Visitor: A Foreigner Novel

by C. J. Cherryh

  “And yet it took this long for the Pilots’ Guild to hold the fuel hostage to the ship’s actions.”

  “They had their little kingdom. We were the easy reason for the station to work and build, the reason for a Pilots’ Guild to hold power. We were fine when we were gone, I suspect. A problem to the station authority when we were in dock. Likely we were always in the way . . . until they wanted something from us.”

  “And what they wanted—for the first time in the history of the station—was protection. So from the founding of Reunion, the ship came in, got fueled, and went out to explore the surrounding space . . . until Ramirez, as Gin put it, stuck his nose where it didn’t belong.”

  It went to the heart of the kyo problem: how long had the kyo been watching? Not just watching Reunion, but the ship itself?

  “Pretty much. Beyond that—beyond that, I just don’t know your answers. To a certain extent, blind loyalty to the ship, adherence to its hierarchy, does drive us. We go where the senior captain tells us. Do what he tells us. Under ordinary circumstances, the why never comes into it much. What happened . . . made sense at the time. Once we knew there was more to the story . . . there was no one to answer the questions, because Ramirez never confided, not in anyone. The log has locked segments only the senior captain can access—which means Ogun, now—and it’s possible it holds the keys to Ramirez’ actions and has greater detail on the entire mess, but my personal feeling is it doesn’t and Ogun doesn’t know.”

  “Where was Ogun, when Ramirez was holding the bridge?”

  “Sabin says he wasn’t on the bridge at any time during the exchange, that he was handling the refueling. She said Ramirez wouldn’t leave the bridge. Shift was held and held. Sabin was third on call, but Ogun himself never got the handoff until after we moved ship. We just arrived, fueled, and left. All under Ramirez. So the last few days, before you got here, when we had Tillington occupying Central shift and shift and refusing to budge, it triggered things. It triggered things, and Sabin began to talk about that time. She’d been awake and trying to get contact with Ramirez during the refueling. She dropped that bit on me, when we were dealing with Tillington’s holdout. She was mad as hell at Tillington. But not really Tillington. I’m breaching a confidence. But she didn’t swear me to secrecy. There’s still old heat there.”

  “Could the kyo ship have been there still? Could Braddock have believed it had gone away and Ramirez have spotted it? Phoenix knew the kyo were here before the station became aware. It has better equipment than the stations. It was designed to search out planets and analyze solar systems from a distance. Right?”

  “Among other things, yes. And knowing what we know from our voyage—yes. It’s entirely possible.”

  “But that brings us back to that secrecy within the crew issue. If Phoenix spotted the kyo, more bridge crew would have known that.”

  “Not necessarily. Then, again, Kalmanov might have been the only one to know, and two can keep a secret.”

  Any distant signal, when no other human ship existed, when they’d already worried about pursuit, would have been reason for Phoenix command to panic.

  Again.

  The kyo had signaled with lights, and Phoenix had run. The kyo, rather than follow, had attacked Reunion and backed off. If they’d tried to contact the ship again, when the ship returned to Reunion, this time via com, and, once again, rather than respond, Phoenix had run.

  Overall, a suspicious and confusing signal, even to him, and he was human.

  There was no denying that when Phoenix returned, ten years later, and this time did respond in kind to that initial signal, the kyo had proven more than ready to talk rather than fight.

  Everything would be so much simpler to figure if both Reunion and Phoenix weren’t so dedicated to their own secrets and so obsessed with shifting blame.

  Jase was the only one to play straight with him, but Jase had been, what? Less than fifteen when Phoenix first encountered the kyo ship. Jase hadn’t been in a position to witness anything.

  Jase was another of Ramirez’ secrets. Jase was what they called one of Taylor’s Children . . . born from lab-held genes, in the ship’s storage. Born on Ramirez’ order—along with Yolanda Mercheson. They’d been born on Ramirez’ orders, and early in his time as senior captain, and taught, also on Ramirez’ orders, a heavy course of human languages, widely varied ones.

