Invader

by C. J. Cherryh

  Enough to make him think about the pill and the water on the bedside table. If he didn’t need his brain tomorrow. But it was a toss-up how the lack of sleep was going to help find a solution, either. He needed a jolt of adrenaline. If he could just summon it up for about six hours tomorrow, he had a fighting chance of thinking his way through to what he ought to do.

  Damn, he said to himself. Damn.

  He wanted to go back and replay the meeting with Tabini and do it all differently.

  He wanted to have made that second phone call from his office, before he’d gone to the airport.

  Oh, Barb, you damn fool. Paul for God’s sake.

  But when they’d broken his shoulder and he’d believed he’d die, he’d not been able to think about Barb, or Toby, or anybody—just the mountains. Just his mountain and the snow. And he’d felt hollow, and didn’t know why he couldn’t think of Barb or find any feeling in himself. He’d found it disturbing that he couldn’t scrape together any feeling about it—he’d tried, tried to reconstruct his feeling for Barb, but he couldn’t get it back the way he remembered it being, not then—not when he’d gotten home.

  He’d thought to call her.

  He’d been worried when he couldn’t reach her—last thought he’d had going under anesthetic, where was Barb? So he’d felt something.

  He’d felt real pain when he’d read her message, felt it right in the gut; he was losing Barb—when he didn’t know he’d ever had Barb, had no reason to think what they had amounted to a life, didn’t know if he loved her—just—a feeling that blinked out on him under the gun in Malguri and blinked on again when he got back to familiar referents and places he was used to being.

  So what was it? Love or a habit he’d gotten into? Or what in hell was the matter with a man who hadn’t been able to remember Barb’s face when he was in the worst trouble he’d ever been in? What was the matter with a man whose deepest feelings blinked on and off like that?

  Too long on the mainland, maybe. Too long wrestling the demons of atevi emotions, until what he’d studied grew commonplace to him and what he’d been grew foreign. He was fluent, he was good, he could find his way among atevi by the map he’d made, he’d made, whole new understandings that humans hadn’t had before—but he wasn’t sure he’d charted the way back.

  Snap. And he was playing by human rules and he loved Barb.

  Snap. And he was deep in atevi thinking and he didn’t know how to do that.

  He was scared. He was really scared.

  It was two hours before dawn, by the watch he’d pulled out of his office drawer. And he had to function tomorrow. He had to pull his wits together tomorrow.

  He had to get some sleep. He daren’t take the pill, now; he’d sleep half the day and drag through the rest and he couldn’t afford that.

  He tried counting. By hundreds. To the highest numbers he could think of.

  He tried thinking about committee meetings, reconstructing lord Brominandi’s speeches to the Transport Committee, sane lawmakers arguing for fifteen solid days whether requiring airports to maintain computer records on flights could accidentally assign infelicitous numbers and cause crashes.

  He woke up dreaming about atevi shadows asking him questions, about an urgent meeting he had to get to—and woke up again with the impression of a beast leering at him from the bedroom wall. But the beast wasn’t here, it was in Malguri.

  He’d flown home. He’d flown back. He’d met with Tabini, that was where he was. The outlines of the room were strange. He was in an atevi lady’s apartment, in a bed a man had died in. He was supposed to solve the ship problem tomorrow.

  Stave off the invaders.

  Hold the world economy together.

  Try to shave and take a damn bath.

  Thirty minutes before dawn. If the servant staff started moving about right now and woke him up, he’d have them all assassinated. He wanted at least two hours sleep. He wasn’t budging until he’d gotten those two hours. Not if the ship orbiting over their heads started firing death rays down on the city.

  Then he started worrying about the computer files and couldn’t get back to sleep.

  The servants began stirring about in the farther hails.

  Don’t touch me, he thought. Don’t dare come in here.

  If I don’t move, they won’t make any noise. If I don’t move, they won’t bother me maybe till they think I’m dead.

