Foreigner

He’d not brought his notes on the transportation problems. He thought he should have. It went to question after question, until at least numbness had set in where he met the chair and where an empty stomach protested the lack of lunch.

“What,” the interviewer asked then, “determines the rate of turnover of information? Isn’t it true that all these systems exist on Mospheira?”

“Many do.”

“What wouldn’t?”

“We don’t use as much rail. Local air is easier. The interior elevations make air more practical for us.”

“But you didn’t present that as an option to the aiji two hundred years ago.”

“We frankly worried that we’d be attacked.”

“So there areother considerations than the environment.”

Sharp interviewer. And empowered by someone to ask questions that might not make the broadcast, but—might, still. Tabini had confidence in this man, and sent him.

“There’s also the risk,” he said, “of creating problems among atevi. You had rail—you almost had rail at the time of the Landing. If we’d thrown air travel into Shejidan immediately, it might have provoked disturbances among the outlying Associations. Not everyone believed Barjida-aiji would share the technology. And better steam trains were a lot less threatening. We could have turned over rockets. We could have said, in the very first negotiations—here’s the formula for dynamite. And maybe irresponsible people would have decided to drop explosives on each other’s cities. We’d just been through a war. It was hard enough to get it stopped. We didn’t want to provide new weapons for another one. Wecould have dropped explosives from planes, when we built them. But we didn’t want to do that.”

“That’s a good point,” the interviewer said.

He hoped it was. He hoped people thought about it.

“We don’t ever want a war,” he said. “We didn’t have much choice about being on this planet. We caused harm we didn’t intend or want. It seems a fair repayment, what the Treaty asked.”

“Is there a limit to what you’ll turn over?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“What about highways?”

Damn, thatquestion again. He drew a breath to think about it. “Certainly I’ve seen the realities of transportation in the mountains. I intend to take my observations to ourcouncil. And I’m sure the nai-aijiin will have recommendations to me, too.”

A little laughter at that. And a sober next question: “Yet you alone, rather than the legislature, determine whether a town gets the transport it needs.”

“Not myself alone. In consultation with the aiji, with the councils, with the legislatures.”

“Why not road development?”

“Because—”

Because mecheiti followed the leader. Because Babs was the leader, and Nokhada hadn’t a choice, without fighting that Nokhada didn’t want, damned stupid idea, and he had to say something to that question, something that didn’t insult atevi.

“Because,” he said, trapped. “We couldn’t predict what might happen. Because we saw the difficulties of regulation.” He panicked. He was losing the threads of it, not making sense, and not making sense sounded like a lie. “We feared at the outset the allocation of road funds might cause division within the Association. A breakdown of an authority we didn’t understand.”

The interviewer hesitated, politely expressionless. “Are you saying, nand’ paidhi, that this policy was based on misapprehension?”

Oh, God. “Initially, perhaps.” The mind snapped back into focus. The villageproblem was the atevi concern. “But we don’t think it would have led to a solution for the villages. Ifthere’d been highways a hundred, two hundred years ago, there’d have been a growth in unregulated commerce. If thathad happened—the commercial interests would build where the biggest highways were, and the straighter the highways, the more big population centers in a row, the more attraction they’d be—while no one but the aiji would have defended the remote villages, who stillwould have trouble getting transportation, very much what we have now, but we’d also have the pollution from the motors and the concentration of even more political power into the major population strings, along those roads. I see a place for a road system—in the villages, not the population centers, as spur lines to the centralized transport system.”

He didn’t engage the interviewer’s interest. He’d gotten too detailed, too technical, or at least promised to lead to technical matters the interviewer didn’t want or felt his audience didn’t want. He sensed the shift in intention, as the interviewer shifted position and frowned. He was glad of it. The interviewer posed a few more questions, about where he lived, about family associations, about what he did on vacation, thank God, none of them critical. He was sweating under the lights when the interview wound to its close and the interviewer went through the obligatory courtesies.

‘Thank you, nand’ paidhi,“ the man said, and Bren withheld the sigh of relief as the lights went out.