Invader

by C. J. Cherryh

  The paidhi wasn’t, as happened, but one didn’t defy madam Saidin’s judgments in front of her staff, and the paidhi stood in the doorway sipping a drink he knew was safe. They had tomatos and potatoes, peppers, onions and herbs on Mospheira they didn’t allow to cross the strait uncooked, for fear of seeds and starts and the mainland ecology, although atevi who’d tried tomatos found something in tomatos and potatoes and peppers they relished, and there was a seasonal trade; but the ubiquitous green sauce, peppery and sour, went well with the bread and atevi foods piled atop so thickly a single slice was gluttony—and there was plenty of that among the staff.

  “What does the dish celebrate?” a servant wanted to know, and the paidhi rapidly searched his mental files and said, shamelessly, “Success in hard work.”

  That pleased everyone, who congratulated each other, and even Saidin was pleased with herself.

  Then Algini came in, in greater haste than Algini’s injuries or Algini’s habit usually afforded, with:

  “Nadi Bren!”

  There was a sudden hush, except of the music from the tape system. Security was all but impossible, as Algini said, “A phone call, Bren-paidhi. From Mogari-nai. They say the ship is calling you. They say they’ll patch through.”

  “This is Bren Cameron,” he said, still out of breath from reaching the office phone, “Go ahead, Mogari-nai.”

  “It’s going through, nand’ paidhi. Stand by.”

  He was still a couple of drinks to the worse and cursing his bad judgment, because, dammit, he’d known a call from the ship was at least still pending, and he’d assumed—assumed—it wouldn’t happen. He took deep slow breaths, trying to pull his scattered wits together.

  The next voice was thinner. “Hello?” it said. “This is Phoenix-com. Bren Cameron, please.”

  “This is Bren Cameron. Go ahead, Phoenix-com.” He could hear the rippling murmur of gossip underway among the servants down the short hall, but the party had quietened, Saidin, at least, being as aware as Algini what was at stake in this phone call.

  “Mr. Cameron, this is Ramirez.”

  “Good evening, sir.”

  “Good evening. Sorry to miss your 1200 request. We’ve been sifting through a swarm of material, yours, theirs—I just got off the com with the island, and the President is claiming you haven’t any authority to negotiate, I should tell you that first.”

  Damn, was the thought. He said, he trusted calmly, while juggling the phone receiver on his good shoulder and trying at the same time to reach the record button with the good hand—he punched the button—“The President has no authority to negotiate for atevi, sir, by the meaning and intent of the Treaty, the text of which you have. By grant of Tabini-aiji, sir, I do have the authority, and while I don’t imagine—” God, the alcohol was making the room too warm, or the tape was cutting off his wind “—while I don’t imagine the President is too pleased with that situation, I’m going to continue to provide translation between you and the atevi authority.”

  “I think we’ve come around to that point. What’s the aiji’s position on dealing with us?”

  “Entirely open-minded.” This wasn’t a diplomat he was talking to. He picked up the bluntness and matched it. “The deal’s been integrated economies, equal technological levels. Atevi and humans were building launch facilities before you arrived, to share renovation and operation of the station. That’s the deal in progress. The aiji sees no cause to change that.”

  “Is he receiving this?”

  “I can arrange it in a matter of minutes.”

  “No need, if you’ll inform him we certainly want a good relationship with his government and we’ve selected the representative to go down there, at his request, on two conditions: one, our representative gets official status and official protection; and, two, there’ll be an immediate application of resources to getting up here. I want an official confirmation from him that this will be the case.”

  “You’ll get an official confirmation of both points, sir, but I can say there’ll be no problem with that.”

  “We’re dropping two representatives, one to you, one to Mospheira.”

  “No problem with that, either, sir.”

  “Good. We’ve got the volunteers. —Jason? Jason Graham. Bren Cameron.”

  “Mr. Cameron.” A new, younger-sounding voice. “This is Jason Graham. Glad to make your acquaintance. I gather I’m likely to be seeing you soon.”

  “Looking forward to that. You’ve got a landing craft, then?”