  But he had to find out whether the files had transferred.

  And he didn’t have that much time to prepare: Tabini had said it, people could die—and he had to be right about the translations, which couldn’t—couldn’t convey anything atevi could construe as irrevocable threat to them: the answer Tabini got back had to be something that would reassure atevi, not something that would hit the evening news with panic—he had to go over the entire vocabulary he’d allot himself in dealing with the matter; after that he could ad lib all he liked—but not until he was sure of extended and obscure meanings.

  He stuck a foot out from under the covers; he got his working elbow under him, unstuffed pillows from under him and made a try to turn on the light.

  Knocked the water glass over.

  On the carpet.

  The pocket-com followed. And the pill bottle. And the lamp.

  The room lights went on.

  “Nadi?” Jago asked, all concern, her hand on the light switch. “Are you all right?”

  5

  It was a strange perspective, either on the scale of human problems or human capacity for delusion, that one hour of daylight could dull acute, even rational, concerns and persuade an exhausted man he’d had a night’s sleep.

  At least he’d achieved a functional distance from the insanity he’d slept with, the carpet had survived the water, the lamp had survived the fall, a breakfast of tea and toast and jam to cushion the necessary antibiotics—not the pain pills—hadn’t upset his stomach, and the breakfast room turned out to have a beautiful view.

  More, life on earth had not after all ended with his relationship with Barb. He couldn’t fix it from where he was, he probably hadn’t the right to fix it—it was the old story: it was going to be too late for him to do a damned thing by the time he had a chance to do anything.

  Meanwhile he had urgent work to do, and the context-sensitive language programs he needed to work out his translation appeared to have made it into his machine.

  So after a tolerably leisurely breakfast in a privacy for which the paidhi’s bathrobe was completely if informally sufficient, he sent Tano to attack the bowlful of mail, so that, excused by his injury, he could sit in said bathrobe in the solarium in view of the magnificent Bergid range, rummage through his Mospheira-origin computer message files and wait for the voice records Tabini had promised him would arrive as soon as possible.

  The message download was immense. Whenever he logged on at his Mospheira office port he’d inevitably acquire, through the filter that censored and frequently made hash of what it let him have, a mishmash of messages, some official, some scholarly inquiries, some the advisories of the hard-worked staff that supported the paidhi’s office, from the devoted crew that sifted the outpourings of the phone-ins of every ilk, to the more reliable information that came to him down official channels, and to the Mospheira news summaries, neatly computer-censored for buzzwords and restricted concepts the paidhi couldn’t take with him across the strait. That he’d gotten anything on his flags reassured him that, Hanks or no Hanks, he was getting cooperation from official channels, and he did have his authorizations intact.

  His message-load held personal letters from a list of correspondents he’d flagged as always full-text, at least as full-text as the censors let him have, ranging from university professors of linguistics and semantics, to old neighborhood friends giving him news of spouses, kids and summer vacations.

  And came the State Department output, which was not, this time, highly informative: information on pensions. Helpful. God.

  S
ome of it had to go—he ordered Explore, and saw the Interactives come back with characteristics and content of the files; he asked it next to Search ship/Phoenix/station/ history content, and it came back with lists.

  And lists.

  And lists.

  With tags of correspondents both regular and names he didn’t at all know: everyone with access to the Foreign Office had had an opinion and offered it when the news broke about the ship returning, that was what had happened—he’d done such a fast turnaround the staff hadn’t had the time they usually had to weed and condense—meaning he had the whole damned load, God help him, every crackpot who could find the address in the phonefile.

  Several of the files were absolutely huge. University papers. Theses. Dissertations.

  He hadn’t thought it possible to crowd the memory limits. It was a big storage. He checked through the overlays, scared something might have started a memory resident to chewing up the available space, but nothing checked out as active but things that ought to be, and nothing was actively eating memory. It was just that much data he’d sucked up in his connection time.

