Invader: Book Two of Foreigner

by C. J. Cherryh

  The very changes he’d taken office to moderate and conduct slowly and without damage were all let loose from Pandora’s fabled box, without review, without committee approval, without advice—just fling open the lid and stand back, maybe with one final choice of intervening to try to moderate the effects—

  But that choice, even to make it now, entailed human values, human decisions, human ethics; or, perhaps the wiser course—to stand back until atevi action made it clear what was likely to result from atevi values, atevi decisions, atevi ethics—and then decide again whether to interpose human wisdom, at least as the older of two species experiences, the one of the two species who’d been down the technological path far enough to see the flex and flux of their own cultural responses to the dawning of awareness of the universe. Human beings had surely had certain investments in their planetary boundaries, once upon a time. Humans had had to realize the sun was a star among other stars. The paidhi didn’t happen to know with any great accuracy how humans had reacted to that knowledge, but he’d a troubled suspicion it could have set certain human beliefs on end.

  Though that they couldn’t work the numbers out exactly wouldn’t have broken up associations, re-sorted personal loyalties, cast into doubt a way of looking at the universe—had it?

  For all he knew, the way atevi handled the universe was hardwired into atevi brains, and that was what he was playing games with.

  He didn’t want to think about that.

  He got up and wandered finally as far as the library, and took down delicate watercolored books of horticulture, one after the other, to find whether he knew the names.

  Of a book of water plants he was mostly ignorant. It was stupid, in the midst of such desperate events, to go back to his computer and enter words, but he was incapable of more esoteric operations.

  Saidin came in to ask whether the paidhi would care for supper in, and whether the paidhi’s personal staff would eat at the same time or at some later time.

  The paidhi didn’t know. The paidhi’s staff didn’t fill him in. He didn’t know whether he’d be here for supper or whether he’d be hauled off to confinement.

  But that wasn’t Saidin’s question.

  “I can only hope your surmise is more effective than mine,” he said. “Nand’ Saidin, I have not been a regular or prompt guest. I apologize for myself and my staff.”

  “Nandi,” Saidin said with a bow, “you are no trouble. Do you admire water gardens?”

  The book. Of course. “I find the book beautifully drawn.”

  “I think so. Have you seen the Terraces?”

  “On the Saisuran?” The book held a major number of plates of water plants, delicately rendered in pastel tones. “No, I fear the paidhi has very few chances. Malguri was an unusual excursion.”

  “If you have the chance, nand’ paidhi, I recommend them. They’re quite near Isgrai’the. Which is very popular.”

  He was intrigued—by the idea of the famous water gardens, and the Preservation Reserve at Isgrai’the. By the notion he might someday have such a chance.

  But most of all he was intrigued by madam Saidin’s unprecedented personal conversation. The book, almost certainly a favorite. One was glad to discover a mutual, noncontroversial interest in a subject; a source of ordinary, mundane conversation.

  She’d felt the tension in the house and in the guest—and the protector of the house had followed her inquisitorial duty, perhaps; or just—counting that word of doings in the house had once found their way to Ilisidi—

  He was too damn critical. Too damn suspicious. Wilson’s fate beckoned: the man who never laughed, never smiled.

  “Nand’ Saidin, thank you. Thank you for recommending Saisuran. I’ll hope for it, that I will be able to see it. I’d like that. I truly would.”

  “One hopes for you, also, nand’ paidhi,” Saidin said, and left the room, with the paidhi wondering where that had come from, or what Saidin had really meant, what she’d heard from what source inside Tabini’s apartments—or whether he’d simply presented her a dejected picture, sitting there staring at the curtains, so morose that the provider of hospitality had simply done her duty for the lady who wanted her guest taken care of.

