Destroyer

by C. J. Cherryh

  Break them up and they fought the harder to reach one another. Aishi. Association. No question of it. Be it human or be it atevi, a bond had formed between Cajeiri and the particular four of that five who, inexperienced in the facts of human history, innocent of a war that had nearly devastated the atevi homeworld over interpersonal misinterpretations, secretly regarded Cajeiri as their friend, as he called them aishidi, that word which did not, emphatically not, mean friends—vocabulary which didn’t match up emotionally or behaviorally, a circumstance of thwarted expectations which had historically had a devastatingly bad outcome in human-atevi history.

  And here it was, like the planet’s original sin, blossoming underfoot.

  Dangerous passions. But how did one explain the hazard to a human child who was just learning what true friends were; or to an atevi boy who was trying to iron out what constituted trustable aishiin, that network of reliable alliances that would, in the case of a likely future ruler of the aishidi’tat, make all the difference between a long, peaceful rule or a series of assassinations and bloody retribution?

  He wrote to Toby about their several-months-long problem, he confessed it to himself, because he had not the fortitude or the finesse to lay the whole situation out in detail for the boy’s father in that other letter. And then he inevitably erased the paragraphs he wrote, saying to himself that humans had no need to know that detail about the future aiji’s development—and saying, I should let the dowager explain the boy’s notions to Tabini.

  But after the computer incident, which had incidentally locked all the doors on five-deck and caused a minor security crisis, even Ilisidi had thrown up her hands. And, instead of laying down the law, as everyone expected, the dowager had seemed to acquiesce to the birthday. Locked in her cabin and grown unsocial in the long tedium of folded space, she undoubtedly knew hour to hour and exactly to date what was going on with preparations for this eighth, infelicitous birthday, and she had said, on that topic, as late as a week ago, “Let him learn what he will learn. He came here for that. Best he see for himself the problems in this association.” And then she had added the most troubling information: “Puberty is coming. Then things will occur to him.”

  That posed very uncomfortable notions, to a human who had long passed that mark and who had found his own intimate accommodation with an ateva of his own bodyguard—an understanding which they neither one acknowledged by what passed for daylight. Much as humans knew about atevi, and an earlier puberty in certain high-ranking individuals was one of those items, there were items the outrageous dowager might mention, but that even his most intimate associate would not feel comfortable discussing in pillow talk. Puberty, it seemed, was one of those unmentionables. It was, and it was not, the point at which feelings of man’chi, of association, firmly took hold of a developing ateva. It was intimate. It was embarrassing. The dowager, armored in years and power, would mention such things with wicked frankness. Jago, with whom he shared his nights, would rather not.

  Well, damn, he thought, embarrassed himself, and on increasingly difficult ground. It was so embarrassing, in fact, that Jago had turned her shoulder to him and gone off to sleep. Which left him staring at the ceiling and wondering if he had offended her.

  The explanation had left him with more questions than answers, and an impending birthday.

  That topic, his staff would discuss. Had discussed, in detail. Atevi birthdays tended to be celebrated only if the numbers were fortunate, which worked out, with rare exceptions, as the paidhi well knew, to every other year. The infelicitous numbers, those divisible by infelicitous two, were questionable even to acknowledge in passing, except as properly compensated with ameliorating numbers. There might permissively be quiet acknowledgement in the case of a very young child—a sort of family dinner, for instance, had become traditional in the worldly-wise capital, elders felicitating the young person and admonishing him to good behavior, mentioning only his next, more fortunate year, and pointedly not mentioning the current one.

  But, God help them, Cajeiri had seen Artur enjoy his birthday presents and being the center of festivities and adoration.

  Was it awakening man’chi? Was it that inner need to be part of a group? If it was, it damned sure shouldn’t be satisfied by a human, however well-disposed.

