Lord Geigi, Lord Regent in the Heavens: His History of the Aishidi’tat
with commentary by Lord Bren of Najida, paidhi-aiji
I
Before the Foreign Star appeared in the Heavens, we, on our own, had reached the age of steam.
We had philosophically and politically begun to transcend the clan structure that had led to so many ruinous wars.
We had eleven regional associations which agreed to build a railroad from Shejidan to the west without going to war about it.
Within the associations, there had been artisan guilds for many years. But during the building of the first railroad, many guilds, starting with the Transportation Guild and the Builders, had not only transcended the limits of clan structure, Transport and the Builders ended by transcending the regional associations. They were the first political entities to do so.
Clans had long formed temporary associations of regional alliance and trade interest. These were associations of convenience that often broke up in bitter conflict.
That was the state of things when, three hundred years ago, the Foreign Star arrived in the heavens.
It appeared suddenly. It grew. Telescopes of the day could make out a white shape that seemed to reflect light instead of shining like a star. The Astronomers offered no one theory to account for it. Earliest observers said it was a congealing of the ether that conveyed the heat of the sun to the Earth. But as it grew and showed structure and shadow, the official thought came to be that it was a rip in the sky dome and a view of the clockwork mechanism beyond.
The number-counters agreed it was an omen of change in the heavens, and most said it was not a good one. Some tried to attach the omen to the railroad, for good or for ill, and for a whole year it occupied the attention of the lords and clans.
But it produced nothing.
And under all the furor, and with a certain sense of something ominous hanging above the world, the railroad from Shejidan to the coast continued. Aijiin, once warleaders elected for a purpose, were elected to manage the project, holding power not over armies, but over the necessary architecture of guilds, clans, and sub-clans, for the sole purpose of getting the project through certain districts and upholding the promises to which the individual clan lords had set their seals.
Empowering them was a small group which itself began to transcend clans and regions: this was the beginning of the Assassins’ Guild, and their job was to protect the aijin against attack by others of their profession serving individual lords.
The Foreign Star harmed nothing. The railroad succeeded. If the Star portended anything, many said, it seemed to be good fortune.
The success of the first railroad project led to others. Associations became larger, overlapped each other as clans and kinships do. And significantly, in the midst of a dispute that might have led to the dissolution of these new associations, the Assassins’ Guild backed the aiji against three powerful clan lords who wanted to change the agreement and break up the railroad into administrative districts.
We atevi have never understood boundaries. Everything is shades of here and there, this side and that. It had not been our separations and our regions that had brought us this age of relative peace. It was associations of common purpose, and their combination into larger and larger associations, until the whole world knew someone who knew someone who could make things right.
And now this one aiji, backed by the Assassins’ Guild, had made three powerful lords keep their agreements for what turned out to benefit everyone – even these three clans, who collected no tolls, but whose people benefited by trade.
That aiji was the first to rule the entire west. The first railroad and the power of the aiji in Shejidan joined associations together in a way simple trade never had. Now the lords and trades and guilds were obliged to meet in Shejidan and come to agreement with the aiji who served and ruled them all. This was the true beginning of the legislature and the aishidi’tat, although it did not yet bear that name.
And without lords in constant war, and with the Assassins enforcing an impartial law, townships sprang up without walls, not clustered around a great house, but developing in places of convenience, with improved health and new goods. Commerce grew. Where conflicts sprang up, the aiji in Shejidan, with the legislature and the guilds, found a way to settle them without resort to war.
Shejidan itself grew rapidly, a town with no lord but the aiji himself. It attracted the smaller and weaker clans, particularly those engaging in crafts and trades. And those little clans, prospering as never before because of the railway, backed the aiji with street cobbles and dyers’ poles when anyone threatened that order. The guilds also broke from the clan structure and settled in Shejidan, backing the aiji’s authority, so that the lords who wanted the services of the Scholars, the Merchants, the Treasurers, the Physicians, or the Assassins, had to accept individuals whose primary man’chi was to their guilds and the aiji in Shejidan.
The Foreign Star had become a curiosity. Some studied it as a hobby. Then as a village lord in Dur wrote, who lived in that simpler time …
One day a petal sail floated down to Dur from the heavens, and more and more of them followed – bringing to the world a people not speaking in any way people of the Earth could understand. Some were pale, some were brown, and some were as dark as we are. Most landed on the island of Mospheira, among the Edi and the Gan peoples. Some landed on the mainland, near Dur. And some sadly fell in the sea, and were lost.
For three years the Foreign Star poured humans down to the Earth, sometimes whole clouds of them. Their small size and fragile bones and especially their manner of reaching the Earth excited curiosity, and won a certain admiration for their bravery. Poets immortalized the petal sails.
These humans brought very little with them. Their dress was plain and scant. They seemed poor. Wherever they landed, they took apart the containers that had sheltered them, and used the pieces and spread the petal sails and tied them to trees for shelter from the elements. They tried our food, but they sometimes died of it, and it was soon clear they could eat only the plainest, simplest things. They were a great curiosity, and one district and another was anxious to find these curious people and see them for themselves. Some believed that they had fallen from the moon, but the humans insisted they had come from inside the Foreign Star, and that they were glad to be on the Earth because of the poverty where they had been.
There was no fear of them by then. They spoke, and we learned a few words. We spoke, and we first fed them and helped them build better shelter. We helped them find each other across the land, and gather their scattered associates. We were amazed, even shocked, at their manners with each other. But they seemed equally distressed by ours.
– Lord Paseni of Tor Musa in Dur
The Foreign Star, as the man from Dur wrote, had for years been a fixture in the heavens. The Astronomers had long ago proclaimed that it had ceased growing, and that, whatever it was, it did not seem to threaten anything.
Then humans rode their petal sails down to the west coast of the continent and the island of Mospheira. They were small and fragile people and threatened no one. With childlike directness they offered trade – not of goods, but of technological knowledge, even mechanical designs.
The unease of the man from Dur might have warned us all. But some humans learned the children’s language, which allowed them mistakes in numbers without offense.
The petal sails kept falling down, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them, until there were human villages. They brought their knowledge. They built in concrete. They built dams and generators: they built radios and other such things which we adopted …
And finally they stopped coming down.
