Foreigner

The only comforting thought was that, if it wasn’t a licensed assassin, it was the lunatic himself or an amateur who couldn’t get a license—the sort that might mow down bystanders by mistake, true, dangerous in that regard.

But Banichi, unlike the majority of the aiji’s guards, had a license. You didn’t take him on. You didn’t take on Jago, either. The rain last night had been a piece of luck for the intruder—who had either counted on the rain wiping out his tracks on the gravel and cement of the garden walkways, or he’d been stupid, and lucky.

Now the assassin wasn’t lucky. Banichi was looking for him. And if he’d left a footprint in a flower bed or a fingerprint anywhere, that man—assuming it was a man—was in trouble.

He daren’t go to a licensed doctor, for one thing. There had been blood on the terrace. Bren personally hoped he’d made life uncomfortable for the assassin, who clearly hadn’t expected the reception he’d met. Most of all he hoped, considering Banichi’s taking on the case, that life would become uncomfortable for the assassin’s employer, if any, enough for the employer to withdraw the contract.

The doors opened. The guards and marshals let the crowd in, and the secretary accepted from the Day Marshal the towering stack of ribboned, sealed petitions and affidavits and filings.

There were some odd interfaces in the dealings of atevi and humans. One couldn’tblame the atevi for clinging to traditional procedures, clumsy as the stacks were, and there wasa computer record. The secretaries in the foyer created it.

But ask the atevi to use citizen numbers or case numbers? Convince them first that their computer-assigned personal numbers were auspicious in concert with their other numerologies. Convince them that changing those numbers caused chaos and lost records—because if things started going wrong, an ateva faulted his number and wanted it changed, immediately.

Create codes for the provinces, simply to facilitate computer sorting? Were thosenumbers auspicious, or was it some malevolent attempt of the aiji’s court in Shejidan to diminish their importance and their power?

Then, of course, there was the dire rumor that typing the names in stillproduced numbers in the computers, numbers of devious and doubtless malevolent intent on the part of the aiji, conspiring, of course, with the humans who had brought the insidious device to earth.

Not all that humans brought to earth was anathema, of course. Television was an addiction. Flight was an increasingly essential convenience, practiced as see-and-avoid by frighteningly determined provincials, although the aiji had laid down the law within his domains, requiring flight plans, after the famous Weinathi Bridge crash.

Thank the atevi gods Tabini-aiji was a completely irreligious man.

The matters before the aiji had one turn of the glass apiece—a summation, by the petitioner. Most were rural matters, some involved trade, a few regarded public works projects—highways and dams and bridges, harbors and hunting and fishing rights which involved the rights of the Associations united under the aiji’s influence. Originating projects and specific details of allocation and budget involved the two houses of the legislature, the hasdrawad and the tashrid—such bills were not the aiji’s to initiate, only to approve or disapprove. But so much, so incredibly much, still needed the aiji’s personal seal and personal hearing.

For chief example, there were the feuds to register, two in number, one a wife against an ex-husband, over illegal conversion of her property.

“It’s better to go to court,” Tabini said plainly. “You could get the money back, in installments, from his income.”

“I’d rather kill him,” the wife said, and Tabini said, “Record it,” waved his hand and went on to the next case.

That was whyhumans preferred their enclave on Mospheira. Mospheira was an island, it was under human administration, computers had undisputed numbers, and laws didn’t have bloodfeud as an alternative.

It did, however, mean that for all the sixty so-called provinces and conservatively three hundred million people under the aiji’s hand, there was a single jail, which generally held less than fifty individuals awaiting trial or hearing, who could not be released on their own recognizance. There were a number of mental hospitals for those who needed them. There were four labor-prisons, for the incorrigibly antisocial—the sort, for instance, who took the assassins’ function into their own hands, after refusal by a guild who did truly refuse unwarranted solicitation.