Destroyer

But Geigi had gone up to orbit, managing the atevi side of the station, while the son of a conspirator, allowed to prosper—Tabini, lately influenced by strong Mospheiran hints that it wasn’t proper or civilized to assassinate the relatives of people who’d tried to kill him—repaid Tabini with treachery.

Spare Murini, he’d asked Tabini. Take the chance. He’d been sensitive to the international, interspecies situation—been sensitive to any perception on the part of Mospheiran or space-faring humans that atevi were less civilized or in any way threatening to humans. Attached to the atevi court, he’d begun to take such accusations of atevi barbarism personally; he’d begun, hadn’t he, to want his atevi to have the respect of his species?

There had been a danger point, if he’d only seen it. But he hadn’t read the winds. He had committed the oldest mistake of joint civilization on the planet—getting distracted by one issue, modernizing too fast, worst of all ignoring atevi hardwiring and ignoring the point that what humans might call barbarism was part and parcel of atevi problem-solving.

What had he tried to promote among atevi? Tolerance of out-clan powers. Therefore tolerance of foreigners. How could an enlightened ruler kill the son of a traitor, simply because of his relatives?

And now that unenlightened son of a rebel, driven, perhaps, by that emotion of man’chi which humans weren’t wired to understand on a gut level, had quite naturally, from an atevi view, turned on the aiji who had spared him.

How much of the aishidi’tat had fractured when that happened? How much pent-up tension in the power structure had just snapped? Classic, absolutely classic atevi behavior.

And what could a human do to mend the damage, when the human in question had made the critical mistakes in the first place, and given his atevi superiors bad advice?

Ilisidi might, with some justification, ask for transport for herself and Tabini’s heir back to her homeland, bidding the paidhi to stay the hell on the island. She might justly tell the paidhi to give her no more advice, certainly not of the quality he’d given Tabini. She hadn’t yet mentioned the word blame, but he was sure she knew a certain amount of this situation was indeed his fault.

And there were no few atevi on the mainland who’d like to explain to him all the mistakes he’d made, he was quite sure of it. By now many of his loyal staff, maybe even Banichi and Jago themselves, were quietly questioning moves he’d made, things they’d accepted.

Now that he had an enforced time to sit and think, not even tea sat easily on his stomach, and sleep, as tired as he was, did not come, no matter how he tried, so the hours stretched on and on, in blacker and blacker thoughts. He ate a bite or two of his supper and found no desire for the rest. He drifted, belted to his seat, in a cabin never quiet—the shuttle had too many fans and pings and beeps for that—but that held a kind of a white, shapeless sound, and permitted far too much calculation.

“Bren-ji, you have not eaten,” Jago observed, loose from her seat for the moment, drifting close to him.

“Later, Jago-ji,” he said. “I shall have it later.”

At the moment he wasn’t sure he could keep another bite down.

But self-blame was a state of indulgence he could not afford. Until Ilisidi did, for well-thought reasons, tell him go to hell, he had to get his wits working and do something constructive, if he could only figure what that was.

So he decided he had best shake the vapors, satisfy Jago, and eat the damned sandwich, bite by bite. Deal with the situation at hand, avoid paralyzing doubt, and try to think of first things first. Try to learn from the mistakes. That was the truly unique view he could bring to the situation. At least he’d had experience in mistakes. He had a very good view, from the bottom of this mental pit, of what they had been, and what not to do twice.

Dry bite of tasteless sandwich. One after the other.

If atevi affairs were to get fixed, the fix had to start from the top of the hierarchy. That was the very point of man’chi. He had to find out what had happened to Tabini, the foremost atevi who’d trusted him, and set things right in that regard, if he had to shoot Murini with his own hand.

There was an ambition worth having. Too late to utterly undo the damage, but at least, if he took Murini out of the picture, as should have been done in the first place, he could free the people of a leader completely undeserving of man’chi, of anyone’s man’chi—in his own admittedly human estimation.

He hadn’t asked himself, in those fast-moving days when the space program had been his only focus, why humans felt guilty if they didn’t spare their enemies, but, more importantly, he hadn’t asked himself why atevi had generally felt extremely guilty if they did. He’d been feeling all warm and smug in his accomplishments in those days, too warm and smug and convinced of his own righteousness ever to ask himself that question… like… do atevi have an expectation of certain behavior on all sides, that might be worth considering?

The human word gratitude had always translated into Ragi, the dictionary blithely said so, as kurdi, root from kur, debt. But what did it mean, derived from the word debt? A feeling of debt for an undue kindness? Good debt or bad debt?

And how was that to translate into atevi actions not within, but across the barriers of man’chi? There was the problem.

And translators previous to him had never questioned whether application of gratitude across man’chi lines was possible—had never taken any within-and-outside-man’chi applications into account because translators before him had never been in a position to see atevi cross those boundaries. Translators before him had never dealt with an aiji as extraordinary as Tabini, whose ambitions had crossed those boundaries and placed him into situations where inside and outside man’chi critically mattered. He hadn’t seen it. Bang! Right in the face, and he hadn’t seen it. None of his predecessors had suggested there might be a problem with the word, that concept, that assumption.

Welcome home, Bren Cameron. Welcome home, on the day all the mistakes suddenly made a difference. Bring the computer up, open the dictionary paidhiin had spent centuries building, and put a significant question mark not only beside that word kurdi, but add a note that every emotional and relational word in the dictionary deserved a number one and a number two entry, an inside meaning and an outside meaning. He’d let his dictionary-making duties slip, thinking they didn’t matter so much as his flashier, newer ones. Lord of the Heavens, he’d become. But where was the clue to his problems? Lurking, as always, in the dictionary, right where he’d begun.

The shuttle made its insertion into atmosphere on a route they’d never used before, so everything was tense. The station confirmed they had clearance from their landing site at Jackson, and from Mospheiran air traffic control in general—it was another worry, that some lunatic Mospheiran with an airplane might take exception to their landing or just, in great admiration, take the unprecedented chance to see a shuttle landing. Both sides of the strait had their patented craziness, and a man who wanted to think about such things could fret himself into deeper and deeper indigestion.

Jago noticed it, and inquired again: “Are you ill, Bren-ji?”

She had put away a fair amount of the offered pre-landing snack, and for answer, he simply gave her his dessert, a prettily wrapped bit of cake. “Would you, Jago-ji? I fear I may weigh my stomach down.”

She knew him. She knew he was worrying. She likely knew he was scared spitless. She floated across the aisle and back a row and shared her acquired pastry with Banichi. Then the two of them gave him analytical looks, and put their heads together and conferred.