Foreigner

A table was set there, in the dark—a dark figure, hair streaked with white, sat having tea and toast, wrapped in robes against the cold. Ilisidi looked up at their intrusion on her before-dawn breakfast and, quite, quite madly, to his eyes, waved a gesture toward the empty chair, while icy gusts whipped at the lace table-covering.

“Good morning,” she said, “nand’ paidhi. Sit. What lovely hair you have. Does it curl on its own?”

He fell into the chair as the guards deposited him there. His braid had come completely undone. His hair flew in the wind that whipped the steam off Ilisidi’s cup. Guards stood behind his chair while the dowager’s servant poured him a cup. The wind took that steam, too, chilling him to the bone as it skirled in off the shadowed lake, out of the mountains. The faintest redness of dawn showed in the lowest notches.

“It’s the hour for ghosts,” Ilisidi said. “Do you believe in them?”

He caught a quick, cold breath—caught up the pieces of his sanity… and engaged.

“I believe in unrewarded duty, nand’ dowager. I believe in treachery, and invitations one shouldn’t take at face value.—Come aboard my ship, said the lady to the fisherman.” He picked up the teacup in a shaking hand. Tea spilled, scalding his fingers, but he carried it to his lips and sipped it. He tasted only sweet. “Not Cenedi’s brew. What effect does this one have?”

“Such a prideful lad. I heard you enjoyed sweets.—Hear the bell?”

He did. The buoy bell, he supposed, far out in the lake,

“When the wind blows, it carries it,” Ilisidi said, wrapped in her robes, and wrapping them closer. “Warning of rocks. We had the idea long before you came bringing gifts.”

“I’ve no doubt. Atevi had found so much before us.”

“Shipwrecked, were you? Is that still the story? No buoy bells?”

“Too far from our ordinary routes,” he said, and took another, warming sip, while the wind cut through his shirt and trousers. Shivers made him spill scalding liquid on his fingers as he set the cup down. “Off our charts. Too far to see the stars we knew.”

“But close enough for this one.”

“Eventually. When we were desperate.” The ringing came and went by turns, on the tricks of the wind. “We never meant to harm anyone, nand’dowager. That’s still the truth.”

“Is it?”

“When Tabini sent me to you—he said I’d need all my diplomacy. I didn’t understand, then. I understood his grandmother was simply difficult.”

Ilisidi gave him no expression, none that human eyes could see in the dim morning. But she might have been amused. Ilisidi was frequently amused at such odd points. The cold had penetrated all the way to his brain, maybe, or it was the tea: he found no particular terror left, with her.

“Do you mind telling me,” he asked her above the wind, “what you’re after? Launch sites on Mospheira is a piece of nonsense. Wrong latitude. Ships leaving for other places is the same. So, is arresting me just politics, or what?”

“My eyes aren’t what they were. When I was your age I could see your orbiting station. Can you, from here?”

He turned his head toward the sun, toward the mountains, searching above the peaks for a star that didn’t twinkle, a star shining with reflected sunlight.

His vision blurred on him. He saw it distorted, and he looked instead for dimmer, neighboring stars. He had no trouble seeing them, the sky was still so dark, without electric lights to haze the dawn with city-glow.

And when he looked fixedly at the station he could still see its deformation, as if—he feared at first thought—it had yawed out of its habitual plane, making a minute exaggeration of its round into an ellipse.

Was it possibly the central mast coming into view? The station tilted radically out of plane?

Logical explanations chased through his head—the station further along to deterioration than they had reckoned, a solar storm, maybe—and Mospheira might be transmitting like mad, trying to salvage it. It would engage atevi notice: they had perfectly adequate optics.

Maybe it was some solar panel come loose from the station and catching the sun. The station rotated once every so many minutes. If it was something loose, it ought to go away and come back.

“Well, nand’ paidhi?”

He got up from his chair and stared at it, trying not to blink, trying until his eyes hurt in the gusts that blasted cold through his clothing.

But it didn’t do those things—didn’t dim, or change. It remained a steady, minute irregularity that stayed on the same side of a station that was supposed to be spinning on its axis… slower and slower over the centuries, as entropy had its way, but—

But, he thought, my God, not in my lifetime, the station wasn’t supposed to break apart, barring total, astronomical calamity…

And it wouldn’t just hang there like that—unless I amlooking at the mast…