  He knew the mental maze he’d wandered into, wild swings between atevi and human feeling, making only half-translations of concepts in that strange doppelgänger language his brain began to contrive in his unprecedented back-and-forth translation, in his real-time listening to one language and rendering it into the other, no time for refinement, no time for precision—leaping desperately from slippery stone to slippery stone, to borrow the image of the book open on the footstool—the water flowers, the stones, half obscured in sun on water—

  A visitor would be very foolish to try that pictured crossing. He knew the treachery of it, from Mospheiran streams—which Saidin, in their crazed, divided world, couldn’t visit, either.

  There was a place like that once and long ago—a stream set well off the road most took up from a remembered highway, a dirt road he’d hiked up from the ranger station, stones over which water lapped in summertime—

  But if one went far, far from that pool, farther up, they’d said in a youngster’s hearing, a waterfall poured from high up the side of the mountain. One couldn’t hear anything but thundering water from the foot of that waterfall, one just stood there, feeling the mist, enveloped by blowing curtains of it—

  Wind-borne, the gray sky above him, and the wind racing off the height: the gale-force winds bent down the trees and swept down deluges on the young and very foolish hiker. He’d been soaked to the skin. He’d had to walk down toward that ranger station to keep from freezing.

  There were so, so many half-thought experiences that had brought him to what he was, where he was. He remembered walking long after he thought his knees couldn’t stop shaking. He’d known he’d been stupid. He’d known he could freeze to death—at least he’d known that people did, in the mountains; but twelve-year-old boys didn’t—he wouldn’t, he couldn’t, it didn’t happen to him.

  In fact it hadn’t. A ranger had come out looking for him on that trail and brought an insulated poncho. The ranger had said he was a stupid kid and he ought to know better.

  Yes, sir, he’d said meekly enough, and he’d known then that even if he might have made it, he’d come close to not making it, and he was aware hiking up there with no glance at the sky hadn’t been the smartest act of his life.

  But he’d never forgotten, either, the storm sweeping sheets of water off the top of the falls. He’d never forgotten being part of the water, the storm, the sound and the elements up there. He’d felt something he knew he’d never forget. He’d wondered on that shaky-kneed, aching way down if the ranger ever had.

  And by the time they’d gotten to the ranger station he’d begun to think, by reason of things the man said, that maybe the ranger had gone up there more than once, but stupid kids up from the tourist camp weren’t supposed to have that experience: stupid kids from the tourist camp were what the rangers were up there to protect the wildlife and the falls from. So he’d been embarrassed, then, and understood why the rangers were upset with him, and he’d said he was sorry.

  The rangers at the station had phoned his mother, fed him, got him warm, and he’d told the man who drove him down the mountain that he’d like maybe to be a ranger himself someday.

  And he’d said that he was sorry they’d had to go out looking for him.

  The ranger had confided in him he didn’t mind the hike up. That he’d hike up the trail in blizzards and icestorms himself to take photographs.

  Then for the rest of the trip the man had told him about what gear you really needed to survive up there, and how if he happened by when he was older, he should come up and see about the summer program the rangers had.

  In the way of such things, his mother hadn’t let him repeat his escapade. She’d chosen the north slopes of Mt. Allen Thomas the next season, probably to keep him from such hikes, and
he and Toby both had taken up skiing, to the further detriment of his knees, Toby’s elbow, and the integrity of their adolescent skulls.

  Saidin said—he should see this place. Atevi appreciated such sights. Atevi found themselves moved by such things. There was something, something, at least, that touched a spot in two species’ hearts, or minds, or whatever stimulus it took to take a deep breath and feel—whatever two species felt in such places that transcended—whatever two species found to fight about.

  He felt less abraded and confused, at least, in the memory-bath. He regretted lost chances—messages unsent: he wondered what Mospheira would think if he asked the international operators to patch him through to the ranger station above Mt. Allen Thomas Resort.

  He imagined what contortions the spies on both sides of the strait would go through trying to figure out that code. It all but tempted him.

