Invader

by C. J. Cherryh

  “So?” Ilisidi asked. “So what does this Grigiji say to Geigi?”

  Ilisidi was intellectual enough to set aside beliefs that didn’t gibe with reality, politician enough to accept some for political necessity; and atevi enough, he suddenly thought, to long for some unifying logic in her world, logic which the very traditions she championed declared to exist.

  He reached inside his coat and found the small packet he’d made, copies of the emeritus’ equations and his own notes such as he’d been able to render them. She didn’t reach for it: the wind was blowing.

  “What is this?” Ilisidi asked.

  “A human’s poorly copied notation of what the astronomer emeritus had to say. And his own words, aiji-ma.” A servant, young and male—Ilisidi’s habit—showed up at his elbow to take the papers into safekeeping.

  “Not the astronomer-aiji?”

  It was a gibe. Is there some reason, the question meant, that Tabini’s own astronomers, high in the court, failed—and a human sought his sources elsewhere? Doubtless this very moment, Cenedi would be sending out inquiries about Grigiji, his provenance, his background, his affiliations. And Ilisidi, who habitually gave the paidhi a great deal of tolerance, but—propositioned—would not commit herself to touch such an obviously political gift: clearly the paidhi was being political; so, in turn, was she.

  “Nand’ dowager,” he answered her carefully, “the aiji’s own astronomers have other areas of study. And they’re not independent. This man, as I understand, and this observatory, have been the principal astronomers engaged on this research. They’re not affiliated with any outside agency. This is an exact copy of what I brought your grandson, nothing left out, nothing added. May I ask the dowager—to advise me?”

  Ilisidi’s hand left the teacup for an insouciant motion. Proceed, she signaled.

  “Understand, aiji-ma, I’m not a mathematician. Far from it. But as I understand both what humans have observed and what this man has been attempting to describe in numbers—as I was flying into the city last night, I saw the lights, high places, low places of the city, lights like the stars shining in dark space.” He knew Ilisidi had flown at night—very recently—into Shejidan. “I saw—out the airplane window, in those lights in high and low spots, all over Shejidan—what humans have described with their numbers. And what Grigiji’s vision also describes, as I faintly understand it. His answer to lord Geigi.”

  “In the city lights. Writ in luminous equations, perhaps?”

  “The paradox of faster-than-light, aiji-ma; say that the universe doesn’t stretch out like a flat sheet of black cloth. That it has—features, like mountains, like valleys. Say there’s a topology of such places. Stars are so heavy in this sheet they make deep valleys. Therefore the numbers describing the path of light across this sheet are quite, quite true. One doesn’t violate the Determinists’ universe: light can’t go faster, by the paths that light must follow. Light and all things within the sheet that is this universe follow those mountains, and take the time they need to take. So nothing that travels along that sheet violates the speed of light. One can measure the distances across the sheet, and they are valid. Right now the effects of atmosphere diminish the accuracy of atevi observations, but when one observes from the station—as atevi will—the accuracy will be far, far greater.”

  “You’re buying time,” Ilisidi said, with another small quirk of the mouth, a flash of golden eyes. “You very rascal, you’re setting it on a shelf they can’t reach.”

  “But it is true, nand’ dowager, and up there they’ll prove it. Those papers, as I understand what I’m told, describe that sheet I’m talking about in terms that admit of space not involved in that sheet. What we call folded space.”

  “Folded space. Space folds.”

  “A convenience. A way of seeing it for people who aren’t as mathematical as atevi, people whose language doesn’t express what that paper expresses. It’s the way starships travel, aiji-ma. It’s the highest of our high technology, and an ateva may have found it without human help—if I could read those notations I copied. Which I can’t, because I don’t have the ability an ateva mathematician has to describe the universe.”

  “Your madman told you this.”

  “Aiji-ma, light doesn’t travel in a straight line. But because light is how we see, how we define shape, how we measure distance, over huge scale—that makes space act flat.”

  “Makes space act flat.”

