Which meant neither the paidhi in the field nor the Foreign Secretary had the easy, routine access to the President that the Secretary of State had.
A Secretary of State with his technocrat cronies who hadn't waked up from fairyland since Tabini came to power, except for his cocktail parties, his influence-trading, his shepherding of special bills through the legislature and his social schedule and his attendance at the soccer nationals and — oh, yes, oh, God, yes — the opening of the Space Research Center, where the Heritage Redevelopment Society, also with an officership populated mostly by wealthy conservatives, consumed enough alcohol to power an airliner into orbit and lamented humanity's losses in the historic war. The HRS annually commemorated the departure of the ship, listened to engineers talk about revitalizing the space station and consistently refused to put speakers from International Studies on the program, even when they wrote papers that directly impacted proposals that the HRS was going to come out with in the next session of the legislature. He'd personally tried, this last spring, being invited by a handful of the Foreign Office and some junior members of the HRS who wanted to get someone of stature to make their point in favor of the trade cities project: the higher echelons of the HRS had politely lost his application and failed to review his paper, which meant he could come and attend, if he could get the time, if he wanted to pay the conference fee, but he wasn't on the agenda.
Deana Hanks had gone to the conference as a guest speaker. Deana Hanks had sat in the meetings and, on personal request of the conference chair who said the conference wanted to acknowledge the paidhi's office, made a polite little speech about human advancement to space and human retention of human cultural heritage.
God, he wanted to kill somebody. Filing Intent on Deana Hanks definitely came to mind. On this side of the strait, total fools didn't last long.
He sat a little longer, then rang the Bu-javid operator again. "This is Bren Cameron. Are we still ringing Hanks-paidhi?"
"One will, Bren-paidhi. Yes."
"Thank you."
He punched in the speaker and heard the repeated ring.
A second time the phone was picked up and slammed down.
"Operator?"
"Nand' paidhi?"
"Do this constantly until I advise you I've had a satisfactory answer. Pass the instruction to the next shift when it comes on. I will have an answer eventually."
"I am so very regretful of the difficulty, nand' paidhi."
"Please account it to human sense of humor, nadi, and thank you so much."
CHAPTER 8
He composed his further messages and answers in the sitting room, while Tano, armed with the paidhi's own message cylinders and seal, answered the simple and the routine.
He expressed the wish for a simple, in-house lunch, and settled down to Tano's summation of the clerical situation: three of Damiri's staff were perfectly competent — more competent, serving in a noble house — at etiquette to answer routine inquiries, with Tano to handle the substance and himself to catch the odd or difficult ones.
A telegram, from a primer-school class in Jackson City, requesting the paidhi to assure them that there wouldn't be a war. No, he said. Atevi are quite as anxious as humans to keep the peace.
Too damn much television.
He asked the staff to scour up a tape of the news coverage. He made a note to send Ilisidi the translation transcripts.
He wrote a note to Tabini that said, Aiji-ma, I am doing well today. Thank you for your kind intervention last night. I hope for your success in all undertakings.
Meaning grandmother hadn't served up the wrong tea, Tano hadn't broken his ribs last night, and he was waiting, hoping for information.
Hanks, meanwhile, hadn't cracked. Wasn't home, contrary to security's expectations. Or had flung herself on security wires rather than listen to the ringing.
He sent his brief message to Tabini; and the one damning Hanks to diplomatic hell to the Foreign Office.
He had his sandwich: the Bu-javid was always kabiu, strictly proper, and the game allowable in the season was by no means his favorite: that left fish and eggs, the allowable alternatives, as his diet until the midpoint of this month, which was, thankfully, almost on them.
The Bu-javid, relatively modern among atevi antiquities, but shared by various atevi philosophical schools, was more meticulously kabiuthan Malguri, in fact, where wise chefs put by a cooked roast or two of this and that. Atevi never shot game out of season, one never trafficked in — unthinkable — domestic meat and never sold meat out of season, but Malguri cannily managed to have leftovers enough to stretch through the less palatable months. A civilized solution, in his reckoning and, one suspected, the original custom of which the strict kabiuof the Bu-javid was the rigid, entrenched rule, probably more to do with early lack of refrigeration than any ceremonial reason — but the paidhi wasn't about to suggest such a solution to the very kabiuAtigeini chef. The paidhi had enough controversy on his hands, thank you, and such a suggestion might set him on the side of some provincial philosophical sect bloodily opposed to some other one critical to the union the Bu-javid represented.
He took to the afternoon reports, wondering now where Jago had gone. She'd just not turned up in the to-do with the office. Add that to Banichi, who wasn't here.
Tano, meanwhile, God help him — coped.
Someone arrived at the door; he hoped it was Jago or Banichi, if only to have the important parts of his household in one place and within his understanding.
But a trip to the door proved it to be another batch of messages — one from the installation at Mogari-nai, which received the transmissions from the ship, which he was anxious to get. That transmissions existed showed, for one thing, that the ship was talking again, and offered a possibility that something might have budged. So he took the tape from Tano, walked back to the study where he had the recorders set up, put it in and set it to play.
The usual chatter of machines talking to machines.
And past that exchange of machine protocols, more chatter, involving, this time, the transmission of documents or images — he wasn't sure, but it was digital, and he was sure the atevi machinery could spit it out, the same as atevi documents ended up intercepted by Mospheira, where there was a listening station: spying on each other was a full-time, well-funded operation, an absolute guarantee of employment for the practitioners.
Tano came in bearing a stack of paper: more correspondence, he thought. But Tano said, quietly:
"I think this must go with the tape, nadi Bren."
It certainly did. He saw that when he opened it, and no wonder the machine-to-machine talk went on and on: Mospheira had elected to go to written transmission, and the transcript…
It was a nonphonetic Mosphei' transcript. On this side of the strait.
It was — he had no trouble recognizing the text — the first chapters of The History of Contact, by Meighan Durna, a work that laid out every action, every mistake of the Landing and the war.
It released a devil of a lot of intimate knowledge about Mospheira and atevi in the process, which he had rather not have had happen on Duma's occasionally incomplete understanding of atevi motivation — but he didn't totally disagree with the decision to transmit the book. It was certainly a way to bring the Phoenixcrew up to speed, or at least as far as most of Mospheira itself knew the truth: every school on Mospheira studied it as foundational to understanding where Mospheirans were and who they were, all three hundred and more pages. He jotted down a background note to the ship, for transmission at the first opportunity: TheHistory, while expressing the origin of the Mospheiran mindset, could not accurately account for atevi behavior and should never be used to predict or explain atevi motivation...