The fact was — he knew far less about Phoenixthan he knew about atevi; he knew Phoenix'present attitudes, inclinations and crew list less than he knew the geography of the moon. He didn't knowwhat Phoenixmeant, or intended, or threatened.
He didn't know the capabilities of the ship, whether it had traveled at FTL speeds or — considering the length of time it had been gone — sublight, which seemed a possibility.
But, ominously, the dialogue between ship and ground-station had gone from massively informative and high-level in the initial moments to, finally, the converse of under-secretaries and ship's officers niggling their way through questions neither side was willing to bring anybody to the microphone to answer.
What was the state of affairs, the ship asked, between Mospheira and the world's native population?
Mospheira wasn't answering that question. The State Department, the same close-mouthed upper echelon that backed Deana Hanks, was advising the President on an entity it didn't know a damned thing about; and the executive once it got involved was used to having weeks, months, even years and decades to study and debate a problem.
Mospheira didn't haveor wantrapid change. The social and technological dynamics meant what was, would be, foreseeably, for fifty, a hundred years, and its planning was always well in advance, a simple steerage of the world at large, atevi and human, toward matching technological bases, toward goals decades away. And if the executive got off its butt and moved — the sub-offices through which governmental communications ran weren't geared to decide faster than they did.
And if the ship knew what it wanted and pushed…
He listened, as back the two sides came to another foot-dragging exchange of minor ship officers demanding station records which they thought Mospheira should have; and after a day and a half, by the time markers, another exchange demanding in turn where the ship had been for two hundred years.
Damn again, Bren thought, hearing Phoenixignore the question and then hail the world at large, wondering if anyone else down there was listening.
Phoenixwas trying to make contact on its own. Thank God nobody in the atevi world understood enough to fire back an answer and begin a dialogue. Thank God the Treaty provided the paidhi at least as a unified contact point. Phoenixwas unknowingly charting a very dangerous course.
After that the ship broke off transmissions for what seemed a long time, and atevi date notations on the tape confirmed it. The ship asked no questions and ominously provided not one answer, not one clue to the President's persistent questions: Where have you been? Why have you come back? What do you want here now?
Mospheira had revealed a great deal to the incomers — necessarily, with the whole planet spread out for the orbiting ship to see — a tapestry of railroads and lighted towns and cities and airports, the same on one side of the strait as on the other, which had not at all been the case when the ship left. And he knew what the ship's optics were capable of seeing, at least the equal of what Mospheira had been able to see through the failing eyes of the station — hype that several times, for what a ship with undamaged optics could pick up.
And there was no way to see inside the ship or the station.
While Mospheira had, he mused, knuckle pressed against his lips, revealed more in its questions than it might realize, too, certainly to him. He knew the Department, he knew the executive, he knew personalities — the ship didn't, unless it discovered old patterns, but, damn, he could almost detect the fingerprints on the questions, the responses, the attitudes. It was Jules Erton, senior Policy; it was Claudia Swynton — it was the President's Chief of Staff, George Barrulin: the President didn't haveopinions until George told him what he thought.
The records became contemporaneous. Mospheira talked. The ship continued its efforts at contacting population centers, Shejidan in particular. There hadn't been contact between the ship and Mospheira for two days. The ship was notcurrently answering questions from Mospheira about its business or its activities.
The cold that had started with his arm had spread to a general shivery unease and left him wishing — which he never thought in his life he would wish — that he could pick up the phone, call Deana Hanks, and say, amicably, sanely, Look, Deana, differences aside — we have a problem.
Which was not, damn the woman, a comfortable proposition. The rift was not a resolvable rift between two people, it was ideological, between two political philosophies on Mospheira. The camp he feared now had thrown Deana Hanks onto the mainland was the same that had supported Hanks through the selection process no matter her test scores, and he suspected foreknowledge of key questions she stillhadn't answered with as high a score as his, as well as outside help on the requisite paper. She was Raymond Gaylord Hanks' granddaughter, and S. Gaylord Hanks' daughter: that was old, old politics, a conservative element that had, ever since the war, argued that Shejidan was secretly hostile — the same damned suspicion among humans that, mirror-image among atevi, believed in death rays on the station, maintained that the atevi space program got atevi funding because, along with getting into space, atevi meant to take the station and use it as a base to deny access for Mospheira.
The fixation of the conservatives lately was the snowballing advances in technology during his and Wilson's tenure, both technological and sociaclass="underline" the conservatives held that Tabini was hostile and using a naive paidhi for his own purposes.
That very conservative camp of human interests moldered away, not in obscure university posts, but in the halls of the presidency, the legislature: they were the old guard politicians, whose families had been in politics since the war, in an island community where politics had traditionally not mattered a damn in ordinary human affairs and nepotism got more immediate results.
In the State Department, most of the view-with-alarmers were at senior levels, entrenched in lifelong tenancies: they had never, ever accepted the official atevi assertion that Tabini was innocent of his father's assassination. It was a tenet of the conservative faith that Tabini had done it, and that Tabini had demanded Wilson-paidhi resign to get a new and naive paidhi to carry out his programs.
In brutal atevi fact, they were very probably right, granted Tabini's grandmother hadn't beaten him to it — but parricide didn't weigh the same on the mainland as it did on Mospheira. One just couldn't judge atevi by human ethics. Assassinate someone of the same man'chi, the same hierarchical loyalty? That was shocking.
Assassinate a relative? That was possibly a rational solution.
The damn trouble was — the paidhi had far better pipelines and mechanisms for dispensing new information into the atevi mainland than he had for moving public opinion on Mospheira. It had never been necessarybefore for the paidhi to convince Mospheirans. It had never been necessarybefore for the paidhi to campaign against the conservatives, because the conservatives had never had a crisis in which they could move members of academe, as he feared they had done, to interfere in the paidhi's office.
But the academic insulation that supported the paidhi and assisted in the decision-making — usually without the politicians involved in the process — was a politically naive group of people, who, confronted with panic, might have been rushed to put Hanks in a position where she could at least observe at a time when lack of information seemed very ominous.