C. J. Cherryh - Foreigner 3 - Inheritor

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CJ Cherryh - [Foreigner 03] Inheritor

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INHERITOR

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CJ Cherryh - [Foreigner 03] Inheritor
Caroline J. Cherryh
Foreigner 03
EBook Design Group digital back-up edition v1 HTML
December 03, 2002
Contents
^
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
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CJ Cherryh - [Foreigner 03] Inheritor

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

POPULAR LIBRARY EDITION

Cover art by Dorian Vallejo.

Map by Jane S. Fancher and Lynn Abbey

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living

or dead is strictly coincidental.

For Elsie

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map

CHAPTER 1

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« ^ »

The wind blew from the sea, out of the west, sweeping up to the heights of the balcony

and stirring the white tablecloth with a briskness that made the steaming breakfast tea

quite welcome. The view past the white-plastered balustrade was blue water, pale sky,

and the famous cliffs of Elijiri, from which, the thought had crossed Bren Cameron's

mind, wi'itikiin might just possibly launch themselves.

But no, the sea was surely too great a hazard for the small, elegant gliders.

"Eggs," lord Geigi urged with a wave of his fingers. It was a delicate preparation, a sort

of crusted souffle, eggs of a species the cook swore were innocent of toxins for the

human guest.

Bren trusted himself to his staff, Tano and Algini having made his sensitivities to

certain native spices quite clear to the cook; and having made equally clear, he was

sure, the consequence of such an accident to the reputation of lord Geigi, who had a

personal stake in not poisoning him. He allowed the servant to pile on a second helping

of the very excellent spiced dish. Rare that he found something he liked that he dared

eat in quantity — it was a piece of intradepartmental wisdom that the way to survive

atevi cuisine was to vary the intake and not allow the occasional trace of an

objectionable substance to become three and four traces at the same meal — but Tano

and Algini thought this dish should be perfectly safe.

Geigi was pleased, clearly, at his enthusiasm for the cuisine, pleased in the crisp, clean

air of a seaside morning, pleased in the presence of an important guest. Geigi's appetite

ran to another, far larger helping of the souffle. Black-skinned, golden-eyed, towering

head and shoulders taller than any tall human, besides being gifted with an alkaloid-

tolerant metabolism, Geigi, like any ateva of the mainland, viewed food as a central

point of hospitality, the consumption of it a mark of confidence and assurance of

honesty, understandable in a society in which assassins were an important guild, and a

regular recourse in interpersonal and political disputes.

Such, as happened, were Tano and Algini, watching over Bren's shoulder, standing near

this breakfast table on the balcony; such, Bren was very sure, were the pair who

hovered on Geigi's side of the table, near the balustrade. Gesirimu, Tano had said, was

the woman's name, and Casurni, her senior partner — the pair in a dark, fashionable cut

of clothes perfectly in character for a lord's private security. And one assumed Tano

knew. One assumed that, among the thousands of members of the Assassins' Guild, the

highest did know each other by reputation and, more importantly, by man'chi — that

word something like loyalty, that meant nothing to do with hire, or birth, or anything

humans were equipped to understand.

But it wasn't necessary that humans understand the passions of atevi minds and souls —

at least, it never had been necessary that humans understand, so long as all humans in

the world — save one — occupied the island of Mospheira, which lay some distance

across the haze of the blue and beautiful strait the other side of that balcony.

That was the state of atevi-human affairs under which Bren had begun his tenure in

office not so many years ago. Translator, Foreign Affairs Field Officer, he was, in atevi

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terms, the paidhi-aiji, the only human permitted by the Treaty of Mospheira to set foot

on the mainland.

He, Bren Cameron, descendant of spacefarers stranded for nearly two centuries on the

earth of the atevi, was the one human alive who walked and lived among the atevi, and

Bren, at twenty-seven, had it as his lifelong business and sacred trust to mediate the

differences between atevi and humans.

Until last year that business had been much the same as that of his predecessors. Most

of his days had been spent in the atevi capital of Shejidan, rendering the vocabulary of

atevi documents into the one permitted human-atevi dictionary for the human

University of Mospheira, for use in the training of other paidhiin. A years-long program

from which the twenty percent who did go all the way through to the degree in Foreign

Affairs disappeared into the bowels of the Foreign Office, all but the one scoring next

highest marks: the paidhi-successor, the other tenured graduate of the program (and

usually not a voice of any importance at all), who waited in the wings for the Field

Officer to quit, die in office, or need a two week vacation. As all the others waited, in

the order of their scores, as the paidhi's support staff in the Foreign Office. That was the

program. That was one job the paidhi did. Train one successor and write dictionaries.

