Foreigner

“I’m supposed to be at breakfast with Tabini’s grandmother,” he said. “Banichi’s mad at me.”

“Why did you accept?”

“I didn’t know I could refuse. I didn’t know what trouble it would make—”

Jago made a soft, derisive sound. “Banichi said it was because you thought he was a dessert.”

He couldn’t laugh for a moment. It was too grim, and on the edge of pain; and then it wasfunny, Banichi’s glum perplexity, his human desperation to find a focus for his orphaned affections. Jago’s sudden, unprecedented willingness to converse.

“I take it this was confused in translation,” Jago said.

“I expressed my extreme respect for him,” he said. Which was cold, and distant, and proper. The whole futile argument loomed up, insurmountable barriers again. “Respect. Favor. It’s all one thing.”

“How?” Jago asked—a completely honest question. The atevi words didn’t mean what he tried to make them mean. They couldn’t, wouldn’t ever. The whole atevi hardwiring was different, the experts said so. The dynamics of atevi relationships were different… in ways no paidhi had ever figured out, either, possibly because paidhiin invariably tried to find words to fit into human terms—and then deceived themselves about the meanings, in self-defense, when the atevi world grew too much for them.

God, why did she decide to talk tonight? Was it policy? An interrogation?

“Nadi,” he said wearily, “if I could say that, you’d understand us ever so much better.”

“Banichi speaks Mosphei’. You should say it to him in Mosphei’”

“Banichi doesn’t feelMosphei’.” It was late. He was extremely foolish. He made a desperate, far-reaching attempt to locate abstracts. “I tried to express that I would do favorable things on his behalf because he seems to me a favorable person.”

It at least threw it into the abstract realm, that perception of luck in charge of the universe, which somewhat passed for a god in Ragi thinking.

“Midei,” Jago declared in seeming surprise. It was a word he’d not heard before, and there weren’t many, in ordinary usage, that he hadn’t. “Dahemidei. You’re midedeni.”

That was three in a row. He was too tired to take notes and the damned computer was down. “What does that mean?”

“Midedeni believe luck and favor reside in people. It was a heresy, of course.”

Of course it was. “So it was a long time ago.”

“Oh, half of Adjaiwaio still believes something like that, in the country, anyway—that you’re supposed to Associate with everybodyyou meet.”

An entire remote Association where people likedother people? He both wanted to go there and feared there were other essential, perhaps Treaty-threatening, differences.

“You really believe in that?” Jago pursued the matter. And it was indeed dangerous, how scattered and longing his thoughts instantly grew down that track, how difficult it was to structure logical arguments against the notion, the very seductive notion that atevi couldunderstand affection. “The lords of technology truly think this is the case?”

Jago clearly thought intelligent people weren’t expected to think so.

Which made him question himself, in the paidhi’s internal habit, whether humans weresomehow blind to the primitive character of such attachments.

Then the dislocation jerked him the other direction, back into belief humans were right. “Something like that,” he said. The experts said atevi couldn’tthink outside hierarchical structure. And Jago said they could? His heart was pounding. His common sense said hold back, don’t believe it, there’s a contradiction here. “So you canfeel attachment to one you don’t have man’chifor.”

“Nadi Bren,—are you making a sexual proposition to me?”

The bottom dropped out of his stomach. “I— No, Jago-ji.”

“I wondered.”

“Forgive my impropriety.”

“Forgive my mistaken notion. What wereyou asking?”

“I—” Recovering objectivity was impossible. Or it had never existed. “I’d only like to read about midedeni, if you could find a book for me.”

“Certainly. But I doubt there’d be one here. Malguri’s library is mostly local history. The midedeni were all eastern.”

“I’d like a book to keep, if I could.”

“I’m sure. I have one, if nothing else, but it’s in Shejidan.”

He’d made a thorough mess. And left a person who was probably reporting directly to Tabini with the impression humans belonged to some dead heresy they probably didn’t even remotely match.

“It probably isn’t applicable,” he said, trying to patch matters. “Exact correspondence is just too unlikely.” Jago had a brain. A very quick one; and he risked something he ordinarily would have said only to Tabini. “It’s the apparent correspondences that can bethe most deceptive. We want to believe them.”

“At very least, we’re polite in Shejidan. We don’t shoot people over philosophical differences. I wouldn’t take such a contract.”

God help him. He thought that was a joke out of Jago. The second for the evening. “I wouldn’t think so.”

“I hope I don’t offend you, nadi.”

“I like you, too.”