Foreigner

by C. J. Cherryh

  Claim man’chi to Ilisidi: they’d read his actions that way—they could, at least, if he lied convincingly.

  They hauled him into the next building, and Cenedi and Ilisidi were behind him, held at gunpoint, shoved up against the wall, while they said someone’s neck was broken—the man Cenedi had kicked, Bren thought dazedly, and tried to make eye contact with Ilisidi, staring at her in a way atevi thought rude.

  She looked straight at him. Gave a tightening of her mouth he didn’t immediately read, but maybe she caught his offer—

  Someone grabbed him by the shirt and spun him around and back against the furniture—red-and-blue, it was. A blow exploded across his face, his sight went out, he wasn’t standing under his own power, and he heard Cenedi calmly advising the man humans were fragile and if he hit him like that again he’d kill him.

  Nice, he thought. Thanks, Cenedi. You talk to him. Son of a bitch. Tears gathered in his eyes. Dripped. His nose ran, he wasn’t sure with what. The room was a blur when they jerked him upright and somebody held his head up by a fist in his hair.

  “Is this yours?” red-and-blue asked, and he made out a tan something on the table where red-and-blue was pointing.

  His heart gave a double beat. The computer. The bag beside it on the table.

  They had it on recharge, the wire strung across the table.

  “Mine,” he said.

  “We want the access.”

  He tasted blood, felt something running down his chin that swallowing didn’t stop. Lip was cut.

  “Tell us the access code,” red-and-blue said, and gave a jerk on his shirt.

  His brain started functioning, then. He knew he wasn’t going to get his hands on the computer. Had to make them axe the system themselves. Had to remember the axe codes. Make them want the answer, make them believe it was all-important to them.

  “Access code!” red-and-blue yelled into his face.

  Oh, God, he didn’t like this part of the plan.

  “Fuck off,” he said.

  They didn’t know him. Set himself right on their level with that answer, he did—he had barely time to think that before red-and-blue hit him across the face.

  Blind and deaf for a moment. Not feeling much. Except they still had hold of him, and voices were shouting, and red-and-blue was giving orders about hanging him up. He didn’t entirely follow it, until somebody grabbed his coat by the collar and ripped it and the shirt off him. Somebody else grabbed his hands in front of him and tied them with a stiff leather belt.

  He figured it wasn’t good, then. It might be time he should start talking, only they might not believe him. He stood there while they got a piece of electrical cable and flung it over the pipes that ran across the ceiling, using it for a rope. They ran the end through his joined arms and jerked them abruptly over his head.

  The shoulder shot fire. He screamed. Couldn’t get his breath.

  A belt caught him in the ribs. Once, twice, three times, with all the force of an atevi arm. He couldn’t get his feet under him, couldn’t get a breath, couldn’t organize a thought.

  “Access code,” red-and-blue said.

  He couldn’t talk. Couldn’t get the wind. There was pain, and his mind went white-out.

  “You’ll kill him!” someone screamed. Lungs wouldn’t work. He was going out.

  An arm caught him around the ribs. Hauled him up, took his weight off the arms.

  “Access,” the voice said. He fought to get a breath.

  “Give it to him again,” someone said, and his mind whited out with panic. He was still gasping for air when they let him swing, and somebody was shouting, screaming that he couldn’t breathe.

  Arm caught him again. Wood scraped, chair hit the floor. Something else did. Squeezed him hard around the chest and eased up. He got a breath.

  Who gave you the gun, nand’ paidhi?

  Say it was Tabini.

  “Access,” the relentless voice said.

  He fought for air against the arm crushing his chest. The shoulder was a dull, bone-deep pain. He didn’t remember what they wanted. “No,” he said, universal answer. No to everything.

  They shoved him off and hit him while he swung free, two and three times. He convulsed, tore the shoulder, couldn’t stop it, couldn’t breathe.

  “Access,” someone said, and someone held him so air could get to his lungs, while the shoulder grated and sent pain through his ribs and through his gut.

  The gun, he thought. Shouldn’t have had it.