  “We don’t operate on a scale on which the curves normally matter. Like a slow rise of the land. The land still looks flat. But the legs feel the climb. Scale makes the difference to the viewer. Not to the math. Not to the hiker’s legs.”

  Ilisidi regarded him with a shake of her head. “Such a creature you are. Such a creature. And not in touch with your university. Done it all yourself, have you.”

  “I know the essence of things I can’t explain by mathematics, ’Sidi-ma.” To his dismay he let slip the familiar name, the way he held the dowager in his mind. And didn’t know how to cover it. “You show your children far more complex things than they have the mathematics to understand. That’s the way I learned. That’s what I have to draw on. A child’s knowledge of how his ancestors moved between the stars. They didn’t teach me to fly star-ships. I just know why they work.”

  “Faster-than-light.”

  “Much faster than light.”

  “Do you know, paidhi, an old reprobate such as myself could ask to what extent all this celestial mapmaking is new, and how much humans were prepared to give at this juncture. You certainly aren’t using Hanks-paidhi for a decoy, are you?”

  “Nand’ dowager, on my reputation and my goodwill to you, I emphatically did not clear Hanks-paidhi to leak that to Geigi. And I didn’t clear with my Department what I’ve just told you.”

  “Whence this astronomer, whence Geigi’s dilemma, at the very moment this ship beckons in the heavens—when you need the goodwill of such as myself, nand’ paidhi? Is this my grandson’s planning? Is this one of his adherents?”

  He was in, perhaps, the greatest danger he had ever realized in his life, including bombs falling next to him. The daylight had increased as they sat, and those remarkable eyes, so mapped about with years, were absolutely cold. One didn’t betray ’Sidi-ji and live to profit from it. One didn’t betray Cenedi and harm Ilisidi’s interests—and walk free.

  Ilisidi snapped her fingers. A servant, one of Cenedi’s, he was sure, brought a teapot and poured for each of them.

  He looked Ilisidi in the eyes as he drank, the whole cup, and set the cup aside.

  “So?” Ilisidi asked.

  “Nand’ dowager, if it’s Tabini’s planning, his means eludes me. This is an old and respected man in his district, no new creation, that I detected.”

  “Then what is your explanation? Why this coincidence?”

  “Simply that the man may be right, nand’ dowager. The man may have found the truth, for what I know. I’m not a mathematician—but I should never wonder at someone finding what really exists.”

  “At the convenient moment? At this exactly convenient moment for him to do so? And my grandson had no collusion with humans to slip this cataclysm in on us, to destroy a tenet of Determinist belief?”

  “It doesn’t destroy it! By what I can tell, it doesn’t destroy it, it supports it.”

  “So you’ve been told. And you just happen to rush out where a man has just happened to find the truth.”

  “Not ‘just happened,’ nand’ dowager. Not ‘just happened.’ It’s the whole progress of our history behind this man. We’ve not been transferring just things into atevi hands. We’ve transferred our designs and our mathematical knowledge to a people who’ve proceeded much more slowly in their science than humans did without atevi skill at numbers—a speed we managed because we dead-reckon, approximate, and proceed as atevi won’t. One can do this—when one builds steam engines and builds things stronger than economical, rather than risk calamity. We were
astonished that you took so long to advance. We watched the debates over numbers. We waited.”

  “For us poor savages.”

  “We thought so in the beginning. We couldn’t figure why you couldn’t just accept what we knew as fact, keep quiet, and build by our designs—but the point is, it wasn’t fact, it was very close approximation. And atevi demanded to understand. Then, then, we began to realize it wasn’t just the designs we were transferring: you were extracting our numbers, refining them in an atevi conceptualization that we knew was going to break out someday in a way we didn’t foresee. When we gave you the computers that most humans use to figure simple household accounts, you questioned our logical designs. We knew there’d come a day, an insight, a moment, that you’d make a leap of understanding we might not follow. Not in engineering, perhaps. You are such immaculate perfectionists, when our approximations will bear traffic and hold back the waters of a lake; but in the pure application of numbers—no, I’m not in the least shocked that a breakthrough has come at this moment, not even that it’s come in astronomy, in which we’ve had the very least direct contact with your scientists. We gave atevi mathematicians computers. We knew study was going on. It never surprised me that the Determinists hold the speed of light as a matter of importance: it is important; it’s far from surprising that astronomers seeking precision in their measurements are using it and discovering new truths—”

  Air seemed scant. He was walking a ledge far past his own scientific expertise—far beyond his ability to prove—and on a major, dangerous point of atevi belief.

