FOREIGNER: a novel of first contact by Caroline J. Cherryh

Count it the better part of a month before Mospheira decided for certain that Shejidan had somehow misplaced the paidhi.

Disturbing, to discover that individual atevi he had personally thought he understood and an atevi society he had thought he intellectually understood suddenly weren’t acting in any predictable way. He felt it as an offense to his pride that he found nothing now wiser or more resourceful to do than to pretend he was utterly naive and that he wasn’t actually being kidnapped across the country—where, face it, he could disappear for good and all. Nobody from Mospheira, not even Hanks, was going to fracture the Treaty looking for a paidhi who just might have made some unforgivable mistake.

Hell, no, they wouldn’t demand him back. They’d just send a new one, with as good a briefing as they could manage and instructions to pull in a bit and not to be so stupid.

He’d trusted so implicitly… never expected Tabini to be other than a hundred percent for atevi and his own personal interests, but he’d always believed he knew what those interests were. Tabini hadn’t resisted his suggestions: not in the rail system, not the space program, not medical research, not the computerization of the supply system. Tabini wasn’t opposed to anything he’d put forward, or, for God’s sake, Tabini could have said something, and they could have talked about it—but, no, Tabini had listened with intelligent interest, asking lively questions—Tabini’s predecessors had all listened to reason, and invested themselves to the hilt in the interlocking of ecology and technological advance, a concept that atevi were quick to understand.

Reciprocally, there’d never been anything an aiji of Tabini’s house had asked that humans hadn’t done, or given, or tried to comply with, since the War of the Landing itself, right down to his current paper regarding processed meat, which tried… tried to explain to Mospheira that commercialization of meat production was deeply offensive to Ragi, no matter that Nisebi saw nothing wrong with it and were willing to sell. That cultural adaptation went both ways, and Mospheira ought to rely on the sea, and fish, which had no season, and thereby show their hosts on the planet that they had made an effort to change themselves to conform to atevi sensibilities, the way atevi had changed their behaviors toward humans…

Sometimes his job seemed like rolling the proverbial boulder uphill. Just not losing ground seemed hard.

But atevi were on the very threshold of manned space-flight. They had satellite communications. They had a reliable light launch system. They were on the verge of developing the materials that, with human advice, could leapfrog them past the steps humans had taken getting down here, right to powered descent, interlinked maneuvering—terms he was having to learn, concepts that he was studying up on during his so-called fall vacations, cramming into his head the details behind the next policy paper he might give—that he ached to give—some time in the next five years, granted the intermediate heavy-lift rocket was going to work.

Not even that they absolutely needed to take that step; but the office on Mospheira said stall, let atevi develop the intermediate lift capacity. The quality in the synthetic materials wasn’t there yet, and the chemical rocket lifter and the early manned experience would give atevi the experience and the political and emotional investment in space—atevi were much on heroes. It was a cultural decision, a scientific decision… it disappointed hell out of him, because he wanted to be the paidhi that put them a hundred percent into the business of space, and he wanted it while he was young enough to go up himself. That was his secret, personal dream, that if atevi were going to trust any human to go, they might trust the paidhi, and he wanted to be that person, and steer the attitudes if not the spacecraft—

That was the dream he had. The nightmare was less specific, only the apprehension which, long before the assassin tried his bedroom, he had been trying to communicate to Hanks and the rest of the office, that you couldn’t go on giving atevi bits and pieces of tech without accelerating the randomness in the process, meaning that atevi minds didn’t work the same as human minds, and that atevi cultural bias was going to view certain technological advances differently than humans did, and atevi inventiveness was going to put more and more items together into their own inventions, about which they didn’t consult the Mospheira Technology Commission.