desk back in the atevi capital of Shejidan.

This– thiswas the first sight of pieces that would become a spacecraft, pieces that were real, solid, tangible, pieces bound someday for space, the dream he’d studied so long, worked so hard, hoped so much, to have happen—in the generation after him.

The paidhi all this particular morning had been listening to the detailed problems of atevi engineers, technical matters and problems arisen from a rushed schedule and translated designs, plans and manuals and measurement standards in an alien language. That meant for several moderately pleasant hours he’d been doing the paidhi’s old, original job, patching up dictionaries.

Atevi engineers adopted or made up a word for something hitherto unknown to atevi, and the paidhi dutifully wrote it down and passed it to other engineers via the official dictionary on the computer links that went to all the plants now. Science and engineering were creating their own words for things for which atevi had had no word, no concept, a year ago. The atevi language as a whole had never hesitated to assume technical terms into its grammar—the word arispesawas a hybrid of which he was entirely innocent.

He had his case full of reports, besides, on what worked, what didn’t work well, and what the legislature, the Space Committee, or the laboratories and manufacturing plants upstream of the technological waters needed to improve. But, God, there wasn’t all that much to complain of. At the beginning of last fall he’d toured mines.

Records from the abandoned station, the library which had come along to this star with what had been intended as a colonial space-based establishment—the sort of thing the paidhi had used to turn over to the mainland a piece at a time—had in the past gone for trade goods. But now there was a new source of ideas in the skies, pouring them down for free. Primary among those gifts was the design thisspacecraft was using.

Whether Mospheira had already owned any of the records involved in this free transaction was an answer he still hadn’t gotten past Mospheira’s official silence, but he strongly doubted it. For one thing, the humans who had abandoned the space station to come down to the planet had done so in two waves. The first humans had landed by parachuting capsules into the planetary atmosphere, because the station officials had refused the would-be colonists the resources and the designsto build a reusable landing craft.

The second wave of the Landing had come down to the planet only after the ship had left, as they claimed, to find their way home; and after the station, increasingly undermanned, had begun to fail. Station officials at that time had lacked the resources and the manpower to build a reusable craft, so with what records they had, the last hold-outs and members of management had parachuted in, too, with no landing craft ever built. The station officials might have brought the library with them; or they might not. The craft described in the design sent down from the ship wasn’t heavy-lift like the chemical rockets of the Mospheiran pro-spacers. In the plans of the ship, the heavy-lift aspect didn’t matter. Raw material, the ship either had or could get in orbit the way their ancestors had gotten it, so the ship captain said. The essential thing was workers to use it. So Jason Graham said.

History also held certain troubling details of worker fatalities Jase had never alluded to, the very thing that had driven the colonists down to the planet—but once up there, upthere, dammit, atevi had a voice; and atevi would outnumber the ship crew, a matter hedidn’t allude to with Jase, either.

And the library might have had records of how to build such a craft; or it might not.

Or the atevi shell that had blown up Alpha Base during the War might have gotten more of the salvaged library than human authorities had ever admitted it had.

At the very least a lot of bitter politics had come between then and now. He’d never had the security clearance even as paidhi– particularlyas paidhi—to get into Mospheira’s highly classified library archive files to find out. He thought it even possible that somebody during the station-versus-colonists-versus-ship dispute had deliberately wiped them out of station records and left the only copy in the ship’s possession, to prevent the colonists getting off the planet without improving the industrial base.

But irony of ironies, Jasehad still had to parachute in, wave three, because the sad truth was that the wondrous starship couldn’t build the landing craft to which it had the design because it lacked the necessary manpower, and even if they somehow surmounted that difficulty, they still couldn’t fly the craft down, because no space-bound pilot had the skill to fly in an atmosphere.

So for all those reasons, and even though Ms. Yolanda Mercheson, the starship’s representative to Mospheira, was supposed to be arranging the building of a human-made ship identical to this one, he was increasingly sure that the ship that would first carry personnel and cargo up off the planet was the one he was looking down upon this very moment.

Even with the plans, humans on Mospheira no longer had the capacity to mount the construction effort he had in front of him. A lively aircraft manufacturing industry was a real asset to an accelerated space program. So were the skilled workers to reconfigure those molds and handle the composites.