The last come were not as peaceful as the first.
We had no idea why.
But the ship that had brought the humans and built the Foreign Star had left. It was of course the space station they had built in orbit above our Earth.
And the last to come down were the station aijiin and their bodyguards, armed, and dropping pods of weapons onto the world.
II
<<Bren>> The origin of the Foreign Star was a human starship, Phoenix, which had as its original purpose the establishment of a station at a star far removed from this world. They held all the knowledge, all the machines, and all the seeds and plans that would let the ship orbit some moon or planet as a temporary base for four thousand colonists to live aboard. The colonists would build a station core and outer structure and set it in full operation.
Another ship would follow Phoenix, with more colonists. That second ship would bring equipment which would let the orbiting station eventually set down people and build a habitat on a world far less hospitable than the Earth of the atevi.
But something happened. The ship-folk believe that the ship met some accident and was shifted somewhere far off its intended course. The ship tried to find some navigational reference that would tell it where it was. The fact that reference stars were not visible where they should be indicated to them that something very drastic had happened.
Phoenix gathered resources such as it could and aimed toward the closest promising star. It saw, among its several choices, a blue world much like humans’ own ancestral Earth. The world had the signature of life – which meant they would indeed find resources there. The world had no artificial satellites. They picked up no transmissions. This informed them there was no space-faring civilization there.
They ended up in orbit about the Earth of the atevi.
They saw, below them, towns and villages. They saw technology of a certain level – but not high enough to come up to them, and their law, remote as they were then from any law but their own conscience, ruled against disturbing the world, even if they had had an easy means to land and ask help … which they did not.
The colonists had come prepared and trained to build an orbiting station. They gathered resources from asteroids, manufactured panels and parts and framework, enclosing themselves from the inside out and housing more and more workers. This became the core of the station. They built tethers, and began the construction of the station ring, to gain a place to stand. Barracks moved into the beginnings of the ring. The first children were born. Spirits rose. They were going to survive.
Phoenix crew was supposed to have supported the colonists this far and then move on. The ship-folk were spacefarers by trade and nature and had no desire to live on a colonial station. But now that the colonists were safe, and now that the ship was resupplied and able to leave – it troubled the ship-aijiin that the ship now had no use and nowhere to go next. They had only one port, and clearly the station was not where they wanted their port to be. The blue planet had exactly the right conditions and everything they needed … but it was owned, and the ship-folk’s law said they should not disturb it.
The ship had long argued against the building of any elaborate station in orbit about the planet. They wanted the colonists to leave off any further development of the station they had, use it as an observation point and a refuge should anything go wrong, and build another, larger station out at Maudit. They should, the ship-aijiin said, leave the inhabited world alone until, perhaps, they might make contact in space some time in the future.
The colonists, born aboard this station, and with all the hardship of the prior generations, had no desire to give up their safety and build again – least of all to build a station above a desolate, airless world. They wanted the world they saw under their feet. They wanted it desperately.
The station aijiin also argued against building at Maudit. They needed their population. They needed their workers – and they wanted no rival station. They absolutely refused the ship’s solution.
The argument between station authorities and ship-aijiin grew bitter. Phoenix, now hearing these same officials claiming authority over the mission and the ship itself – decided to pull out of the colonial dispute altogether. They considered going to Maudit with a handful of willing souls and building there, then trying to draw colonists out to join them in defiance of the station aijiin – but that idea was voted down, since the colonists even at Maudit would still be in reach of that living planet, and the crew was vastly outnumbered if it came to a confrontation on the matter. By now the ship-folk did not entirely trust even the colonists they considered allies, with the green planet at issue.
The ship’s crew voted to take aboard those colonists who wanted to leave, and go. They went a year out into deep space, to a star with resources of metal and ice. There they set up a station they called, optimistically, Reunion.
From Reunion, the ship continued its exploration, through optics, and by closer inspection. The crew no longer hoped to find their own Earth, but they did hope that by increasing the human population at Reunion, then, from Reunion, establishing other colonies at planets or moons of some attraction – they could then revisit the population they’d left at the Earth of the atevi and convince them there was an alternative to landing.
Alternatives, however, did not immediately present themselves. The station at Reunion grew. But there was no suitable world. More troubling still, in one direction, they found the signature of another technological presence.
Back at the first station, from the week of Phoenix’s departure, the authorities had begun losing control. All that had stopped the colonists from going down to the Earth in the first place was the simple fact that, among the colonists or on the ship, there was nobody who knew how to land in a gravity well, or fly in an atmosphere, with weather and winds. Phoenix itself had been fairly confident that the colonists would, without the ship’s crew, have to agree among themselves to survive, and that the solution would not involve experimental manned landings on the planet.
But the colonists had a considerable library. And in those files they found a means within their capability to build, to aim, and to operate.
They pointed it out to the station aijiin.
They demanded action.
The station aijiin gave in. They built machines that would land in undeveloped land, and explore. If those reported well, they would build a craft to land by parachute, that would carry a scientific team, such as they could muster.
Those would go first.
All went well down to the second stage. The team, composed of names still honored by place names on Mospheira, met the tribal peoples … and after a brief period of good report and apparent progress – they vanished, with no clue, even to later generations.
The program was shut down, and remained shut down, for a long time. But dissatisfaction grew, in claims the station aijiin had been too timid. There were other places. There was empty land, even on the island. There was a whole other shore. There were extensive forests. There were vast plains where no one at all lived. There was a very large island south of the main continent.
Station authorities tried to silence the idea. The population had increased, but the space station had not. The ship had taken away the machinery that might have let them add more room easily. And then supplies began to disappear.
Small conspiracies assembled simple life-support for small capsules, shielded against the friction of the atmosphere, and provided with only one button, which would blow the shield off the parachute in the event the sensors that should do that automatically – failed.
By twos and threes they launched these fragile capsules toward the gravity well, and parachuted down.
When colonists learned the first capsules had come down safely – and more, that they were welcomed – more and more groups fled the station. The station-aijiin attempted to find and destroy these efforts, and the desperation of the colonists only increased. Workers refused to work. Groups stole materials in plain sight, and threatened anyone who tried to stop them. And the station grew more empty, and shut down, second by section. Those manufacturing materials said openly what they were for, and a small group exercised discipline enough to keep the effort going despite the objections of station aijiin.
