And pretty soon now, he was going to have to lie to the atevi legislature and tell them everything was under controlc when they all knew that there were still plenty of people out there who thought the paidhi hadn’tdone a great job of keeping human technology from disrupting their culture.

This didn’t, however, stop atevi from being hell-bent on having wireless phones. Some clans thought his opposing their introduction was a human plot to keep the lordly houses at a disadvantage—because the paidhi’s guard had them, and probably Tabini’s had them, and nobody else currently could have them. Clearly it was a plot, and Tabini was in the pocket of the humans, who secretly told Tabini what to doc they became quite hot about it.

Tea with Prakuyo became the windblown outside of a racing locomotive, with a great Ragi banner atop, and the paidhi sat atop that engine, chilled to the bone by an autumn wind, hoping nobody found his pale skin a particular target.

They were coming into the capital. And the people of Shejidan might or might not be glad to see Tabini return to powerc

“Bren-ji.” Jago’s voice. “We have just passed Parodai.”

They were approaching the lowlands. In the red car. Carrying all his baggage.

He was appalled, and looked at Banichi and Jago, who had gotten less sleep last night than he had, and who were still wide awake.

Maybe they had napped, alternately. Maybe Tano and Algini were taking the opportunity, safely sealed in the baggage car. He certainly hoped they were.

Had he been wound that tight, that the moment he quitted the capital, he slept the whole day away? He still felt as if he could sleep straight through to the next morning.

But he had now, with Banichi’s and Jago’s help, to put on his best coat, do up his queue in its best style, and look like the returning lord of his little district.

He owed that, and more, to the people of the district, who had held out against the rebels.

He owed it to the enterprising staff, many of them from the Bujavid—who had fled during the coup and simultaneously spirited away his belongings—which had consequently notfallen into the hands of the Farai.

His people had held out on his estate, staying loyal to him when that loyalty could have ultimately cost them their lives.

That it had not come under actual attack had been largely thanks to the close presence of Geigi’s neighboring estate and the reluctance of anyoutsider to rouse the Edi people of that district from their long quietc the Edi, long involved in a sea-based guerilla war with almost everybody, were at peace, and not even the Marid had found it profitable to add the Edi to their list of problems. The west coast was remote from the center of the conflict, which had centered around the capital and the Padi Valley—and it just hadn’t been worth it to the rebels to go after that little center of resistencec yet.

He’d gotten home in time. Tabini had launched his counter-coup in time. The estate had held out long enough. The threat of war was gone and Najida stood untouched.

And the paidhi-aiji owed them and Geigi’s people so very much.

He had fresh, starched lace at collar and cuffs, had a never-used ribbon for his queue—the ribbon was the simple satin white of the paidhi-aiji, not the spangled black of the Lord of the Heavens, which he very rarely used. He sat down again carefully, so as not to rumple his beige-and-blue brocade coat, and let Banichi and Jago put on their own formal uniforms, Guild black, still, but with silver detail that flashed here and there. Their queues were immaculately done, their sleek black hair impeccable—Bren’s own tended to escape here and there, blond wisps that defied confinement.

He opened up his computer for the remainder of the journey. He’d hoped to work on the way, on matters for the next session. He’d slept, instead, and now there was time only for a few more notes on the skeleton of an argument he hoped to carry into various committees. Atevi, accustomed to the various Guilds exchanging short-range communications, had seen the advanced distance-spanning communications they had brought back from the ship, and gotten the notion what could be had.

Worse, humans on Mospheira had adopted the devices wholesale and set up cell towers, and the continent, thanks to improved communications, knew it.

He had to argue that it wasn’t a good idea. He had to persuade an already suspicious legislature, reeling from two successive and bloody purges—one very bloody one when Tabini went into exile, and one somewhat less so when he returned—that he was notarguing against their best interests, and that after all the unwelcome human technology he had let land on the continent, he was going to say no to one they wanted. And the paidhi’s veto, by treaty law, was supposed to be absolute in that arena. That, too, was under pressure: if he attempted to veto, and if Tabini didn’t back him and the legislature went ahead anyway, that override weakened the vital treaty—and did nothing good for the world, either.

He just didn’t know what he was going to meet when the legislature met. The last session had seen gunfire in the chambers, blood spilled in the aisle—that memory haunted his worst nights. In the upcoming session, the bloodshed might be figurative, but no less dangerous: undefined new associations trying to form, alliances being made, power-brokering from end to end of the continent, in whole new configurations that had never existed before, never tested themselves against the others.

Everything was undefined with these new representatives coming to the session in Shejidan, people who had come to their posts after the upheaval. The remnant of the old legislature, those canny enough, devious enough, or stupidenough not to have had an opinion during the Troubles, were going to meet that tide of “new men” in a month, in the aisles of the hasdrawad and the tashrid. God knew what the flotsam would be on the beaches of those debates, or whether the paidhi’s influence could moderate a rush to give Tabini exactlywhat Tabini had always campaigned to have: more and more of the human tech that conferred power, medical advances, comforts, conveniences—and the damned wireless phones.

Too much too fast ran the risk of shipwrecking thousands of years of atevi culturec worse, yet, of running up against that great unknown of social dynamic. Wireless phones in particular made changes in the way people made contact. Easy and informal contact imitated the way humans interacted—humans, who had the word loveand friend;and had alliances outside their kinships. And atevi, who had the word association, and who felt the pull of emotions that held clans together—atevi little comprehended the changes it would make if communications started going outside their ordinary channels and if information started flowing between individuals who had no proper power to resolve an issue.

Man’chi was an emotion that to this day the paidhi could neither feel nor grasp, not even in the two nearest and dearest associatesof his, who sat on the same bench with him. They couldn’t feel what he felt; he couldn’t feel what passion beat in their hearts, and that was just the way it wasc all unknown, all fragile, all foreign, all the timec but it was what kept the clans together. Banichi and Jago would lay down their lives for him, a concept which, were he to do it for them, would mortally offend their sense of the way the universe had to work, not just the emotional sense—but the basic logic and reason underlying every decision. Such an impulse on his part would be, in their estimation, completely insane.

So when it came to politics, wireless phones and pocket coms, according to Toby, it was notjust the social perniciousness of instant communication. The cell phone plague now preoccupied humans on the island of Mospheira, a plague making them walk into traffic while in conversation that preempted their awareness of their surroundings; a compulsion that suddenly rendered them incapable of ignoring a phone call in the presence of actual people they should be dealing with. It had gone overnight (from the view of someone two years out of the current) into, Toby said, its own kind of insanity.