Pretender

The buzz rose up again, and someone shouted out, as the hasdrawad would, with speakers of lesser rank, “This we know! Go well beyond this, paidhi!”

“Nadiin.” He bowed, to cover his confusion.

“And why risk the heir on this adventure?” someone shouted.

Another murmur, loud and long.

A movement brushed against him, unheard in the racket. The young gentleman himself had gotten to his side, and what the dowager or Tabini or Damiri was doing in the background, Bren had no idea. Cajeiri could move like lightning when he was motivated.

But it was no time for a gesture of the heir’s solidarity with his influence—it was the worst thing.

“Because if we had stayed here in our apartment we might be dead,” Cajeiri shouted. “Because Murini would have killed all of us if he could reach us. My father wanted me to go out and learn everything I could about the humans, to see and to make sure they were telling the truth! And it was indeed the truth! We saw what happened—we saw nand’ Bren deal with the station, we saw him rescue the people, we saw it all, we talked to the foreign humans, so did my great-grandmother, and we know nand’ Bren is not a liar.

He did everything my father asked and saved all sorts of people!”

It was a shocking declaration, particularly from an eight-year-old. It was, one suspected—except the lapses in grammar, the mingled negatives and the confused symmetry of numbers—the dowager’s own words. That young voice shocked the chamber at least enough to diminish the buzz of exchanges, probably while adults added the items and took into account whether the three-part we was the singular, the regal we, or the number of persons acting.

The lord of Dur stood up, in the tashrid seats. “Did the paidhi not just go to the aiji’s defense?” Dur shouted out, and Bren’s heart went thump and the warmth drained from his face.

Go to the aiji’s defense. Never mind the assassin had been aiming at him.

Go to the aiji’s defense—like the mecheiti after the herd leader, fences and barriers be damned. Go to the leader—like everything native to the world. He’d outright flattened the aiji of the aishidi’tat —he’d afflicted Tabini’s dignity and simultaneously made Tabini a target in the process. But Dur’s statement produced a racket of debate in the chamber that did not die away.

And what did he then say if the assembly took that move of his for proof of that deep atevi emotion? Use as fact the misapprehension paidhiin had spent generations denying, that there was, after all, an atevi sense of man’chi operating in a human? Claim that the two species felt things exactly the same, when what he’d felt most was a desperate sense of priorities, a visceral outrage that one shot could take out the one man who could knit everything together?

The War of the Landing had started on such a convenient misconception, allowed to bubble along in the subtext.

“Nand’ Bren came to rescue me!” Cajeiri shouted out at the assembly. “And nand’ Bren saved everybody in the foreign station!

And we met new foreigners who were angry at us, and we ended up talking to them on their own ship, because nand’ Bren rescued one of them, too! His name is Prakuyo an Tep and he is very respectful of my great-grandmother!”

There was the matter, inside out and hind end foremost, but the new item in the mix created two breaths of bewildered silence, in which first Tabini-aiji and then Damiri moved near their son. Then, with a crack and a measured tap of her cane, Ilisidi rose and came forward to stand by Cajeiri, a solid front, the entire leading family of the Ragi clan.

He bowed, clearly become an extraneous particle in this line, willing quietly to cede the floor to authority and postpone any explanation while atevi sorted out their own business.

Bang! went Ilisidi’s cane, silencing every murmur, and every head in the chamber turned toward the dais, in a moment of breathless silence. Bren respectfully froze in place.

“A fool would urge us to stay out of matters in the heavens and let humans dictate such things as they understand,” Ilisidi said. “A fool would argue we could build the necessary machines with no fleeting disturbance to our social schedules, not a ripple in our occupations and our attention to the numbers of this world. But we are not fools, and we know the one is not wise and the other is not possible. No, this generation is not a generation of fools! It has sacrificed! This generation has secured its command over this world, an authority which the ship-aijiin and even the Presidenta of Mospheira acknowledge. The ship-aijiin appointed a ship-paidhi to consult with Tabini-aiji on all matters, acknowledging that nothing of value comes from this world but that the aiji in Shejidan sends it.

Were you aware of that? But the rebel attacked and tried to kill her, as he attacked the aiji himself. Are you aware that the foreigners we have met in the farthest distance of the ether have acknowledged the authority of my grandson as governing, binding, and safeguarding our world? If Murini failed to tell you such things, why, it was surely not because he would wish to conceal the aiji’s success from you. It was because he, being only a shortsighted upstart and ignorant of every needful activity of educated governance, had appointed no observers aloft. He had constituted no authority in the heavens, he wielded no authority in affairs of dire import to the world, and he not only proved utterly ignorant of the numbers of the wider world, he even failed to govern the continent or satisfy the reasonable requests of its regions and associations, sowing only discord and jealousy, and attending to not even the proper benefits of his own region! Bad numbers, false numbers, nandiin, nadiin, inevitably lead to wider error. Baji-naji, the universe does not tamely bear a fool on its back! We, on the other hand, know the numbers that do exist, numbers as wide as the distance we have traveled. More, we have numbers reported by foreigners who have voyaged still farther, into territory as yet unexamined and unaccounted—numbers contained within the records of our voyage. We have reported all these numbers to the Astronomer, whose records his devoted students rescued from fools bent on destroying themc” A mild buzz, quickly suppressed by a crack of the cane. “Ask the paidhi-aiji why they would so urgently wish to destroy these numbers.”

God. Bren’s mind went blank, utterly blank, in that second.

Then snapped back into focus. He took a step forward, found breath enough to make himself heard over the murmur.

“Truth,” he said, “is in those numbers, nadiin, nandiin, and those numbers clearly favor the government which has led atevi through these delicate points of balance. Peace is possible, through the outcome of a mission pla

They may well visit this world to pay respect to such an authority.

One has every confidence they will be met by a strong and impressive association which will assure the integrity of its own territory. Nadiin, nandiin, you have the report of the voyage.

Images are provided within the document.”

Now let the murmur loose. Now let legislators look at one another and flip through the pages of the document, but before they could get to the back, where those pictures werec Seize the moment, Bren said to himself, and aloud: “Tano.”