  It wasn’t going to be an easy sift-out. The computer was going to have to search and search.

  And there was one thing he had to do, before he sank all the way into study: he asked Saidin for a phone, sat down in his bathrobe and, calmly composed, called through the Bu-javid phone system with a request for Hanks-paidhi.

  Not available, the operator said.

  “Message to her residence,” he said patiently, very patiently.

  “Proceed, nand’ paidhi. Record now.”

  “Hanks-paidhi,” he said in the atevi language. “Kindly return my call. We have urgent business. End, thank you, nadi.”

  The bloody hell Hanks wasn’t available. He took a deep breath, dismissed Hanks and her maneuvers from his list of critical matters, and went back to his chair and his computer.

  He set his background search criteria, then, to his needs, defaulted to print-matches-to-screen at his own high-rate data-speed, which was damn fast when he was motivated and the criteria were subject-narrow: a lifetime of foreign language, semantics, dictionary work and theoretical linguistics gave him some advantages in mental processing and rapid reading, and what he did in his head with the files was a personal Search and Dump and Store that didn’t even half rely on conscious brain. Just the relevant stuff reached the mental data banks, a process that rapidly occupied all the circuits, preempted the pain receptors, turned off everything but the eyes and the fingers on a very limited set of buttons.

  What came through to him was an impression, variously derived from his university scholar correspondents and the mishmash from correspondents both authorized and not, of a degree of concern about the ship’s long absence, and its careful questioning of Mospheiran officials. He couldn’t nail the specific questions: the letter that might have been most specific was full of censored holes.

  But references abounded to that bitter dispute among the original settlers, whether to land on the one livable world in the system, or mine and stay in space. There were specific names of ship crew, which he tagged as useful—who had been in important positions versus where descendants ranked might tell him something about the difference between the power structures that existed two hundred years ago—the foundation of scholarly and governmental assumptions—and those that existed now: clues to the passing of power downward.

  A university professor he’d thought long-retired offered him information about the final ship-station exchanges, a file which contained exact quotes. Those he dived after and read, and read, and read, at a speed at which his eyes dried out and his teacup stayed suspended until a deft touch removed it from his hand.

  Banichi said, “Would the paidhi care for hot tea?”

  “Thank you,” he said, stopped the dataflow of that not-friendly exchange, and took a brief intermission to what atevi genteelly called the necessity.

  A servant had meanwhile supplied a fresh teapot, a clean cup and a plate of wafers, and he restarted the dataflow three minutes before the interrupt point.

  The sun inched up out of the window. Lunch appeared, sandwiches ceremoniously brought to his chair.

  There arrived, with it, Banichi, and a message from Tabini that asked whether he had any questions Banichi and Jago couldn’t answer. “No, nadi,” he said to Banichi’s inquiry. “Just the ground-station transmission records. Please. Do you have any idea the reason of the delay, nadi?”

  “I believe they’re changing format,” Banichi said.

  “Banichi, if I’m supposed to listen to the tapes, I don’t need the intelligence people to clean them up. Peel the access codes out, I don’t care about the numbers, I swear to you, I don’t have to have their precious numbers—we’re not ’counters here. Just get me the damn—excuse me—voice recordings. That’s all I ask, nadi.”

  “I’ll urge this point with Tabini. I need the paidhi’s authority to approach him against other orders.”

  “Please do.” He was frustrated. Time was running. Someone in Defense was apparently holding things up for real concerns or obstructionist motives. He couldn’t guess. He couldn’t let go of his thoughts. He’d built too fragile a web of translated conjecture. He’d never yet taken his eyes from his screen and the reminders of where he was in the structure; and when Banichi left, he reached for half a sandwich with the same attention he’d given his teacup, then dived back into his work, only moving a leg that had gone to sleep.

  “Tabini-aiji asks,” Banichi said at another necessity-break, “if the paidhi would care to issue a statement for the news. It’s by no means a command. Only a suggestion, if the paidhi is able.”