  While Ramirez was out hunting for another life-bearing world. Preparing to make contact with an alien species, or so they’d pieced together. And Jase was to be his conduit for contact.

  So they believed. Chances were, they’d never know for certain, since Ramirez had spilled one secret when he died, but taken others with him.

  And why in hell—if Ramirez simply wanted to contact an alien civilization—hadn’t he just come back to Alpha Station in the first place? Was he that determined to work out of Reunion?

  “I’m asking these things,” he said to Jase, “not because I doubt anything you’ve told me, but to get your take on Braddock’s story about Ramirez’ actions back at Reunion. Is he lying?”

  “I can’t tell.”

  “The food business. Is that a lie?”

  “First of all, they had supplies. Enough to survive long enough to effect repairs just as Braddock said they needed to do, and to get back in operation. Second, we could have taken what they had, added it to what we had, and even if they were way low, chances are we could have made it. It wouldn’t have been a happy voyage. We’d all have gotten a lot leaner. But we could have made it here. The ship was designed to carry colonists. That means feeding them on the voyage. Stored food? That’s for variety, not survival.”

  “Would the Reunioners be aware of that fact?”

  “Hard to say. They’re several generations removed from the original settlers, who might well have been briefed. The fact the station here was mothballed when we arrived, the fact that everything was shut down—you’ll recall we got the old machinery up and running in fairly short order, but we were never running wholly on that. Until we got the tanks functioning again, we were working solely on Phoenix’s own resources. We went on doing that, easily supplying our own people, while we contacted you and built a space program. Could we have prioritized differently—if we’d arrived here and found the station had been wrecked, even destroyed? Yes. We could have. It’s within our capabilities. Whether the stationers understood that at the time, whether they believe it now, I don’t know. Evidently not, if Ms. Williams believes the story. But we would not have boarded more people than we could feed—no more than this time, when we were completely surprised by the numbers. We were built, in the long ago, to be able to sustain huge numbers. Being conscious as we are of how fragile our species still is in space—we always maintain that capability. If the worst should happen here, if we can’t make peace with the kyo. Phoenix can still run. We’re not advertising that, but it can. And it will, if it comes to that. I tell you that in confidence, too.”

  Bren drew a long, deep breath. And was absolutely sure Jase Graham, whatever else, was telling him as much truth as he knew, regulations and rules aside. He’d bet lives on it in the past. He bet them now.

  “The ship’s run away twice already, and abandoned one manned station,” he said. “If it should run a third time, that certainly wouldn’t say anything good to the kyo.”

  “It’s not going to run. You’re going to get us out of this.”

  “Thanks. Thanks for the confidence.”

  “Trust us, too.”

  “I trust you like a brother. I somewhat trust Sabin and I have a notion what Ogun wants. I don’t know Riggins.”

  “Ogun’s man, entirely. Trained under Ogun. He’ll stand by Ogun, at very least.”

  Split. Still. Right down the middle of the Captains’ Council. And Riggins was out there in charge of the ship, which had weapons—not near what the kyo had. But tools that could be weapons.

  “I’m disposed right now to make Ogun very unhappy,” Bren
said. “He wants Braddock turned over. And I have a strong feeling I should keep Braddock and his aides and Ms. Williams where I can reach them. They’re the only command-level witnesses to the attacks on Reunion.”

  Jase smiled grimly. “Then Ogun will have to live with it, won’t he? I’ll give you another for free: If the kyo demand Braddock’s hide, once the truth comes out, or if Prakuyo just wants payback . . . if it’s between him and the rest us, give him to them. None of the captains will complain.”

  “We’ll hope it doesn’t come to that. A lot depends on how much I can get out of Braddock, when I talk to him. I want to know what, if anything, the station did to trigger that first attack. Ms. Williams claims that the second time, the kyo ship hit something. A service-bot is the popular story. Implying a misunderstanding could have triggered an attack.”

  Jase snorted. “Starships don’t ‘blunder into things.’ Besides, the kyo themselves indicated they sent a slow-moving manned probe, that a fast-moving something from the station struck and exploded the probe. We know that at least one of the passengers, Prakuyo, escaped, only to be held hostage for the next six years.”

