Invader

by C. J. Cherryh

  There on the front row of the dignitaries’ gallery he could sit alone, with the reassurance of Jago and Tano hovering in the standing area near him.

  The lords of the Association and the elected representatives of the provinces were drifting in rapidly now. He directed his attention to the card he had yet to memorize, a handful of words that could convey what he wanted to convey without unwanted connotations, a handful of atevi-language definitions he’d devised. FTL was an absolute ticking bomb. He didn’t want to handle it tonight. He hoped to steer away from technicalities.

  From a third of the seats filled there was a sudden abundance of legislators in the aisles, moving with some purpose, and he was not at all surprised, once that influx had found seats, that Tabini-aiji arrived by the same entry he’d used—but Tabini walked to the fore of the chamber. The gallery was jammed with observers, and while Jago and Tano stood steadfastly on guard near Bren, Tabini walked to the podium.

  “Nand’ paidhi,” Tabini said, the speakers echoing out over both halls.

  He got up, picked up the computer Jago had set near him, and began his trek down the aisle while Tabini received the standing, silent courtesy of the joint houses, and then declared that the paidhi would, for the first time in this administration, address the houses of government and the provinces conjointly, “to provide expert information on the event in the heavens.”

  He came up to the secondary microphone with no other fanfare, bowed to Tabini, bowed to the tashrid, to the hasdrawad, and set the computer down.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the Association,” was the correct address, and, “Nand’ paidhi,” he heard back, as the members bowed to him in turn, men sat down.

  He drew an insufficient breath, and found a convenient place to lean a supporting arm on the lower rails of a speaker’s platform far too tall for him.

  A sea of dark, listening, variously expectant faces confronted him.

  “A long time ago,” he began, “nadiin, a ship set out from a distant world, intending to build a space station at a place they thought they were going to live. But some accident sent the ship out of sight of all the stars the navigators knew, into a place so heavy with radiation it was deadly to anyone working outside the hull. Very many of the crew died gathering the resources they had to have to take the ship to safety. The workers who were only passengers on this mission had no skills to save the ship: they voted the ship’s crew extraordinary privilege and power so long as it was ship’s crew who went outside the hull.”

  Atevi audiences didn’t emote in a formal presentation. They sat. They kept impassive faces and absolute, respectful silence. They didn’t cue a speaker what way they were thinking, or whether they were understanding, or whether they wanted to shoot the speaker. Atevi audiences just listened, disconcertingly so.

  But the reason for the granting of rank and privilege was absolutely important to atevi thinking. And while privilege could arise from ancestral merit, it had to have constant merit, or it was suspect: that was the groundwork he was laying. Deliberately.

  “Nadiin,” he said, and fought for breath over the constriction of the tape around his ribs, damnably unforgiving of the fact the wearer was scared, needed to project his voice, and needed more air. “Brave people mined the fuel they needed to fly the ship to a more favorable and healthful place, which they had to choose on very little data. This world—” One avoided more precise cosmology. It had to come soon. Just, please God, not tonight. “This world was promising. But once they entered orbit here, they were vastly upset to learn it was an inhabited planet. They’d spent all their fuel. They’d lost so many lives they were growing fragile as a community. The ship crew wanted to withdraw to the fourth planet from the sun and build a station in orbit, thinking it then might be a long time before atevi discovered human presence—but after such a dangerous journey—”

  Another pause for air, and he still had no reaction at all, good or bad, to what was mostly old information, with insights that weren’t in the previous canon. “After such a terrible journey, nadiin, and so many lives lost, people were afraid of travel and harsh, unknown environments. They reasoned if they built their home in orbit around a life-bearing world, and if something went wrong in space, there was the planet below as a last resort. They saw that atevi were civilized and advanced—their telescopes told them so. They felt much safer where they were, and they voted against the ship’s crew.

  “But some Mospheirans say the crew of the ship was anxious to maintain the reason for their rank and privilege, and that was their real reason for wanting to take the ship back into deep space.

  “Some argue, no, it was a true concern for disturbing atevi lives.

  “Still others say that they simply were a space-faring people and saw themselves constricted by this long time at dock.

  “But for whatever reason, the crew of the ship wanted to leave and wanted fuel. The workers’ representatives opposed more expenditure of effort for the ship in a venture in which they saw no advantage for themselves. That was the point at which the association on the station truly began to fragment.

  “Some said they should go down to the planet and establish a base there.

  “Some said all resources should go to the station as a permanent human home in orbit, and that they wouldn’t divert resources to a landing or to the ship for any new venture.

  “Now there were three factions, and the situation demanded compromise.

  “The ship sided with the workers who wanted to maintain the station, because they needed the station for a dock and a source of repair and supply; but taking the ship out into deep space, which was their highest priority, demanded an immense amount of the resources the station wanted for itself. The workers who wanted to land on the planet switched sides and voted with the ship’s crew, at least one human scholar suspects, in return for secret assurances the spacefarers wouldn’t let the station dwellers block their activities.

