“Do you say,” Uncle Tatiseigi asked querulously from across the room, and, with debate opening up to yet another quarter, it seemed time for the paidhi-aiji to get up and get out of the way. “Do you say not only the hill clans, but next, those ragtag radical students? Those upstarts that deny their clan?”
“Indeed,” Tabini said, and shot out a hand and seized Bren’s arm as Bren attempted to rise from his awkward position and remove himself from the verbal line of fire.
“Aiji-ma.”
“There will be ample time for us to hear your records, paidhi-ji.
But for now the books are all in hiding. The shuttles are under Kadagidi guard, and the pilots have all fled to the outer regions and taken their flight manuals with them. The Kadagidi have the University computers, but their mathematicians are so unwilling to accept the computers’ calculations that, the last we heard, they are paralyzed in debate and argument, refusing to let their own people use the machines. The traditional mathematicians cannot justify what the computers tell them. Their political supporters support the Kadagidi mathematicians, because the computers are, of course, a human idea.” Grim amusement danced in Tabini’s eyes.
“And you know best of all, do you not, paidhi-ji, what that means?”
Intellectual turmoil. The new mathematics. University teachers had so carefully skirted any confrontation of belief against demonstrable mathematical proof, had constructed examples to avoid direct offense, and now that confrontation, blindly pushed forward by the conservatives, had run straight into the University computer department. “Yes, aiji-ma,” he said, envisioning that moment, the traditionalists afraid to destroy the computers, afraid to let information out. The books, the translations would go if the Kadagidi became too frustrated—or too frightened—by their impasse. Everything he had built, everything the University had built, was on the brink not just of hostile rule, but destruction. A return to the precomputer world. A denial of everything the University taught.
“Leave matters to these fools, paidhi-aiji, and let them ban the new books, and deny the evidence and hide what will not fit their numbers, and we will be two hundred years climbing back out of the pit. They say your advice was wrong. Is that not so?”
He was inches from Tabini’s face. Tabini’s grip cut off the blood to his lower arm, the arm an ateva had once broken with his bare hands. It was irrelevant, that old pain. The atevi world swayed, tottered, threatened to crash.
“I might have done things better, aiji-ma. Even if what I said was my best advice.”
“Tell me, paidhi-ji. If one opens a door and discloses a room afire, is the fire one’s fault?”
“If it spread the fire, aiji-ma. If the paidhi has to be at fault, one is ready to be at fault.”
“This fire, this fire, paidhi-aiji, has been eating at the timbers under our feet for a very long time. It would have dropped us all into the flames sooner or later. You knew the hazards. You warned us. And we likewise are not fools. You showed us numbers that the counters could not refute, nor take into their systems, did you not?
Have you fed us poison?”
“No, aiji-ma.” But he had dismissed the danger of disturbed philosophers and outright fortune-tellers as secondary to greater dangers ever since the ship had arrived in the heavens, the ship that had brought them Jase, with all the attendant troubles.
Humans on Mospheira had begun to politic with the ship-folk and some of them had decided to determine the future of the atevi whose planet this wasc which was wrong, by his lights, morally wrong. He had fought that fight, for atevi ownership of their own world. He had gained atevi their place in the heavens.
But he was not, in the long run, atevi. He could not feel what atevi felt. His ‘place in the heavens’ had meant earth-to-orbit flight, and computers, which had meant human mathematics. Human ways of viewing the universe had come flooding into an atevi culture that rested so heavily on its mathematics, its perceptions of balance and harmony, its linguistic accommodations, its courtesies and orders of power and precedence. He had loosed the genie, he had known what he was doing, he had foreseen the dangerc that he might compromise what was atevi, even while trying to save them. Atevi could fix the problem—the mathematics embedded even in the atevi language was able to accommodate a mutable universec of course they could. Was there not the dowager? Was there not the Astronomer, and the mathematicians of the University? Didn’t they adjust their thinking and come back with uniquely atevi insights?
He had thought they could ride the whirlwind, and, being no mathematician, he had left the details to the scholars to hammer out.
And had not the aiji-dowager herself warned him that the whirlwind could not be dismissed? Wrong. Very dangerously wrong.
And Tabini had reinforced those rural fears, by more and more gifts of dazzling technology to even out the economy in the remoter regions, the aiji trying to balance economic advantage, and risking the whole structure. He had had his misgivings all along. He had progressively stifled them, in worse and worse revelations from the heavens. He had never argued with Tabini’s economic policy, his awarding of new construction to depressed regions. It ought to have lifted the whole country up.
He saw, as in a lightning flash, a landscape in convulsion.
And Tabini-aiji, son of a bloody, dangerous man, grandson of a conniving Easterner, had listened to him, attempting to be a different, modern kind of atevi ruler.
“Well, well,” Tabini said, “so we are where we are, paidhi. Our enemies have steadfastly refused to advance their philosophy or their mathematics in the last three hundred years. They may be factually wrong. But, gods less fortunate, they are persistent.”
“Television, an advancement,” Lord Tatiseigi scoffed. “And these computers are questionable and impudent.”
“You would never take the Talidi part, great-uncle.” This bit of politics from Damiri. “They decry computers. One is gratified to know Atageini clan has the sense to own them.”
“A damned nuisance,” Tatiseigi muttered. “They were supposed to report from the valley. And did they?”
“The Kadagidi destroyed the sensor,” Tabini said darkly, “and it reported that, nandi.”
“And what good is it after?” Tatiseigi retorted. “A telephone could have told us how many, and what direction.”
“Your telephones are compromised, nandi.”
“Not Atageini doing! We accepted this Murini under our roof in the interests of peace, when the whole region was in upheaval.
What alternative did we have but further conflict?”
“Did we not say,” Ilisidi interjected, “no mercy for Talidi leadership back when we had the chance? And did I not warn you, Tati-ji, that sheltering their ally was no solution?”
“What were we to do? Slaughter a guest? If you had moved in, he would have moved out sooner.”
“We had our own beast to hunt,” Ilisidi said, leaning on her cane, “and a great deal on our hands, nandi. We have our own province.
And where were you when matters turned difficult, Tati-ji?”
Bren found his hand gone numb.
“Dare you,” Tatiseigi cried, “and under our roof, and us sheltering Ragi guests, to our personal danger, accuse us?”
“Nandiin,” Bren said, “nandiin, one asks, one most earnestly asks—” Tabini was looking him past him when he spoke, but immediately those uncanny pale eyes snapped back to his, at close range. “One most earnestly asks,” he resumed, suddenly short of breath, and felt Tabini’s grip ease, as if Tabini had remembered whose arm he was holding. “Moderation in these events,” Bren finished.