“We met other foreigners out there, aiji-ma, foreigners to humans, too, and, all credit to the dowager and to your son, aiji-ma, these new foreigners are expecting— our whole agreement with them rests on it—to find you in power and able to answer them. We have assured them you sent our mission out to them, to unwind all the mistaken communications between them and humans. We have assured them you are in charge, and will take charge, a situation for which they have reasonably high hopes.”
“We have heard something of the sort.” It could only have come from the dowager. “You have been quite busy in remote space, paidhi-aiji.”
“But there is a grave complication, aiji-ma. These foreigners themselves claim powerful and dangerous enemies, still another batch of foreigners, aggressive and with a bad history, on the far side of their territory. In short, aiji-ma, these foreigners are involved in a situation we do not understand, nothing that threatens us yet, but there are details—everything—in my computer, aiji-ma, including linguistic records and transcripts of negotiations in which the dowager and your son were deeply involved. They will tell you events, but I have a long, long account to give, information which the legislature and the Guild must understand, information absolutely critical to our safety. If one could engage the media, we have a reason it is absolutely essential for you to be safe—”
“We have already heard something of the details,” Tabini said, “which are neither here nor there at the moment. There are more urgent things.”
“We might publish the news, aiji-ma, attack the Kadagidi with information, unseat Murini from the capital. If we were to go back to the hills, we could—”
“Back, nandi? Who said where we have been?”
It was information the paidhi had not been told, precisely the sort of information the paidhi-aiji could never afford to let pass his lips anywhere he could be overheard. The tightly-contained ship-world he had lived in had given him very bad habits, and his staff, even Banichi and Jago, could fall into extreme and deadly disfavor if Tabini suspected they had told him classified matters they had learned from his staff.
“Aiji-ma, your whereabouts was my own guess, unfounded, probably entirely inaccurate. One can only apologize, and urge—”
“A guess, indeed.”
“One unfounded on any particular information.”
“A very clever guess, paidhi.”
“Only a surmise, aiji-ma, knowing that this entire unfortunate business has centered around me and foreign influencec”
“Around you!” Tabini outright laughed at the temerity of his notion. “Around you, paidhi-aiji!”
“Indeed,” Ilisidi said, leaning forward on her stick, as she sat on Tabini’s other side. “Around the paidhi, around this galloping modernity which you promoted far and wide, grandson, from shuttles we needed, to television, which we might—gods less fortunate!—have escaped. Kabiu violated. This modern device become the center of attention.You never would listen to advice.”
“Oh, indeed,” Tabini said, and his position had by now become very uncomfortable to hold, kneeling for conversation with one of the powers of the earth and having another primal force suddenly going at her grandson on the other side, in what could well become a lengthy debate. Bren cast about for a graceful way to get up and back to his chair and found none, none at all.
“So you went up into the high hills, did you,” Ilisidi said, “and settled your presence on the innocent Astronomer, who was bound himself sooner or later to be a target? Our esteemed human had no trouble reasoning out this brilliant move. How long before the Kadagidi approach the same conclusion and do harm to the distinguished man and his students?”
“Aijiin-ma.” Peacekeeper being the paidhi’s job, it seemed time to perform it, urgently so, at the risk of extreme disfavor. “It was by no means an apparent guess, if that was where the aiji indeed resided.”
“The hill provinces sheltered us,” Tabini said, “but no longer.
They will be here, mani-ma, presently, in force.”
My God, Bren thought. The hillmen, a hundred little clans at tenuous peace with each other, and for centuries ignoring the rest of the world—what in all reason could move them to come down to the Padi Valley? They’d detested flatland politics. They’d desperately wanted the University that Tabini had finally built up there, and then argued with its modern advice and advisements once they had it.
Not to mention the Observatory, the precious Observatory, adjunct to the University—all the students there. They were set at risk. The University library and all its generations of work, the center for the space program, the shuttle work, the translations of human-given books, the technical translations, many of which were only available by computer reader manualsc Perhaps the look was transparent. “At the University,” Damiri said, looking directly at him, “there was, this year, a general suspension of classes, nand’ paidhi, by order of the pretender. There was a particular attack on the library.”
The bottom dropped out of his stomach.
“The night previous, warned by computer messages, the students dispersed in all directions,” Tabini-aiji said with evident satisfaction, “and took the new books with them. Some have gone back to their homes, some sheltered in the hills, and no few of them have set up on the coast, taking resources with them, spreading word wherever they go, and establishing their own communications network. They have the portable machines. And we are informed they will be here.”
“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?”