Their technicians deserted. Station maintenance suffered. At the very last there was no choice for the administrative and systems managers but to join the movement. They mothballed the station, set the systems to maintain stable orbit so long as they could, and parachuted their armed bodyguards and themselves to the planet.
The last sudden band of humans, who emphatically resented being there and did not want to adapt to the planet in any way, changed everything.
Atevi suddenly attacked, for no reason humans understood.
In fact atevi had long since been pushed past the limit, and when they met the managers and the large load of weapons, they had finally pushed back.
III
<<Geigi>> Characteristically, we reacted to this threat in our clans, our guilds, and our associations. Offense to one of us triggered others, to the dismay of the humans.
Coastal associations responded. Then the aiji in Shejidan moved to assert control, and took over leadership in the War of the Landing: this absorbed the last western clans still holding apart from the aishidi’tat, and eventually brought the Marid in as well.
The aiji formed a strategy to contain the problem reasonably rapidly: to push the humans off the continent and onto Mospheira, where the greatest number of humans were already living. Mospheira was the home of the Edi and Gan peoples, who had first met the humans, and who were part of the bloodiest action, but they were not part of the aishidi’tat, and were not Ragi, nor of the same customs. They persisted in attacking the humans on their own, with disastrous results.
The aiji offered the tribal peoples refuge from the fighting, in two small areas of the west coast where they could pursue their traditional ways and their livelihood of fishing. Without attacks coming at them on the island, humans found it a place of safe retreat, and centered their non-combatants there – which left only the most aggressive humans on the continent, exactly the situation the aiji wanted. The humans on the mainland could now be attacked and maneuvered into small pockets that could be cut off.
The War of the Landing ended with the humans on the mainland cut off from supplies, with no way back to the space station, and with no prospect of rescue from the island, or even of retreat to it, since the forces from the Marid held the strait. The aiji in Shejidan offered these groups a choice: extermination, or a way out. Humans might have ownership of the large and rich island of Mospheira, the conditions being first, total disarmament – the weapons they had were to be taken out to sea and sunk.
Secondly, and this was why the aiji was so generous: surrender of the technology. In return for an untroubled sanctuary, the humans were to send a paidhi to Shejidan to live, to translate, and to supervise the gradual turnover of all their technology to the aishidi’tat – namely to the aiji … and they were not to build or use any technology that was not approved by the paidhi.
The desperate humans had a very limited understanding of what a paidhi was. They understood that he was to mediate, translate, and that he would be their official in the aiji’s court, so they picked the most fluent Ragi speaker they had, hoping to stall off any demand for their weapons technology.
That was very well, the aiji said to them, through the paidhi they sent. There would surely be areas of agreement, and very useful things would serve.
That any knowledge could be turned to other purposes, and that atevi scientists were already finding out the secrets of foreign machines they had captured, was something the aiji failed to mention.
That there was still a starship the humans hoped would someday return was a matter humans had failed to mention, on their side.
But that agreement brought sufficient peace: this was the Treaty of the Landing, on which all our dealings with humans have been based. The Foreign Star, empty, continued to orbit the world.
Humans, vastly outnumbered, set about transforming Mospheira to suit themselves.
The aiji in Shejidan argued convincingly that the association atevi had formed to defend themselves should not be dissolved, since who knew if there were more humans to arrive from the heavens?
The allied association of the Marid had joined the aishidi’tat at the last moment, and would not accept the guilds: it maintained its own. Likewise the East was not yet part of the aishidi’tat in any permanent way.
But in the same way atevi had built the railroads, they had found pragmatic ways to work together – and the number-counters found fortunate numbers in the suggestions of an extension of the association – so it was felicitous that the Western Association, which was no longer just western, should stay together to respond quickly to any further difficulty from the humans on Mospheira.
The lords of the outlying clans and the regions, the aiji said, all should sit equally in the legislature in Shejidan, and they should all have a say in the laws of the aishidi’tat, the same as those born to the cental region.
The aiji further divided the entire continent into defensive districts, and these became provinces, with their own lords, also seated in the legislature. This added a few extra votes to critical regional associations, to balance the dominance of Shejidan: this pleased the lords.
The aiji then went to the guilds with another proposal: that, as they had all worked across regional lines during the War, they should continue after the war, adding a special privilege and formal principle. The guilds of the expanded aishidi’tat should have no respect for clan origin in candidacy for membership or in assignment: in fact, the guilds of every sort, like the Assassins, like Transport, should become their own authority, assigning members to posts only based on qualification, officially now without regard to kinship, regional association, or clan. This placed all power over membership into the hands of the guild masters.
The heads of the various guilds, interested in maintaining the power they held under war conditions, saw nothing but advantage in the aiji’s proposal. The idea was less popular with some of the regional associations, who still held apart from the guild system – but in the main, it became the rule, not by statue, but by internal guild rules, and there was nothing the regional associations or the newly created provinces or the clan lords could do about that – if they wanted guild services.
The Assassins’ Guild, in private conference and at the aiji’s request, agreed to one additional rule, that no one of their guild could seek or hold a political office or a lordship. They received a concession in exchange: that, as they were barred from politics, they would have certain statutory immunities from political pressure. Their records could not be summoned by any lord, their members would testify only before their own guild council, and the disappearance or death of any member of that guild, granted the unusual nature of their work and the extreme discipline imposed on the membership, could only be investigated by that guild and dealt with by that guild, by its own rules.
There were other, more detailed, provisions in that Assassins’ Guild charter, and there were peculiar ones, too, in the regulation of other guilds, and also in privileges granted the residents of Shejidan, to have their own officials, independent of any clan.
It was a tremendous amount of power the aiji let flow out of his hands.
But it also meant the aiji in Shejidan gained the support of the city and all the guilds, and now outvoted any several regional lords.
And from that time, the Assassins, freed of political pressure, became not only the law enforcement of the aishidi’tat, but the check and balance on every legal system, the unassailable integrity at the heart of any aiji’s rule.
