“There’s also the risk,” he said, “of creating problems among atevi. You had rail—you almost had rail at the time of the Landing. If we’d thrown air travel into Shejidan immediately, it might have provoked disturbances among the outlying Associations. Not everyone believed Barjida-aiji would share the technology. And better steam trains were a lot less threatening. We could have turned over rockets. We could have said, in the very first negotiations—here’s the formula for dynamite. And maybe irresponsible people would have decided to drop explosives on each other’s cities. We’d just been through a war. It was hard enough to get it stopped. We didn’t want to provide new weapons for another one. Wecould have dropped explosives from planes, when we built them. But we didn’t want to do that.”
“That’s a good point,” the interviewer said.
He hoped it was. He hoped people thought about it.
“We don’t ever want a war,” he said. “We didn’t have much choice about being on this planet. We caused harm we didn’t intend or want. It seems a fair repayment, what the Treaty asked.”
“Is there a limit to what you’ll turn over?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“What about highways?”
Damn, thatquestion again. He drew a breath to think about it. “Certainly I’ve seen the realities of transportation in the mountains. I intend to take my observations to ourcouncil. And I’m sure the nai-aijiin will have recommendations to me, too.”
A little laughter at that. And a sober next question: “Yet you alone, rather than the legislature, determine whether a town gets the transport it needs.”
“Not myself alone. In consultation with the aiji, with the councils, with the legislatures.”
“Why not road development?”
“Because—”
Because mecheiti followed the leader. Because Babs was the leader, and Nokhada hadn’t a choice, without fighting that Nokhada didn’t want, damned stupid idea, and he had to say something to that question, something that didn’t insult atevi.
“Because,” he said, trapped. “We couldn’t predict what might happen. Because we saw the difficulties of regulation.” He panicked. He was losing the threads of it, not making sense, and not making sense sounded like a lie. “We feared at the outset the allocation of road funds might cause division within the Association. A breakdown of an authority we didn’t understand.”
The interviewer hesitated, politely expressionless. “Are you saying, nand’ paidhi, that this policy was based on misapprehension?”
Oh, God. “Initially, perhaps.” The mind snapped back into focus. The villageproblem was the atevi concern. “But we don’t think it would have led to a solution for the villages. Ifthere’d been highways a hundred, two hundred years ago, there’d have been a growth in unregulated commerce. If thathad happened—the commercial interests would build where the biggest highways were, and the straighter the highways, the more big population centers in a row, the more attraction they’d be—while no one but the aiji would have defended the remote villages, who stillwould have trouble getting transportation, very much what we have now, but we’d also have the pollution from the motors and the concentration of even more political power into the major population strings, along those roads. I see a place for a road system—in the villages, not the population centers, as spur lines to the centralized transport system.”
He didn’t engage the interviewer’s interest. He’d gotten too detailed, too technical, or at least promised to lead to technical matters the interviewer didn’t want or felt his audience didn’t want. He sensed the shift in intention, as the interviewer shifted position and frowned. He was glad of it. The interviewer posed a few more questions, about where he lived, about family associations, about what he did on vacation, thank God, none of them critical. He was sweating under the lights when the interview wound to its close and the interviewer went through the obligatory courtesies.
‘Thank you, nand’ paidhi,“ the man said, and Bren withheld the sigh of relief as the lights went out.
“I’m sorry,” he said at once, “I’m not used to cameras. I’m afraid I wasn’t very coherent at all.”
“You speak very well, nand’ paidhi, muchbetter than some of our assignments, I assure you. We’re very pleased you found the time for us.” The interviewer stood up, he stood up, Banichi stood up, from the shadowed fringes, where the lights had obscured his presence. Everyone bowed. The interviewer offered a hand to shake. Someone must have told him that.
“You’ve been informed on our customs,” he ventured to say, and the interviewer was pleased and bowed, shaking hands with a crushing grip.
There was the commercial plane returning at sunset. The news crew had another assignment in Maidingi, on the electrical outage. Thank God. The crew was packing up lights, disconnecting cable run like an infestation of red and black vines across the ancient carpets, from the remote hallways. Maigi went to retrieve the far end somewhere near the kitchens, where, Bren was sure, the staff was not eager to admit strangers. Everything folded away into boxes, The glass-eyed animals stared back from the walls, as amazed and dazed as the paidhi.
What have I done? he asked himself, asked himself if he could justify everything he’d said, when he wrote his report to Mospheira, but they’d kept off sensitive topics—he’d accomplished that much, give or take his mental lapse on the highway question.
“We’d like to do more such interviews,” the man said—he could notrecall the name: Daigani or something like it. “We’d be delighted to tape one, nand’paidhi, actually in Mospheira. Perhaps reciprocal arrangements with your television, but one of our crews actually on site—interviews with ordinary people, that sort of thing.”
“Certainly if something of the sort could be worked out,” he answered. It was the answer to any unlikely proposal. He couldn’t have it go to Mospheira as something he’d agreed to. “I could contact the appropriate people—” It was a deliberate, Give me a phone, challenge to Banichi and Jago andTabini. A dozen uneasy thoughts slithered through the back of his mind. The news services had to know that someone had tried to kill him, and no one had mentioned that fact. Hehadn’t. The Bu-javid’s conspiratorial attitude about security seeped into the blood and bone of those who lived there—one didn’ttalk to the press without authorization, one didn’t carry gossip, one left it to the departments with authority to state official policy.
But he couldn’t tell the news that a man had died here yesterday? Or they knew and didn’t ask?
He didn’t know what had gone out on the news in the last week. He didn’t know what wascommon knowledge and what wasn’t, and the policy of his office said keep quiet when you didn’t know.
So he made polite expressions and bowed and sweated, still, in spite of the cooling of the air. A front was moving in. The crew hoped their flight would beat it out. They’d ridden through the front this morning, a choppy, bumpy flight, what Jago called ‘long,’ and the news crew called ‘uncomfortable,’
But the front doors were open now, with the wind blowing through, and the light coming in, brighter than the electric bulbs in this hall, which only managed a wan, golden glow. The crew carried out their lights, the interviewer lingered for small talk, and Tano and Algini had their heads together over by the door, watching the crew carry the equipment—Algini had come up with them. So had Banichi, Jago was… somewhere, probably resting; and meanwhile the thoughts about what he’d said and what he’d thought kept jostling one another at the back of his mind, clamoring for attention and further analysis.
Banichi carefully disengaged the interviewer, then, and walked him as far as the door, where one last round of bows was obligatory.