Burning Bright

Chauvelin grinned, sobered instantly. “Suffice it to say that ji-Imbaoa has more influence than he should, and he wants this done. And that’s the other thing I want to find out: why the hell should he be so worried about Damian Chrestil?”

Ransome shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe they had a bar fight, their tastes seem similar enough. Though I don’t think Damian Chrestil drinks quite so much.”

“Let me put it this way,” Chauvelin said, and his voice was suddenly devoid of all expression. “Ji-Imbaoa is worried enough to remind me that, since I made you min-hao, you could still face charges in HsaioiAn, for lese majesty.”

“Lesser treason,” Ransome murmured, through lips grown suddenly stiff and unresponsive, “but still treason.”

“Just so.”

They sat in silence for a long moment, the only sounds the faint whistle of the seabirds and the whine of a denki-bike passing in the street. Ransome slipped his hand into his pocket, found the handful of carved stones he had collected, turned them over one by one. He had been glad to be tried as houtaback on Jericho; insults up the social scale, from person to person or from min-haoto a person, could be construed as a kind of treason, and the sentences for that were more severe than they were for theft. Insults by houta, on the other hand, were “no more than the barking of dogs,” or so the hsaii judge had said through the human translator, and therefore didn’t count against him. Unfortunately, the hsai had a very long memory for insults.

He slipped one of the stones out of his pocket, fingering the delicate features without really looking at them. His eyes traveled instead beyond the lower terrace, beyond the Straight River, where he thought he could see the bow of the Crooked River, dividing the Old City from the Five Points District. It was a trick of the light, he knew that, of the hazy sunlight and the water-heavy air, that turned all distances vague and soft-edged, drowned in a blue-grey haze like a watercolor wash. Even so, his mind filled in the outlines, drew a second steely curve beyond the more solid line of the Straight. Five Points proper, the five projecting pieces of cliff edge where the descendants of the city founders lived, lay beyond that curve, invisible, tantalizing, and the third of the points belonged to the Chrestil-Brisch. He had been there once, years ago—before Chauvelin, before Jericho, before he’d even thought of leaving Burning Bright, when he had still thought he could play certain games without penalty even though he’d been born poor canalli, child of a Syncretist Observant, playing games on equal terms with the second child of Chrestil-Brisch…

He put that thought aside. Cella Minter was nudging him back into the Game, and the hand behind her was Damian Chrestil’s: that was what mattered now, that and whatever hsai politics Chauvelin was tangled in. Chauvelin had been adopted into the tzu Tsinraan, and was relatively a modernist and a moderate even within the moderate faction that dominated the court. But where he stood in the greater conflict that lay behind the factional quarrel, Ransome had never been completely sure. HsaioiAn wanted to control settled space—the hsai needed to control settled space, because their culture could not admit that other species equalled their own; the whole elaborate fiction of adoptions and legal kin-species had been set up to allow the hsai to pretend that other beings were really a part of their own species. Chauvelin had embraced that fiction, heart and soul, or he wouldn’t be here.

But he had been careful, all the years Ransome had known him, never to say whether he supported the wider definition of kinship, one that would eliminate the concept of houtaand replace it with an acknowledgment of a basic kinship between all intelligent species, or the older, more conservative version. Most conscripts Ransome had known supported the old, narrow definition: why should others get for nothing what they had worked so hard to win? That sort of selfish self-aggrandizement wasn’t Chauvelin’s style—but then, it was equally unlike Chauvelin to keep silent even about risky political beliefs. More likely, Chauvelin had thought of himself as hsaie for so long that it no longer occured to him to think of himself as involved in that debate. Chauvelin had made one thing very clear. If Ransome didn’t serve Chauvelin’s interests, Chauvelin would no longer be able to protect him. That knowledge had a sour taste, and he looked away, stared over his shoulder toward the shimmering towers of Newfields. Even at this distance, he heard a rumble like distant thunder, and squinted skyward in spite of knowing better, looking for the pinpoint light of an orbiter already long out of sight. He looked back, dazzled—the sun was starting the decline over the highlands, turning the sky to a white haze—and saw Chauvelin looking at him.