  “Well—we’ve got one. I’d like to call tomorrow, your choice of times, and get some feeling about what I’m dropping into.”

  “Delighted.” He was. “Local daybreak’s easy to figure. We left your clock when we landed. Tomorrow morning?”

  “Daybreak. Dawn. Sunrise. All those words. Tomorrow dawn, it is. Good night. Do you say that?”

  “Good night,” he said, with the least small unease of realization that those were all dictionary words to the man. Conceptually dead. Three hundred and more years away—and daybreak was conceptually a dead word to him.

  He signed off with the technicians at Mogari-nai, snatched the tape out of the machine before anything could happen to it, and phoned Tabini’s private phone with, “I just had a brief ship contact, aiji-ma. They’ve apparently agreed to everything we want. I’ll get you the full text.”

  “This is very good, Bren-ji. This is very good.”

  “They say they’ve got a landing capability of some kind and two people are scheduled to come down, one for the mainland, one for Mospheira. I’m going to talk to their representative at the crack of dawn tomorrow and I’ll have more detail: the conversation was very brief. They want, they said, good relations with the atevi government. That’s about the limit of the conversation, but it was cordial and positive.”

  “Very good news, Bren-ji. Good to hear. —Bren-ji?”

  “Aiji-ma?”

  “One hears of celebration over there.”

  “I’m terribly sorry if I’ve disturbed you, aiji-ma.”

  “No, our walls are quite thick. Enjoy the evening, Bren-ji.”

  “Thank you,” he said, bewildered, as Tabini hung up.

  Then it slowly came to him that there was something changed, and they might have reason to celebrate—the threat to the world might have taken a turn toward real, productive solution.

  He walked out to the dining hall where a hushed assembly of servants stood waiting—hushed until he arrived: then the staff began to ask all at the same time, “Did you speak to the ship, nand’ paidhi?” and “Did it go well, nand’ paidhi?”

  “Hush,” Saidin said, scandalized. “Hush! This is by no means our business.”

  “But it did go well, nand’ Saidin,” Bren said. “If we can believe what I hear from the ship.” He dared not claim to have reached any agreement, although he was sliding giddily toward believing it himself, for reasons that had more to do with where the resources were than any confidence in innate generosity in orbit over their heads. For that, he counted more on Mospheira, and that, very little and in offices not in ultimate authority over anything.

  But around him there was growing excitement on faces. Algini was still in the group, and the crowd in the dining room and the hall numbered, he was sure, every servant on staff. Even Saidin and Algini seemed to catch the enthusiasm when he’d said as much as he had said, and someone put a glass in his hand, which accounted for all his ability to hold anything. It smelled at least like the safe variety, a wary touch of the tongue didn’t have the queasy rough taste the truly dangerous drink had, and while he was engaged in deciding that, Saidin snatched it from him with an exclamation of dismay and replaced it with another, Saidin berating the glass-giver in the same instant for unwarranted carelessness with the paidhi, who everyone knew had a delicate stomach and a delicate constitution and was, moreover, Saidin’s harangue continued, a virtual invalid lately wounded in the service of the Association, beside the hazard to lady Dam
iri’s reputation in their carelessness.

  The music had come up again, and cook’s cart had arrived, this time with trays of chilled sweetmeats, probably a month’s provisions, on which the servants descended and stripped tray after tray. Saidin was nibbling a sweet herself, and Algini had a number of very nice-looking young ladies backing him against the wall and firing questions at him, doubtless on his recent adventures and the reason for the bandages.

  Then, ominous, dark and formal in her uniform, Jago arrived in the midst of things, and surveyed the situation without expression.

  “Bren-ji,” she said, moving up beside him, “one heard, down in Security.”

  “About the ship? It sounds good so far.”

  A servant would have given Jago a glass, but she ordered tea; there was still food to be had, and while Jago wouldn’t drink, she took down a piece of pizza in short order, and listened to the music, standing by him with a solemn and on-duty stare at the proceedings as dancers, twenty or so of them, this time, wound down the hall.

