“Nadi,” he said, “have you forgotten my question?”
“No, paidhi-ji.”
“But you don’t intend to answer.”
Jago fixed him with a yellow, lucent stare. “Do they ask such questions on Mospheira?”
“Always.”
“Not among us,” Jago said, and crossed the room to the door.
“Jago, say you’re not angry.”
Again that stare. She had stopped just short of the deadly square on the carpet, turned it off, and looked back at him. “Why ask such a futile question? You wouldn’t believe either answer.”
It set him back. And made him foreign and deliberate in his own reply.
“But I’m human, nadi.”
“So your man’chi isn’t with Tabini, after all.”
Dangerous question. Deadly question. “Of course it is.—But what if you had two… two very strong man’chiin?”
“We call it a test of character.” Jago said, and opened the door.
“So do we, nadi Jago.”
He had caught her attention. Black, wide, imposing, she stood against that bar of whiter hall light. She stood there as if she wanted to say something.
But the pocket-com beeped, demanding attention. She spoke briefly with headquarters, regarding Banichi’s whereabouts, and HQ said that he was out of the lab, but in conference, asking not to be disturbed.
“Thank you,” she said to the com. “Relay my message.” And to him: “The wires will both be live. Go to bed, paidhi Bren. I’ll be outside if you need me.”
“All night?”
There was a moment of silence. “Don’t walk in the garden, nand’ paidhi. Don’t stand in front of the doors. Be prudent and go to bed.”
She shut the door then. The wire rearmed itself—he supposed. It came up when the door locked.
And did it need all of that—Jago and the wire, to secure his sleep?
Or where was Banichi and what was that exchange of questions, this talk about loyalties? He couldn’t remember who’d started it.
Jago could have forgone an argument with him, at the edge of sleep, when he most wanted a tranquil mind—but he wasn’t even certain now who’d started it and who’d pressed it, or with what intention. He hadn’t done well. The whole evening with Banichi and then Jago had had a stressed, on the edge quality, as if—
In retrospect, it seemed that Jago had been fishing as hard as he had been to find out something, all along—pressing every opportunity, challenging him, or ready to take offense and put the worst construction on matters. It might be Jago’s inexperience with him—he’d dealt mostly with Banichi and relied on Banichi to interpret to her. But he couldn’t figure out why Banichi had deserted him tonight—except the obvious answer, that Banichi as the senior of the pair had had matters on his mind more important to the aiji than the paidhi was.
And so far as he could tell, neither he nor Jago had completely gotten the advantage, neither of them had come away with anything useful that he could figure out—only a mutual reminder how profound the differences were and how dangerous the interface between atevi and human could still turn, on a moment’s notice.
He couldn’t even get his points across to one well-educated and unsuperstitious woman with every reason to listen to him. How could he transmit anything, via his prepared statements to the various councils, make any headway with the population at large, who, after two centuries of peace, agreed it was a very good thing for humans to stay on Mospheira and grudgingly conceded that computers might have numbers, the way tables might have definite sizes and objects definite height, but, God, even arranging the furniture in a room meant considering ratios and measurements, and felicitous and infelicitous combinations that the atevi called agingi’ai, ‘felicitous numerical harmony.’
Beauty flowed from that, in atevi thinking. The infelicitous could not be beautiful. The infelicitous could not be reasoned with. Right numbers had to add up, and an even division in a simple flower arrangement was a communication of hostility.
God knew what he had communicated to Jago that he hadn’t meant to say.
He undressed, he turned out the light and cast an apprehensive look at the curtains, which showed no hint of the deadly wire and no shadow of any lurking assassin. He put himself to bed—at the wrong end of the room—where the ventilation was not directly from the lattice doors.