At least, that was how a descendant nine or so generations down reconstructed the decision-making process… the atevi couldn’t be too different. They had locomotives. They had steam mills. They had industry.
They had one hell of a different hard-wiring, but you couldn’t tell that from the physics they used.
Couldn’t tell that meeting an atevi. Hello, how are you, how’s the weather? Nice people. Arrange a little trade, a little tech for an out-of-season game animal or two…
Right bang into the cultural rift.
Try to settle it—make it right with the local leaders: right into the cultural whirlpool.
Count the ways the first settlement had screwed it up. Count the ways they’d gotten good and deep into the interface before they’d begun to figure out betrayal wasn’t betrayal and murder wasn’t murder and that you couldn’t promote one local aiji and fight another one without involving a continent-spanning Association with everything that conflict dragged into it. You didn’t expect a steam-powered civilization to have world government…
But, then, if you were an early human colonist, maybe you didn’t expect anyone to behave in any way you wouldn’t.
Fifty years and two paidhiin ago, Mospheira had taken a collective deep breath and thrown satellite communications and rocket science onto the table, with the fervent hope that by hooking it to advanced communications, biichi-ji and kabiu together would keep some enterprising atevi entity from combining the explosive with the propellant technology and blowing their rivals to hell.
Because they thought now they’d gotten to know the atevi.
God help fools and tourists.
He flipped an unread page of the history, realized he hadn’t read it, and flipped it back again, trying to concentrate on the doings of aijiin and councillors long since drifting on the Malguri winds, washed into its soil with the rains, down to the sea from Lake Maidingi rather more rapidly in this season than in fall.
He was bitterly angry and his mind was wandering, back and forth inside known limits, like a caged creature, when the real answers had to lie outside the bars of his understanding.
Maybe it was a point all paidhiin got to. Maybe he was the most naive, maybe because he’d gone into a relationship with the most friendly of aijiin, and it was so damned easy to ignore the warnings in every text he’d ever studied and fall right into the same trap as the first humans on the planet… expecting atevi to be human. Expecting atevi to do what one naturally expected nice, sane human people to do and, God help him twice, what he wanted atevi to do, what he emotionally needed atevi to do, instead of himself waking up, paying attention to danger signals, and doing the job he’d been sent here for.
He should have made that phone call, back in Shejidan, if he’d had to make it with Bu-javid guards battering down the door. He shouldn’t be thinking, even at this hour, that Tabini was under some sort of pressure and desperately needed him back in Shejidan, because if that was the case, then the television network Tabini tightly managed wouldn’t be looking for interviews to prove the paidhi was a nice, easy-going friendly fellow, not some shadow-villain plotting world domination or contriving death-rays to level cities.
I will not betray you, Bren-ji?
What in hell did that mean, before Jago lit out the door and down the hall at the next thing to a dead run? And where’s the gun, Jago? Where is Banichi’s gun?
The logs burned down and fell, showering sparks up the flue. He put on another, and settled back to his book.
Not a word back from Banichi or Jago about what was wrong out there—whether someone had breached the security perimeter, or whether someone odd had simply arrived at the airport or whether they’d had some dire word from Tabini.
He flipped the page, figured out he’d stopped reading the second time somewhere in the middle of it, and turned it back, with a dogged effort to concentrate on the text, in atevi directions, and to make sense out of the antique, ornate type style.
The lights went on again, out again.