Unfortunately humans on Mospheira didn’t have that resource, either. Oh, there wasan aircraft plant on Mospheira, but it had stopped manufacturing large jets, due to competition from the atevi industry on the mainland. Government subsidies necessary to sustain a virtually customerless Mospheiran aeronautics industry had been cut by the legislature in a general protest against taxes two presidential elections back, and the human aerospace workers had gone to other jobs.

Meanwhile the Mospheiran composites manufacturing facility, despite pleas by the pro-spacers, had lacked the spare parts to keep it functioning, because it couldn’t find customers outside the now defunct aircraft plant. Atevi-human relations had been peaceful for decades, and the defense implications of buying the few commercial jets Mospheira needed for domestic service from Patinandi Aeronautics on the atevi mainland just hadn’t figured with the legislature against the public frustration with high taxes. Even the humans at the top of the campaign for a human return to orbit had promoted chemical rockets as the way to go, because that was the way humans historically had done it, those were the plans they apparently did have, and because it was easier to sell a historicalconcept to the dim lights of the Human Heritage Party who had fallen into bed with them, politically speaking, than it was to sell the technologically more complex reusable vehicle that depended on the composites manufacturing facility they didn’t want to fund.

So thatpolitical bedfellowship had concentrated their lobbying efforts and the scarce tax money on their rocket program, for, supposedly, as the Treaty of Mospheira provided should happen, the simultaneous development of a human and an atevi space program. For decades after slow decades, through the paidhiin, the Mospheiran Defense Department had released only the minimal data that the Mospheiran government had to release to atevi to get the industry going that was ultimately going to feed both raw materials and finished goods to the human space effort on Mospheira—and in the way Mospheira liked to have such militarily dangerous exchanges, raw materials were going to get into Mospheiran hands sufficiently early to give Mospheira a running start.

He should know; some of it had already happened on his watch, brief as it had been. And on his predecessor, Wilson’s, before Wilson retired.

On the other hand, from what Jase said, the ship had questioned Mospheira very closely on that matter and discovered a truth Mospheira had no way to deny:

Mospheira couldn’t immediately or foreseeably launch a damn thing, manned or unmanned.

Probably the Mospheiran president in recent negotiations had told the truth to Jase’s captain and there had never been a secret rocket launch site even contemplated.

So there they were: atevi had been bothering no one when the petal sails of legend dropped humans in their midst and they’d built their way up from steam engines.

Atevi had barely been contemplating satellites and manned space last year, sure that the station was unmanned and the only humans were on Mospheira, when a new thunderbolt of human presence in the skies had fallen on the world; and when blueprints guaranteed to work without experimentation had descended electronically from the heavens.

In the last six months it had become a national mandate to get the pieces of the atevi space program reconfigured—that was the word that echoed through all departments– reconfigured. Tabini-aiji was in a race, a race to show results to his own uneasy people, a race to get a foothold in the heavens where atevi could maintain their say over the future of theirplanet—and this particular aircraft manufacturing facility was critical.

Manufacture of a spacecraft that had much the same materials base and much the same configuration as the planes this facility had built commercially was far faster than invention of a rocket-driven heavy launch system from scratch.

Testing was on a materials-specifications basis, straight out of very clear records.

Training programs were already shaping up to teach a hand-picked set of atevi pilots the handling characteristics of the craft they were building.

As he understood the situation on the island, humanscientists were running to catch up to the technological dataflood pouring down from the heavens.

He’d personally discovered the information gap in the university physics and chemistry programs: Defense had kept some things sequestered—FTL was only one example of it. The University hadn’t taught him or his predecessors what it didn’t have access to, and, wondrous to say, the people in Defense who’d understood the data had died, and their successors had just guarded the file drawers without knowing what they were sitting on… until the downloads from the ship in a matter of seconds had obsolesced the secrets the Defense Department was keeping.

So now the executive branch of the Mospheiran government had no cards to play. Atevi, holding the principle continent, held most of the developed mineral resources. Humans, on the large, mountain-centered island, had to trade fish for aluminum and copper. And human orders for those supplies hadn’t yet increased, possibly because the human legislature hadn’t moved to authorize the trade; but the aiji had with one pen stroke authorized atevi mines to produce what this ship needed.