  “I don’t know these things, aiji-ma. I’d wish the astronomers of the Bergid and the scholars on Mospheira could talk to each other. But I’m the only one who could translate. And the emeritus was using mathematical symbols I don’t remotely know how to render—I’m not even sure human mathematics has direct equivalents. I suspect some of them are couched in the Ragi language, and if they rely on me to get them into Mosphei’, humans are never going to understand.”

  “Such delicate modesty.”

  “No. Reality. Most humans don’t speak your language, aiji-ma, because most humans aren’t nearly as good in math as I am. You view it as so important to know those numbers—and we don’t, aiji-ma. We can’t add that fast in our heads. We have to approximate—not that we’re disrespectful of atevi concepts; we just can’t add that fast. Our language doesn’t have your requirements, your expressions, your concepts. At times my brain aches just talking with you—and for a human, I’m not stupid. But I’m working as hard as I can sometimes just talking to you, especially about math—far from conveying folded-space mathematics to anyone whose symbols I can’t remotely read, nand’ dowager. I’m reduced to asking the man’s young students what he said and finding out that they don’t understand all he says, even with their advantage in processing the language.”

  There was long silence, once he stopped talking. Long silence. Ilisidi simply sat and stared at him. Wind stirred the edge of the tablecloth, and blew the scent of diossi flowers to the table.

  “Cenedi will see you out,” Ilisidi said.

  “Nand’ dowager,” he said, feeling both fear—and real sadness in his sense of failure. He rose from the table, bowed, and went to the door and inside the apartment.

  Cenedi met him there.

  “I’ve offended her,” he said to Cenedi quietly. “Cenedi-ji, she doubts me.”

  “Justly?” Cenedi did him the courtesy of asking.

  “No,” he said fervently. “No. But I can’t make her understand I’m not smart enough to do what she thinks I’ve done. I may have given her the ravings of a madman. I hope I haven’t. But I can’t read his writings to judge. I could only copy them. I can’t judge the quality of it. I don’t know what I’ve given her. I hoped it would do some good.”

  “One heard,” Cenedi said as they crossed the room toward the door.

  “At least—tell her I wish her well, and hope for her eventual good regard.”

  “One will pass the message,” Cenedi said, “nand’ paidhi.”

  Banichi picked him up—and asked, since the paidhi wasn’t bothering to put on a cheerful face, not how it had gone, but what had happened; and he could only shrug and say, “Nothing good, Banichi. I did something wrong. I can’t tell what,”

  Banichi answered nothing to that. He thought Banichi might try to find out where he’d misstepped—easier for Banichi to ask Cenedi outright, since Banichi had the hardwiring to understand the answer. But it seemed to a human’s unatevi senses that he’d simply pushed Ilisidi too far and given her the suspicion she’d very plainly voiced to him: that he was Tabini’s, a given; that the whole Hanks business was a setup possibly engineered by Tabini himself; and one could leap from that point to the logical conclusion that if Hanks was a setup designed to push atevi faster than the conservatives wanted to go, it couldn’t happen without Bren-paidhi being in on it.

  Which meant—perhaps—that in Ilisidi’s mind all the relations she had had with him were in question, including how far he’d be willing to go to sweep Ilisidi away from her natural allies. Never mind the broken shoulder: Ilisidi was surrounded by persons of extreme man’chi, persons who’d fling themselves between Ilisidi and a bullet without an editing thought: she was used to people who took risks. She might not know humans as well as Tabini, but she had expectations of atevi and she had experience of Tabini that might lead her at least to question, and not to risk her dignity or her credibility on someone not within her man’chi.

