C.J. CHERRYH
TRACKER
To Willow, especially Irene.
1
The sun touched the end of the bay, the end of a good day. A ragged streak of cloud lit up gold with a shadowy attempt at pink.
Jaishan ceased her leisurely tacking toward the sunset and turned for port with an experienced hand at the helm. Gold sunlight swept her deck, cast shadows down the planks as the massive boom swung over.
The sail thumped and filled with the shoreward wind, a purposeful course, now homeward bound for Najida estate.
“Fascinating system.” Jase Graham, spacefarer, turned and took a firm grip on the rail as water began to rush and foam under the bow.
Bren Cameron leaned easily beside him, elbows on the same rail. He loved the sound and the feel of the sea. They could have had a bit more speed, but that wasn’t what they wanted now. This was the last bit of sailing they’d get before Jase went back to the space station overhead, and good-byes were in the offing.
Tano was at the helm, enjoying the job—atevi, native to the world, as humans were not: black-skinned, golden-eyed, a head taller than most humans. Tano’s partner Algini was close by him; and their teammates, Banichi and Jago, were lounging on the equipment locker, against the rail, enjoying the wind and the absolute absence of threat.
Bren was glad to see it. Rare that his bodyguard got an hour off, let alone whole days, let alone a week of such days. His bodyguard was still in uniform—Assassins’ Guild black happened to be all they owned. But they had shed their heavy leather jackets in the sun today, and gotten in a little fishing.
Banichi was certainly moving far better than he had a week ago. He was zealously keeping up with the exercises on his arm and shoulder. He was also getting impatient with the rehab schedule and entirely ready, Banichi assured them all, to resume ordinary duty.
Being on the boat meant security enough that Banichi and the rest of them could relax. Ordinary duty out here in the wide bay need involve nothing more strenuous than watching the horizons and casting a line.
There was hardly anywhere on the planet more secure than where they’d been the last number of days. The aishidi’tat, the Western Association of the atevi, was at peace—still in shock from the loss of two lords, the investiture of an heir, and the return of the old leadership of the Assassins’ Guild—but at peace. Banichi, of that Guild, had been no little involved in the event—which was why he was under doctor’s orders not to push anything, and why it took being out in the middle of all this water, with a navy ship out across the bay—to make Banichi admit there was indeed leisure to relax.
Banichi laughed at something his partners had just said. That was a very good thing to hear. It unwound something in Bren’s own gut.
“First vacation in a long time,” Bren said to Jase, beside him. “You’ve got to come down to Earth more often. You’re good for us.”
“My duty-book’s going to be stacked and waiting for me,” Jase said with a sigh. “Anything the senior captains don’t want to handle, guess where it’ll go in my absence. Right to my desk. —But it’s worth it. I’ve enjoyed this.”
“Even the gunfire?”
“Well, I mostly missed that part.”
“Not all of it.”
“It was an experience,” Jase said. “And your own duty-book’s going to look like mine, I’m afraid. You’ve still got the chaff from that mess up north to deal with. Wish I could help with that.”
“Minor,” Bren said. It said something about recent months, that he could call the ruin of an historic atevi clan “minor.” But it was minor—now that the Kadagidi clan’s influence had diminished.
And diminish, yes, it had. The aishidi’tat, the Western Association, was in fact down two clan lords since the start of Jase’s visit, and politics was certain to surround the replacements, but Bren had some hope there would be a quick, sensible solution—as yet unthought-of—but it was not his job to think of it. The aiji in Shejidan, Tabini, was firmly in power. The Assassins’ Guild, the core of the judicial system, was functioning as it had not in years. And Bren, paidhi-aiji, translator to the court, intermediary-at-large, could now draw a deep breath and hope all the agreements he’d pinned down stayed put.
They were both human, he and Jase. Bren, born to the planet and Jase, to the starship Phoenix. Jase had been a special child—born of long-dead heroes, destined to be something a dead man had known and Jase had never learned. That he’d come early to a captaincy—one of the four who held that post—was destiny, maybe; genetics and politics, certainly—“But I don’t know what I was for,” Jase had put it.
“Does anybody, really?” Bren had answered that one, and Jase had thought about it and laughed.
So here they were—Jase a ship’s captain, visiting a planet that had so much history with his ship; and Bren himself—wielding a power he’d never remotely planned on holding, disconnected from Mospheira, and inextricably involved in Tabini-aiji’s affairs. But alike. Intermediaries, both, trained to mediate, to communicate—both of them grown into an authority neither of them had planned to hold and a job nobody had imagined would exist. Mediators. Negotiators. Translators not just of language, but of mindsets and cultures.
Humans were the cosmic accident on the planet, involving Phoenix and a desperate human colony, centuries ago. Phoenix had arrived at the Earth of the atevi, crew and passengers destitute and dying, an unknown world their last reachable hope.
But the world already had a population. Atevi had been chugging along in their steam age, having achieved railroads, having achieved a reasonably peaceful government long before humans had ever appeared in their heavens.
Phoenix built an orbiting station for a base, manned it, and left in search of another home for its colony. But the humans left behind saw what they wanted, and reached for it, flinging themselves earthward, desperately, on what atevi called the petal sails, one after another, until the station could no longer sustain itself, and the final handful left, shutting the station down, leaving it to drift silent, abandoned.
And the descendants of those desperate colonists now formed a terrestrial nation: Mospheira. The island of that name lay a day’s sail away, too far across the strait to spot from this vantage, even as a haze above the sea. It was a large island, tag-end of the massive monocontinent on which atevi dwelled, easily within reach of any determined individual with a rowboat and a mission.
But it was isolated by atevi law—excepting one appointee: the paidhi, the human interpreter to the atevi court.
These days, that would be him.
The paidhi’s original job, as Bren had undertaken it, had been, first, to assure an accurate flow of information between humans and atevi; and secondly to turn over human technology to atevi at a measured, studied rate, so as not to upset the peace of the world. That was how the original humans had bought their safety, having lost the War of the Landing.
And humans, Mospheirans now, had locked themselves in technological synchrony with the atevi of the mainland, turning over the safe parts of their precious Archive, not accelerating the pace of development, not pushing atevi into change that might turn dangerous, that might cause upheaval, and war.
Mostly the paidhi’s job had been to collect words—whatever atevi words the sitting paidhi judged humans could accurately and safely use, in the University-controlled interface. It was a glacially slow process. The paidhiin had handled the careful, meticulous phrasing of official communications, but held no control over the content.