Invader

But right now, if something happened in the landing and the ship concluded atevi weren't civilized enough to deal with directly, that would suit her and her friends on Mospheira andher friends in the tashrid. They wanted something to go wrong. The radicals of both nations had found common cause. And he'd seen it possible — but he'd not seen it coming from the angle it had. He'd counted on Deana slowly gaining an understanding of atevi — God, how did you work that closely with them and still maintain humans had to have absolute dominance?

And how did atevi lords not see what she espoused — if not that it was so damned uniquely human?

He thought about aijiin, and antiquity, and how, yes, humans had studied the Padi Valley origins of the Western Association, but in the way of humans not hardwired for such understandings, humans hadn't known instinctively, as would have been obvious to atevi, that that formerly powerful association would never turn the participants loose, not so long as they retained any territorial holdings here, not so long as they remotely had interests here — The hierarchies would still operate and the rivalries would still exist.

(Mecheiti on the hillside, shoving each other dangerously for position, because there was just one mecheit'aiji, one leader, and there was a rival, and there were almost-rivals — and those far enough down the order of things they didn't contend.)

Humans concentrated on the competitions of economics and never saw the opposition of the tashrid to Tabini as significant. They saw atevi adopting a human pattern, democratization following a rise in the middle class.

Wrong.

Very damn wrong. Democratization had happened beforethe economic rise of the middle class, democratization in order to secure the rise of a middle class, maybe because the first paidhi, in his need to communicate about human decision process, had let slip something to his aiji as disturbing in its day as FTL to Geigi's philosophy.

There wasn't such a thing as a solitary creature in all the world. The wi'itkitiin perhaps came closest. But even they nested in associations. If there was one — there'd be others. Crawling their way uphill from their brief flights, doggedly, determined in their courses, they got back to their cliffs, those that survived the predators. Damned stubborn. As atevi were. As mecheiti were. They didn't give up on a project. They didn't give up on an effort. Lords didn't give up. It could go thousands of years; they didn't give up, the way, perhaps, wi'itikiin didn't give up their ancestral nests on ancestral relative heights on ancestral cliffs. Atevi wrote downtheir purposes, and told them to their children, so they never damned well forgot.

Very bad enemies, he thought, watching the valley unwind in front of them, watching the distant brown tile roofs of Taiben appear in the distance above the trees.

Humans who didn't know that, didn't know the atevi. Not their good points nor their bad. Deana didn't know what she'd tied into. Deana was still operating — he was willing, in the face of all other misjudgments he'd made, to bet on this one as truth — on the theory that what one saw in atevi now had always been true; that the opposition to Tabini was a political and not a biological impulse; that economics drove atevi to the same extent and in the same way as it drove Mospheiran humans.

Naturally. It was her specialty. What was her paper? Economic determinism?

It wasn't his field, but he knew the premise: that industrial society ultimately produced like social institutions.

No need for Deana to struggle with nuances of the language — atevi would grow more and more like humans. She'd just deal with the atevi that agreed with her position. Her friends in the Heritage Party didn't want to understand atevi — just deal with them. Just the way it was when Wilson was in office.

Right, Deana. No arguing with success.

CHAPTER 21

The servants were waiting on the rustic back porch of the lodge as the train pulled in to the platform. They insisted on snatching his bags and they chattered at him about the accommodations.

And perhaps it was the sight of familiar ground, where, at every visit, only pleasant things had happened; perhaps it was, despite the crowd of female servants, the comfortable recognition of an odd stone in the porch wall, the sight of its unshaped wood, its muted browns and stone grays, the plain character of its timber-and-stone halls — he felt as if he'd shed the Bu-javid at the door, as if, here, the landing itself was finally real, and he could actually do something about the problems it brought with it. He walked from the train depot door, down the hall with its hunting memorabilia and the leather couches and wooden benches, let his baggage find its way to the other wing while he lingered in the formal reception hall with the benches and the fireplace. To his pleasure, the servants or, more likely, Gaimi and Seraso, chief of the permanent, year-round ranger staff, who used Taiben when the family wasn't in residence, had a small fire going to welcome him, mostly of aromatics, the sort of thing the rangers laid by after clearing brush. The room smelled of evergreen and oilwood.

Beyond that was his room. Hisroom, when he stayed at Taiben, a very comfortable room, with country quilts as well as the furs, a bedstead that could have stood in an earthquake, a trio of tables, and a wood-carving of a stand of seven trees that wasn't grand art or anything, but elegantly executed and pleasant.

His bed. A mattress he knew. A bathroom with a propane heater for winter. Shower tiles with wildflowers hand-painted on them. He realized he'd drawn a deep, deep breath, and that something in his chest had unknotted the minute he'd stepped off the train.

Then Tabini's security staff arrived to say they had chosen two rooms next to his for the foreigner paidhiin, if he would care to inspect them, and his mind snapped back to the business of descending landers, terrified spacefarers probably enroute at the very moment.

He viewed the rooms, one after the other; rooms like his own, one with a sling chair made of marvelously shaped driftwood and red leather, one with a human-high carved screen showing a hunting party, and asked himself what they'd think, surrounded by stone and wood and live flame, which was, he was sure, very unlike the station or the ship. But he assured Naidiri's two assistants and the servants that they were magnificent rooms fully proper for foreigner paidhiin — they didn't, he was thinking to himself, have trophy heads on the walls, which was probably just as well.

A senior servant came in with a bouquet of wildflowers of, she assured him, felicitous color and number, and said that such rooms and such a place would surely help assure harmony, as the servant said, "The numbers of the earth run through this house. They can't be infelicitous with the numbers of the heavens."

"One certainly agrees, nadi," he murmured, finding a comfort in the reckoning that wasn't humanly rational — just that atevi thought it worked, atevi arranged things with good will in mind, very simply conceived good will that said they should all be harmonious and fortunate. "I think it's very well done. Very well thought, nadiin. They should feel well taken care of."

He couldrelax, then, at least enough to leave the servants to install his small amount of clothing in the drawers and the closet and to press what wanted pressing. He went outside to stand on the porch and breathe the free air, looking out over the hillside.

Taiben sat on a gentle slope, its rearmost sections camouflaged in the edge of a hillside forest, its porch shaded by trees. In this season, in the nightly chill of the hills, grasses were just turning from green to gold: a hundred meters on, trees and brush began to give way to meadow-lands which ran on and on, interspersed with trees, to what they called the south range — and the landing site, a good drive distant.