  We’re having the long-awaited birthday party for Cajeiri. This is, inescapably, an event involving the whole staff. There will be Cajeiri’s young guests, and I’ve given Bindanda recipes for authentic cake and ice cream, such as we can manage with synthetics and our own stores. We’re very careful about the ingredients, to be sure—no incidents, no alkaloids served to the human guests . . . no poisoning people’s children at a birthday party.

  And this being, of course, an eighth birthday, we mustn’t mention it’s the eighth. You know what that means.

  So there’s been ever such careful plotting on staff to figure how to do this gracefully. Narani suggested a beautiful patch on the situation, that we can celebrate not the oncoming eighth, but the felicity of the very fortunate seventh completely completed, so to say. And after that little dance around numerical infelicity, we have only to communicate to the parents of his human associates that they and their offspring must in no wise say ‘eighth birthday’ or ‘eight years old’, but rather say that he will be ‘completely seven.’ We seem to have finally persuaded the human parents that this semantical maneuvering is no joke. I tried to explain to the parents in that meeting yesterday, and they are the best of the best, who at least can conceptualize that passionate feelings other than human might exist in very non-human directions. Most of the Reunioners can’t remotely imagine such a case. Especially they can’t imagine it in folded space, where their brains aren’t quite up to par. Universally it’s a hard sell, in concept, to people who’ve always defined universal reality by their own feelings, and have never met anyone unlike themselves.

  The humans they had rescued off Reunion Station were, to say the least, not acclimated to dealing with non-humans—they were incredibly provincial, for space-farers, and Artur’s mother had even called the to-do over the attachment between the children that very dangerous word, silly.

  The woman had meant, certainly, to reassure him that she didn’t expect there would be any trouble. But that was precisely the point. She didn’t remotely grasp the history of the problem, or its potential outcome. Any Mospheiran, and he was Mospheiran, from the onworld island enclave of humans, found that mother’s attitude of laissez-faire both sinister and very scary. This was, he saw in that statement, a well-meaning human as naïve in atevi culture as Mospheirans had been before the Landing—before each side’s ignorance and each side’s confidence they were completely understanding one another had triggered the War of the Landing, the cataclysm that nearly ruined the planet.

  Out of that conflict, the one good that had come was the paidhi’s office—a human appointed as the atevi aiji’s own translator and mediator where it regarded the mysterious thought processes of humans, the human appointed to execute the terms of the treaty that had ended the War, turning over human technology to the atevi conquerors at a pace that would not work such grievous harm on atevi culture. He understood his predecessors’ history, he knew what they’d been through, what they’d learned painfully and sometimes bloodily, over the elapsed centuries.

  And trying to convey his Mospheiran-born experience to the Reunioners, it was like starting from the beginning—like being the first paidhi that had ever existed. Reunioners, born in space, entirely unaccustomed to accepting other languages and other human cultures, let alone non-human mental processes, had just come within a hair’s breadth of starting an interspecies war in the district where they had come from.

  Which was why humans elsewhere had had to send Phoenix out to collect them and get them back to safety in the first place. Humans who lived with atevi had known the moment they heard of human encounters with neighboring aliens that they were possibly in deep trouble. And, oh, God, they had been in t
rouble—had all but provoked another species into wiping them out and hunting down the rest of humankind.

  Had the Reunion refugees now learned from this experience? No. The majority of them chose not to regard the near-war as in any sense their fault, were quite indignant at any such suggestion, and had no ingrained appreciation what a serious business it was to trample on other species’ sensitivities. Certainly they had not a care in their world that their Mospheiran cousins had, some hundreds of years in the past, fought a great war over such ‘silliness’ as humans insisting on fixed property lines and disregarding the fingernails-on-chalkboard effect of human numerical deafness, in their children’s considerate attempts to learn the atevi language.

  Infelicitous eighth?

