Foreigner

by C. J. Cherryh

  Hence the Treaty which meant the creation of the paidhi’s office, and the orderly surrender of human technology to the atevi Western Association, at a rate—neither Tabini’s ancestor nor the first paidhi had been fools—that would maintain the atevi economy and the relative power of the aijiin of various Associations in the existing balance.

  Meaning, all of the rivals, the humans and the technology securely in the hands of Tabini’s ancestor. The War had stopped. … Mospheira’s atevi had resettled on the Ragi aiji’s coastal estate-lands, richer than their own fields by far, a sacrifice of vast wealth for the Ragi aiji, but a wise, wise maneuver that secured the peace—and every damned thing the Mospheira atevi and the Ragi atevi wanted.

  Humans weren’t under this sun by choice. And (the constant and unmentioned truth) humans to this day didn’t deal with the atevi by choice or at advantage. Humans had lost the War: few in numbers, stranded, their station soon in decay, their numbers dwindling above and below … descent to the planet was their final, desperate choice.

  Impossible to conceal their foreignness, impossible to trust a species that couldn’t translate friendship, impossible to admit what humans really wanted out of the agreement, because atevi in general didn’t—that foreign word—trust people foolish enough to land without a by-your-leave and possessing secrets they hadn’t yet turned over.

  The paidhi didn’t tell everything he knew—but he was treaty-bound to the slow surrender of everything humans owned, to pay the rent on Mospheira—and to empower the only human-friendly government on the planet to keep humanity’s most implacable enemies under his thumb. The aiji of that day had wanted high-powered guns—the atevi had had muzzle-loading rifles and cumbersome cannon, and took to high-velocity bullets with—terrible turn of speech—an absolute vengeance.

  Fastest piece of talking a paidhi had ever done, pressed with the aiji’s request for designs that would put a terrifying arsenal in Ragi hands, Bretano had pointed out that such weapons would surely reach Ragi rivals as well, and that the Ragi already had the upper hand. Did they want to tip the balance?

  Pressed for advanced industrial techniques, Bretano had objected the ecological cost to the planet, and the whole committee behind him, and his successors, had begun the slow, centuries-long business of steering atevi science steadily into ecological awareness—

  And toward material production resources that would serve human needs.

  The one tactic, the ecological philosophy … hoped to get war out of the atevi mindset, to build experimental rockets instead of missiles, rails instead of cannon, to consider what happened to a river downstream when a little garbage went in upstream, to consider what happened when toxic chemicals blew through forests or poisons got into the groundwater—thank God, the atevi had taken to the idea, which had touched some cultural bent already in the Ragi mentality, at least. It had locked onto successive generations so firmly that little children in this half-century learned rhymes about clean rivers—while human tacticians on Mospheira—safe on Mospheira, unlike the paidhi—deliberated what industry they dared promote, and what humans needed the atevi to develop in order for humans to get launch facilities and the vehicle they needed.

  The unspoken, two hundred-year-agenda, the one every human knew and the paidhi walked about scared out of his mind because he knew—because even if atevi guessed by now that getting themselves a space program meant developing materials as useful to humans as to themselves, even if he could sit in the space council meetings and surmise that every atevi in the room knew what they developed had that potential, it was a question he never brought up, not with them, not with atevi he knew the best—because it was one of those impenetrable thickets in atevi mindset, how they’d take the knowledge if it became impossible to ignore it. He’d certainly no idea at all how it would play outside Tabini’s court, out across the country—when popular novels still cast human villains, and they appeared in shadow, in nebai, in the machimi plays—nebai, because they couldn’t get human actors. …

  Humans were the monsters in the closet, the creatures under the bed … in a culture constantly on its guard against real dangers from real assassins, in a culture where children learned from television a paranoid fear of strangers.

  What were humans really up to on Mospheira? What dark technological secrets was Tabini-aiji keeping for himself? What was in the telemetry that flowed between the station in space and the island an hour by air off Tabini’s shores?

  And why did some loon want to kill the paidhi?

  He had a space council meeting tomorrow—nothing he considered controversial, a small paper with technical information the council had asked and he’d translated out of the library on Mospheira.

  No controversy in that. None in the satellite launch upcoming, either. Communications weren’t controversial. Weather forecast wasn’t controversial.

  There was the finance question, whether to add or subtract a million from the appropriation to make the unmanned launch budget add up to an auspicious number—but a million didn’t seem, against six billion already committed to the program, to be a critical or acerbic issue, over which assassins would swarm to his bedroom.

  There was, occasionally smoldering, the whole, sensitive manned versus unmanned debate—whether atevi should attempt to recover the human space station, which was in increasing disrepair, with its tanks empty now, in its slow drift out of stable orbit.

  The human policy wasn’t to scare anyone by bringing up the remote possibility of infall in a populated area. Officially, statistically, the station debris would come down in the vast open oceans, in, oh, another five hundred years, give or take a solar storm or so—he couldn’t personally swear to any of it, since astrophysics wasn’t his forte, but the experts said that was what he should say, and he’d said it.