  “The human community became a nest of intrigue as the new sub-associations pulled each in their own directions. The ship sided with the would-be colonists to get the resources it needed—

  “But, because in this three-way standoff, the pro-Landing people couldn’t get funding or resources for advanced landing craft, no one believed they could land, especially since the Pilots’ Guild refused to fly the designs they had for a landing craft—or—the Landing faction began to suspect, any design they would ever come up with.

  “So—that group built landers with old technology that didn’t need Guild pilots. In effect, they fell toward the planet and parachuted in, the petal sails of the old account. Mospheira looked to them to have a lot of vacant land, and they thought if there were trouble, it would be easy to live in the north of the island and make agreements with atevi to the south in what they thought was an island government.”

  Atevi calm cracked in scattered laughter. Certain members clearly thought it was a joke. It was funny, if lives on both sides hadn’t paid for it; he was relieved: they were following his logic. They were understanding this very critical point of human behavior.

  “It actually got worse, nadiin. The Guild thought the Landing would lose credibility, either operationally, due to crashes, or practically, in atevi unwillingness to allow them on the planet.

  “But the first down landed safely. The world seemed perfectly hospitable. Even the station workers and the Guild now believed, since atevi hadn’t objected, that all the empty land on the planet was unowned land, where they’d bother no one.

  “That, nadiin, was the situation when the ship left. That’s the last it knows. It knows nothing about the war, it knows nothing about the Treaty, it knows nothing about the abandonment of the station and it knows nothing about the reasons that bar humans and atevi from dealing directly. You are faced, nadiin, in my estimation, with both marginal good will from the ship and an ignorance equaling the ignorance of my direct ancestors in that year, in that day, in that hour of their departure.

  “Nadii
n, humans in the early days had no idea how they’d disturbed atevi life—they didn’t understand they’d transgressed associations when they’d followed a geographical feature they believed was a boundary. They blundered through association lines, they built roads with no remote thought that they were creating a problem, they brought technology to one association with no remote idea they were altering balances, and, baji-naji, there are humans on Mospheira who still can’t make that leap out of their own mentality and into atevi understanding, just as there are doubtless atevi who dismiss human behavior as complete insanity.

  “But we have that ship up there that left a planet with atevi just developing steam engines. Now it looks down on railroads, cities, airports, power plants alike on Mospheira and the mainland, and sees nothing there to tell it what the agreements are that let this happen peacefully.

  “I report to my great regret a hitherto harmless minority of officials in my government, a faction who take the demands of cultural separation in the Treaty agreement as a major item of their belief: we call them separatists, but some of them go much further than mere cultural preservation, and believe that humans should exclude atevi from space, which, along with advanced technology, they view as their exclusive heritage. They may see the ship as a chance for them to recapture the past. They may try to urge the ship’s crew that I’m a gullible fool and that they’re being threatened by atevi, whom they have always apprehended as seeking to destroy human culture.

  “The most serious danger is not the ship. It’s in offering a reckless minority of my own people on this world the belief that they have alternatives to negotiation with atevi if they can mislead the crew of the ship to their own opinions, and particularly if they can get a presence of their own persuasion brought up to the station.

  “I’ve not completely traced the origins of the human separatist movement, or analyzed its membership: in fact, most won’t admit to it. But recall that the station had to be abandoned because of failing systems and lack of resources, that the faction which wanted the station maintained is on this planet with us, and I think likely the pro-space movement among humans logically contains those who wish we’d stayed in space. They in particular may be lured into an association with the separatists because the separatists could offer them a return to the station. It involves conjecture on my part, but I fear an association may suddenly be possible involving these two groups with a human return to space as its unifying purpose. I am utterly, morally, opposed to seeing a handful of Mospheirans go back into space with borrowed technology and entering into agreements that convey political power again on the ship crew. The space program this world develops must be jointly human and atevi, and control of the station must be jointly human and atevi.

  “I know that some atevi also ask, Why human presence at all? And, yes, ideally no human would ever have come down to this planet; but since humans have no other planet in all of space around which to center their activity, and since humans are in orbit around this planet, it’s reasonable that the ship, representing many factors of higher technology than any this world can manage right now, is up to activities that will inevitably involve this world on which atevi live. For that reason it becomes imperative that atevi secure a vote in human space activities.

  “Nadiin, I do not intend to let a minority of humans put themselves forward as the only voice speaking for this planet. I wish to put forward the Treaty as the operative association of humans and atevi.

  “I am willing to translate atevi voices to the ship, in order to see to it that whatever the ship wants or whatever the Mospheiran President or Mospheiran factions of whatever nature may do, the ship will not be conducting business in the same ignorance that led to the War of the Landing.