  The fact was, as every Mospheiran knew, and Reunion folk did not, atevi heard numbers in everything. Numerical sensitivity was embedded in the atevi language, very possibly even in their brain architecture, influencing their whole outlook on the universe. Bjorn, Irene, Artur and Gene, who had made rudimentary efforts at talking to Cajeiri in his own language, had seemingly grasped the facts of the situation faster than their parents, though their own human nerves were absolutely deaf to the mistakes that made atevi shudder: they were continually trying to figure out what made Cajeiri scowl at them as if he’d been insulted, and to add to the problem, they were not particularly good in math, which was so matter of course to Cajeiri he had trouble understanding their mistakes. Their back-and-forth computer correspondence, which protective atevi staff had hacked, were full of very long, very convolute explanations to each other as to what one had meant by “two of us,” and, apologetically, how two wasn’t really “two.”

  The youngsters’ willingness to analyze their communication was at least encouraging, no matter that they were surely not destined for a career in mathematics and would never progress beyond the children’s version of the language. Their being drawn to Cajeiri—in a bond that, for reasons he himself could not completely understand, atevi were reluctant to sever—was fraught with every imaginable difficulty.

  But if they could somehow keep an even keel under the relationship, and avoid an emotional breach, who knew? The next generation necessarily extended into a scary dimension of time the paidhi couldn’t control, couldn’t even imagine, let alone predict. He only saw, uneasily, that the very circumstance of there being four young humans had seemingly undermined atevi resistence to the idea of their association: he knew that four was calamity unless combined with an apex fifth, a dominant fifth. These four under the peculiar circumstances of this voyage, constituted some kind of foreboding threat in certain minds. Joined to an atevi future ruler—they made a five of potential power—at least by what he could figure Ilisidi’s reasoning to be.

  Scary as hell, to a human trying to figure out a volatile situation that might undermine everything he’d struggled to preserve.

  But today all he had to cope with was the debated slumber party, in which Cajeiri had not even remotely twigged to the impropriety of young people of various sexes spending the night in the same bed. Irene, Cajeiri said, wasn’t a girl, she was Artur’s sister. Translation: she was clan, she was family, she was part of his aishid. Which had to worry anyone in the context of oncoming changes in the boy.

  Not to mention the understanding of human parents, who saw a boy as tall as a grown human proposing to sleep with their very underage daughter.

  Three ticks of the keys windowed up an ebony face, a young face, though humans not used to atevi might not see how young . . . gold eyes that brimmed with questions, questions, questions. There was so much good in that young heart. So much enthusiasm and willingness.

  And his parents’ good looks, and his father’s cunning and, when thwarted, his father’s volatile temper. Which, fortunately, there was the aiji-dowager, his great-grandmother, to sit on, when needed.

  Tantrums there might be, a last-ditch insistence on the slumber party.

  We decided to offer a movie for the entertainment, he calmly wrote to Toby. Since we haven’t encouraged the boy in his movie-viewing out of the Archive lately, and since the dowager has loaded him with homework to fill his time, this should be a special treat.

  In several well-considered opinions, Cajeiri had gotten far too fond of those human-made movies. Prepubescent as the lad still was, most machimi plays, the classic and common literature of his own people, did sail right over his head, both intellectually and emotionally, and unfortunately that had combined with the boredom of a long voyage to make the human Archive all too attractive to a boy who should have been out riding the hills and conniving with other children—not that Cajeiri understood the nuances of the human dramas, either, but there was in the vast Archive a great store of the sort of movies he favored . . . notably those with abundant pyrotechnics, a great deal of sword-swinging, and most especially horses and dinosaurs.

  Machimi were, in origin, stage-plays, largely filled with people talking, in limited, static sets. The classic ones didn’t have the flash and sweep of a movie epic. So what did their boy do when admonished to view the classics of his own culture? He fast-forwarded to the blood and thunder scenes, and disrespectfully skipped through the intellectual and sensitive parts, ignoring all the things that should have begun to mean something to his developing brain.

  This fast-forwarding button had begun to make his elders just a little uneasy. He was bright. He was extremely bright. They were not sure about his other attributes, or how this fascination with blood and battle played in his developing brain.

