Foreigner

Jago? he thought. His shoulders still felt the force of her fingers. And her footsteps were fading at a rapid pace down the hall outside, while he stood there asking himself where Banichi had been last night when he’d set the alarm off.

If there wasanother system—Banichi had known about him opening that window, if Banichi had been monitoring it. And for whatever reason—Banichi hadn’t come back when the general alarm went.

Maybe because Banichi had already discounted it as a threat. But that wasn’tthe Banichi he knew, to take something like that for granted.

It was craziness, from breakfast with the dowager to the television crew arriving in the middle of a security so tight he couldn’t get a telephone. He didn’t like the feeling he was having. He didn’t like the reasons that might make Jago go ru

He double-checked the window latch. What kind of person could get in on the upper floor overlooking a sheer drop, he didn’t know, but he didn’t want to find out. He checked the outer door lock, although he’d heard it click.

But what good that was when everyone on staff had keys to the back hall of this place—

He had a sudden and anxious thought, went straight to his bedroom and, on his knees by the bed, reached under the mattress.

The gun Banichi had given him… wasn’t there.

He searched, thinking that the Malguri staff, making the bed, might have shifted it without knowing it was there. He lifted the mattress to be sure—found nothing; no gun, no ammunition.

He let the mattress back down and arranged the bedclothes and the furs—sat down then, on the edge of the bed, trying to keep panic at arm’s length, reasoning with himself that he had as much time to discover the gun missing as they thought it might take him, before they grew anxious; and if they hadn’t devised visual surveillance in the rooms he didn’t know about, whoever had taken it didn’t know yet that he’d discovered the fact.

Fact: someone had it. Someone was armed with it, more to the point, who might or might not ordinarily have access to that issue pistol, or its caliber of ammunition. It was Banichi’s—and if Banichi hadn’t taken it himself, then somebodyhad a gun with an identification and a distinctive marking on its bullets that could report it right back to Banichi’s commander in the Bu-javid.

No matter what it was used for.

If Banichi didn’t know what had happened—Banichi needed to know it was gone—and he didn’t have a phone, a pocket-com, or any way he knew to get one, except to walk out the door, go violate some security perimeter and hope it was Banichi who answered the alarm.

Which was the plan he had. Not the most discreet way to attract attention.

But, again, so long as he called no one’s bluff—things mightstay quiet until Banichi or Jago got back. The missing gun wasn’t a thing to bring to the staff’s attention. He could probably trust Tano and Algini, who’d come with them from Shejidan—but he didn’t know that.

He was rattled. He was tired, after an uneasy night and a nerve-wracking afternoon. He wasn’t, perhaps, making his best decisions—wasn’t up to cleverness, without knowing more than he did.

His nerves twitched to distant thunder—that also was how tired he was. He could go try to trip alarms—but Banichi and Jago were out in the rain, chasing someone, or worse, chasing someone insidethe house. His imagination pictured a tank of methane sitting in the basement, someone with explosives—

But they mustn’t deface Malguri. Atevi wouldn’t take that route. Mishidi. Awkward. Messy. No biichi-ji.

So they wouldn’t explode the place. If anything happened, and a bullet turned up where it shouldn’t, with marks that could trace it to Banichi, he could swear to what had really happened.

Unless he was the corpse in question.

Not a good time to go walking the halls, he decided, or startling his own security, who thought they knew where he was. He’d pla

About atevi. And loyalty. And expectations that didn’t work out.

Expectations on his side, too—about feelings that just weren’t there. Flat weren’t there, and no use—no possibility—of changing anything to do with biology. What could one do? Pour human hormones into atevi bloodstreams, crosswire atevi brains to send impulses atevi brains didn’t have?

And ask how humans had to fail atevi expectations, at what emotional level. There had to be an emotional level.

No. There didn’t have to be. Terracentric thinking again. There was nothing in the laws of the universe that said what let atevi achieve a very respectable society on their own hadto have human attributes, or respond when humans tried to attach to them in human ways. In a reasonable universe, it didn’t have to happen; more, in a reasonable universe, it was more reasonable for atevi locomotives to resemble human-built locomotives than for atevi to resemble humans psychologically. Locomotives, designed by whatever species, had tracks for easy rolling, shafts to drive the wheels, steam or diesel, and gears to power the shafts, and a pipe to vent the smoke—that was physics. Airplanes flying through an equal density of air wouldn’t tend to look like locomotives. Rockets wouldn’t resemble refrigerators. Physics had its constraints for machines and structures with one job to do, and physics on old Earth and physics on the earth of the atevi wasn’t a smidge different.

But biology, for intelligent beings with a whole damned lot of jobs to do, with microenvironments, evolutionary pressures, and genetic baroque sifted into the mix—had one hell of a lot of variables in potential makeup.

Not anybody’s fault. Not anybody’s fault they’d come to this star—wormhole, discontinuity of some kind—the physics people had their theories, but no human could prove the cause from where they sat, which was on the far side of God-knew-what galactic disk, for all they knew: no spectrum matched Sol or its neighbors, the pulsars, which the physicists said could peg their location… hadn’t.

They hadn’t known where they were then, and they didn’t know now—as if where they were had any absolute referent when they didn’t know how long it had taken them to get there: hundreds of years in subspace, for all anyone knew—stuck here, able to cobble the station together—

But it was a long, slow haul to the star’s frozen debris belt and back to the life-zone, where they’d built the station: that, the way he’d understood it, had been the real politics, whether to build in the life-zone or at the edge of it; and the life-zone had won out, even knowing it was around a living world, even knowing someday it was going to mean admitting they were making a dangerous choice on very little data…

Political compromise. Accepting a someday problem to solve a near-term worry.

Add in the refinery wreck and the solar storms, which no one at the time knew the limit of, and the attractive planet just lying there under their feet, hell—they’d do no damage, they’d get along, the natives already had steam, they were bound to encounter anyway, and why should they risk their precious lives trying to hold together against the odds.

At least, that was how a descendant nine or so generations down reconstructed the decision-making process… the atevi couldn’t be too different. They had locomotives. They had steam mills. They had industry.

They had one hell of a different hard-wiring, but you couldn’t tell that from the physics they used.

Couldn’t tell that meeting an atevi. Hello, how are you, how’s the weather? Nicepeople. Arrange a little trade, a little tech for an out-of-season game animal or two…