The new principle of guild recruitment across clan and regional lines had an unintended consequence. It brought ideas into contact with other ideas, and fostered a flowering of arts and skills, invention and innovation – a cross-pollination that within a few years ended one major cause of wars. Even the domestic staffs that served a clan lord might be from different clans, different regions, and different philosophies, all working together.
It was, in that sense, an idyllic era of growth, discovery, and change – with occasional breaches and dissonances, true – but the clan feuds grew fewer, and more often bloodless, to the wonder of those who thought in the old ways, and distrusted the new.
There were two exceptions.
There had once been a great power in the southern ocean, which had conquered and colonized the Marid before the Great Wave had destroyed all the seaboard cities on the Southern Island. The Marid, of a culture separate from the north, had been reaching for the west coast before the petal sails had begun to fall … and while it had cooperated with the aishidi’tat during the War of the Landing and remained officially a member after the Treaty was signed, it refused to allow what it called the Shejidani guilds to make any assignments in the Marid – and it did not have all the guilds. It maintained its own recruitment and training centers for the Assassins, the Treasurers, the Merchants, the Artisans, the Kabiuteri, and the Builders, as well as some unique to their region. The five clans of the Marid united only infrequently, maintained their seats in the legislature of the aishidi’tat, and their disputes frequently resorted to warfare among themselves.
The Eastern Association, headed by Malguri from the time of the War of the Landing, was the second isolate entity, a vast territory walled off from the west by the continental divide, and by the storms of the Eastern Ocean. Its small clans and its three cultures had united with the West for the first time in the face of the threat from the heavens. But after the Treaty, as before, Easterners hunted, fished, and worked crafts, never having formed the guilds that were so important in the rest of the world.
They were, however, fierce fighters, and one guild had gotten a toehold in the East during the War of the Landing – the Assassins. They had organized their own training, their own guild hall, and ran their own operation in the East during the War. The Eastern Assassins’ Guild affiliated itself with the Guild in Shejidan. It allowed certain of their members to be assigned by the Guild in Shejidan – but allowed no outsiders to come in. They were good, they were impeccably honest, they were in high demand because of their reputation, and recruitment was easy because of the general poverty of the East. But the East was otherwise separate from the guild system of the aishidi’tat … until Ilisidi, aiji in Malguri, was courted by the aiji in Shejidan.
Ilisidi-aiji brought a great deal to the marriage. She joined the vast territory of the East to the aishidi’tat. She had her own opinions, and voiced them, and being widowed, she continued to voice them in support of a list of causes including opposition to human presence, opposition to industrial encroachment, support for the environment, and concern for the unresolved west coast situation in the regions facing Mospheira. She maintained a considerable and independent bodyguard, larger than any other lord in the East or the west, and when widowed, she refused to give up her young son to the aiji’s maternal grandfather.
She maintained control of the Bujavid, made herself aiji-regent, since she did not succeed in having the aishidi’tat accept her as aiji in fact – and she simultaneously refused to leave Shejidan – while she kept an iron control of Malguri. She continued well into her son’s majority to have her own agenda, and her own very large bodyguard, which by now had extended her authority over the entire East, and which maintained her safety, even in annoying a number of the powers of the aishidi’tat in Shejidan.
Her son, Valasi, finally succeeded in establishing his own authority as aiji in Shejidan, with the help of the Taibeni clan of the Padi Valley, his grandmother’s clan, and others of the north and mountain regions. He was twenty-seven by the time he made his bid for power, and Ilisidi conceded to him, finally, as he gained sufficient votes in the legislature.
Valasi made a contract marriage with a woman of the Taibeni, quickly produced an heir as insurance, and found it convenient to follow that contract marriage with several others, of whatever region he needed to draw more firmly into his hands. This bedroom diplomacy solved several petty wars.
He also gained several important technological advances through his partnership with Wilson-paidhi, including aviation and early television, and in all, had a strong grip on power, while he avoided having his eldest son in the hands of his various wives by putting young Tabini into Ilisidi’s hands and urging the aiji-dowager to keep Tabini safe in her own estate at Malguri.
This kept his minor son and Ilisidi both separate from the center of politics. It kept the center of the aishidi’tat very happy, in the absence of their chief irritant, the aiji-dowager, but Valasi’s concentration on trying to keep power out of Ilisidi’s hands had left the west coast of the aishidi’tat embittered: they viewed Ilisidi as their ally, and her departure to Malguri as Valasi’s definitive refusal to deal with their problems.
The west coast clans, notably the Maschi at Targai and Tirnamardi, had been forced to play a cautious kind of politics, balanced between the Edi tribal people, who supplemented their traditional fishing with piracy and wrecking, and the Marid clans, who saw the west coast as naturally theirs. Marid shipping was the principle target of the piracy. The Marid at times pursued their aims with contract marriages in the west, but all the same, given the resentments of the Edi people, unwilling settlers on that coast, and clan wars inside the Marid, all these moves came to was a generally unsettled condition on the west coast. The north coast fared somewhat better, in the happy relationship of the Gan tribal people with their nearest neighbors, also mariners, on the island of Dur –
But the adjacent Northern Association, while not in the same ferment as the south, and somewhat inland, had its own ambitions. The head of the Northern Association, within the aishidi’tat, was the lord of Ajuri clan … and he, pressed by a struggle inside his own clan, arranged the marriage of a young relative, Komaji, to an older lady of the ancient Atageini clan – the Atageini lord being one of the closest allies of the aiji-dowager, and at the moment engaged in politics with Valasi-aiji, in a dispute with their nearest neighbors, the Kadagidi.
It was a marriage of great potential value for Ajuri. It proved, however, unfortunate, in the death of the Atageini lady soon after the birth of a daughter, Damiri, under circumstances some called suspicious. Lord Tatiseigi of the Atageini, in a heated confrontation with Komaji, handed over the baby to Komaji, thus breaking the association with Ajuri and terminating the Ajuri hope of having a relative in an influential position within the great Atageini house.
Valasi-aiji managed to patch the quarrel between the Atageini and the Kadagidi, and simultaneously prevented the Atageini lord from Filing Intent on Komaji. He also kept the southwest coast out of the hands of the Marid, and had got control of the aishidi’tat back into western hands and out of the hands of the aiji-dowager.