  He’d advanced his modest paper on the topic of mission goals at his inaugural meeting with the space council, proposing the far from astonishing concept that lifting metal to orbit was expensive, and that letting what was already orbiting burn up was not economical, and that they should do something with the dead, abandoned station before they sank large resources into unmanned missions.

  Manned space advocates of course agreed immediately, with celebration. Astronomers and certain anti-human lobbies disagreed passionately. Which put the question into the background, while council members consulted numerologists on truly important issues such as (the currently raging question) whether the launch dates were auspicious or not, and how many dates it was auspicious to approve in reserve—which got into another debate between several competing (and ethnically significant) schools of numerology, on whether the current date should be in the calculation or whether one counted the birthdate of the whole program or of the project or of the date the launch table was devised.

  Never mind the debate over whether the fuel chamber baffle in the heavy lift booster could be four-partitioned without affecting the carefully chosen harmonious numbers of the tank design.

  The truly dangerous issues that he could think of, lying here flat on his back, waiting for assassins, were all the quiet ones—the utilization of the station as an atevi mission goal was one item of some controversy he’d strenuously advocated, now that he began to add up the supporters, some of them less reasonable, behind the genteel voices of the council.

  And always factor into any space debate the continual exchange of telemetry and instructions between Mospheira and the station, which had gone on for two hundred years and was still going.

  A certain radical element among atevi maintained there were weapons hidden aboard the abandoned station. The devoted lunatics of the radical fringe were convinced the station’s slow infall was no accident of physics, but a carefully calculated approach, perhaps in the hands of humans secretly left aboard, or instructions secretly relayed from Mospheira, now that they knew about computer controls, which would end with the station descending in a blazing course across the skies, ‘disturbing the ethers to disharmony and
violence,’ and creating hurricanes and tidal waves, as its weapons rained fire down on atevi civilization and placed atevi forever under human domination.

  Forgive them, Tabini was wont to say dryly. They also anticipate the moon to influence their financial ventures and the space launches to disturb the weather.

  Foreign aijiin from outside Tabini’s Association actually funded offices in Shejidan to analyze those telemetry transcripts on which Shejidan eavesdropped—the numerologists these foreign aijiin employed suspecting secret assignments of infelicitous codes, affecting the weather, or agriculture, or the fortunes of Tabini’s rivals … and one daren’t call such beliefs silly.

  Actually Tabini did call them exactly that, to his intimates, but in public he was very kabiu, very observant, and employed batteries of number-counters and geometricians of various persuasions to study every utterance and every bit of intercepted transmission, just as seriously—to refute what the conservatives came up with, to be sure.

  From time to time—it was worth a grin, even in the dark—Tabini would come to the paidhi and say, Transmit this. And he would phone Mospheira with a segment of code that, transmitted to the station, would be complete nonsense to the computers, so the technicians assured him—they just dropped it into some Remark string, and transmitted it solely for the benefit of the eavesdroppers, and that fixed that, as Barb would say. Numbers would then turn up in the transmission sequences that burst some doomsayer’s bubble before he could go public with his theory.

  That, God help them all, was the space program. And that was not worth a grin. That was every program they promoted. That was the operation of the council and the hasdrawad and the tashrid and the special interests that operated in the shadows—radical groups among those special interests, groups that called the Treaty of Mospheira a mistake, that called for those things the most radical humans—and God knew there were those—suspected as existing in extensive plans and Tabini dismissed as stupid, like another attack on Mospheira.

  Humans might have no illusion of welcome in the world—but there were certainly the serious and the non-serious threats. Serious, were the human-haters who focussed on the highway dispute as a human plot to keep the economy under Tabini’s thumb—which cut much too close to the truth neither the paidhi nor the aiji wanted in public awareness.

  There was, thank God, the moonbeam fringe—with a slippery grip on history, the laws of physics, and reality. The fringe went straight for the space program (one supposed because it was the highest and least conceivable technology) as the focus of all dire possibility, ideas ranging from the notion that rocket launches let the atmosphere leak out into the ether … to his personal favorite, the space station cruising at ground level causing hurricanes and blasting cities with death rays. Atevi could laugh at it. Humans could. Humor at the most outrageous hate-mongering did everyone good, and poked holes in assumptions that otherwise would lie unventilated.

  The fringe had done more good, in fact, for human-atevi understanding than all his speeches to the councils.

  But if you ever wanted a source from which a lunatic, unlicensed assassin could arise, it was possible that one of the fringe had quite, quite gone over the edge.

  Maybe the numbers had said, to one of the lunatics, one fine day, Go assassinate the paidhi and the atmosphere will stop leaking.

  Thus far … Tabini and his own predecessors at least juggled well. They’d dispensed technology at a rate that didn’t overwhelm the economy or the environment, they’d kept ethnic differences among atevi and political opinions among humans well to the rear of the decisionmaking process—with the Ragi atevi and the Western Association they led profiting hand over fist, all the while, of course, by reason of their proximity to and special relationship with Mospheira; and, oh, well aware what that relationship was worth, economically. Tabini had probably had far more than an inkling for years where human advice and human techonology was leading him.