  But he lived his life nowadays just hoping that things he remembered were intact, unchanged, still viable in a rapidly evolving world. He tried to reckon what the man’s age had been. He couldn’t remember the man’s name. The paidhi—with all his trained memory—couldn’t recall the man’s name.

  More, he was afraid to learn the man might have left, or died. He lived all his life somewhere else—afraid to know something he’d left, if he tried to access it, might have changed—or died.

  And that particular cowardice was his defense against all that could get to him.

  God, what a morass of reasoning. Sometimes—

  Sometimes he was such a construction of his own carefully constructed censorships and restraints he didn’t know whether there any longer was a creature named Bren Cameron, or whether what he chose to let bubble to the reflective surface of his past defined the modern man, and the rest of him was safely drowned under that shiny surface that swallowed childhood ambitions, childhood dreams, childhood so-called friends—about whom he didn’t like to think—

  Was that the origin of his capacity to turn off that human function and look for something else?

  Strip those pieces away and he guessed there wouldn’t be a whole man left. Break down the constructions he’d made of his memories and something essential went—that old business with the ranger station, that was a stone that held up other stones, and it would mean something calamitous to him if the man was dead, he supposed—that was why he instinctually tucked it close and wouldn’t change it, the way he wouldn’t change other things, not the hurts, not the flip down the snowy slope that had provided his first experience with mortality, and crutches, not slipping off a mossy stone on a summer hike on the mountain, either, and squishing back to camp in an experience that gave a portrait of the fabled Terraces textures and temperatures and value in his adult and harried mind.

  He didn’t know what damn good it did to accumulate more and more experiences like that as you lived, so that you could forget them all when you died—unless somehow what mattered was doing something with them: the older you got, the wiser you grew, the more power you got within your hands.

  Maybe that was what it meant. Doing something.

  Young, you ran the risks the way he’d gone up on that mountain; fresh from college you ran the risks you knew about because you had life to spare and nothing touched the truly fortunate; experienced in infighting and with more power to screw things up than you ever wanted—you sweated blood, and questioned every damn step of the way, foresaw/remembered the disasters, and kept on the track and kept sweating and trying to do your job only because you knew the young and the educated didn’t remotely know where they were going.

  The ranger might have his own reasons for climbing up there. But he’d gone up that night after a kid who might have made it on his own, and, who knew? Being a kid all the same: maybe if he’d made it on his own, he might have been the same cocksure disaster as Hanks was.

  Or he might have tried hiking up there again in a storm, with less luck, in which case, no Bren, Hanks would have succeeded Wilson, Tabini would have been dealing with her and all history might be different. The ranger who’d trekked up the hill in the driving rain hadn’t been interested in returning starships and international crises, and probably wouldn’t have stopped to listen to a protestation Bren was going to be somebody vital—he’d have just said, as he had said, “Here, kid, get warm.”

  That man hadn’t counted on knowing the outcome of what he did. He’d done what he did for the reasons that brought him to the mountain. He might have hauled a hundred kids down off the trails. He might not know that he’d saved a life. Or damned the planet to lose what he valued.

  There was a step in the hall. It wasn’t the aiji’s advisement he was under arrest. It was Saidin come personally to say dinner was about to be served.

  “Still so thoughtful,” Saidin said.

  “Still so much to do,” he said, thinking to himself that he evidently had to write that letter to Ilisidi—

  Saying, what? I’m sorry. Evidently we’ve been doing exactly what you suspected, and I forgot to wonder about what you asked me?

  I’m sorry—the assurances I wanted you to give your associates may not be justified?

  Stone to damn stone to damn slippery stone. Tabini hadn’t arrested him. Therefore Tabini wanted him to do that—he guessed so at least. He’d do so after supper. He’d find diplomatic language. He’d find words to explain himself.

  His mind was back in that battering blast of cold spray and rain and sound and wind. Everything was gray and his skin was numb. He should have seen that numbness as a danger signal. To him, at that time, it had been environment, like the sound, like the color of the air. He hadn’t known he could die of it. He hadn’t known he should question his own reactions.

