“We are the paidhiin’s security,” Banichi said.
“Assassin’s Guild.”
“Yes, Ramirez-nandi.” Banichi was very polite in his salutation.
“He calls you Lord Ramirez,” Bren said, and saw Ramirez take that in with mild embarrassment, in the Pilot’s Guild’s long pretense of democracy. Bren added: “Banichi and his partner aren’t security as your Guild defines it. They also have the aiji’s ear, and rank very high in their Guild.”
“Would they care to sit?”
“It’s not their tradition. But they will report, to those places where they report. You always have to assume their Guild knows what’s going on. It has to. They’re the lawyers.”
“With guns.”
“That custom limits lawsuits,” Bren said.
“And this Guild enforces the aiji’s law?”
“The aiji himself enforces the aiji’s law by hiring certain of this Guild; but likewise his opponents may do the same. But the law theyenforce, the law as the Assassins’ Guild sees right and wrong, has no codification, only tradition: that rule of theirs is the one constant, sir, in the whole flexible network of man’chi.”
“Man’chi: loyalty.”
“Don’t fall into the trap of defining their words in human terms. Man’chi: an ateva’s strong instinct to attach to an authority. As long as man’chi holds the organizational structure steady, there’ll be more smoke than fire in any dispute, and you negotiate with the head of the association. Man’chi transcends generations, settles disputes, brings atevi to talk, not fight. The War of the Landing happened because humans insisted on making associations in one man’chi and turning around and making them in another. We call that peacemaking; to them it was creating war. I can’t emphasize enough how dangerous that is.”
“So we don’t agree with them?”
“Agree with their leader. Not leaders. Leader. What we bring to this association, sir, is more than resources and engineering. There’s an expertise to contacting foreigners and finding out their intentions, one that might well have saved your outlying station. It’s the most important resource we have in this solar system, one you have now, in Jase Graham, in Yolanda Mercheson. There’s also an art to listening to your interpreters and not letting politics or your own needs reinterpret what they’re telling you. The Mospheirans have something you need: companionship, a nation, a place to belong; the atevi have something else you need: mineral resources, industrial resources, mathematics, engineering, a highly efficient organization, but more than all of that: adaptive adjustment to a species you don’t instinctively understand. You could stand on the ancestral plains in front of a lion, sir—I believe we both agree what a lion is—and you’d biologically understand what it might do. I submit to you that you can’t ask the lion, but that you’d more or less recognize a hungry one and one that wasn’t. With the atevi, with any species that didn’t evolve in earth’s ecosystem, all those signals, all those assumptions don’t reliably work. We’ll teach you what we’ve learned on this world. That, gentlemen, in your situation, is the most valuable thing.”
“You think we could talkto a species that blew hell out of our station and that probably got our records.”
“I think that if you’re dealing with a species which might be numerous, sophisticated, and very different, coming from a place we don’t know, the ability to figure them out and to talk, if it’s appropriate, might save us. I don’t say you have to like them. I’m saying you need to know whythey shot at you.”
He left a long silence.
“And your atevi can figure that out.”
“No, sir, though they might, now; I’m saying an atevi-human interface might manage to make smarter moves. As a set, we may figure out what we otherwise couldn’t.”
“Makes no sense,” Ogun said. “Confusion’s confusion.”
“No, sir. You aren’t responsible for understanding the atevi; your gut never will do that. Just learn what you should and shouldn’t do. I happen to likethem, but I can’t translate that word and they don’t understand. They’ve given me their man’chi, passionately so, and I can’t figure that from the gut, either, except it’s a feeling like homeand mine, and I know the quality of these two honorable people. You’re not in familiar territory here. Confusedis a condition of life on the interface, but you canknow when you’re with people you can trust. Trust intersects directly with We’re confused, sir, and I know for people who deal in exactitude on both sides, trust comes hard. But trusting the rightpeople is absolutely essential here, or we take on additional enemies when we might have had allies.”
He watched physiological reactions across the table, body language, two men who’d unconsciously leaned back from him leaned forward; Ogun had just heaved a long, deep, meditative breath—thinking, getting rid of an adrenaline rush that probably urged Ogun to attack him, his ideas, and the whole situation that pinned Phoenixto an agreement the Pilots’ Guild had hoped would be very different.
“Think of the planet,” Bren said softly, “as a very large space station with a two-species cooperation that already works.”
“Yes,” Ramirez said wryly, “but docking with it is hell.”
Bren laughed, and immediately there was less tension in the room, less critical thought, too.
“There’s no need,” Bren said. “We do that. You do the technical operations your crew knows how to do, and you teach where we don’t know. You have our cooperation, and with us, the deal’s done, if you agree. Technicalities have to be worked out with Mospheiran authorities, with your various sections…”
“The Guild itself has to meet,” Ramirez said. “You will have a majority on the Council.”
Bren replayed that, replayed it twice for good measure, asking himself if it was really over, if he’d actually done it. He saw a more relaxed body language on the part of Ramirez and Ogun, consciously projected consideration and solemn thought on his own part, and nodded.
“Then we can proceed to numbers, and matters the aiji will govern. The fact that he will have to assure fair, decent supervision of labor is entirely his problem. The aiji will deal with station repairs, the training, labor management, and his own relations with Mospheira. The aiji proposes the area of the station where you have your headquarters and your offices be under your law and your regulation, the same with your ship, in which he has no interest. He proposes that an area of the station of sufficient size be under Mospheiran law, for their deputies and business interests. And he further proposes that the aishidi’tat will govern the entire rest of the station and its general operations under its own law and customs, build to its own scale, and provide your ship with its reasonable requirements of fuel and supply at no charge.” He said nothing of ownership of the station, of policymaking, of war-making, and command of that effort. That all waited on the growth of atevi presence in space, but he also had a very clear idea that Tabini had not an intention in the world of allowing the Pilots’ Guild to dictate to him, once he owned the establishment that fed Phoenix. If the Guild should study the history of the aishidi’tat, it might learn how Tabini had ended up running the continent and, to a certain extent, Mospheira… in the sense that Mospheira nowadays didn’t work against Tabini. But he hoped they wouldn’t concern themselves with old history, not until or unless it repeated itself. Given the history of the Guild, including bringing them a war, he had every determination to see the whole station under Tabini’s guidance. They could shoot him if not… and various interests had tried.