  That little animated sequence, part of the first real communication with the kyo, was only one of the questions he hoped the upcoming meetings with the kyo would clarify.

  “Might some people have seen that initial explosion and that’s the story that’s grown up around the situation?”

  “I think it a lot more likely that Braddock himself created the story to cover the fact that he fired first.”

  “My thoughts trend in that direction as well,” Bren said. “I’ll be curious to hear Braddock’s story directly from him. The one thing I’m afraid we simply can’t answer is whether Ramirez spooked out of Reunion mid-negotiations with the suspicion of a kyo ship on the horizon—or whether he made the cold-blooded decision to leave the instant the ship was refueled. To get out while the crew was unaware there were survivors, and maybe to come back once he had another base secure for the Reunioners to jump to. Maybe he read Braddock the same as you read him, and figured the promise of a new kingdom would get him to abandon the old. That plan relied on this station still being alive. Instead, it took ten years to get it operational, and not solely in human hands. And all the while Ramirez knew what he’d done. And when he died, the situation back at Reunion was his dying statement.”

  “Confession or warning, it was a hell of a thing to keep from us all these years.”

  More than a little bitterness colored Jase’s tone. Fully justified, in Bren’s opinion. But there was still something missing in the Braddock equation. Something very important. Blind ambition, the need for power, didn’t wholly explain Braddock’s reluctance to board. Given the conditions he claimed, it wasn’t, bottom line, reasonable.

  “Tell me this,” he said to Jase. “And I ask because I need to understand. Why do you think Ogun’s so very hot to bring Braddock up for trial? What does he possibly hope to gain by it? Is it that important to the crew? Does he want to stir all that up again?”

  “Important to Ogun personally, maybe,” Jase said. “I don’t know. I don’t know about the value to the crew, except as a demonstration of some sort of justice. I think Ogun’s carrying a lot of anger about what happened—on Ramirez’ behalf—or anger against Ramirez, I don’t know. He was Ramirez’ direct alternate, the way I’m Sabin’s. He’s the one person Ramirez might have taken into confidence. Or not. My personal suspicion is—Ramirez didn’t. And Ogun had to find out with the rest of us what Ramirez had done. Ogun didn’t want Sabin to go back there. But he didn’t try all out to stop it, either. Maybe guilt. Maybe just wanting some reasonable explanation for why Ramirez betrayed him on such a scale. Maybe he just wants the truth out of Braddock, and wants to extract it himself, never mind Braddock couldn’t possibly tell him what Ramirez was thinking.”

  “You think he’s looking for a scapegoat?”

  “In a word . . . yes. I’m personally not that anxious to see it happen. I don’t think it’ll help anybody. We need to deal with the situation that exists right now, not find someone to blame for the past.”

  “Granted. Still, I want to know the past mistakes: what happened, not necessarily why. I don’t want to repeat those mistakes. I’m going in to talk to the kyo and I’m hour by hour finding out things that disturb what I thought I knew about what happened back then. I have to know: did Phoenix get anything off that station I don’t know about?”

  “No. And Sabin and I have personally had our hands on every file we did pull—if there was anything greatly surprising, I didn’t spot it. The team blew up everything they couldn’t lift. I wish we did have something on the kyo, on Ramirez, on Prakuyo’s time as a hostage, beyond what we know and beyond what I’ve told you. We don’t.”

  “If you think of anything, if anything occurs to you, if someone suddenly recalls something someone said ten years ago, I want to hear it. Immediately.”

  A short silence, then:

  “Williams disturbed you. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone do that. Not even remotely.”

