Destroyer

The colonists, finding there was an alternative where they’d arrived, had desperately flung themselves onto an i

Hence his job, when he wasn’t being Lord of the Heavens. Hence the paidhiin came into being, the translators appointed to interpret not only words, but psychology—to prevent two species who’d originally thought it was easy to understand one another from pouring their technology and their concepts into each other’s heads until the system fractured.

One of a long line of paidhiin who’d served the system, trickling humanity’s advanced technology into atevi hands at a sane pace, trying to make humans live lightly on the planet and not offend atevi beliefs and traditions—he’d tried, at least, to keep the faith.

But had he?

Therein lay the guilt… guilt that in recent hours burrowed itself a wider and wider residency under his heart, laying its foundations the moment he’d heard Tabini had gone down, and growing to a whole suite of rooms when he’d heard Geigi lay out the reasons for Tabini’s downfall. Too much tech and too much change too fast had brought—not war with humans, this time—but an internal calamity to atevi, the fall of the aiji who’d pushed, lifelong, for more tech, more tech, more tech… and made too-quick changes in the atevi way of life to take advantage of it. At some point the paidhi was supposed to have said no, and not to have been so accommodating. That had been his job, for God’s sake. It was why all prior paidhiin had not been so snuggly-close with the atevi leadership. Tabini had had the notion of making his people the technological equals of humans in their island enclave—a technological equality they’d all conceptualized as a good rail system, air traffic crossing the continent, maybe even a computer revolution, in his lifetime.

But then long-lost Phoenix had shown up from deep space, and ownership of the abandoned space station had become an issue. Tabini had been determined to secure it for his own people, entirely understandable, and he had been convinced that if humans got it up and ru

Step by step, Tabini had waded into hotter and hotter water, all for the sake of protecting his people from the changes humans brought, and the paidhi, who should have said no, wait—stop—

To this hour the paidhi just couldn’t figure what else he could have done.

Average atevi, who, like Banichi, had only just figured out the earth went around the sun, or why they should care, had suddenly become critical to the planetary effort to get back into space. The mainland had the mineral resources and the manufacturing resources to do what the ship could not: supply raw materials and workers to get the space station operating again… and, most critically, the planet had the pilots to fly in atmosphere, an art the spacefarers had flatly forgotten and had no time to relearn.

Atevi had been able to get their manufacturing geared up to handle the crisis. The island enclave of Mospheira had still been debating the matter when the atevi’s first spacecraft lifted off the runway and blasted roof tiles off the eaves of Shejidan.

Change, change, and not just change—change proceeding at breakneck speed through every aspect of atevi life. Mines and factories were opened, sudden wealth created for some districts, with shortages of critical materials and extravagant plenty of new luxuries: Mospheiran society, wrangling over regional advantage and company prerogatives, hadn’t been able to do it, even with the technological advantage. Atevi society, where a strong leader could dictate where new plants were to be built, could balance the economy of regions against regions, equalize the supply and demand—and in so doing, created new values, new economy, new emphasis on manufacturing instead of handcrafting of objects valued for centuries, not even to mention such radical notions as preserved food, instead of food auspiciously and respectfully offered in season, with awareness of one’s debt to the natural world…

Cultural change, religious change, upheaval in the relative importance of provinces and districts, not according to history but according to the mineral wealth and the siting of some new critical facility, partly by the aiji’s grace, partly by the questions of where nature had put the resources. It had all worked. It had been a toboggan ride to a brave new tomorrow, and Tabini’s brilliance had kept everyone prosperous, kept himself in charge, abandoned not a shred of his power and put down every attempt to unseat him…

And had the paidhi objected? He’d superintended Tabini’s rush to modernize, confident Tabini’s management of the economy was going to preserve the traditions as well as create new professions, new Guilds. He’d known he was riding the avalanche, and he’d thought he’d steered Tabini to safety. When the crisis came that called them out to Reunion, he’d left Tabini never more powerful, the Association never more prosperous, the atevi economically and politically equal to humans in every regard, even in relation to the ship-humans on the station. He’d left a people possessed of shuttlecraft and every functioning facility to land and service spacecraft, even building a starship of their own, while Mospheiran humans, across the straits from the mainland, dithered and debated and never had accomplished more than those modifications to the airport at Jackson that would serve as a reserve landing site in emergency… give or take the twenty feet of runway that couldn’t get past certain special interests and the Jackson Municipal Golf Course.

Humans on Mospheira had continued to have mixed feelings about the space station, that was the problem underlying Mospheiran politics. Some were extremely enthusiastic about going back to space, but more were suspicious and resentful of their cousins on the ship. And like the atevi, Mospheirans had mixed feelings, too, about the changes, the haste to turn the entire economy into a space-based push for technological equality with the ship-folk, the trampling of, well, fairly old, if not ancient traditions of Mospheiran life.

He’d foreseen all the objections. He’d hoped both Shawn Tyers, the President of Mospheira, and Tabini-aiji, head of the aishidi’tat, the atevi government, would weather all the storms of discontent at least until they’d been able to get back from their mission to Reunion and report that all this sacrifice and striving had produced a result worth having.

He seemed to have won the bet in the case of his old friend Shawn Tyers, though Shawn’s political survival when he had left had seemed more precarious. Shawn was still in office, despite the volatile politics of the island and all the pressures bearing on him.

He had been disastrously wrong, however, about the atevi side of the equation. Tabini had seemed unassailable, delicately and deftly maneuvering around difficulties, as he always had, having secured the help of such unlikely individuals as his own grandmother, the aiji-dowager, a unifying power of the far east, who might have threatened his reign. He’d begotten an heir, Cajeiri, with an Atageini woman, the Atageini, historically speaking, posing one of the greatest threats to the stability of the aishidi’tat. He’d gotten the crotchety, traditionalist head of the Atageini clan on his side. He’d put down one bad bit of trouble arising in the seafaring south and west, and engaged the gadget-loving western Lord Geigi firmly on his side, in the process, Geigi’s influence being a firm bulwark against trouble in all that curve of western coast. What more could he need than those several allies? Nothing had looked remotely likely to shake Tabini from power.