  Horses, pirates, and especially dinosaurs are his current passion, he wrote to Toby. Did I mention he’s keenly disappointed to be told we don’t really have horses or dinosaurs on Mospheira? He was all ready to take a row-boat over there and see them, and we had to tell him they were long ago and far away, and that dinosaurs were not alive when humans appeared on old Earth.

  Cajeiri had put in his request for Captain Blood as the birthday movie, but the dowager’s staff had lately made the firm decision that pirates were not appropriate fare for a young one-day ruler. Cajeiri and his young associates had recently sent each other a series of fanciful between-decks letters about overthrowing the ship-aijiin and cruising the universe as space pirates, a plan which, whatever its lack of feasibility, entirely scandalized his grandmother.

  The offering the staff has settled on for the festive occasion is The Lost World, which has wall-to-wall dinosaurs. Presumably this will please him, since we’re sure this is a version he has not seen and the dinosaurs, staff informs me, are particularly well done.

  Surely in the next few years the problem would fade: his great-grandmother seemed to think so. When the boy got old enough, the machimi plays, the ancestral art of his Ragi forebears, would touch his awakening sensibilities and adult instincts in ways peculiarly and exquisitely atevi. Then human-made movies would no longer satisfy the young rascal.

  Then he would stop being the appealing young rascal he was and start becoming, well, what he ought to be, ateva to the core—which would leave the paidhi a little lonely, he had to admit it. He’d never thought to bring up a son. Even a surrogate one. And he’d had the boy on his hands for over two years. Did that qualify as fatherhood, for a man who, given his only deep romantic attachment wasn’t to his own species, would never father a child?

  Change of topic. Some things he didn’t write to his brother, or commit even to volatile memory.

  Gin and her crew invited me in for the poker game yesterday night. It’s only for sugar packets, but I won ten. It’s the math, you know. Before this voyage is over I should have a corner on. . . .

  The door to his cabin opened. “Nandi.” Narani came in, his chief of staff: atevi, a head taller than he was, skin which should be black as ink and eyes gold as sunset, but the absolute of both colors had faded a bit from age. His queued and ribboned hair was peppershot with gray, his face mapped with years. He was the gentlest of men . . . never mind he was, like the rest of his staff, a Guild
Assassin. “Jase-aiji advises us he will call in person in a moment.”

  “Will he?” He didn’t see near enough of Jase Graham, whose day was his night—they met, when they met, in the morning and twilight of their respective days, and it was evening at the moment. He folded up his computer. Jase’s announcement of his imminent presence was usually done from the central lift system.

  Narani reached and adjusted his lace cuff, which had fallen back and snagged on his coat. In no wise would this good gentleman permit the Lord of the Heavens to meet the ship’s second captain at any disadvantage of dress. If there had been time, Narani would have called the rest of the staff and gotten him into a more formal coat.

  Bren drank off the cold remainder of his cup, when he had satisfied his staff. Then he went out into the hall, the main corridor on this part of five-deck, the atevi section.

  Jase had already passed the section doors. Jase was in his working uniform, blue sweater and blue coat, and in a fair hurry.

  News? Bren wondered, his heart beating a little faster. It wasn’t an invitation to a dinner-breakfast upstairs. Jase would have simply called down for that.

  “Jase,” he said, as Jase reached him, all prepared to stand aside and show him into the cabin—to offer him a precious cup of tea, if he could, all the courtesies of old, yes, friends in his otherwise atevi universe. Jase was the closest human tie he owned, except Toby.

  “We’re about to drop out,” Jase said. “Emergence tomorrow on my watch, 0416.14h.” Jase’s eyes fairly danced with what he had come to say. “We’re there, Bren. We’ll be there, tomorrow morning, right on the button. I have it from nav, and Sabin concurs.”

  Sabin was senior, first-shift captain, Jase being second-shift, just preparing to go on duty about now. Drop out meant emerge from subspace, and there—