The other job was to serve as the conduit through which the Mospheiran State

Department made a slow transfer of human technology into the atevi economy. The

paidhi did have definite importance in that regard. And he served as his government's

eyes and ears in the field. He reported what data he gathered; he took requests from the

atevi government and relayed them; he handled customs questions, and the occasional

legal tie-up or bureaucratic snag. Based on what information he passed through, the

University of Mospheira and the Mospheiran State Department slowly made decisions

about what technology to release — debated sometimes for years over the release of a

word, let alone, say, microchips. The goal was to keep the technology compatible, to

keep, say, the standards such that a grade of wire produced on the continent could be

connected inside a toaster built on Mospheira with no thought of difficulty.

He'd never looked for things to change appreciably in his lifetime, not the toaster, not

the society and not the level of technology. Steady, economically stable progress: that

had been the design for the atevi-human future. Interlocked economies, meshing just

like perfectly standardized nuts and bolts.

Now, just since last year, there was one more human on the mainland, one Jase

Graham, born lightyears removed from the earth of the atevi, and certainly not a

product of the University's Field Officer candidate program.

And Jase Graham's arrival was why he, Bren, was sitting on lord Geigi's balcony eating

a souffle of spiced eggs and relying on two assassins' professional judgment that there

was nothing by design or default harmful in the dish.

The situation and his job had changed radically overnight when the starship had turned

up, the same starship that, two hundred years ago, had left his ancestors to fend for

themselves among the atevi. The atevi government (which had elevated intrigue to an

art form) had consequently suspected the human government of Mospheira (which Bren

well knew couldn't site a new toilet in a public park without political dithering) of

double-crossing atevi high, wide, and with considerable cleverness for nearly two

hundred years.

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It was not the case, of course; there had been no human double-cross of the atevi,

though for a time even the paidhi had had to wonder whether his own government

really had been more clever than his park-toilet estimate. The humans on Mospheira

had had no idea that the ship would return. They had, in fact, believed quite to the

contrary.

As it had turned out, the State Department on Mospheira had truly reacted as

desperately and as ignorantly as he'd feared. They had tried to contact the ship directly,

and in secrecy, to secure its alliance exclusively for Mospheira.

They'd tried, in short, to shut the atevi out of the dealings.

If they'd asked, Bren could have told them they were fools, that you didn't double-cross

the atevi. To be sure, the State Department at first had been unable to secure his advice;

but they hadn't listened to him once he did get through, no — since his advice hadn't

agreed with what their fears and their biases said they should do in responding to the

Atevi Threat.

The atevi government had, of course, found them out. Sharp atevi eyes had spotted the

new star that attached itself to the abandoned space station in the heavens, and atevi

antennae had intercepted the communications between Mospheira and the ship. The

atevi had promptly taken action, in which Bren had been inextricably involved, that had

placed them in direct communication with the starship.

Mospheira's maneuvers hadn't won the sympathy of the starship, which had turned out

willing to deal with the atevi and with the human enclave on an equal basis — anyone,

the starship maintained, was welcome up in space, but the one thing they wouldn't

agree to was time.

The ship wanted help, manpower to repair the station abandoned two centuries before,

and they wanted it immediately, or as immediately as a world without a manned

spacecraft could build one. The ship cared nothing about the careful work of centuries

not to destabilize the atevi government — which in turn supported the atevi industrial

base, which in turn supplied the factories and shops on Mospheira and the human

economy.

But with the mutability of self-interest, Mospheira's attitudes had shifted. Of course the

State Department supported the atevi government, and of course it was more than

willing to work with the atevi to obtain materials the atevi needed to go into space

equally with humans, and of course it supported the paidhi, any paidhi the atevi wanted,

just so the Treaty stood firm.