Valasi was accounted a great aiji.
He died unexpectedly, however, with his heir still short of the twenty-three years of age required to be elected aiji.
The aiji-dowager returned to Shejidan with her grandson Tabini and applied to be elected aiji herself, citing the complex business of the aishidi’tat, particularly in view of increasing traffic with the Mospheirans, who were beginning to colonize neighboring Crescent Island, and who were developing industry without restraint – a matter which left the northwest coast of the continent on the receiving end of the smoke and the effluent.
She repeated her argument that several areas of the aishidi’tat remained a problem, since they had been stop-gap arrangements following the War of the Landing; and she also proposed tough new negotiations with Mospheira about the protection of the environment.
The legislature balked … on all points. Regional interests did not want pieces of the post-War treaty reopened, for fear of having their pieces of it reopened. The Marid certainly did not want her solution to the west coast problems, and nobody but Dur cared about smoke that was mostly landing on the Gan peoples, since they had never signed on to the aishidi’tat.
Ilisidi ruled as aiji-regent through the last of Tabini’s minority and through the last years of Wilson-paidhi’s service, aided by a Conservative coalition headed by Lord Tatiseigi of the Atageini.
Meanwhile Damiri, now a young woman, disaffected from her Ajuri father and angry, deserted a family outing during the Winter Festivity in Shejidan and presented herself to her influential Atageini uncle, asking to be taken in by Atageini clan. Lord Tatiseigi, who had not sought this, and in fact had only resumed relations with Ajuri at all to further the aiji-dowager’s cause, saw in the young woman her mother in her youth. Being himself childless, and the holder of a great political power which teetered constantly on the edge of disaster because of that – he sent a conciliatory letter to the Ajuri lord, saying that he had found the missing young lady, that she was, typical for the child of a contract marriage, having a crisis of man’chi, and that he would be willing to entertain his young niece until she grew equally dissatisfied with the fantasy of life in her mother’s clan.
In point of fact – the observation was not a lie. But Lord Tatiseigi likely had no intention of letting the young lady grow dissatisfied with her Atageini heritage. She was indisputably of his bloodline, she was pretty, she was intelligent, certainly enterprising, and he needed an heir, which, baji-naji, he had not produced. The Ajuri marriage originally had had that consideration. If she came still with an unfortunate attachment to Komaji of the Ajuri, he judged that a surmountable difficulty. The Atageini were richer, more powerful, had a stronger influence in government, and if the young lady attached man’chi to him rather than to Komaji, he might have what he greatly needed.
So things ran for that year. Tabini passed his twenty-third year.
And finally, mustering an unlikely but temporary coalition of the Taibeni, the Kadagidi, the Marid, the mountain clans, and the Northern Association – Ajuri was all too ready to support anybody but the aiji-dowager, who was Tatiseigi’s political patron – Tabini was elected aiji in his own right.
People feared there might be a confrontation – extending even to armed conflict and the breakup of the aishidi’tat if the aiji-dowager would not relinquish power. Some even feared humans would take advantage of such a conflict and attack the mainland. People were storing food in their houses and the requests to the Assassins’ Guild for hired protection in such an event were reportedly unprecedented.
The aiji-dowager and Tabini-aiji, however, appeared together on that new and still-rare medium, television, as well as radio, and the aiji-dowager congratulated her grandson on his election and wished him well.
The aishidi’tat, and indeed, the human population on Mospheira, breathed a sigh of relief. Wilson-paidhi, notorious for granting Valasi whatever he wanted, to the extent the aiji-dowager feared a human plot to undermine atevi morals, withdrew from public life entirely, in deep disfavor with, now, the new aiji, and wanting only to get off the continent alive.
The aiji-dowager retired to Malguri, with occasional visits to her apartment in the Bujavid, visits notable for their tension and difficulty.
Tabini, as aiji, did as he had said he would do: he dropped the environmental matters – telling his grandmother he would revive that negotiation once Wilson-paidhi finally retired, a decision he was trying to hasten. Tabini also conducted several actions designed to protect the west coast from the Marid’s ambition, including a promise to the Marid to protect their shipping from piracy – and he used that as a pretext for an order increasing the size and armament of the Mospheiran navy, incidentally strengthening his position regarding Mospheira.
He needed the Conservatives on board, and found his opportunity to gain the man’chi of the aiji-dowager’s chief ally, Lord Tatiseigi – when he met Tatiseigi’s niece, Damiri.
Wilson-paidhi retired. Tabini-aiji was far from a technophobe, and had always a deep interest in technology of every sort, different from Valasi-aiji, who had primarily pressed Wilson-paidhi for things his advisors thought might lead to better armaments – wires were one such development. And in this he differed from Ilisidi, who deeply distrusted and despised everything human, and who had mostly treated Wilson-paidhi as an adversary – one she had to force to carry her ecological concerns to human authorities, and whom she considered utterly and foundationally unreliable.
There was had a crisis looming in the Marid, and a report of a suspected fracture in human politics – possibly worse if fed by what Wilson-paidhi could say, once he began to talk to his superiors and possibly to persons less discreet. Nobody had ever trusted Wilson-paidhi. No one could tell whether Wilson-paidhi was having a good day or not. After Wilson-paidhi’s decades on the continent – as a translator – nobody on this side of the straits could tell what Wilson-paidhi thought, what he felt, what he was reporting to his government, whether it was accurate or whether Wilson-paidhi even knew whether it was. No one had been able to tell, especially lately, whether Wilson-paidhi was, in fact, an enemy or outright unbalanced. Some of his actions had given the latter impression … and in fact there had been some suggestion that the wisest course for Tabini-aiji to take on Wilson-paidhi’s retirement was to have Wilson-paidhi meet an accident while he was still in reach, and before a madman reached the island enclave and began to report imaginary wrongs and insane plots.
He might be served the wrong sauce at dinner, perhaps, or tread on a waxed marble step. The man was fragile as porcelain, and moved like it. He had no bodyguard. He was entirely undefended, and Tabini-aiji personally doubted the humans on Mospheira would raise too great a fuss about losing a man who was, after all, on his way out and more than a little strange.