  “It—rather well grew, nadi,” Bren said, feeling foolish and completely responsible. “I hate to tell them no, but I fear we’re disturbing the peace.”

  “No,” Jago said in her somber way. “Though Cenedi, downstairs, made inquiry for the dowager’s sake.”

  “Oh, damn.”

  “And Banichi and Tano demand a share saved for them.” Jago’s tea arrived, with suitable deference, and Jago stood and sipped tea. “They’ll be in later. Cook is going to be beset for the recipe. Pieces made their way down to Security, over to Tabini, and down to the dowager. One hopes this contravenes no ceremonial propriety.”

  “No,” he said solemnly. “By no means. God, is nothing safe?”

  “The recipe?” Jago said.

  “The information. Everything I do—”

  “We do watch, Bren-ji. But don’t rely on it too far. Banichi says get to bed in good season, don’t proposition the servants, and don’t break the ancestral porcelains.”

  “Where is he?”

  Jago cast a glance aside, then said, “He’s got your plane arranged.”

  “Plane.”

  “To the observatory,” Jago said, as if, of course, he should have known.

  Which he should. The paidhi wasn’t tracking as well as he ought. Probably it was the third glass. He was relatively sure it was the third.

  “Day after tomorrow,” Jago said, and sipped her tea. And hadn’t, he realized a moment later, answered his question about Banichi’s whereabouts at all.

  Dammit, he thought. He got more information out of Cenedi and Tano than he did out of either of the two security personnel he counted closer to him.

  But it wasn’t the time or the place to insist. Banichi would turn up, probably as Jago disappeared somewhere, as they’d been doing. Jago’d mentioned a security station, and somehow Jago and Tabini and Banichi knew every move he made and every breath he took, which might indicate the nature of the security station they were occupying and the fact that the porcelains might be listening.

  Which might indicate that, with a country at risk, or what passed for one in atevi reckoning, Tabini might not find it within his conscience to take him totally on his word.

  Or dared not, with the amount of controversy he’d generated, and apparently a major crisis in the Assassins’ Guild, leave him unwatched for a second.

  Celebration might be in order. But solutions didn’t fall into your hands, strangers didn’t agree with you for no reason of advantage to themselves, and aijiin, presidents, and likely ship captains as well, when they had constituents at issue, didn’t just do the logical, straightforward, economical—or trusting—thing.

  Not that he’d ever observed.

  13

  “I’ve got a very little of a few languages,” Graham said, on the phone patch-through. “I’m as close as we could come. I’m a history hobbyist. That’s how I’m elected to the atevi side of this—I’ve got a background in history. The other of us, going to the human population—she’s got all the technical background you want, but no study in languages at all. Nobody has, much. We don’t have different languages. I just got into it because I was interested in history, and I got curious. And I teach, too. It was something I thought I ought to know.”

  “You’re a teacher?” Bren asked, and poured a cup of tea from the pot on the office desk, with growing visions of a gentle, professorial young man, politically naive, dropping into political hell.

  “Well, computers most of the time, but somebody’s got to write the lessons for the kids. I gave them language study. I thought it was good for them. But not too many were interested.”

  “Know a noun from a verb?”

  “Yes, sir. Conjugations, declensions, participles—”

  “That’s going to be useful. I’ve prepped another data-load for you this morning, atevi-Mosphei’ grammar notes with at least the basics—you’re not going to understand half of it. A handful of phrases in the remote case you have to communicate with somebody other than me. We’re not dealing with a human grammatical structure, as you’ll find out. Good in math?”

  “Up to a point, sir. Why?”

  “Because you have to do some calculation constantly. The number of persons in a polite sentence isn’t by head count, it’s by calculations of rank plus real number, and there are forms you use to avoid jinxing somebody when you have to use an infelicitous number of persons. You’ll love it. I’m so glad to have somebody from the ship who’s going to understand that this isn’t a straightforward matter of word-for-word translation. I’ve been trying for years to make my department heads understand that answers one time aren’t the answers the next time. If I haven’t scared you by now, you may do.”

  “I’m at least daunted.”