Meanwhile the average human citizen was both scared of the ship in the skies, which

bid to change a way of life they'd thought would go on forever, and scared of the atevi,

who had defeated them once in war and who were alleged in popular understanding to

be utterly incomprehensible to humans — this at the same time atevi were supposedly

growing more and more like humans, having television and fast food, skiing and soccer

— which of course defined everything.

So somehow, without destabilizing the atevi, as they'd been taught all their lives would

happen if someone slipped too much tech to atevi too fast, they were going to merge the

cultures instantly and have universal peace.

No wonder the population of Mospheira was confused.

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As a result, Bren Cameron no longer exclusively served the President on Mospheira

who'd allowed that state of confusion to develop. He damn sure no longer exclusively

served the higher-ups in the State Department, who'd tried to browbeat the Foreign

Office and to use the situation for domestic political leverage.

The Foreign Office within the State Department, well, yes, he was loyal to them — if

the commotion his actions had caused had left anyone of his staff and his superiors in

office.

He'd last heard from his old chief Shawn Tyers two months ago. His personal bet was

that the President wouldn't dare jerk Shawn out of office, because without Shawn, the

Mospheiran government had no chain on the paidhi. But even the two months since

he'd last talked by phone was a long time, and the silence since implied that Shawn had

no power to call him as often as he'd like; or, evidently, to send him mail.

And by now (unless Shawn had somehow protected within the system the computer

codes Shawn had ingeniously slipped him on his last trip home) the Field Officer's

access codes to the Mospheiran computer net were useless. His access to Shawn

himself grew increasingly less assured.

He didn't know the true distribution of power in Mospheiran governmental offices any

longer. He knew who might be in charge. And for that reason he wouldn't link his

precious computer to Mospheiran channels right now for all the fish in the briny sea —

because without the protection of updated codes and the access they gave, some

electronic disease might come flashing back to its vulnerable systems from people who

really didn't want his computer to hold the records it did.

A situation that half a year ago had had the Foreign Secretary hiding computer codes in

a cast on the paidhi's arm didn't inspire the paidhi to confidence in the State Department

even at that time, and his government having since then reacted in internal partisan

panic and having done things and issued statements which, unmediated, could have

blown the fragile peace apart, he didn't think the situation had improved.

So with Shawn and every living soul in the Foreign Office who actually knew the atevi

seeming not to have power to prevent such folly, the paidhi, Bren Cameron, loyal to the

previous regime, but damned sure not to the present one, conceived it as his personal

duty to stay in his post on the mainland and not to come home.

The paidhi counted himself lucky to be sitting on this balcony, in that consideration.

The paidhi reflected soberly that humans and atevi alike were extremely lucky that the

situation, touchy as it occasionally became, had never quite surpassed the ability of

sensible humans and sensible atevi to reason with one another.

The fact was, their two species had reached a technological level where they had a

common ground for understanding. It was possible that the threatened economic and

social destabilization was no longer a justifiable fear. The trouble was — it was a

deceptively common ground. Or a commonly deceptive ground — again, that interface

was the paidhi's department.

Fortunately, too, the essential interests of both species were not incompatible, meaning

that both of them could adapt to space — and it had been the aim of both species and

the better-thinking members of both governments to get there some time this century,

even before the ship reentered the picture.

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But the common ground was treacherous in the extreme. There had already been

moments of extreme risk: a particularly nasty moment when he lay senseless in a

Mospheiran hospital, when conservative political interests on Mospheira, led by

Secretary of State Hampton Durant, had sent in the paidhi-successor to replace him,

hoping to make irrevocable changes while their opposition in the government was

having a crisis.

And they'd nearly succeeded.

Deana Hanks, dear Deana, daughter of a prominent conservative on Mospheira, had

within one week man-a*ged to founder two hundred years of cooperation when she'd

used the simple words faster-than-light to lord Geigi of Sarini province.

The same lord Geigi with whom and on whose balcony Bren shared breakfast.

Simple word, FTL. Base-level concept — to human minds. Not so for atevi. Through

petty malice or towering folly, Deana had managed in a single phrase to threaten the

power structure which governed in this province and the sizeable surrounding territory,

which in turn held together the Western Association, the Treaty, and the entire

industrialized world — because FTL threatened the very essence of atevi psychology

and belief.

The atevi brain, steered by the principal atevi language (a chicken or the egg situation),

was ever so much more clever than the human brain at handling anything to do with

numbers. The atevi language required calculation simply to avoid infelicitous numbers

in casual utterance.

