Visitor: A Foreigner Novel Read Online Free Page A

into custody,
and
makes an important point. Right now and forever, the kids are under the aiji’s protection, and under atevi law, that includes their relatives and associates, so far as the kids choose to maintain the association from their end. Which is convenient. I don’t
want
the parents to go back to the Reunioner sections. It’s not safe, political pressure is inevitable, and frankly, and above all else,
I
can’t afford the worry right now. I need my head free to deal with the kyo. Where they are right now, they become Geigi and Ilisidi’s problem. I haven’t asked them their preferences, because if they run counter, I’m not going to listen.”
    “Works for me. What about their stuff? I understand looting and theft are still a problem in the Reunioner sections.”
    There
had
been that problem on the voyage, dealt with as best they could. House survivors in a damaged station for years, and need began to trump ownership in more than a few instances. Whether it was a problem that would persist once they assumed something like normal lives was something for future authority to sort out.
    “Geigi’s hard-locked their apartments, and Ilisidi will consider the aishidi’tat’s credibility involved, should anything happen to them or their belongings.”
    “Excellent. —Regarding the Reunioners in general, the President is taking the position that the new meds mean the Reunioners can successfully acclimate to the planet, and that means they can integrate into Mospheira. He says you back the idea, therefore the aishidi’tat will back it.”
    “I do back it. I think Tabini will. Likewise, I think, the captains; it gets the problem off their deck. With the situation we have now, it’s the
only
solution that’s going to work. Trying to expand the station to accommodate them is not going to erase the differences between Reunioners and Mospheirans. Living on a planet—is its own logic.”
    “Logistically—”
    “A slow, slow process. I know.”
    “Maybe not as slow as you think. We could use the petal sails. Not for passengers. But for cargo.”
    Petal sails—like those that had brought the first Mospheirans down to Earth.
Jase
had made his first, terrifying trip down by parachute. Likely Jase still had nightmares. But the technology was so old, so primitive. Chutes had failed—lost people, lost supplies, landed in the sea and sunk. The hazard was legendary, a scar on the Mospheiran psyche.
    But using landers to bring down
cargo,
and reserving the shuttles for people . . .
    “We
know
weather now,” he said. “The old landers were tin cans dropping blind, but as I understand it, Geigi targeted his chutes, dropping his relay stations.”
    “He crashed one,” Gin said, “what I hear, pretty spectacularly. The others landed soft enough.”
    “Might not have lost that one, if he’d been able to work directly with the Mospheiran side of the station.”
    Gin shrugged, a side-tip of her head, and took another sip. “I think we can do it.”
    Geigi had had no paidhi to translate between him and humans, during their absence on the Reunion mission. When the coup that unseated Tabini and grounded the shuttles severed him from his own government, Geigi had immediately secured communication with Mospheira’s university linguistics department, which was, itself, tightly connected to the Mospheiran State Department, which talked directly to the Mospheiran President.
    For two years, Geigi had told the University scholars what he wanted—from Tillington, ironically enough, on the other side of the station wall, then had to wait for an answer relayed down to the ground and up again. Geigi had traded materials he had stockpiled for the atevi starship to get cooperation from the station, and had set up, via satellites aloft and his petal-sail landers on Earth, a communications network that had kept data coming in from the mainland and from space.
    Geigi’s landers weren’t the desperate, cobbled-together efforts of