  “Good judgment. Atevi and humans have deep but solvable conceptual differences, moderately significant psychological differences, and I’ll tell you, we were just on the verge of important breakthroughs including space missions when you turned up in the sky scaring hell out of the children. Any background in negotiation? Politics?”

  “History. Just—history.”

  He had an academic on his hands. God help them. Or a dilettante.

  “Good vocabulary?”

  “A pretty good one. Better than some.”

  “I’ve asked your captain to give you real authority to negotiate. And stand behind you. Will he?”

  “I’ve heard what you said. He told me just—call if I had a question and I’m supposed to get a thorough briefing before I go down, on what we’re going to need, on the lift vehicle and after. I’ll need regular communications with the ship. I can get the technical details in download.”

  Either the captain was naive—a possibility—or the captain was sending them somebody who didn’t know enough to spill anything under interrogation.

  But Jason Graham wasn’t stupid. A man who made a hobby out of history and languages wasn’t stupid.

  A fool, maybe. That was a different matter.

  “You have any concept of politics, Graham? How do you make critical decisions up there? What’s your procedure?”

  “Guild vote, sir. The captains lay out what’s to be done, or sometimes the technicians do, and then we all lay out what our choices are—it’s not like a whole country, sir, its a lot more like we’ve got information, and we’ve got what we don’t know, and we’ve got to figure.”

  “How did you decide to come back, for example?”

  A silence for a moment. “Well, we were always going to. And we decided it was a good time.”

  “Why was it a good time?”

  “Well, because we’ve got another station, and linking up the two of them could give us a lot more options where we could go.”

  “Fueling, you mean.”

  “And supplies.”

  “What are you going to trade for?”

  Another small silence. “I don’t know, sir. I think that’s something that’s still pretty far off, the way the s
tation looks right now.”

  Meaning the station needed population, the station needed workers, and the ship—

  The ship, as it always had, wanted refueling. The ship wanted provisions. And the world was supposed to provide that, free of charge, one could guess, after one hell of a lot of man-hours of dangerous effort producing what the starship could drink down at one gulp and leave.

  But as Jason Graham said, there were things to do first. They were stuck with the ship as a factor. They had a station decaying more rapidly by the year, the ship was a shortcut to saving it—which was worth something, damn sure.

  And the ship—couldn’t get anything off the planet. By everything he knew—it couldn’t get anything that wasn’t brought to it in space. That meant the world had leverage.

  “Meaning they’ll send down their figures as they develop them.”

  “Essentially, sir, but—can we talk very frankly?”

  “Anything you want to talk about. Go ahead.”

  “I’m volunteering because I want to do something more with my life than push keys, which is the job I’ve got, but I don’t want to get my throat cut, and I don’t want to end up somebody’s hostage. Neither does Yolanda. It won’t work, for one thing. The captain says he won’t deal there to get us back. If anything goes wrong we’re on our own. So—how safe are we?”

  “You’ll have the protection of Tabini-aiji. That’s very safe. I can’t say about your companion, but Mospheira’s quiet to the point of tedium under most circumstances. I’ll make every effort to meet you when you arrive. Are you coming down at the same time?”

  “That’s what we plan. If we can get one of us a way to get to the other place.”

  “Easily. By the next plane.”

  “Mospheira says—speaking frankly, sir—that atevi can shoot you for no reason. Legally. That somebody just tried to kill you. Twice. That we’re much safer landing on the island. You’re telling me otherwise.”

  “I—equally frankly—advise you that landing on Mospheira would create special problems for you. Yes, there are some very different customs here, and assassination is legal, but it’s also strictly regulated. The attempts against me were illicit, they were met by the aiji’s security and stopped. In fact, if you land on the island, it would make you much less safe: Tabini-aiji has a great stake in your protection if you land where he asks you to, on his invitation—he’s given you his personal assurance of safety, that’s one thing. For another, he considerably outranks the Mospheiran President, and accepting the Mospheiran invitation over his would be very bad protocol. Atevi would take it for a calculated insult, or collusion and secret arrangements, which would start you off very badly. Please pass that word into your decision-making process.”