Tabini-aiji made up his mind, however, to send Wilson-paidhi home unscathed, and not to begin his new relationship with humans, about whom he was intensely curious, with an assassination – or to initiate a crisis which might have the humans declining to send a paidhi without certain assurances. That could lead to a serious crisis in international affairs, and if he ever granted any assurances, it would set a very bad precedent. A diplomatic standoff would not be a good beginning at all … not for an aiji who wanted concessions from humans.
Tabini-aiji even assigned two of his personal bodyguards to get Wilson-paidhi safely onto a plane, against the not-too-unlikely chance that some other power – such as the aiji-dowager – might decide Wilson should not report all the details of his dealings with her.
Tabini-aiji could not be sure what humans would send him: another old stick of a man like Wilson-paidhi. A determined ideologue. A person with an agenda of his own.
He was absolutely delighted to have a paidhi his own age. And one who spoke, more to the point, without writing things down and consulting his dictionary.
Before, however, any sort of relationship could develop, given the situation Tabini-aiji was hearing about on Mospheira, and the situation in the Marid, and his own contemplated relationship with Lord Tatiseigi’s niece – he needed to enlist Ilisidi, who had reared him, not as his potential adversary, but as an ally.
She had retired to Malguri, that ancient fortress, holding occasional meetings with her Eastern neighbors, meetings regarding him, he was sure.
Someone made an attempt on the new paidhi’s life.
Tabini-aiji was far from surprised that would happen. He had assigned the new paidhi bodyguards. He had given the new paidhi a very illegal firearm and seen to it the new paidhi had at least rudimentary instruction in using it and hitting a target.
Tabini-aiji had made himself look as innocent of any harm to the paidhi as he could possibly look, inviting the paidhi to a retreat at the Taibeni lodge he favored for brief holidays, making him a personal guest – which would signal most people inclined to make a move against the paidhi that they would have him to deal with.
His grandmother had, however, said she would like to talk to the new paidhi. His grandmother was undoubtedly expecting Tabini to keep his word and open a discussion with Mospheira about the smoke.
And if there was one person who could breach his grandmother’s private fortress at Malguri – and convince his grandmother that they were dealing with somebody very different from Wilson-paidhi – it was the person about whom she was most curious.
He attached bodyguards – and sent the new paidhi to the aiji-dowager.
He knew his grandmother very well. He had gained her attention.
She knew what her grandson was up to. And she came back to Shejidan of her own will, intensely engaged – suspicious, but engaged. And Bren-paidhi was, for his part, likewise engaged.
That engagement completely changed the political landscape. It drew Lord Tatiseigi, however reluctantly, into Tabini’s camp – which was doubly convenient. The match with Damiri became possible … and that was a more than political matter, which could be done with a contract marriage with or without an heir produced. Tabini-aiji wanted Damiri-daja, not as a contract marriage, but in a way lords rarely arranged their relationships, as a lasting marriage and a lifelong ally.
It complicated matters that Damiri had, predictably, had her differences with her uncle Tatiseigi and gone off to her father now and again. Ajuri was a minor clan, and it was the matter of a little unfortunate public attention. He sent Damiri-daja a letter. He sent one to her father and to her uncle. He wanted her to take up residence in Shejidan, with him, he wanted a reconciliation of Ajuri clan with her uncle, and he wanted a formal marriage –
Unwise, his advisors said, pointing out that the Northern Association was not the best bargain on its own, being small and frequently divided into factions, and that Lord Tatiseigi had enemies among the aiji’s strong supporters, some of whom had perfectly eligible daughters for perfectly sensible contract marriages.
Besides, such a strong affiliation with Lord Tatiseigi would smell strongly of his giving in to the aiji-dowager and falling under her control. Damiri-daja’s youthful actions had gained notoriety, and painted her as a creature of flightiness, shallowness, and hot temper.
Tabini-aiji ignored all of the advisors and married her. The quarrels with his wife matched, in reputation, his quarrels with the aiji-dowager – a fact which leaked out by the ancient sources – servants – and not, thankfully, the news services on the television the Conservatives so despised.
As aiji, he did request restrictions on emissions on Mosphei-ra and Crescent Island. He also instituted air traffic control, greatly antagonizing the number-counters, who were powerful especially in certain regions of the aishidi’tat, and powerful among the Conservatives. He clamped down on the Messengers’ Guild, which had developed some internal problems and was under accusation of graft and other misdeeds. He supported regional lords against encroachments by neighbors, stating that land questions had been settled definitively by the charter of the aishidi’tat and he was taking that as the final answer.
He attempted to exert Shejidan’s authority over the Marid, which remained a problem. He established a peaceful relationship with the East, under Ilisidi’s governance of Malguri.
He gained all sorts of minor concessions from the new paidhi and greatly annoyed the Conservatives by sending blueprints of numerous trivial machines to the Scholars’ Guild.
He refused to allow Filing on any monetary matter, until he had had testimony from officials of the Treasurers’ Guild. The Assassins’ Guild protested its own prerogative. He maintained his position, and the rule held.
And he gained Bren-paidhi’s cooperation in increasing his communication with the Mospheiran government, despite the rise of anti-atevi sentiment by certain groups in the island enclave.
IV
<<Bren>> One reason for the stir among the radical groups on Mospheira was precisely the improved relations between the mainland and Mospheira. The radicals wanted separation, not cooperation – and they were increasingly upset by the paidhi’s actions. They always made their greatest political gains by alarming the public, and elements of that party took to the airwaves with a campaign of rumor mixed with sufficient facts to make people uneasy. The paidhi at times ran a certain risk in his visits to Mospheira, but Mospheiran tradition forbade any overt display of protection.
V
<<Geigi>> Things were going fairly well, however … until without any warning the starship Phoenix arrived at the space station. The Mospheirans suddenly found the authority of the ship over their heads and the Phoenix captains found that all the humans that should be on the station were down on the planet.
Tabini-aiji suddenly doubted every assurance the Mospheiran government had given him.
VI
<<Bren>> Phoenix made radio contact with Mospheira. Liberals were extremely anxious – having no wish to have another argument with a ship authority which had no understanding of them or the atevi.