  One was supposed to get smarter than that, over time. At least one told oneself so.

  18

  Supper was solitary. Algini was on duty, Tano was still out seeing to something regarding the clerical office, which had occupied an inordinate amount of Tano’s time. Neither Banichi nor Jago was available yet, and by no means would Saidin sit down to table in front of the staff. Everything he wondered about seemed negative. He still had a difficult letter to phrase to Ilisidi, he hadn’t had a reply to his message to Tabini, he hadn’t gotten the anticipated message from Jase, and he told himself that if he hadn’t it wasn’t Jase’s personal decision; no, that level of responsibility was ultimately by the decision of the ship’s captain, possibly the occupation of ship’s communications in hot and heavy conspiracy with Mospheira, and it wasn’t exactly politic to call the ship and ask whether Jase was available, like some stiffed and forgotten assignation.

  Not politic, though an option at this point; but, always to take into account, he spoke for Tabini, at least until arrested, and if Jase missed appointments it wasn’t the paidhi’s job to cajole Jase into keeping them. The paidhi’s job was to report the missed communication to Tabini, which he had done, translate Tabini’s response, which he hadn’t yet received, always supposing Tabini wasn’t trying to restrain his temper and weigh the paidhi’s value future and present before ordering him dropped into a quiet place out of the way of trouble.

  Harm him—he didn’t think so. But he’d given Tabini one hell of a headache, and reason to think that the human advice he’d had wasn’t that reliable.

  He hoped the Jase Graham matter and the whole agreement with the ship wasn’t becoming one more item to blow up in his face today, unraveled by better bribes from Mospheira. It would total out his account with no few skeptics in the hasdrawad and the tashrid, and if he could guess a reason for the prolonged silence, he’d bet Phoenix was using whatever means it had to discover what Mospheira did have.

  If he had to place an interpretation on Graham’s missing two days contacting him, they coincided well with Mospheira’s new proposal, and he didn’t expect the diplomatic obstacles at this point to fall like dominoes: things didn’t work that way, not with so many interests to protect.

  Which meant, given the initiative toward the s
hip might fail, the Mospheiran initiative and his offer of cooperation with the President might fail.

  In which case—back to square one, with vastly damaged credibility, even granted Tabini left him in charge of anything. If they had to go back to negotiations, Tabini wouldn’t budge from what he saw as already his—though Tabini might sound as if he were budging—and come after the matter from a new vantage, one of those small privileges of a leader with consensus pre-voted and as yet unwavering. And he might want to cut off communications for a while. Not what the paidhi would suggest. But—

  Maybe—maybe the ship had found some technical glitch in the lander. Maybe they found their target date slipping for safety reasons and they were waiting for reports.

  Maybe it just took a long time to analyze the imaging he was sure they were using.

  One certainly had to ask what the captain’s motives were for speaking so frankly with Mospheira, considering he had to know the mainland picked up the conversations. They could encode, he was relatively certain, using things the Defense Department knew and he didn’t.

  But the ship didn’t do that, unless there was something going through the telemetry.

  He could think himself in circles. Nothing was worse than sitting in an informational blackout.

  He held himself to tea, not liquor, told himself even the quantity of what he’d been pouring down wasn’t without effect on the nerves, and he had to stop gulping entire cups of it as the only relief from thought and action—tea that lacked alkaloids was still native to the planet and contained minute amounts of stimulant that could add up.

  But, damn, it did keep the mouth from drying. He thought of asking for it iced, which would scandalize the house—and wished the weather would take that pending turn to cooling. The active sea-winds of morning had become a sultry Shejidan night, and good as the concealed ventilation generally was, he longed for autumn, when he could pile blankets on the bed and sleep the night through. Sleep was increasingly attractive, even lying abed was—and he still had to draft that letter to Ilisidi.