  But Tabini’s association also enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world, was very fond of its comforts and its television. And Ragi planes didn’t crash into bridges any more.

  Somebody after Tabini’s hide was the likeliest scenario that kept bobbing up—a plausible scenario, in which the paidhi could remotely figure, if whoever was after Tabini, knowing how difficult a target Tabini was, would be content to take out Tabini’s contact with humans and make that relationship more difficult for a season.

  A new paidhi, a state of destabilization in which no paidhi was safe. Somebody might even be after a renegotiation of the Mospheira Treaty to spread out the benefits to other associations, which had been proposed, and which the Western Association had adamantly refused.

  In that case the paidhi-aiji might well become a critical flash-point. He got along with Tabini. He liked Tabini. Tabini didn’t reciprocate the liking part, of course—being atevi. But Tabini and he did get along with all too much levity and good humor, perhaps—as some might see it, like that business at the retreat at Taiben, far too cozy.

  Some might think it, even among the Ragi themselves, or among the outlying allies, each of whom, in the nebulous fashion of atevi associations, had at least one foot in other associations.

  Maybe the better, special relationship he thought he and Tabini had—had brought this on, transgressing some boundary too rapidly, too inexpertly, in blind, too-confident enthusiasm.

  Frightening thought. Appalling thought. Succeed too well and fail completely?

  If Tabini’s government went unstable, and the network of atevi Associations shifted its center of gravity, say, eastward and deeply inland, where there was never that easy familiarity with humans, where ethnic and historical differences between Ragi and Nisebi and Meduriin could find only humans more different and more suspect than they found each other.

  Atevi had been, with the exception of the tribals in the remotest hinterlands and the islands in the Edi Archipelago, a global civilization, at a stage when humans hadn’t been. Atevi explorers had gone out in wooden ships, done all those things that humans had, by the records, done on lost Earth—except that atevi hadn’t found a New World, they’d found the Edi, and damned little else but a volcanic, troubled chain of islands, not advanced, not culturally up to the double assault of the explorers from the East and the explorers from the West, who’d immediately laid claim to everything in sight and still—still, for reasons the ethnographers were still arguing—the same explorers met each other in those foreign isles and found enough in common and enough difficult about the intervening geography—the continental divide in the principal continent topped 30,000 feet—to trade not overland, but by sea routes that largely, after the advent of full-rigged ships, excluded the Isles where the two principal branches of atevi had met.

  Atevi had, historically, cooperated together damned well, compared to humans. Hence the difficulty of getting atevi to comprehend correctly that humans had been very willing to be let alone on Mospheira, and not included in an association—an attitude which the atevi turned out not to trust. Shejidan had thrown itself into the breach, sacrificed its fear of outsiders for the foreign concept of ‘treaty,’ which it marginally understood as the sought-after association with humans. Which was one of the most critical conceptual breakthroughs the first paidhi had made.

  To this day Tabini professed not to comprehend the human word ‘treaty,’ or the word ‘border,’ which he denied had real validity even among humans. An artificial concept, Tabini called it. A human delusion. People belonged to many associations. Boundaries might exist as an arbitrary approximate line defining provinces—but they were meaningless to individuals whose houses or kinships might lie both sides of the line.

  He lay in the dark, watching the moonlit curtains begin to blow in a generous cool breeze—the weather had greatly moderated since the front had come through last night. He hadn’t been in the garden this afternoon to enjoy it. Someone could shoot him from the rooftop, Jago said. He should stay out of the garden. He shouldn’
t go here, he shouldn’t go there, he shouldn’t walk through crowds.

  Damned if Banichi had forgotten his mail. Not Banichi. Things regarding the person Banichi was watching just weren’t trivial enough to Banichi that they completely left his mind. This was a man that, in the human expression, dotted his i’s and crossed his t’s.

  Second frightening thought.

  Why would Banichi steal his mail—except to rob him of information like ads for toothpaste, video tapes, and ski vacations on Mt. Allan Thomas?

  And if it weren’t Banichi that had gotten it, why would Banichi lie to him? To protect a thief who stole advertising?

  Stupid thought. Probably Banichi hadn’t lied at all, probably Banichi was just busy and he was, ever since the nightmare flash of that shadow across the curtain last night, suffering from jangled nerves and an overactive imagination.

  He lay there, imagining sounds in the garden, smelling the perfume of the blooms outside the door, wondering what it sounded like when someone hit the wire and fried, and what he should do about the situation he was working on—

  Or what the odds were that he could get Deana Hanks out of the Mospheira office to take up temporary duty in the aiji’s household, for, say, a month or so vacation—God, just time to see Barb, go diving on the coast, take reasonable chances with a hostile environment instead of a pricklish atevi court.

  Cowardice, that was. It was nothing to toss in Hanks’ lap—oh, by the way, Deana, someone’s trying to kill me, give it your best, just do what you can and I’ll be back when it blows over.

  He couldn’t escape that way. He didn’t know whether he should call his office and try to hint what was going on—he ran a high risk of injecting misinformation or misinterpretation into an already uneasy situation, if he did that. There were code phrases for trouble and for assassination—and maybe he ought to take the chance and let the office know that much.