Inheritor

“Where wasmy female colleague lodged when she was not in the Bu-javid?” he asked Banichi as they walked. “May we now ask officially, and for the record?”

“With lady Direiso.”

He was not utterly surprised. To say the least. “And Geigi simply walked in there?”

“Guns were involved, but not seriously. Direiso-daja had launched her greater hope without guns, simply in her acquisition of Hanks-paidhi.”

“ Shetook her away.”

“Without serious resistance.”

“One thought so. And getting Deana back—was there bloodshed?” That defined a level of seriousness in most quarrels. Not in this, he thought. “Did Direiso resist?”

“No bloodshed,” Banichi said. “Against fear of her own harm, she saw there was nothing left but graceful acquiescence to the aiji-dowager and the hope that Tabini would soon be a dead man. And that you would be. That would leave Deana Hanks as paidhi. And if Direiso’s wishes had proved to have stronger legs, it would have led to herin possession of the ship-paidhiin—which again would have made her powerful. Hence her easy capitulation on the day in question.”

Thatwas a plateful of information. Direiso had folded when Ilisidi, whom Direiso had regarded perhaps as rival andas ally, had walked in at gunpoint and demanded Hanks be turned over to her. Direiso had still hoped to reach the descending capsule and get her hands on Jase and Mercheson-paidhi.

But she hadn’t won that race. Theyhad.

So Direiso had lost Ilisidi’s support (realizing perhaps at the last that Ilisidi would have cheerfully put a dagger in her back, perhaps not even figuratively, rather than see her as aiji.) And now it was possible Direiso was courting the Atageini after an assault on Atageini pride last year, which had destroyed the lilies, perhaps by accident or perhaps not.

“Was not Direiso’s son withTatiseigi of the Atageini at that moment?” he asked Banichi. He recalled hearing that.

“That he was, Bren-ji.”

“You exceed my human imagination. Why?”

“If I knew that for certain, Bren-ji, Damiri might be lord of the Atageini at this hour.”

Serious news. Banichi suspected Tatiseigi of existing on the fringes of Direiso’s conspiracy, and the son’s presence there as not without Direiso’s approval. “You suspect Tatiseigi was withDireiso, at least in the attack against us in Jase’s landing?”

“We suspect everything.” They had reached the doors. “We act on what we know.”

“And she’s still plotting against the aiji. Hence the business in the peninsula.”

“True.”

“And its timing?”

“One can only guess, Bren-ji.”

He was talking to the entity both best and least informed on the matter, the one who’d most likely carried out the strike against Direiso’s ally Saigimi.

While heguested with lord Geigi, who’d seemed Direiso’s ally and then Tabini’s.

One needed a flow-chart. One truly did.

But probably the atevi thought that about humans.

There were things they had never admitted to one another. Radios belonging to the atevi government listening to transmissions. Jamming. On both sides of the strait. Phone lines that went down every time a stray cloud appeared. Banichi had said it once: an old man in a rowboat could invade the island. Or the mainland.

If Hanks had been transmitting to Direiso, there were atevi working for Tabini who would intercept those messages—and Deana and those behind her were just clever enough to plant what they wanted planted: poison, no matter the recipient, poison, whether in the hands of Tabini’s people or Direiso’s.

“Damn,” he said, envisioning listening posts up and down the coast, on which atevi could pick up whatever short-range transmissions the conservative faction on Mospheira wanted to send. It wasn’t just Direiso’s cause such hateful broadcasts might incite, if Deana and her supporters wanted to see bloodshed.

The fact that such conservative humans hated atevi was in no way skin off Direiso’s nose. The fact that Direiso hated her was no skin off Deana’s. Both the conservative atevi that wanted Tabini dead and human technology restricted—and the conservative humans whose varied agendas just wanted humans to stay technologically superior to atevi—shared the same agenda: restrict technology getting to Tabini. Tabini inpower and Bren Cameron inoffice meant a rapid flow of tech into atevi hands. So get rid of one or both.

The door opened. The servants received them. Junior security, having used the same lift on its return trip, overtook them before the doors shut and rearmed. He wasn’t acutely aware of his surroundings.

That Banichi told him what he did was indicative at least that he was being told truth on a high level. Atevi no longer kept the paidhi, who was acting in their interests, more ignorant than other humans, who were working against those interests.

That was useful. It was one step deeper into the situation he was already in.

It didn’t, however, stop Deana Hanks, whose agenda he didn’t believe he entirely guessed—and he couldn’t act upon his suspicions until he could hear exactly what she was saying and what she hoped to provoke.

And there’d been no atevi offer yet to provide him that information.

Damn, again.

11

The matter we were discussing,” Bren said to Banichi as they entered the apartment, as servants converged and he began to undo the buttons of his coat. “Can you prepare me a more extensive report on the problem, Banichi-ji? Andreport to the aiji regarding the reason for my question, regarding the interview? I want the text of what she’s been saying.”

“Yes,” Banichi said in that abrupt Ragi style, which was an enthusiastic yes, and went immediately to the security station, where, Bren said to himself, there was about to be a very intense, very serious session that might well extend feelers next door, and might end in a reporter finding himself in serious dialogue with the aiji’s security. Reporters on Mospheira questioned government agencies with a great deal of freedom and were lied to routinely. But on the atevi mainland, the concept of instant news was under current consideration by the government, the way the inclusion or non-inclusion of a highway system had gone under consideration by the government—and been rejected as socially destructive. Similar airy assumptions that what had worked for humans was good and right for atevi had started the War and killed tens of thousands of people.

In that consideration Bren didn’t like what had happened down in that interview. He saw interests at work that didn’t lead in productive directions for atevi—atevi interests that wanted Tabini dead and someone else installed as aiji.

But the implications of a person like Deana Hanks, a person trained to deal with atevi, working by radio purposely to destabilize the atevi government—that was against every law, every principle of the office. He was on shaky moral ground with the State Department because of the decisions he’d taken, but dammit, he was trying to keepthe stability of Tabini’s regime. His way was sanctioned by the people that had sent him here; and sent him backhere by means so desperate Shawn had secreted the new computer codes under the cast on his arm and hadn’t even told himhe was doing it.

He wanted a Mospheiran newspaper, dammit.

He wanted to know what was happening on the island in details on which the government couldn’tlie.

But in an atmosphere where people were afraid for their lives, as some clearly were on Mospheira, including his mother and his brother and his former fiancee, he wasn’t sure of getting the truth even if he got such a newspaper, or the unrestricted datafeed. So much for Mospheira’s supposedly free press.