  “Access,” the man said. And hit him in the face. A hand came under his chin, then, and an atevi face wavered in his swimming vision. “Give me the access code.”

  “Access,” he repeated stupidly. Couldn’t think where he was. Couldn’t think if this was the one he was going to answer or the one he wasn’t.

  Second blow across the face.

  “The code, paidhi!”

  “Code …” Please, God, the code. He was going to be sick with the pain. He couldn’t think how to explain to a fool. “At the prompt …”

  “The prompt’s up,” the voice said. “Now what?”

  “Type …” He remembered the real access. Kept seeing white when he shut his eyes, and if he drifted off into that blizzard they’d go on hitting him. “Code …” The code for meddlers. For thieves. “Input date.”

  “Which?”

  “Today’s.” Fool. He heard the rattle of the keyboard. Red-and-blue was still with him, someone else holding his head up, by a fist in his hair.

  “It says ‘Time,”’ someone said.

  “Don’t. Don’t give it. Type numeric keys … 1024.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s the code, dammit!”

  Red-and-blue looked away. “Do it.”

  Keys rattled.

  “What have you got?” red-and-blue asked.

  “The prompt’s back again.”

  “Is that it?” red-and-blue asked.

  “You’re in,” he said, and just breathed, listening to the keys, the operator, skillful typist, at least, querying the computer.

  Which was going to lie, now. The overlay was engaged. It would lie about its memory, its file names, its configuration … it’d tell anyone who asked that things existed, tell you their file sizes and then bring up various machine code and gibberish, that said, to a computer expert, that the files did exist, protected under separate passcodes.

  The level of their questions said it would get him out of Wigairiin. Red-and-blue was out of his depth.

  “What’s this garbage?” red-and-blue demanded, and Bren caught a breath, eyes shut, and asked, in crazed delight:

  “Strange symbols?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re into addressing. What did you do to it?”

  They hit him again.

  “I asked the damned file names!”

  “Human language.”

  Long silence, then. He didn’t like the silence. Red-and-blue was a fool. A fool might do something else foolish, like beat him to death trying to learn computer programming. He hung there, fighting for his breaths, trying to get his feet under him, while red-and-blue thought about his options.

  “We’ve got what we need,” red-and-blue said. “Let’s pack them up. Take them down to Negiran.”

  Rebel city. Provincial capital. Rebel territory. It was the answer he wanted. He was going somewhere, out of the cold and the mud and the rain, where he could deal with someone of more intelligence, somebody of ambition, somebody with strings the paidhi might figure how to pull, on the paidhi’s own agenda …

  “Bring them, too?”

  He wasn’t sure who they meant. He turned his head while they were getting him loose from the pipes, and saw Cenedi’s bloodied face. Cenedi didn’t have any expression. Ilisidi didn’t.

  Mad, he said to himself. He hoped Cenedi didn’t try any heroics at this point. He hoped they’d just tie Cenedi up and keep him alive until he could do something—had to think of a way to keep C
enedi alive, like ask for Ilisidi.

  Make them want Ilisidi’s cooperation. She’d been one of theirs. Betrayed them. But atevi didn’t take that so personally, from aijiin.

  He couldn’t walk at first. He yelled when they grabbed the bad arm, and somebody hit him in the head, but a more reasonable voice grabbed him, said his arm was broken, he could just walk if he wanted to.

  “I’ll walk,” he said, and tried to, not steadily, held by the good arm. He tried to keep his feet under him. He heard red-and-blue talking to his pocket-com as they went out the door into the cold wind and the sunlight.

  He heard the jet engines start up. He looked at the plane sitting on the runway, kicking up dust from its exhaust, and tried to look back to be sure Cenedi and Ilisidi were still with them, but the man holding his arm jerked him back into step and bid fair to break that arm, too.

  Long walk, in the wind and the cold. Forever, until the ramp was in front of them, the jet engines at the tail screaming into their ears and kicking up an icy wind against his bare skin. The man holding him let go his arm and he climbed, holding the thin metal handrail with his good hand, a man in front of him, others behind.

