Deceiver

How could he achieve that? Machigi would, assuming he was acting sanely, act in his own best interest. That interest had to become congruent with the interests of the aishidi’tat. And Machigi had to perceive that to be the case.

And the situation wouldhave an explosive and embarrassing emotional component: he had first to make Machigi aware of the situation with the Guild, if he was not aware already, and avoid Machigi’s indignation coming down on him as the bearer of bad news. He could not seem to despise Machigi in any regard.

But neither could he afford to be intimidated. And it was a good bet Machigi would try to do that.

He thought of the approach he would make.

Getting into Tanaja alive was first on the list.

What did they know about Machigi’s character? Without his computer, he had to haul it up from memory, and arrogant, ostentatious, argumentative, and ruthlesswere at the top of the list.

Young, brilliant, and unaccustomed to failure or reversal.

Ambitious, and already at the top of the Marid power structure.

Challenged from below, really, for the first time.

Humility was going to win no points with this young man. Brilliant?

What about educated?That was different than brilliant.

An education about the world outside the Marid would be an asset. He couldn’t remember data on that. But Machigi, like most Marid-born, had never been outside the Marid. His world experience was somewhat limited. Ergo his education was somewhat limited. He would not have seen things to contradict his own ideas.

Bad trait, that.

One couldn’t attempt to intimidate him with education: he wouldn’t recognize conflicting data as more valid than his own.

It was a difficult, difficult proposition, this mission.

“Nandi,” Tano said suddenly, having been listening to something for a few moments. “Nandi, Banichi has gotten to the lord’s bodyguard. He has gotten them to advise their lord you wish to speak to him on a matter of importance.”

Get ready, that meant. He straightened his collar, his cuffs, as if Machigi could be aware of that detail; but he was, and it set his thoughts in order.

Points to Banichi, if Banichi could get this man to talk in person. It would be damned inconvenient to have to conduct this argument relayed through his staffc a process that could go on for hours and end up with a number of important points taken out of order or lost entirely.

Fingers crossed.

He shut his eyes and waited. Sixty. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight.

He got to minus twenty, and Tano said: “The lord will be available momentarily.” Tano passed him an earpiece and mike, across the aisle.

That was actually amazingly fast. Machigi had pounced on that one. Interesting. Encouraging, even.

Curiosity, maybe. A burning, though predatory, curiosity.

And now there was a very delicate protocol involved. One could not be waitingfor the other. And one could not be madeto wait for the other, not without creating serious problems from the start. Algini, with his own headset, was listening, and held up a finger to signal that, by what he heard, the lord was very likely about to take up communication. Two opposed security teams were required actually to cooperate to achieve simultaneity.

He put on the headset. Tano signaled him.

“Nand’ Machigi?” Bren asked.

“ Nandi,” came the answer, a young voice with the distinctive Marid dropping of word endings. “ You are on our border.”

“It is our hope you will favor us with a meeting, nandi. More than that one should not say in this call. We ask a truce and safe passage to Tanaja, and a personal meeting at the earliest.”

A lengthy silence. “ Interesting.”

“My office is not warlike. Discussion will be, one hopes, of mutual benefit. We ask your active and constant protection on the road to Tanaja, nandi, for very good reason.”

A second, shorter silence. Then: “ Come ahead, nand’ paidhi. You have our assurances.”

That simplified things. One stipulated the road toTanaja. That got a yes.

Getting out againc he would have to manage that when the time came.

“One looks forward to our meeting, nandi. Let communication pass now to staff.” He handed the equipment back to Tano, and Tano resumed listening. Doubtless Banichi, in the rear of the bus, was handling the specifics.

Bren drew a long breath, thinking of Najida at the moment, his pleasant little villa above a su

Lives damned well wasted in the long, long determination of ambitious lords to take the West and set up some power to rival the aishidi’tat.

Medieval thinking. Medieval ambitions. Modern ships could power their way around the curve of the coast and see with electronic eyes, could trade, and fish, and prosper on a par with the rest of the aishidi’tatc if the Marid ever joined the rest of the world and modernized.

But the seafaring Marid, still locked in the Middle Ages, still spent resources on its fleet, on its old, old ambition for dominance of the southwestern coast. Eastward—eastward on that southern side of the continent, starting from the Marid, there were no harbors, except one sizeable island, which the Marid had: but all along that coast eastward of the Marid was the history of geologic violence—sunken borderlands, swamps, abrupt cliffs, leading toward the forbidding East itself, which was one rocky upland after another. The Marid had long seen westernexpansion, around the curve of the coast, as their natural ambition.

But technology could do so much more for them. Access to space—the ultimate shift in world view that happened among atevi who couldmake that transition—

Giving the Marid more advanced tech, however—that was a scary proposition. In point of fact, the scholarly traditionalists of the north had nothingon the grassroots conservatives of the South, when it came to the fishermen, the craftsmen, the tradesmen and armed merchantmen who, point of fact, had not greatly changed their ways or their world view since beforethe first humans had landed on the earth.

What else did he know?

That there was no educational system in the Marid, per se. The whole Marid worked by apprenticeship and family appointment. The classes of the population that needed to read and write, did; the classes and occupations that could get by with the traditional sliding counters and chalk ticks on tablets— did.

Taxes were whatever the aiji’s men said you owed.

Justice was whatever the aiji or his representatives or the local magistrates said was just.

It wasn’tShejidan. Not by a long shot.

And the Marid as a whole hadn’t been interested in having literacy spread aboutc certainly not by the importation of teachers from the north; and there was no way the local educated classes were anxious to teach their skills to the sons and daughters of fishermenc any more than most of the sons and daughters of fishermen were inclined to press the issue and leave their elders unsupported while they did it. Especially considering custom would keep them from using that education, and oppose their intrusion into other classes.

A medieval system with a medieval economy that was linked by rail and sea lanes to the far more modern economy of the north. The Marid had always been capable of sustaining itself, if it was cut off. It didn’t buy high-level technology. There probably was no television in Tanaja. There was radio. There certainly was armament, some of it fairly technical, imported by one class that wastechnologically educated: there were from time to time fugitives from the northern Guilds, who, rather than face Guild discipline, had offered their services in the South, and lived well. Lately there had been a fair number in that category, fugitives from the return of Tabini-aiji to power. There would be various Guilds in the court of Machigi and his predecessors, and elsewhere across the Marid—Guildsmen, who did the unthinkable, and trained others outside their Guild without sanction of the Guilds in Shejidan. In every period of trouble, there had been the fugitives who had taken formal hire with the various Marid aristocrats. There had been Assassins to make forays against lords of the aishidi’tat.