Math? Atevi cut their teeth on it. And questions abounded. There could not be paradox

in the orderly universe on which atevi philosophy depended.

Fortunately, an atevi astronomer, a despised class of scientists since their failure to

predict the human Landing, had been able to find a mathematical logic in the FTL

paradox that the philosophical Determinists of the peninsula could accept. Vital

reputations had been salvaged, the paidhi-successor had been bounced the hell back

across the strait where she could lecture to conservative human heritage groups to her

heart's content and harm no one.

But as a result of Deana's brief foray onto the continent, and thanks to the publicity that

had flown about atevi society on what had otherwise been a quietly academic question,

the FTL concept had leapt into atevi popular culture last fall.

He'd had to explain to the atevi populace on national television that the human ship

which had come to their world had entered their solar system and come from another

sun, which was what all those stars were they saw in their skies at night, and about

which most atevi had never wondered overmuch. Yes, humans had fallen down to earth

on the petal sails of legend (there were even primitive photographs) and no, humans

were not originally from the moon. But the difference between a solar system and a

galaxy and the dilemma of the origin of humans, until now shrouded in secrecy from

atevi, was up for question.

Yes, he'd said, there were other suns, and no, such suns weren't in this solar system, and

yes, there were many, many other stars but not all of them had life.

So now the atevi, who had been building a heavy lift rocket launch system, in an

undeclared space race with Mospheira, were building an earth-to-orbit spacecraft that

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would land like an airplane, thanks to the information the ship in the heavens had

released to them. That spacecraft under construction was what his entire trip to this

province was about.

And he had to admit he was far less worried about the spacecraft and its materials

documentation dumping unconsidered tech wholesale into the atevi economy (although

a year ago the proposed import of a digital clock had — justifiably — raised storms of

concern in the Foreign Office) than he was about the work of the gentle, slightly daft

atevi astronomer who'd come up with that mathematical construct that let them translate

FTL into atevi understanding.

The elderly astronomer, Grigiji, who might be the most dangerous man to come out of

those mountains since the last atevi conqueror, had been the guest of lordly choice

throughout the winter social season, feted and dined, wined and elevated to legend

among the amateur philosophers and mathematicians who were the hangers-on of any

lordly house — Grigiji, the gentle, the kindly professor, had taught any hearer who

would listen (and the respect accorded him approached religious fervor in atevi minds)

his quietly posed and philosophically wandering views.

Now Grigiji was back in his mountain observatory confusing his graduate students.

And the paidhi, who had survived the social shocks of the paidhi-successor's

adventurous offering of faster-than-light, didn't even want to imagine what was going

on in atevi universities all over the continent in the last several months, as that faster-

than-light concept, along with the mathematics that supported it, hit the lecture halls

and the ever fertile minds of those same atevi students, who were neither hangers-on

nor amateurish.

Considering the excitement the old man had raised, and considering the ability of atevi

to take any mathematical model and elaborate on it, the paidhi on certain bad nights lay

awake imagining atevi simply, airily declaring at year's end they'd discovered a physics

that didn't need a launch vehicle or a starship to convey them to the stars, and, oh, by

the way, they didn't truly need humans, either.

The paidhi, who thought he'd had a very adequate mathematics education in his

preparation for his office, thank you, had had six very short months to study up on a

branch of mathematics outright omitted from the Mospheiran university curriculum for

security reasons — mathematical concepts now spreading limbs and branches in other

areas of atevi academe besides the lately fashionable astronomers.

And all this brain-bending study he did only so he, the paidhi, who was not a

mathematical genius, could laboriously translate the documents of atevi who were

mathematical geniuses — to humans on the island and on the ship who didn't half

suspect the danger they were in from a species they thought dependent on them.

He hoped at least to keep well enough abreast of matters mathematical so that

conceptual translation remained possible between two languages, and two (or counting

the ship's officers, three) governments; he also had to translate between what was

formerly two, but definitely now three, sets of scientists and engineers, all of whom

were flinging concepts at each other with a rapidity that numbed the sensibilities.

Now humans who had never met atevi face to face — the crew of that ship — were

proposing to bring atevi into space and to hand atevi the kind of power that, by what he

understood, couldn't be let loose on a planet.

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