Foreigner

“The council’s been postponed.” Banichi shook the coat out and held it for him, preempting the new servants’ offices. “The ratios in the slosh baffles will have to wait at least a few days.”

He slipped his arms into the coat, flipped his braid over the collar and settled it on with a deep breath. The weight wasn’t uncomfortable this crisp morning.

“So what does Tabini want?” he muttered. But both the servants were in the room, and he didn’t expect Banichi to answer. Jago hadn’t been there when he waked. Just Tano and his glum partner, bringing in his breakfast. He hadn’t had enough sleep, for two nights now. His eyes stung with exhaustion. And he had to look presentable and have his wits about him.

“Tabini is concerned,” Banichi said. “Hence the postponement. He wishes you to travel to the country this afternoon. A security team is going over the premises.”

“What, at the estate?”

“Stone by stone. Tano and Algini will pack for you, if necessary.”

What could he ask, when he knew Banichi wouldn’t answer—couldn’t answer a question Tabini hadn’t authorized him to answer? He took a deep breath, adjusted his collar, and looked in the mirror. His eyes showed the want of sleep—showed a modicum of panic, truth be known, because the decision not to call Mospheira was fast becoming an irrevocable one, with decreasing opportunities to change his mind on that score without making a major, noisy opposition to people whose polite maneuvering—if that was what he perceived around him—might not be profitable to challenge.

Maybe it was paralysis of will. Maybe it was instinct saying Be still— don’tdefy the only friend humanity has on this planet.

Paidhiin are expendable. Mospheira isn’t. We can’t stand against the whole world. This time they have aircraft. And radar. And all the technological resources.

They’re very close to not needing us any more.

In the room behind him the door opened and Jago came in, he assumed to supervise the two servants, whose words to him had consisted in controversies like: “Preserves, nadi?” and “Sugar in the tea?”

Moni and Taigi had known answers like that without asking him at every turn. He missed them already. He feared they wouldn’t be back, that they’d already been reassigned—he hoped to a stable, influential, thoroughly normal atevi. He hopedthey weren’t in the hands of the police, undergoing close questions about him, and humans in general.

Banichi opened the door a second time, for them to leave for the audience, and he went out with Banichi, feeling more like a prisoner than the object of so much official concern.

“Aiji-ma.” Bren made the courteous bow, hands on knees. Tabini was in shirt and trousers, not yet at his formal best, sitting in the sunlight in front of the open doors—Tabini’s doors, high in the great mass of the Bu-javid, faced not the garden, but the open sky, the descending terraces of the ancient walls, and the City that was the fortress’ skirt, a geometry of tile roofs, hazed and softened by the morning mist to faintest reds, roofs auspiciously aligned in their relationship to each other and in the city’s accommodation to the river. Beyond that, the Bergid range, riding above a haze of distance, far across the plains—a glorious view, a cool, breathless dawn.

The table was set in the light, half onto the balcony, against that prospect. And Tabini was having breakfast.

Tabini made a hand-sign to his servants, who instantly procured two more cups, and drew out from the table the two other chairs.

So they were completely informal. He and Banichi sat down at the offered places, with the Bergid range a misty blue and the City spread out in faint tile reds below the balcony railing.

“I trust there’s been no repetition of the incident,” Tabini said.

“No, aiji-ma,” Banichi answered, adding sugar.

“I’m very distressed by this incident,” Tabini said. A sip of tea. “Distressed also that you should be the object of public speculation, Bren-paidhi. I was obliged to take a position. I could notlet that pass.—Has anyone approached you in the meetings?”

“No,” Bren said. “But I do fear I was less than observant yesterday. I’m not used to this idea.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Disturbed.” He wasn’t sure, himself, what he felt. “Disturbed that I’ve been the cause of so much disarrangement, when I’m here for your convenience.”

‘That’s the politic answer.“

“—And I’m very angry, aiji-ma.”

“Angry?”

“That I can’t go where I like and do what I like.”

“But can the paidhi ever do that? You never go to the City without an escort. You don’t travel, you don’t hold entertainments, which, surely, accounts for what Banichi would counsel you as habits of the greatest hazard.”

“This is my home, aiji-ma. I’m not accustomed to slinking past my own doors or wondering if some poor servant’s going to walk through the door on my old key… I do hope someone’s warned them.”

“Someone has,” Banichi said.

“I worry,” he said, across the teacup. “Forgive me, aiji-ma.”