Radical groups on Mospheira were literally dancing in the streets. They wanted instant access to space – they called it rescue – and they wanted Phoenix to threaten the aishidi’tat and remove the Mospheiran government.
The Phoenix captains, being no fools, took a look at the cities on both sides of the strait. Their prosperity surpassed any expectation, but their cultural difference was clear, even from space. Phoenix received a rational though cautious response from the Mospheiran government, asking who was in command and what their condition was and whether they needed help.
The ship-aijiin overheard the demands of the radicals in their monitoring. They saw nothing on the planet to indicate hostilities except in the radicals themselves.
The government of Mospheira was certainly deeply perturbed at the entry of a new power into their affairs, but they were reassured that Phoenix accepted the situation, was not in imminent distress, and was anxious not to involve itself in local politics.
Phoenix was upset that the station was in serious decay – the captains were very anxious to see it operating again. Their interests, they assured Mospheira, were only in their ship and its safety. Phoenix wanted a port.
The Mospheiran public, and in fact the government, remained a little fearful that the ship might try to become their government.
That was what the radicals wanted to happen. They saw a return to space as everything they wanted … including access to advanced weaponry.
The Mospheiran government was equally determined that the people it should send to space, if it could send anyone, would be those most worried about the ship’s intentions, the most determined to secure Mospheiran control of the station.
By no means did they want to let the radical groups get into direct association with the Phoenix crew.
VII
<<Geigi>> We were highly upset with the sudden turn of events, and suspicion still ran deep. Bren-paidhi assured Tabini-aiji and the aiji-dowager that the Mospheiran government had not expected the return of the ship, and that Mospheira was determined to gain control of the station, preventing the ship from doing so. Mospheira, he said, was determined to prevent the radicals getting to space or laying hands on advanced technology.
He said further that the only way to preserve atevi rights in this situation was for atevi to speak to the ship-folk directly, invite them to negotiate, and make it clear that the local authority was the aishidi’tat, not Mospheira. They should in fact offer to ally with the Mospheirans in their demands for complete control of the station, and be prepared to share that authority with them.
There was one drawback to everybody’s plans, of course, and it was an old one. None of the starship pilots knew how to fly in an atmosphere. None of the atevi or Mospheiran pilots, who well knew how to fly in atmosphere and gravity, knew how to fly in space.
There were no ship-construction facilities at the mothballed station, which had no population and no workers.
And critical natural resources necessary to build a spacecraft were available only on the mainland. Mospheira had been trading for them – but the mainland could cut that off cold at any time.
Phoenix had the blueprints – the complete library in the data storage of the starship. But atevi had the mines, the factories, and the resources.
Negotiation and unprecedented cooperation between Mospheira and the mainland built a small fleet of shuttles.
Negotiation with the Mospheirans and Phoenix gave half the station to atevi, half to humans.
Tabini would ultimately set an atevi lord, myself, Lord Geigi of Maschi clan, to be in charge of the half of the station.
But before that day came a great upheaval.
The technology that came with the shuttle plans brought massive change to the economy of both Mospheira and the mainland. It required new materials, computers, new plants – it brought all manner of things that poured new goods into the hands of Mospheirans. Of course denial of access agitated the radicals of Mospheira, who most wanted to be lords of space – a situation neither the liberal Mospheirans nor any ateva ever wanted to have happen.
But on the mainland, among us, the shock was as much cultural as economic. For two hundred years the paidhiin had carefully brought technology onto the mainland – items like telephones, and, lately, airplanes, plastics, and transistors. These were benign in most ways – beneficial, unless one asked the older folk.
Then the space program poured new materials and new concepts down from the sky, advice telling us where to mine, with new ways of doing so, telling us how to manufacture, and offering us modern ceramics, and even dropping down certain materials from space.
All this challenged us philosophically. Traditional numbers-causality and the mediaeval concept of astronomy met starfaring equations and a universe that clearly did not consist of a clockwork sky dome and an ether that surrounded the sun and planets. That realization upset the Conservatives … and the paidhi-aiji had to open a clerical office simply to answer the letters from people asking, for instance, if a shuttle taking off would let the atmosphere escape.
And there was the politics of it all, which fell on Tabini-aiji. Some districts where the ecological impact would be minimal or which had transportation advantages were awarded manufacturing facilities, rousing resentments from those equally deserving who did not get such facilities – and of course there were areas that wanted none of it, and bitterly resented the economic advantage to those who had such industry.
The fractures in atevi society began to multiply.
On both sides of the straits, people found the whole world changing.
Then the ship-captains admitted the existence of another colony out in deep space, their Reunion Station, which they had never mentioned. This was especially disturbing to the Mospheirans. Phoenix next confessed that their reason for coming back to the Earth now was a need to put the Reunion population somewhere.
Why? the world asked.
Then Phoenix made a third and terrible admission: they had, they said, met hostile strangers in space, who might attack Reunion.
Some on both sides of the strait were inclined to tell Phoenix that they regretted the distress of these people very much, but they were not going to give permission to bring the Reunioners to this world.
Then Phoenix made yet another admission, the infelicitous fourth – that, in its own library, Reunion Station had the location of the atevi sun, and if Reunion fell – the Earth of the atevi might see these hostile strangers arrive here.
VIII
<<Bren>> In the urgency of building the shuttle fleet, the mainland had seen change after change, wealth had poured into places of poor land that had not had wealth, and society had become increasingly unstable, but the alternative – having decisions taken in the heavens without atevi participation – was insupportable.
Tabini-aiji had already pushed the citizenry to the limits of their patience when he found out what the ship-folk had confessed. He was angry. And now he was suspicious that neither atevi nor Mospheirans had been given the truth. He decided to take strong action to find out the situation in space, and be sure that things were as the Phoenix captains said they were. He charged Bren-paidhi, who knew humans, and the aiji-dowager, who would not be put off with lies, to go find out the truth. And because he now knew that the news of the ship’s deception would bring his household increasingly under threat, he sent his son, both to learn the new knowledge, to understand humans, and to be taught by the woman who had taught him.