  “Tell them,” he said, floundering brain-overloaded in a sea of input, “tell them in my name that I would wish to speak to them, but I’m in the middle of a briefing. Whatever you can contrive, Banichi-ji. I can’t possibly issue a definitive statement yet. I’m translating and memorizing as fast as I can. I’m drowning in details. —And they won’t get me the records. What in hell are they doing, Banichi?”

  “One is aware,” Banichi said carefully. “Steps have been taken. Forgive my intrusion.”

  Banichi was a professional—at the various things Banichi did. The paidhi at the moment had one focus: data and cross-connection; reading for hours on end at unremitting scroll.

  Figuring out how, with a limited dictionary, to explain interstellar flight in unambiguous words for the Determinists and the Rational Absolutists, whose universe didn’t admit faster-than-light, was absolutely terrifying. He didn’t understand FTL, himself, and finding two atevi-mentality numerical philosophies a linguistic straw of paradox to cling to, to keep two provinces of the Association from disintegrating into riot, made his brain ache. It was all a structure of contrived cross-connections and special pigeonholes for the linguistically, historically, mathematically and physically irresolvable—and he hoped to God nobody asked the question.

  Especially when all the historical information contradicted itself—and indicated the Mospheiran records, God help him, were not infallible.

  Paidhiin before him had elevated atevi science from the steam engine to television, fast food, scheduled airlines, and a space program—and he didn’t know if the next step might be Armageddon.

  So he bent himself again to his reading, seeing the Seeker had come up with a further digest of content—slow, memory-hungry operation, running slower than usual in the background—and had the summary of thirty-three trivial files, all inquiries, none informative.

  That could go down to temp-store on a card. Free up memory. Make the computer run faster. The paidhi had other problems.

  And, seeing that the Seeker had created another ship/history thread through a chain of files, he said, “Thread, ship/history, collect,” and saw the result rip past at his fast-study speed.

  But the information wouldn’t coalesce for him. He’d blown his concentration or there was something else knocking at the back door of
his awareness, something large and far-reaching, all associative circuits occupied—

  “Forgive me again,” Banichi said, and Bren restrained a frantic impulse to wave it off, because he had almost realized there was something there.

  But Banichi laid a recorder on the table—along with a message cylinder carrying the red-and-black seal that indicated it came from Tabini himself.

  Thoughts went to the winds. He suffered a cold chill, murmured a, “Thank you, nadi, wait a moment,” and opened the message cylinder, finding a note in Tabini’s hand: This is the complete record, paidhi-ji, with the numbers. I hope this proves helpful.

  He hoped to God. He found lunch not sitting well on his stomach. “Thank you, nadi-ji,” he said, dismissing Banichi to his own business, and lost no time first in setting his computer to run full bore on the time-consuming Seeker summary program, then in setting the recorder to play back.

  The first of it—he’d heard last night. He sped past that and fast-played the computer chatter.

  More voices, then.

  It fit the suspicion he’d formed from the records he’d been handed—the parting nastiness of Pilots’ Guild politics suddenly played out real-time in what had gone on while he was in the east: the Pilots’ Guild, for reasons for which one had to trust the distinguished university professor’s unpublished history, had cast some obstacles in the way of the Landing all those years ago, ostensibly to protect atevi civilization.

  But, the professor’s account suggested, the Guild had both promoted and double-crossed the operation, because the Guild’s real objective had been to maintain the ship as paramount, over the station, over any planetary settlement. The Guild had intended to run human affairs—as it had done during the long struggle to get to the earth of the atevi.

  Trusting any history for the truth in a situation rapidly becoming current was, by its very nature, trusting a sifted, condensed account of hour-by-hour centuries-old events that he couldn’t recover—events sifted by somebody with a point of view rooted in his own time, his own points to prove. He doubted that the detail he needed still existed even in the computer records on Mospheira: the war had taken out one big mass of files.