  She hadn’t poisoned him. He’d not flinched from the possibility. He’d surely scored points in that regard. But he’d trod all over atevi beliefs, atevi pride—which with Ilisidi was very personal: Ilisidi had unbent with him a little and he’d used that, or advantaged himself of it, and asked the dowager to support Tabini—

  The wonder was she hadn’t poisoned him, And he was attached to Ilisidi—he didn’t know exactly how it had happened, but he was as upset at her accusation of him as he’d be if he’d somehow crossed the other atevi he’d grown close to.

  Which didn’t include, somehow, Tabini. Not in that sense of reliance and intimacy. Not in the sense that—

  That he’d damn well regretted Jago had left his room night before last, experimentation untried. And he was mortally glad Jago had stayed out of his close company the last two days.

  But he longed to find her alone and find out what she did think, and whether she was upset, or embarrassed, which he didn’t want; and didn’t want to risk the relationship he had with her and with Banichi, without which—he was completely—

  Alone.

  And scared stiff.

  From moment to moment this morning he dreaded the intrusion of other humans. He didn’t know what to do if the interface went bad. He had a certain security in his atevi associates and he had to spend, hereafter, the bulk of his free time, such as it was, teaching a foreign human what that foreign human might not ever really understand.

  After which, in a number of years, Jase Graham boarded an earth-to-orbit craft and went back to his ship, leaving the paidhi—whatever the paidhi had left.

  He was in a major funk, was what had hit him. Two days ago he’d looked forward to Graham’s arrival as the panacea for his troubles. But that was when at least his atevi world had been holding together.

  And the paidhi always had that image of the clock stopped. The ultimate, shocked surprise of that moment that atevi had reacted in self-preserving attack on the very humans who really, really liked atevi.

  He had to get his mind back in order, his hurts and his self-will packed back in their little boxes, and, God, most of all he couldn’t let himself start brooding over how much atevi didn’t like him. Ilisidi never had liked him. Ilisidi had found him amusing, entertaining, informative, a dozen other things—and now he wasn’t. Now things were too serious. Humans were coming down from the sky. Ilisidi had decisions to make and she’d make them for atevi reasons. If he had a duty, if was to inform Tabini of
Ilisidi’s reaction.

  And Ilisidi knew it.

  “Banichi-ji, Ilisidi asked me—” One didn’t say suspects, didn’t say, implied: when the paidhi was deep in the mazes of atevi thought, the paidhi said exactly what had happened, not what he interpreted to have happened. “—asked me whether Tabini had set Hanks-paidhi, Geigi, the question, the astronomer happening to come up with a possible answer and all at this crisis.”

  There was silence for a moment. Banichi drew a long, audible breath as they walked. “Such a tangled suspicion.”

  “She may have been angry. Under the theory that I may simply have angered her with a social blunder, perhaps you could inquire of Cenedi the cause of her displeasure with me.”

  “Possible. One might ask. This befell when you gave her the calculations.”

  “She wouldn’t touch them herself. A servant took them before they either blew away or I had to take them back.”

  “She suspected their content.”

  “She said she suspected the emeritus as Tabini’s creation. I tried to assure her I haven’t the fluency or the mathematical knowledge to have understood the reasoning in my own language, let alone to have translated them into this one. The fact that I don’t have the concepts is why I went out there in the first place, for God’s sake.”

  “I’ll pass that along,” Banichi said.

  By which Banichi assuredly meant to Tabini. Possibly back again to Cenedi.

  “I truly regard the woman highly.”

  “Oh, so does Tabini,” Banichi said. “But one never discounts her.”

  17

  It wasn’t an easy thought to chase out of one’s mind, Ilisidi’s potential animosity, no more than it was easy to avoid comparisons with Tabini’s interested reception of the papers. Tabini had sent him a verbal message at the crack of dawn, by Naidiri himself, Tabini’s personal bodyguard, stating confidentially that in the aiji’s opinion, the emeritus’ papers at least presented the numbers-people something to chase for a good long while, it was the craziest proposal Tabini personally had ever seen, and the aiji was sending security to watch over the observatory.