  He almost fainted on the steps. He entered the sheltered, shadowed interior, and somebody caught his right arm, pulled him aside to clear the doorway. There were seats, empty, men standing back to let them board—Cenedi helped Ilisidi up the steps, and the other men came up after Cenedi.

  A jerk on his arm spun him away. He hit a seat and missed sitting in it, trying to recover himself from the moveable seat-arm as a fight broke out in the doorway, flesh meeting bone, and blood spattering all around him. He turned all the way over on the seat arm, saw Banichi standing by the door with a metal pipe in his hand.

  The fight was over, that fast. Men were dead or half-dead. Ilisidi and Cenedi were on their feet, Jago and three men of their own company were in the exit aisle, and another was standing up at the cockpit, with a gun.

  “Nand’ paidhi,” Banichi gasped, and sketched a bow. “Nand’ dowager. Have a seat. Cenedi, up front.”

  Bren caught a breath and slumped, bloody as he was, into the airplane seat, with Banichi and Cenedi in eye-to-eye confrontation and everyone on the plane but him and Jago in Ilisidi’s man’chi.

  Ilisidi laid a hand on Cenedi’s arm. “We’ll go with them,” the dowager said.

  Cenedi sketched a bow, then, and helped the aiji-dowager to a seat, picking his way and hers over bodies the younger men were dragging out of the way.

  “Don’t anybody step on my computer,” Bren said, holding his side. “There’s a bag somewhere … don’t step on it.”

  “Find the paidhi’s bag,” Banichi told the men, and one of the men said, in perfect solemnity, “Nadi Banichi, there’s fourteen aboard. We’re supposed to be ten and two crew—”

  “Up to ten and crew,” somebody else called out, and a third man, “Dead ones don’t count!”

  On Mospheira, they’d be crazy.

  “So how many are dead?” the argument went, and Cenedi shouted from up front, “The pilot’s leaving! He’s from Wigairiin, he wants to see to the household.”

  “That’s one,” a man said.

  “Let that one go,” Bren said hoarsely, with the back of his hand toward the one who’d said his arm was broken, the only grace they’d done him. They were tying up the living, stacking up the dead in the aisle. But Banichi said throw out a dead one instead.

  So they dragged red-and-blue to the door and tossed him, and the live one, the one who’d resigned as their pilot, scrambled after him.

  Banichi hit the door switch. The door started up. The engines whined louder, the brake still on.

  Bren shut his eyes, remembering that height Ilisidi had said rose beside the runway. That snipers could stop a landing.

  They could stop a takeoff, then, too.

  The door had shut. Engine-sound built and built. Cenedi let off the brakes and gunned it down the runway.

  Banichi dropped into the seat next the window, splinted leg stiff. Bren gripped his seat arm, fit to rip the fabric, as rock whipped past the windows on one side, buildings on the other. Then blue-white sky on the left, still rock on the right.

  Sky on both sides, then, and the wheels coming up.

  “Refuel, probably at Mogaru, then fly on to Shejidan,” Banichi said.

  Then, then, he believed it.

  XVI

  He hadn’t thought of Barb when he’d thought he was dying, and that was the bitter truth. Barb, in his mind and in his feelings, went off and on like a light switch …

  No, off was damned easy. On took a fantasy he flogged to desperate, dutiful life whenever the atevi world closed in on him or whenever he knew he was going back to Mospheira for a few days’ vacation.

  ‘Seeing Barb’ was an excuse to keep his family at arms’ length.

  ‘Seeing Barb,’ was the lie he told his mother when he just wanted to get up on to the mountain where his family wasn’t, and Barb wasn’t.

  That was the truth, though he’d never added it up.

  That was his life, his whole humanly-speaking emotional life, such of it as wasn’t connected to his work, to Tabini and to the intellectual exercise of equivalencies, numbers, and tank baffles. He’d known, once, what to do and feel around human beings.

  Only lately—he just wanted the mountain and the wind and the snow.

