"Her advice has run counter to yours," Geigi said bluntly — and rudely — without the proprieties of address. "What are we to think? That juniors are free to advise us?"
"Our advice should not be that different." He felt giddy, blood as well as breath insufficient, or the heart not beating fast enough. Which seemed impossible. Like falling off a mountain. Like a fast downhill, on an icy slope. You could stop. But you didn't come up there to stop. He'd determined on his attack. He launched it. Cold and clear. "Let me be more clear, lord Geigi: in the State Department, there are divergent opinions: those who view that atevi and humans should always stay separate, a view which Hanks-paidhi has held; and those who believe as I do, that there's no unraveling a society that has become a whole fabric. I'm aware that certain atevi are equally apprehensive of true technological parity as if it were a subterfuge for cultural assimilation. That is the point on which Hanks' party and mine do find agreement: that cultural assimilation is not the ideal and not the target. The traditions and values of atevi are for atevi to keep. We know that attractions and change come with advances —"
"Television," a conservative representative muttered.
"Television," he agreed. "Yes, nadi, television. And we should nothave provided the formats for broadcast and news. Maybe the television stations shouldn't broadcast full time. Maybe we've made mistakes. I'd be the first to agree that following our pattern is attractive, both culturally and economically — my predecessor vetoed the highway bill becausehe viewed it as casting atevi into a human development pattern destructive of atevi associational authority, and, pardon me, he found extremely strong opposition to and resentment of that veto. I've moderated my own view on the matter, I understand that there were and are local situations that should receive exceptions, but that's beside the point: one can't carry local situations into a major, continent-spanning development of a technology that's going to disrupt atevi life. The paidhiin have always opposed that kind of development."
"But the damage is done, nadi. And whereare our traditions?"
"Nadi, I've recently been to the heart of the mainland, to a fortress built before humans ever left their earth — I've lived, as far a modern man can, the life atevi had before the world changed. I didn't come back unscathed, as you see. — Nor did I come back unaffected in my opinions. The course humans and atevi have followed has preserved such places and the land around them, and when we were struggling together for our lives, nadiin, with the shells flying around us, we found our instincts could work together and that we could fear for each others' lives as well as our own."
"All of this aside," the lord of Rigin said, "some would say this was no place for a human."
"Some would say the same of atevi on the station. I disagree, nadi. I agree it's a shaky cooperation. It will bea shaky cooperation, with exceptions to rational behavior, and it will be a carefully circumscribed cooperation, for our lifetimes at least, but consider, nadiin: there is one orbital space, one natural environment in which ships from this planet hope to operate, and we must each adapt to this new environment."
"With your designs. Your history. Your technology. Your path."
"Nadiin, there is one air, and one gravity, and one atmosphere through which airplanes move — atmosphere designs the planes, people don't. Some designs move through the air and stay in the sky more efficiently than others; and if humans had never come here at all, the airplanes you designed would work — in principle — exactly like our airplanes, because they operate under similar conditions. As they grew more efficient, they'd look more and more like our best designs, their controls would look very much like our controls — and the need to communicate about those machines at their speed would change your language, as it has, and change your attitude toward computers, which it has. Computers would have to exist. Television, whether or not you used it for general broadcast, would have to exist to give you efficient sight of things far off. And the ships you built for space would look very like the ship up there, once you've pared away all the nonessentials and adjusted the design to do what you need."
"These needs are still cultural decisions," the head of committee said. "That's why this committee exists. That's why we don't take your lordly designs, nadi, and go and build them exactly as you built them."
"Wisely so, my lord." God, he saw the cliff coming. Geigi was listening, chin on fist, glowering, and he took the jump, knowing the danger. "But cultural needs are one thing. There cannot be mathematical differences in our universes, my lord of Rigin. Physics is physics, whether accommodated by humans or by atevi."
"There is one universe," Geigi muttered.
"As efficient machines are what they need to be, no more, no less. To be efficient in a given environment, they turn out to look very much alike, nadiin, and manuals for running them turn out very similar, and people who run them eventually think very similarly, apart from their philosophical beliefs. Given that humans and atevi need similar machines to explore the same environment, we will grow more and more alike in our thinking. Physics guided even the wi'itkitiin, in their evolution, to have wings and not fins, to adjust their wing-surfaces in flight, as airplanes do, as atevi and human pilots do; in short, nadiin, neither humans nor atevi are immune to the numbers of the natural world. And atevi who live in space will use true numbers to understand its demands, and therefore enter harmony with the behaviors of humans who Likewise live in harmony with those numbers. Numbers rule us all, nadiin. We admire atevi minds and your language that so readily expresses the harmonies of numbers: atevi have that advantage over us. We can admire. We respect atevi ability. We want association with atevi not least of all because of your remarkable language and your faculty with numbers, which may well develop new understandings in this new environment."
"Not when ships violate natural law," Geigi muttered. "I want to hear an explanation for your ships moving faster than light, nand' paidhi. I want to see the numbers."
Tension hung heavy in the conference room. Civil peace and civil war hinged on that question. Lord Geigi posed a demand the answer to which could shatter his belief, his political stability, the existence of his house and the institutions it supported, and he did it in public, with his personal fortunes at absolute low ebb — a man with nothing to lose but the philosophy on which he pinned his beliefs.
"Nadi-ma," Bren said, "I will find you an answer. I promise that. Mosphei' doesn't express such concepts easily, which hampers my understanding of the physics as well as my attempt to translate."
"Does that ship exceed the velocity of light?"
"Mosphei' expresses it in that way." The paidhi was desperate, and the tape around his ribs made him short-winded and probably pale as a sheet. "But the human language often approximates more complex situations, lord Geigi, since we have no convenient way to express what the atevi languages do — especially in high numbers and spatial concepts. We're entering on a field of math that I've never tried to express." And never damn well understood. "Let me work on the problem a few days. I'm sure there's a better way of putting it than either I or Hanks has done."