Inheritor

If they’d asked, Bren could have told them they were fools, that you didn’t double-cross the atevi. To be sure, the State Department at first had been unable to secure his advice; but they hadn’t listened to him once he did get through, no—since his advice hadn’t agreed with what their fears and their biases said they should do in responding to the Atevi Threat.

The atevi government had, of course, found them out. Sharp atevi eyes had spotted the new star that attached itself to the abandoned space station in the heavens, and atevi ante

Mospheira’s maneuvers hadn’t won the sympathy of the starship, which had turned out willing to deal with the atevi and with the human enclave on an equal basis— anyone, the starship maintained, was welcome up in space, but the one thing they wouldn’t agree to was time.

The ship wanted help, manpower to repair the station abandoned two centuries before, and they wanted it immediately, or as immediately as a world without a ma

But with the mutability of self-interest, Mospheira’s attitudes had shifted. Of coursethe State Department supported the atevi government, and of course it was more than willing to work with the atevi to obtain materials the atevi needed to go into space equally with humans, and of course it supported the paidhi, any paidhi the atevi wanted, just so the Treaty stood firm.

Meanwhile the average human citizen was both scared of the ship in the skies, which bid to change a way of life they’d thought would go on forever, and scared of the atevi, who had defeated them once in war and who were alleged in popular understanding to be utterly incomprehensible to humans—this at the same time atevi were supposedly growing more and more like humans, having television and fast food, skiing and soccer—which of course defined everything.

So somehow, without destabilizing the atevi, as they’d been taught all their lives would happen if someone slipped too much tech to atevi too fast, they were going to merge the cultures instantly and have universal peace.

No wonder the population of Mospheira was confused.

As a result, Bren Cameron no longer exclusively served the President on Mospheira who’d allowed that state of confusion to develop. He damn sure no longer exclusively served the higher-ups in the State Department, who’d tried to browbeat the Foreign Office and to use the situation for domestic political leverage.

The Foreign Office within the State Department, well, yes, he was loyal to them—if the commotion his actions had caused had left anyone of hisstaff and hissuperiors in office.

He’d last heard from his old chief Shawn Tyers two months ago. His personal bet was that the President wouldn’t dare jerk Shawn out of office, because without Shawn, the Mospheiran government had nochain on the paidhi. But even the two months since he’d last talked by phone was a long time, and the silence since implied that Shawn had no power to call him as often as he’d like; or, evidently, to send him mail.

And by now (unless Shawn had somehow protected within the system the computer codes Shawn had ingeniously slipped him on his last trip home) the Field Officer’s access codes to the Mospheiran computer net were useless. His access to Shawn himself grew increasingly less assured.

He didn’t know the true distribution of power in Mospheiran governmental offices any longer. He knew who mightbe in charge. And for that reason he wouldn’t link his precious computer to Mospheiran cha

A situation that half a year ago had had the Foreign Secretary hiding computer codes in a cast on the paidhi’s arm didn’t inspire the paidhi to confidence in the State Department even at that time, and his government having since then reacted in internal partisan panic and having done things and issued statements which, unmediated, could have blown the fragile peace apart, he didn’t think the situation had improved.

So with Shawn and every living soul in the Foreign Office who actually knew the atevi seeming not to have power to prevent such folly, the paidhi, Bren Cameron, loyal to the previous regime, but damned sure not to the present one, conceived it as his personal duty to stay in his post on the mainland and notto come home.

The paidhi counted himself lucky to be sitting on this balcony, in that consideration.

The paidhi reflected soberly that humans and atevi alike were extremely lucky that the situation, touchy as it occasionally became, had never quite surpassed the ability of sensible humans and sensible atevi to reason with one another.

The fact was, their two species hadreached a technological level where they had a common ground for understanding. It was possible that the threatened economic and social destabilization was no longer a justifiable fear. The trouble was—it was a deceptively common ground. Or a commonly deceptive ground—again, that interface was the paidhi’s department.

Fortunately, too, the essential interests of both species were not incompatible, meaning that both of them could adapt to space—and it had been the aim of both species and the better-thinking members of both governments to get there some time this century, even before the ship reentered the picture.

But the common ground was treacherous in the extreme. There had already been moments of extreme risk: a particularly nasty moment when he lay senseless in a Mospheiran hospital, when conservative political interests on Mospheira, led by Secretary of State Hampton Durant, had sent in the paidhi-successor to replace him, hoping to make irrevocable changes while their opposition in the government was having a crisis.

And they’d nearly succeeded.

Deana Hanks, dear Deana, daughter of a prominent conservative on Mospheira, had within one week man-a*ged to founder two hundred years of cooperation when she’d used the simple words faster-than-light to lord Geigi of Sarini province.

The same lord Geigi with whom and on whose balcony Bren shared breakfast.

Simple word, FTL. Base-level concept—to human minds. Not so for atevi. Through petty malice or towering folly, Deana had managed in a single phrase to threaten the power structure which governed in this province and the sizeable surrounding territory, which in turn held together the Western Association, the Treaty, and the entire industrialized world—because FTL threatened the very essence of atevi psychology and belief.

The atevi brain, steered by the principal atevi language (a chicken or the egg situation), was everso much more clever than the human brain at handling anything to do with numbers. The atevi language required calculation simply to avoid infelicitous numbers in casual utterance.

Math? Atevi cut their teeth on it. And questions abounded. There could not be paradox in the orderly universe on which atevi philosophy depended.

Fortunately, an atevi astronomer, a despised class of scientists since their failure to predict the human Landing, had been able to find a mathematical logic in the FTL paradox that the philosophical Determinists of the peninsula could accept. Vital reputations had been salvaged, the paidhi-successor had been bounced the hell back across the strait where she could lecture to conservative human heritage groups to her heart’s content and harm no one.