Foreigner

“Banichi’s working with the house maintenance staff. I don’t know what he might have found, but he’s extremely exacting. His subordinates do hurry when they’re asked.” Cenedi took another drink of tea, a large one, and set the cup down. “I wouldn’t worry about it. He’d have advised me, I think, if he’d found anything irregular. Certainly house maintenance would, independent of him.—Another cup, nadi?”

He’d diverted Cenedi from his conversation. He was obligated to another cup. “Thank you,” he said, and started to get up to get his own tea, in the absence of a servant, and not suggesting Cenedi do the office, but Cenedi signaled otherwise, reached a long arm across the corner of the desk, picked up the pot and poured for him and for himself.

“Nadi, a personal curiosity—and I’ve never had the paidhi at hand to ask: all these years you’ve been dealing out secrets. When will you be out of them? And what will you do then?”

Odd that no one had ever asked the paidhiin that quite that plainly… on thisside of the water, although God knew they agonized over it on Mospheira.

And perhaps that wasCenedi’s own and personal question, though not thequestion, he was sure, which Cenedi had called him downstairs specifically to answer. It was the sort of thing an astute news service might ask. The sort of thing a child might… not a political sophisticate like Cenedi, not officially.

But it was very much the sort of question he’d already begun to hint at in technical meetings, testing the waters, beginning, one hoped, to shift attitudes among atevi, and knowing atevi couldn’t go much farther down certain paths without developments resisted for years by vested interests in other departments.

“Things don’t only flow one way across the strait, nadi. We learn from yourscientists, quite often. Not to say we’ve stood still ourselves since the Landing. But the essential principles have been on the table for a hundred years. I’m not a scientist—but as I understand it, it’s the intervening steps, the things that atevi science has to do before the principles in other areas become clear—those are the things still missing. There’s materials science. There’s the kind of industry it takes to support the science. And the education necessary for new generations to understand it. The councils are still debating the shape of baffles in fuel tanks—when no one’s teaching the students in the schools whyyou need a slosh baffle in the first place.”

“You find us slow students?”

Thattrap was obvious as a pit in the floor. And damned right they’d expected atevi to pick things up faster—give or take aijiin who wouldn’t budge and committees that wouldn’t release a process until they’d debated it to death. An incredibly short path to flight and advanced metallurgy. An incredibly difficult one to get a damn bridge built as it needed to be to stand the stresses of heavy-hauling trains.

“Extremely quick students,” he said, “interminable debaters.”

Cenedi laughed. “And humans debate nothing.”

“But we don’t have to debate the technology, nadi Cenedi. We haveit. We useit.”

“Did it bring you success?”

Watch it, he thought. Watchit. He gave a self-deprecating shrug, atevi-style. “We’re comfortable in the association we’ve made. The last secrets arepotentially on the table, nadi. We just can’t get atevi conservatives to accept the essential parts of them. Our secrets are full of numbers. Our numbers describe the universe. And how can the universe be unfortunate? We are confused when certain people claim the numbers add in anything but felicitous combination. We can only believe nature.” He was talking to Ilisidi’sseniormost guard, Ilisidi, who chose to reside in Malguri. Ilisidi, who hunted for her table—but believed in the necessity of dragonettes. “Surely, in my own opinion, not an expert opinion, nadi, someone must have added in what nature didn’t put in the equations.”

It was a very reckless thing to say, on one level. On the other, he hadn’t said whichphilosophy of numbers he faulted and which he favored, out of half a dozen he personally knew in practice, and, human-wise, couldn’tdo in his head. He personally wanted to know where Cenedi, personally, stood—and Cenedi’s mouth tightened in a rare amusement.

“While the computers you design secretly assign unlucky attributes,” Cenedi said wryly. “And swing the stars in their courses.”

“Not that I’ve seen happen. The stars go where nature has them going, nadi Cenedi. The same with the reasons for slosh baffles.”

“Are we superstitious fools?”

“Assuredly not. There’s nothing wrongwith this world. There’s nothing wrong with Malguri. There’s nothing wrongwith the way things worked before we arrived. It’s just—if atevi want what we know—”

“Counting numbers is folly?”