  “I don’t trust her. I don’t think her connection to Braddock’s operation is slight, and I find Braddock’s former aide just happening to have an apartment near the section doors to be highly suspect. I read people fairly well. She’s tough and she’s smart, and when somebody I don’t trust scrambles truth and untruth with some skill about it, I do get uneasy. The one pretense she’s not that good at—is caring. She’s like a mirror. She reflects the person she’s talking to. Until I talked about her daughter, she didn’t show any concern. I think she’s taken reasonable actions to protect herself and protecting Irene was a byproduct. I don’t think having her daughter involved with the aiji’s household necessarily makes Ms. Williams our friend, and I think she’d use that association in a heartbeat to further her own position—I think perhaps she did use it to further her position in Braddock’s entourage. But then—I don’t always understand ship folk.”

  “She’s not ship-folk,” Jase said. “She’s a generation of stationer you’ve never met, born to a set of rules you’ve never lived by. I find those rules difficult to understand at times myself. Rules are rules, no logic need be applied. The rules exist to control the station, to keep the machine running. Ship-folk, stationers, like atevi—we’re born to a loyalty. Unlike atevi, there’s nothing biological holding us there, only a conviction drilled into us from the time we’re born, and there’s no recourse if it falters. Shatter it and you shatter us. We are analytical people, but we don’t ask questions that might disturb the people who make the decisions.”

  “You don’t reflect like a mirror. You don’t put on emotion on set cues. Your loyalty isn’t blind.”

  “Mine? You mean me, personally?”

  Bren nodded.

  “You’d know that better than I, I suppose. But no. Certainly not consciously.”

  “And I can’t claim I’ve never seen her type before, if I’m reading her correctly. Irene didn’t want to go home, did you know that? She ran back to me, last thing before boarding, begging me to get her back.”

  “Was that what she asked? She wouldn’t tell the boys.”

  “She’s not her mother. I think she’s fought harder than we can imagine not to be her mother. And if I can smooth her path to her own set of rules, I will.”

  “Turning some Reunioners into Mospheirans may only take a generation. Making Reunioner admin into Mospheirans may be a wholly different matter. And it won’t be just Braddock and his lot who will resist.”

  “Damn.” Bren closed his eyes, trying to shut down the analysis of yet another problem. “I have to detach, Jase. I have to stop thinking about it. Except as it produces information relevant to the kyo’s perceptions of our collective actions. Except as it affects their intentions now.”

  “Of course you do. —Let it go, Bren. I’ll keep the Captains’ Council happy. I don’t know how, but a short recitation of Don’t disturb Bren Cameron right now may be reasonab
ly effective. Stay away from Braddock. Don’t engage with him.”

  “I have to.”

  “You don’t know the technicals that can sift truth from untruth. Give me access. Give me the questions you’d ask him. I’m sure Ogun and Sabin can amplify them. I can judge the technicals he can throw out, and if I can’t, they can. And I agree, I promise: he stays continually in atevi hands, until you say otherwise.”

  “Best offer I’ve had, I suppose.”

  “I’ll relay your assessment of Williams, by your leave. There may be more questions for her, as well.”

  “I’ll clear you with Geigi, and with atevi security. You might debrief also with the Guild Observers. Your ability to explain to them would take another load off my mind.” He’d understood as much as he needed to, regarding the kids, who were underfoot, and the rest of human politics, which was going to be Gin’s job, not his. “You might talk to Williams for a start, go in dressed atevi-style, court dress, the whole business.”

  “She’ll recognize me.”

  “I don’t doubt. But if you speak to her in that capacity, she might see you as different than other ship-humans, and say things she might not say otherwise.”

  “She might,” Jase said. “She might be a little confused as to what I am, and where the relationships run, considering where she is. Which is only to the good. I’ll consult. But you leave that to me for now, friend.”

  That word. That uniquely human word Jase used consciously, by choice. Our relationship. Lateral, not hierarchical, nor part of any hierarchy.

  He wasn’t used to that. He’d become less and less certain how he could relate to it. Trust me to make decisions, Jase meant. Trust those decisions.

  He nodded. “Appreciated. I do trust you.”

  “Sabin asks how ready you are for this.”

  “On one level, as ready as I can be. On another, I don’t know enough, haven’t thought enough, haven’t prepared enough. But some things I’m only going to get when I actually have to deal with our visitors.”