Foreigner

A movement in the doorway caught his eye. Cenedi was watching him silently. How long Cenedi had been there he had no idea. He stared back, dimly realizing that Cenedi along with Ilisidi had just gained his agreement—and Cenedi had arranged the whole damned shadow-show.

Cenedi only nodded as if he’d seen what he came to see, and left, without a word.

Anger sent a shiver through him, and he hugged the robe closer to hide the reaction. One of Ilisidi’s guards—he remembered the name as Giri—had lingered, working with the fire. Giri looked askance at him. “There’s another blanket, nadi,” Giri said, and in his sullen silence got up and brought it and put it over him. “Thin folk chill through faster,” Giri said. “Do you want the tea, nand’ paidhi? Breakfast?”

“No. Enough tea. Thank you.” Cenedi’s presence had upset his stomach. He told himself—intellectually—that Cenedi could have done him far greater hurt: Cenedi could have put enough pressure on to make him confess anything Cenedi wanted. He supposed Cenedi had done him a favor, getting what he needed and no more than that.

But he couldn’t be that charitable, with the livid marks of atevi fingers on his arms. He’d little dignity left. He made a desultory, one-handed twist of his hair at the nape of his neck—he wanted to make a plait or two to hold it, but the arm they’d twisted wouldn’t lift while he was shivering. He was angry, in pain, and in the dim, dazed way his brain was working, he didn’t know who to blame for it: not Cenedi, ultimately; not Ilisidi—not even Tabini, who had every good reason to suspect human motives, with the evidence of human space operations over his head and his own government tottering around him.

While he’d been doing television interviews with newscasters and talking to tourists who hadn’t said a damned thing about it.

His office had probably rung the phone off the desk trying to get hold of him, but atevi news was controlled. Nothing of that major import got out until Tabini wanted it released, not in this Association and not in others: atevi notions of priority and public rights and the duties of aijiin to manage the public welfare took precedence over democracy.

The tourists might nothave known, if they hadn’t been near a television for some number of days. Even the television crew might not have known. The dissidents who must have gravitated to Ilisidi as a rival to Tabini… they would have had their sources, in the hasdrawad, in the way atevi associations had no borders. They would have wanted to get to the paidhi and the information he had, urgently. At any cost.

Maybe the rival factions had wanted to silence his advice, the character of which they might believe they knew without hearing him.

Or maybe they had wanted something else. Maybe there had never been an assassination attempt against him—maybe they’d wanted to snatch him away to question, to find out what a human would say and what it meant to their position, before Tabini took some action they didn’t know how to judge.

Tabini had ordered their rushed and early return from Taiben—after arming him against the logical actions of the people Tabini already intended to send him to?

Had the attempt on his bedroom been real in any sense—or something Tabini himself had done for an excuse?

And why did someone of Banichi’s rank just happen to be in his wing that night? The cooks and the clerks didn’t merit Banichi’s level of security. It washis room they’d been guarding—Tabini had already been advised of the goings-on in the heavens.

But somebody of Banichi’s experience let a man he was guarding sleep with the garden doors and the lattice open?

Things blurred. He felt a clamminess in his hands, was overwhelmed, of a sudden, with anger at the games-playing. He’d believed Cenedi. He’d believed the game in the cellar, when they’d put the gun to his head—they’d made him think he was going to die, and in such a moment, dammit, he’d have thought he’d think of Barb, he’d have thought he’d think of his mother or Toby or someone human, but he hadn’t. They’d made him stand face-to-face with that disturbing, personal moment of truth, and he hadn’t discovered any noble sentiments or even human reactions. The high snows and the sky was all he’d been able to see, being alone was all he could imagine—just the snow, just the sky and the cold, up where he went to have his solitude from work and his own family’s clamoring demands for his time, that was the truth they’d pushed him to, not a warm human thought in him, no love, no humanity—

His hand flew up to his face scarcely in time to bury the sudden rush of helpless, watery reaction that he told himself at once was nerves, the psychological crash after the crisis—that, at least, was human, if anything he did was human, or natural, if anything he did was anything but one damned calculated move after technologically, politically calculated move—