CHAPTER 4
Acable lift existed in the guarded back corridors of the aiji's apartment, a creaky thing, an antique of brass filigree and an alarming little bounce in the cables; but Bren rated it far, far better than a long walk. He went down with Tabini, with Banichi and with Tabini's senior personal guard, Naidiri, a two-floor descent into the constantly manned security post below, and out a series of doors which gave out onto a hall not available to the public.
By that back passage, one came to a small guard station with a choice of three other doors that were the secure access to separate meeting rooms which had, each, one outside general access. It was the closed route the Bu-javid residents used to reach the area where atevi commons and atevi lords met elbow to elbow, with all the vigorous give and take the legislatures employed.
On this route the lords of the Association, who held court at other appointed times, could reach their meetings safe from jostling by crowds and random, improper petitioners — and on this route one comparatively fragile and battered human could feel less threatened by collision in the halls.
More, the walk from the lift to the committee rooms was quite short, the room being, in this case, the small Blue Hall, which the Judiciary and Commerce Committees regularly used.
Jago and Tabini's second-rank security had preceded them down, were already at the doors, and briskly opened them on a noisy debate in progress among the twenty or so lords and people's representatives — the Minister of Finance shouting at the lord Minister of Transport with enough passion to jar the nerves of a weary, aching, and somewhat queasy human.
Perhaps they'd rather shout and finish the business they clearly had under consideration; and if he asked Tabini very nicely they might get him to his bed where he could fall unconscious.
But the debate died in mid-sentence, a quiet fell over the room, and lords and representatives of the Western Association bowed not just once to Tabini, but again to the paidhi, very clearly directing that courtesy at him.
Bren was taken quite aback — bowed before he thought clearly, and doubted then in muzzy embarrassment whether the second courtesy could be possibly aimed him at all.
"Nadiin," he murmured, confused and dizzy from the exertion, hoping only to make this short and not to have to answer more than a few questions.
Aides and pages hastened to draw out chairs and to settle him at the table, a flurry of courtesy, he thought, unaccustomed to the solicitousness and the attention, as if the paidhi looked to be apt to die on the spot.
Death wasn't an option, he thought, drawing a breath and feeling pain shoot through the shoulder, the wind from the air ducts cold on his perspiring face. But fainting dead away — that, he might dp. Voices came to him distantly, surreal and alternate with the beating of his heart.
"Nadiin," Tabini said quietly, having sat down at the other end of the table, "Bren-paidhi is straight from surgery and a long plane flight. Don't be too urgent with him. He's taxed himself just to walk down here."
Came then a murmur of sympathy and appreciation, the tall, black-skinned lords and representatives who set a lone, pale human at a childlike scale. A small tray with water and a small pot of hot tea arrived at Bren's place, as at every seat, then a small be-ribboned folder that would be, like the other such folders, the agenda of the meeting. He opened it, perfunctory courtesy. He wanted the water, but having settled at a relatively pain-free angle, didn't want to lean forward to get it.
"We were hearing the tape," lord Sigiadi said, the Minister of Commerce. "Does the paidhi have some notion, some least inkling, what the dialogue is between the island and the ship?"
"I haven't heard the tapes, nand' Minister. I'm promised to have them tomorrow."
"Would the paidhi listen briefly and tell us?"
The whole assembly murmured a quick agreement to that suggestion. "Yes," they said. "Play the tape."
At which point the paidhi suddenly knew, by the suspicious lack of special ceremony to Tabini's arrival, and by the equally elaborate courtesy to the paidhi, that the committee had almost certainly seen Tabini earlier in the same session.
And that the paidhi had just been, by a master of the art, sandbagged.
But it was a relief to sit still, at least, after a long day's jostling about. Even in the brief spell of sitting he'd had in Tabini's apartment, he'd exhausted himself, and the Council of Committees demanded nothing of him more than to sit in this late-night session and listen to the week's worth of tapes he urgently wanted to hear and get the gist of.
Which made it necessary to keep every reaction off his face, while men and women of the Western Association, themselves minimally expressive and capable of reading the little expression which high-ranking atevi did show in public, were watching his every twitch, shift of posture, and blink.
So he sat propped at his least painful angle, chin on hand, facial nerves deliberately disengaged — the paidhi had learned that atevi art early in his tenure — listening to the numeric blip and beep that atevi surveillance had picked up from Mospheira communications to the abandoned space station, machine talking to machine, the same as every week before the ship had arrived out of nowhere.
"This is computers talking," he murmured to the committee heads. "Either stored data exchange or one com puter trying to find the protocols of another. I leave the numbers therein to the experts, to tell if there's anything unusual. If the technician could go directly to the discernible voices —"
Then, with a hiccup of the running tape: " Ground Station Alpha, this isPhoenix. Please respond."
Even expecting it to happen, that thin voice hit human nerves — a voice from space, talking to a long-dead outpost, exactly as it would have done all those centuries ago.
But it was real, it was contemporary. It was the ship-dwelling presence orbiting the planet — a presence expecting all manner of things to be true that hadn't been true for longer than anyone alive could reckon.
"They're asking for an answer from the old landing site," he said, trying to look as blas6 as possible, while his pulse was doing otherwise. "They've no idea it's been dead for nearly two hundred years."
On that ship might even be — his scant expertise in relativity hinted at such — crew that rememberedthat site. The thought gave him gooseflesh as he listened through the brief squeal and blip, computers talking again: as he judged now, searching frequencies and sites for response from what optics had to tell the ship was an extensive settlement. He was about to indicate to the aide in charge of the tape to increase the playback rate.
"What are the numbers?" Judiciary asked. Loaded question.
"I believe they have to do with date, time, authorizations. That's the usual content."
Then he heard an obscure communications officer in charge of the all but defunct ground-station link answer that inquiry. " Say again?"
Which he rendered, and rare laughter touched the solemn faces about the table — surprise-reaction as humor being one of those few congruent points of atevi-human psychology; he was very glad of that reaction. It was an overwhelmingly important point to make with them, that humans had been as surprised as atevi; he hoped he'd scored it hard enough to get that fact told around.
That recorded call skipped rapidly through an increasingly high-ranking series of phone patches until he was experiencing the events, hewas waiting with those confused technicians — recovering the moments he'd missed while he was tucked away in remote places of the continent, and which, with Hanks sitting idle and unconsulted, atevi had had to experience without knowing what humans were saying.