  Lately he’d been happy with atevi, and successful with Tabini, and all of it had been a house of cards. The things he’d thought had made him the most successful of the paidhiin had blinded him to all the dangers. The people he’d thought he trusted …

  Something rough and wet attacked his face, a strong hand tilted his head back, something roared in his ears, familiar sound. Didn’t know what, until he opened his eyes on blood-stained white and felt the seat arm under his right hand.

  The bloody towel went away. Jago’s dark face hovered over him. The engine drone kept going.

  “Bren-ji,” Jago said, and mopped at a spot under his nose. Jago made a face. “Cenedi calls you immensely brave. And very stupid.”

  “Saved his damn—” Wasn’t a nice word in Ragi. He looked beside him, saw Banichi wasn’t there. “Skin.”

  “Cenedi knows, nadi-ji.” Another few blots at his face, which fairly well prevented conversation. Then Jago hung the towel over the seat-back ahead of him, on the other side of the exit aisle, and sat down on his arm rest.

  “You were mad at me,” he said.

  “No,” Jago said, in Jago-fashion.

  “God.”

  “What is ‘God?”’ Jago asked.

  Sometimes, with Jago, one didn’t even know where to begin.

  “So you’re not mad at me.”

  “Bren-ji, you were being a fool. I would have gone with you. You would have been all right.”

  “Banichi couldn’t!”

  “True,” Jago said.

  Anger. Confusion. Frustration, or pain. He wasn’t sure what got the better of him.

  Jago reached out and wiped his cheek with her fingers. Business-like. Saner than he was.

  “Tears,” he said.

  “What’s ‘tears’?”

  “God.”

  “‘God’ is ‘tears’?”

  He had to laugh. And wiped his own eyes, with the heel of the hand that worked. “Among other elusive concepts, Jago-ji.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Sometimes I think I’ve failed. I don’t even know. I’m supposed to understand you. And most of the time I don’t know, nadi Jago. Is that failure?”

  Jago blinked, that was all for a moment. Then:

  “No.”

  “I can’t make you understand me. How can I make others?”

  “But I do understand, nadi Bren.”

  “What do you understand?” He was suddenly, irrationally desperate, and the jet was carrying him where he had no control, with a cargo of dead and wounded.

  “That there is great good will in you, nad
i Bren.” Jago reached out and wiped his face with her fingers, brushed back his hair. “Banichi and I won over ten others to go with you. All would have gone. —Are you all right, nadi Bren?”

  His eyes filled. He couldn’t help it. Jago wiped his face repeatedly.

  “I’m fine. Where’s my computer, Jago? Have you got it?”

  “Yes,” Jago said. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  “I need a communications patch. I’ve got the cord, if they brought my whole kit.”

  “For what, Bren-ji?”

  “To talk to Mospheira,” he said, all at once fearing Jago and Banichi might not have the authority. “For Tabini, nadi. Please.”

  “I’ll speak to Banichi,” she said.

  They’d charged the computer for him. The bastards had done that much of a favor to the world at large. Jago had gotten him a blanket, so he wasn’t freezing. They’d passed the border and the two prisoners at the rear of the plane were in the restroom together with the door wedged shut, the electrical fuse pulled, and the guns of two of Ilisidi’s highly motivated guards trained on the door. Everybody declared they could wait until Moghara Airport.

  Reboot, mode 3, m-for-mask, then depress, mode-4, simultaneously, SAFE.

  Fine, easy, if the left hand worked. He managed it with the right.

  The prompt came up, with, in Mosphei’: Input date.

  He typed, instead, in Mosphei’: To be or not to be.

  System came up.

  He let go a long breath and started typing, five-fingered, calling up files, getting access and communications codes for Mospheira’s network, pasting them in as hidden characters that would trigger response-exchanges between his computer and the Mospheira system.

  The rebels, if they’d gotten into system level, could have flown a plane right through Mospheira’s defense line.

  Could have brought down Mospheira’s whole network. Fouled up everything from the subway system to the earth station dish—unless Mospheira, being sane, had long since realized he was in trouble and changed those codes.