Foreigner

Finally the gates of the stable court were in front of them, then behind them, with the mecheiti anxious for stables and grain. He managed to get Nokhada to drop a shoulder, and climbed down off Nokhada’s towering height onto legs he wasn’t sure would bear his weight.

“A hot bath,” Ilisidi called out to him. “I’ll send you some herbs, nand’ paidhi. I’ll see you in the morning!”

He managed to bow, and, among Ilisidi’s entourage, to walk up the stairs without conspicuously limping.

“The soreness goes,” Cenedi said to him quietly, “in four or five days.”

A hot bath was all he was thinking of, all the long way up to the front hall. A hot bath, for about an hour. A soft and motionless chair. Soaking and reading seemed an excellent way to spend the remainder of the day, sitting in the sun, minding his own business, evading aijiin and their athletic endeavors. He limped down the long hall and started the stairs up to his floor, at his own pace.

Quick footsteps crossed the stone floor below the stairs. He looked back in some concern for his safety in the halls and saw Jago coming toward the stairs, all energy and anxiousness. “Bren-ji,” she called out to him. “Are you all right?”

The limp showed. His hair was flying loose from its braid and there was dust and fur and spit on his coat. “Fine, nadi-ji. Was it a good flight?”

“Long,” she said, overtaking him in a handful of double steps a human would struggle to make. “Did you fall, Bren-ji? You didn’tfall off…”

“No, just sore. Perfectly ordinary.” He made a determined effort not to limp the rest of the way up the stairs, and went beside her down the hall… which was supposing she wanted the company of sweat and mecheita fur. Jago smelled of flowers, quite nicely so. He’d never noticed it before; and he was marginally embarrassed—not polite to sweat, the word had passed discreetly from paidhi to paidhi. Overheated humans smelled different, and different was not good with atevi, in matters of personal hygiene; the administration had pounded that concept into junior administrative heads. So he tried to keep as discreetly as possible apart from Jago, glad she was back, wishing he might have a chance for a bath before debriefing, and wishing most of all that she’d been here last night. “Where’s Banichi? Do you know? I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

“He was down at the airport half an hour ago,” Jago said. “He was talking to some television people. I think they’re coming up here.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, nadi. They came in on the flight. It could have to do with the assassination attempt. They didn’t say.”

Not his business, he concluded. Banichi would handle it with his usual discretion, probably put them on the next flight out.

“Not any other trouble here?”

“Only with Banichi.”

“How?”

“Just not happy with me. I seem to have done something or said something, nadi-ji—I’m not even sure.”

“It isn’t a comfortable business,” Jago said, “to report an associate to his disgrace. Give him room, nand’ paidhi. Some things aren’t within your office.”

“I understand that,” he said, telling himself he hadn’t understood: he’d been unreasonably focussed on his own discomforts last night, to the exclusion of Banichi’s own reasonable distress. It began to dawn on him that Banichi might have wanted things of him he just hadn’t given, before they’d parted in discomfort with each other. “I think I was very rude last night, nadi. I shouldn’t have been. I wasn’t doing my job. I think he’s right to be upset with me. I hope you can explain to him.”

“You haveno ‘job’ toward him, Bren-ji. Ours is toward you. And I much doubt he took offense. If he allowed you to see his distress, count it for a compliment to you.”

Unusual notion. One part of his brain went ransacking memory, turning over old references. Another part went on vacation, wondering if it meant Banichi did after all likehim.

And the sensible, workaday part of his brain told the other two parts to pay attention to business and quit expecting human responses out of atevi minds. Jago meant what Jago said, point, endit; Banichi let down his guard with him, Banichi was pissed about a dirty business, and neither Banichi nor Jago was suddenly, by being cooped up with a bored human, about to break out in human sentiment. It wasn’t contagious, it wasn’t transferable, and probably he frustrated hell out of Banichi, too, who’d just as busily sent him clues he hadn’t picked up on. As a di

They reached the door. He had his key from his pocket, but Jago was first with hers, and let them into the receiving room.

“So glum,” she said, looking back at him. “Why, nand’ paidhi?”

“Last night. We were saying things—I wished I hadn’t. I wish I’d said I was sorry. If you could convey to him that I am…”

“Said and did aren’t even brothers,” Jago said. She pulled the door to, pocketed her key and took the portfolio from under her arm. “This should cheer you. I brought your mail.”

He’d given up. He’d accepted that it wasn’t going to get through security; and Jago threw over all his suppositions about his situation in Malguri.

He took the bundle she handed him and sorted through it, not even troubling to sit down in his search for personal mail.

It was mostly catalogs, not nearly so many as he ordinarily got; three letters, but none from Mospheira—two from committee heads in Agriculture and Finance, and one with Tabini’s official seal.

It wasn’tall his mail, not, at least, his ordinary mail—nothing from Barb or his mother. No communication from his office, messages like, Where are you? Are you alive?

Jago surely knew what was missing. She had to know, she wasn’t that inefficient. And what did he say about it? She stood there, waiting, probably in curiosity about Tabini’s letter.

Or maybe knowing very well what was in it.

He began to be scared of the answers—scared of his own ignorance and his own failure to figure out what the silence around him was saying, or what of Tabini’s signals he was supposed to have picked up.

He ran his thumbnail under the seal on Tabini’s letter, hoping for rescue, hopingit held some sort of explanation that didn’t add up to disaster.

Tabini’s handwriting—was not the clearest hand he had ever dealt with. The usual declaration of titles. I hope for your health, it began, with Tabini’s calligraphic flourish. I hope for your enjoyment of Malguri’s resources of sun and water.

Thanks, Tabini, he thought sourly, thanks a lot. The rainy season, no less. He rested a sore backside against the table to read it, while Jago waited.

Something about television. Television, for God’s sake.

… my intention by this interview to give people around the world an exposure to human thought and appearance far different than the machimi have presented. I feel this is a useful opportunity which should not be wasted, and have great confidence in your diplomacy, Bren. Please be as frank with these professionals as you would be with me, privately.

“Nadi Jago. Do you know what’s in this?”

“No, Bren-ji. Is there a problem?”

“Tabini’s sent the television crew!”

“That would explain the people on the flight. I am surprised we weren’t advised. Though I’m sure they have credentials.”

Under the circumstances which have made advisable your isolation from the City and its contacts, I can think of no more effective counter to your enemy than the cultivation of increased public favor. I have spoken personally to the head of news and public awareness at the national network, and authorized a reputable and highly regarded news crew to meet with you at Malguri, for an interview which may, in my hopes and those of the esteemed lord Minister of Education, lead to monthly news conferences…