Inheritor

The paidhi through his staff had suggested that the proposed spacecraft did have wings for atmospheric operation, so that, if the gentleman and his wife could perfect the conversion ray, it would be perfectly compatible with the current design.

So far there was no news from that province of such a development.

And there was the board devoted to children’s letters: the staff tallied those, too, mostly sweet, occasionally clever, sometimes fearful of half-heard adult conversations. The staff passed on to him the best of the children’s letters and the letters which seemed to represent a trend, and occasionally gave him copies of the really good crank letters and marriage proposals. His security handled the death threats.

But mostly these clericals dealt with the flood of general correspondence, which would have inundated him and taken all his time. They also transcribed his tapes and cleaned up his rough and informal notes into the language most appropriate for the occasion. That small service alone saved him an immense amount of dictionary-searching—not that he didn’t know the words, but he was never sure there wasn’t a better one and never, on an important report, dared trust that the word that popped into his head didn’t have infelicitous co

Besides, his dictionary was one humans had compiled, of necessity, to equate human words—and sometimes one could make an unthinking glitch on the numbers because counting didn’tcome naturally and even atevi made mistakes. These experienced governmental clericals would, like his experienced governmental security, fling their knowledge between the paidhi and the dedicated number-counters who sometimes sent letters specifically designed to entrap the paidhi into numerically infelicitous statements, which they, in the perverse self-importance of such experts, could then term significant.

As a minor court official, again, he’d been immune from such public relations assassinations. As a major player in affairs of state, he, like the aiji, wasa target of such manipulators, and his strike in return was a standing order for commendations to any clerical who by handwriting, postal mark, or other clues, identified one of these nuisances by name, handwriting, and residence and posted them to others in the pool. The staff shared information with the aiji’s staff and, in a considerable network, with various lords’ staffs: ’counters could be a plague and a pest, and the clericals detested and hunted them as zealously as the Guild hunted armed lunatics.

It made him feel a certain disco

And he couldn’t stay in touch with them, and couldn’t allow himself the human softness, either, to reserve a spot for them in that i

And in that one simple example he saw why humans could become so disruptive of atevi society in so short a time, just by existing, and dragging into their likingpersons who really, never, ever should be associatedwith them in the atevi sense.

Humans had created havoc without knowing the social destruction they were wreaking on the foundations of society where people could be badly bent out of their comfortable associations, in that region where man’chi could become totally complex.

In some wisdom the aiji had set himup in the rarified air where man’chi could flow safely upto him—but sometimes he looked with great trepidation at the day when, their mutual goal, atevi might be working side by side with humans on the space station they were diverting the economy of a nation to reach.

In such moments he asked himself what potentially disastrous and crazy idea he’d given his life to serve.

He deliberately didn’t think too deeply into the changes in his personal status he’d encouraged or accepted—or a part of his brain was working on it, but it wasn’t a part that worked well if someone turned on the lights in that dark closet.

Stupid choice, Bren, he sometimes said to himself, when he realized how high he’d climbed and how he’d set himself up as a target. Deadly stupid, Bren Cameron, he’d say, on cold and lonely nights—or standing as he was in the middle of the atevi clerical establishment that, with great dedication to him, for emotional reasons he couldn’t reciprocate, continually and routinely saved him from making a fool of himself.

He could afford at least the question of what in hell was he doing and what did it all mean and where was he leading these people who approached him with the kind of devotion they ordinarily spent on the aiji, who wasworth their devotion.

How did he dare? he asked himself; and Chance and George Barrulin, the answer echoed out of the haunted basement of his suspicions, one of whom, Chance, was the demon in the design of the atevi universe and the other of whom, the President’s chief advisor, was the devil in the design of Mospheiran politics.

Neither of them was fit to be in charge of as many lives as they controlled.

But Tabini, he strongly believed, wasfit: fit by biological processes he couldn’t feel and political processes purely atevi.

To his continual wonderment, Tabini accepted what the paidhi did, double-questioned him on his choices, and threw his authority behind the concept of atevi rights in space, when human authority said atevi might be destroyed by the concept of microchips and nuclear energy.

What atevi did after they were up there in space, that was another matter.

He asked himself, on lonely nights, whether he’d live, himself, to see that ship fly. He could envision himself standing at the side of the runway. But in his imagination he never could see the ship. He’d become superstitious about that image in his mind, even gloomy and desperate, and he wasn’t ready to dig too deeply and learn what exactly his subconscious thought he was doing. He didn’t have a choice; he didn’t currently have a better idea, and what he was doing had to be done before the next stage of worrying.

He came down here when he was scared. As the interview had him scared. He faced that fact now. He’d had it easy in the provinces, on tour. He’d been traveling in the aiji’s plane, under the aiji’s guard, and everybody was glad to see him because he might bring trade and funds.

Here, in the Bu-javid, the predators gathered, and snarled and swarmed after scraps in ways that reminded him very uncomfortably of the situation back home.

He’d discussed it with Tabini.

Now a man was dead, who’d been part of the drive to take the power back to the provinces. It wasn’t just that Saigimi was a disagreeable man with bad numbers: it was that Saigimi was a peninsular lord who’d represented a policy and a movement that didn’t like the influence of the paidhi—that didn’t like the paidhi’s acquisition of this office, this prominence, this kind of loyalty. Or Tabini’s appetite for technology and power.

It was remotely possible that Saigimi had had a point. A rotten way of expressing it, but a point.