  “I do know humans, nadiin, from the inside. I can assure you as I know the sun will rise tomorrow, that the ship crew won’t be nearly as naive about Mospheira’s humans as they may be about atevi. It’s going to be very hard for any Mospheiran faction to persuade the ship that they’re without ulterior motives, and very hard for any faction on Mospheira to persuade the ship to any course, not alone because the ship will suspect factionalism, but because the ship itself may have internal factions whose siding with one faction or the other on Mospheira may absolutely paralyze decision and produce new sub-associations with the potential for truly dangerous compromises.

  “For that reason I foresee that the human government on Mospheira will respond to evidence of division among atevi with paralytic inaction on the part of the government, frenetic activity on the part of those out of power, and no rational decision will result.

  “I therefore recommend, nadiin, that atevi speak with one voice when they speak to humans on the ship and on Mospheira, that your inner divisions and debates remain strictly secret, and that you treat Mospheira and the ship as two separate entities until they themselves can speak with one voice. I recommend you claim, not demand, claim as a fact an equal share in the space station … for a mere beginning.

  “I recommend that you speak to the ship directly and soon. I am the paidhi the Treaty appointed to deal between Mospheira and the atevi of the Western Association. I ask the Association to appoint me paidhi also to deal with the ship. This triangular arrangement—” one was never without awareness of the all-important numbers “—places the Western Association on equal footing with Mospheira, who has already delegated spokesmen to deal with the ship.

  “The ship knows it must understand Mospheira as well as atevi before it can be confident of its actions. The permutations of advantage and disadvantage in this arrangement are complex, and I am convinced that atevi can secure equal advantage for themselves, particularly by securing agreements with both the elected government of Mospheira and with the ship’s authority. Again, a trilateral stability.

  “I hope for your favorable consideration of the matters I’ve brought before you, my lords of the Association, most honorable representatives of the provinces, aiji-ma. Thank you. I stand for questions.”

  There it goes, he thought, made the requisite formal bow, and suffered a shortness of breath, a sweating of the palms, and a fleeting recollection, of all things, of Barb on the ski run: Barb laughing, all that white, and the whole world stretching on forever—that time, that chance, that life—

  Gone—maybe gone for good, with the moves he was making.

  And he had, with that disoriented sense of what now? and where now? a consuming fear that he hadn’t been entirely dispassionate in his judgment, when he most, God help him, needed to be.

  Slowly, in the way of atevi listeners, a murmur of comment had begun, then:

  “Nand’ paidhi.” It was a distinguished member of the tashrid, rising to question, in the custom of the chambers. “Has your President assigned you this action against human interests in some sense of numeric balances?”

  An intercultural minefield. Had the human government found inharmonious numbers for the whole situation or did it wish to create them for atevi? And the gentleman of the tashrid damn well knew humans didn’t count numbers: he was playing to rural atevi paranoia and he was playing straight to the television.

  So could he.

  “Lord Aidin, I by no means see Mospheiran and atevi best interests as conflicting. Consider, too, my government returned me, in a crisis and under medical circumstances which clearly justified my staying on Mospheira for weeks—cooperating because Tabini-aiji requested my return. They know that if there weren’t a paidhi, or if the aiji should break off relations with the paidhi-successor, as the aiji has done, no communication at all would be possible between atevi and humans. Had Mospheira wished to hold me hostage and cut off communication they might have done so. My return, literally rushing me from surgery to the airport, signals a very strong human desire to maintain communication with the mainland and their firm acknowledgment that the aiji is the ruler of the Western Association.”

  Lord Aidin sat down, having planted what he’d chosen to plant, all the same, for minds set on number
conspiracies, damn him; but he’d gotten his own little drama in front of the cameras, too.

  Then, in the evenhanded alternation of questions, a member of the hasdrawad rose, a woman he didn’t know, with an abrupt: “Then who, nadi, sent Hanks-paidhi?”

  Nadi, to an official speaker on the platform, was not fully respectful, and it roused a rare stir in the chambers—a sharp look from Tabini.

  He answered, nonetheless, to an ateva who might have either been offended by Hanks, or leaned to Hanks as a source and now found herself embarrassed in Hanks’ lack of authority:

  “By the Treaty, nadi, there is only one paidhi. And, nadi, nadiin, Hanks is my successor-designate, doubtless confused by the rapidity of events. She should have received a recall order, but events have moved perhaps faster than ordinary lines of communication. She has as yet received no such orders, and feels it incumbent on her to stay until she does. I’ve requested of the aiji to allow her presence temporarily. If you have doubt of the delivery of your messages to the paidhi during this transition, please don’t hesitate to resend. No slight is intended, nadi.”

  So, so quietly posed. It was really the most byzantine atevi warning he’d ever managed to deliver, and he was quite satisfied with his performance—injecting into the atevi consciousness at basement level an insight into human decision-making, and not just the hasdrawad and the tashrid, thanks to the television cameras. He had had the option, being only human, of ducking the after-address questions ordinary for an atevi speaker; but he saw those cameras, and daunting as they’d been at the outset, he’d managed, sure in his own mind it was useful for atevi out in the provinces to see the paidhi and get a sense of his face, his reactions, his nature.