It was a desperate dice-throw, with no knowledge of the scale of the universe, or the fact that the ship could not communicate across that distance, or how hard and dangerous it would be.
XI
<<Geigi>> Tabini-aiji made a decision that shocked the aishidi’tat and revised all calculations. He set all his scattered household out of reach of his enemies: his son, the aiji-dowager, who had ruled the aishidid’tat more than once, and the paidhi-aiji, who could understand humans.
He had also set a technologically adept atevi population in the heavens, governed by Lord Geigi, who had the ability to reach the Earth if he were given a target and an order.
If he himself were to die, Tabini-aiji reasoned – his grandmother and his son would gain power in the heavens, come back, and take back the aishidi’tat. If they failed to return, then Geigi and the atevi in the heavens would declare an aijinate, contact reliable lords on the Earth, and reshape the aishidi’tat in whatever way it had to be shaped to preserve atevi control of the world.
Tabini-aiji did not, however, intend to die. He had reduced his household by two. He became more cautious, was far less frequently in transit, far less exposed to threats from unstable persons. He had not been advised of any Filings against his supporters, nothing of the sort, even though he daily expected it. He had begun to suspect something was being organized, but if it was, it was not behaving in any legitimate way. It had the flavor of the Marid – but the Marid was troubled by none of the issues that troubled the rest of the aishidi’tat.
He asked the Guild to investigate, and they reported only the usual persons, the usual statements, the usual activities, none of which reached to Shejidan. He relied on the information he was getting from the Guild – and from the ship-paidhi Yolande Mercheson – who may have failed to understand one quiet warning, from a source who did not sign the letter.
The ship left the station. The aiji-dowager, the heir, and the paidhi-aiji went with it, not to return for two years.
But – perhaps it was the note given the ship-paidhi that had alarmed the conspirators, or perhaps the indications that the aiji was taking precautions and might discover who they were: rumors grew more frequent than fact. Some believed humans had kidnapped the dowager and the heir. Some said the ship had never left and they all were dead.
Within the year, the conspirators moved. They intended to assassinate Tabini-aiji in his residence. They discovered he was not there. They correctly guessed he might have gone to Taiben, and they attempted to strengthen their assault there – but that entailed some confusion. Murini of the Kadagidi had already proclaimed himself aiji, and Tabini was not dead. The attacks were simultaneous, to control all means to reach the heavens: the shuttles, the airport at Shejidan, the dish at Mogari-nai. The conspirators seized the shuttles being serviced. And they seized the radio station. They believed that Lord Geigi had thus been removed as a threat, with no means to replace the shuttles or to threaten the world, because they believed there were no mines in the heavens and that there would be no communication with the heavens because they held Mogari-nai.
Tabini and Damiri narrowly escaped from Taiben, but their bodyguards did not.
Rather than go to the neighboring Atageini estate and bring Lord Tatiseigi into danger, too – they crossed the Kadagidi’s own territory and used the skills Tabini-aiji had learned in Malguri to hunt and survive, making no contacts at all for a year.
The conspirators were hunting them everywhere they could think of. The last place the Kadagidi expected Tabini-aiji to be was on their own borders.
The atevi on the space station meanwhile began to plot what they could do with only one shuttle, and there was a question of whether to land it on Mospheira and send a mission to contact Tabini-aiji.
But Lord Geigi received repeated assurances from the humans that the aiji-dowager, the heir, and Bren Cameron were going to come back on a certain date, or close to it … and he argued against risking the one shuttle still in their control. He instead communicated with Mospheira, and with the assistance of Shugart-nadi and other humans, began to build communications and to position certain relay stations, made fearsome and self-defending, to unsettle the regime.
XII
<<Bren>> Phoenix had reached the Reunioners – and ended up facing an alien species, the kyo, bent on destruction of the human station which they viewed as an invasion. Nobody on Reunion had a clue how to open communication with foreigners of any sort. Neither, as happened, had the kyo themselves any concept of negotiation with outsiders. But having aboard Phoenix two species in cooperation, a skilled translator and diplomat, as well as a revered elder – the aiji-dowager; a child – the aiji’s heir; and ship’s personnel who had been living with atevi for a year – all this was persuasive. Two species working together as we did completely amazed the kyo. The kyo were willing to ask questions, particularly by the cooperation of a kyo who had come to communicate with the aiji’s young son. From this small beginning, each side found out what the other wanted.
It was agreed the Reunioners would be removed and transported out of kyo territory.
Phoenix did this, partly by force, partly by agreement of the Reunion population. The library was stripped, the population was removed, and Phoenix set out for the Earth of the atevi. The young gentleman, the aiji’s heir, achieved an education far beyond what the aiji envisioned in sending him: he dealt with the kyo authorities, became acquainted with the ship-aijiin, and also with several young Reunioner-folk, while pursuing his other studies under the personal supervision of the aiji-dowager – a teaching both traditional and thorough.
XIII
<<Geigi>> Phoenix returned to the world, and in the same hour the aiji-dowager learned what had happened in her absence, that Tabini-aiji had been overthrown.
She did not delay. Lord Geigi urged her to all possible speed, fearing that Earth-based telescopes would show the ship docked at the station, and that once their enemies on the planet knew that the ship was back, they would expect the shuttle and know who might be on it.
The aiji-dowager, the aiji’s son, and Bren-paidhi took the shuttle which Lord Geigi had kept ready for their return. They landed on Mospheira, then with Mospheiran assistance, crossed onto the continent and went to Taiben and with Taibeni help, went on to Atageini territory.
Lord Tatiseigi opened his doors to them. Murini-aiji had instilled terror in the citizenry, but Lord Tatiseigi aided them with all his resources as the news of their return spread.
Tabini-aiji and Damiri-daja were not far away. They received word and arrived at Lord Tatiseigi’s estate.
Terror might have aided Murini at the first, but it had gained nothing but resentment from the citizenry. Once word spread that the aiji and his household were alive, that the humans had kept their word, and that the station aloft and the humans on Mospheira were indeed their allies, the people gained the courage to rise up in their hundreds of thousands and support Tabini-aiji and the aiji-dowager.
Unfortunately it was easier to restore the aijinate than to undo the damage Murini had done.
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