Invader

by C. J. Cherryh

  It certainly did. He saw that when he opened it, and no wonder the machine-to-machine talk went on and on: Mospheira had elected to go to written transmission, and the transcript …

  It was a nonphonetic Mosphei’ transcript. On this side of the strait.

  It was—he had no trouble recognizing the text—the first chapters of The History of Contact, by Meighan Durna, a work that laid out every action, every mistake of the Landing and the war.

  It released a devil of a lot of intimate knowledge about Mospheira and atevi in the process, which he had rather not have had happen on Durna’s occasionally incomplete understanding of atevi motivation—but he didn’t totally disagree with the decision to transmit the book. It was certainly a way to bring the Phoenix crew up to speed, or at least as far as most of Mospheira itself knew the truth: every school on Mospheira studied it as foundational to understanding where Mospheirans were and who they were, all three hundred and more pages. He jotted down a background note to the ship, for transmission at the first opportunity: The History, while expressing the origin of the Mospheiran mindset, could not accurately account for atevi behavior and should never be used to predict or explain atevi motivation …

  He wanted to get on with the tape. At home, he could have used voice-search. The atevi machine didn’t have that luxury. He fast-forwarded and listened to the pitch.

  There was indeed a voice section.

  He sat and listened, then turned on his second recorder, the one with a blank tape, and used the directional mike to make a running commentary and quasi-translation for Tabini.

  “Mostly operational protocols, discussion of the gap in relays. Schedules of contact.”

  Then it was something else. Then it was a ship captain asking to speak to the President of Mospheira.

  Almost immediately the sign of a break, and probably an interval in which they patched the communications link together.

  The President came on.

  The captain said, after preliminary well-wishes, “We’re very impressed, Mr. President, with the extensive development, on both sides of the water. Peace and prosperity. You’re to be congratulated.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” came the answer. The President quite comfortably taking credit for all of it. Leave it to him.

  “The condition of the station is such,” the captain continued, “that we can with effort bring it up to operational. We’d like to offer you a cooperative agreement. As I understand—you trade with the atevi, technology, raw materials, anything you want.”

  “There are limits, Captain. Nothing that destabilizes the society or the environment.”

  Good, Bren thought. The man at least said that.

  Then:

  “You’re preparing,” the ship captain said, “a return to space. You are making efforts in that direction.”

  “Yes. Considerable effort. The circumstances that forced our landing—”

  “Yes. I’m aware. On the other hand—we can provide a far shorter route to orbit. We’ll provide the design. You provide the manufacturing, build the ground-to-orbit craft and we can put this station back into full-scale operation. …”

  Bren took deep breaths to calm his heart. With what resources? He shaped the words with his lips, willing the answer, hoping it wasn’t a package dropped in from space, free of effort.

  “We can make secure habitat for five hundred workers to start with; ten thousand in three years, then—then there’s no practical limit, Mr. President.”

  That’s labor crews, Mr. President, do you hear it?

  “You should know, you’re not unique in space. We’ve got another station, near to this star, small operation, but we’re growing. This is prosperity, Mr. President. This is the human future we came for.”

  There was a lump of ice in Bren’s chest.

  “You’re saying,” the President answered slowly, “that you’ve already built another station. Out there. Somewhere.”

  “A mining and repair operation, self-sustaining food supply. Humanity is in business in this district of space, Mr. President. We’re asking you to rejoin the universe. We don’t dispute whatever arrangements you’ve made down there. It clearly works. All we’re interested in is the station.”

  How nice. How magnanimous. How concerned for everyone’s rights.

  “We can restore what we had. We can build, Mr. President. All you’ve got to do is get up here: a share of the station, exactly what the original mission charter calls for, to all the builders and their descendants.”

  “I have to consult,” the President said. “I have to consult with the council and the Departments.”

  Depend on it. God, the man couldn’t executive-order a fire drill.

  “That’s fine, Mr. President. I’ll be here.”

  So what are you going to do now, Mr. President? Consult about what?

  Strangers to our whole way of life are on the station. They’re sitting up there in possession of it, and now they want manpower, Mr. President. They want what they wanted from us two hundred years ago, and you don’t even know for a fact there’s another station, the way they claim. We’ve got their word for it, don’t we, the way we’ve got their word for everything else in space.

  The way we had their word for it they’d let the station-builders and the miners run the station once they finished it, and you know how much say we had over what they did with the ship, and how much say we had over policy on the station. They double-crossed the station-keepers to get fuel for their ship, and now they’re mad that the station-keepers couldn’t keep the station going?

  The good ones in the crew, the heroes—they’d volunteered to go out into the radiation hell of the star we came to after the accident, to get us to a kinder sun. The brightest and the best, they died way young, back when Taylor was captain.

  The heroes weren’t in charge when the scum that let them do the dying made all the later decisions.

  The real heroes in the crew died and left the self-saving sons-of-bitches to run the thing they died for, Mr. President: don’t believe these people. What they’re dealing for is not just a ticket to fly. The idealists, the dreamers, the engineers and the nose-in-a-data-table scientists, are all in the same basket with this generation of sons-of-bitches who want off the planet, the ones who want their political party up where they control real power—power not to deal with atevi except down the barrel of a gun, a laser, whatever state of the art they’ve got up there. After that, nobody but them gets up there—

  They’re still fighting the damn war, Mr. President, but they don’t let me on conference programs to call it what it is—they’re still nursing a hatred of atevi that has nothing to do with the facts either present or past. They’re the ones who write the letters about plots in atevi advances. They don’t see anything but war. They think God made them perfect, in His image, and atevi …

  Atevi can’t love, they have no feelings, the separatists told those willing to listen—they couldn’t expound it on television: the censors bleeped them off as inciting to break the peace; but they said it in places where people gathered who wanted to listen—not many people, because Mospheirans weren’t political, weren’t discontent, didn’t give a damn so long as water came from the tap and they could observe their annual cycles of vacation at the shore-sides, winter break for the mountains, total employment, pensioned retirement—the bowling societies, the touring societies, the dance societies, the low and the fashionable nightclubs, and the concern, if they worried about anything, over the weather, their health, their social standing, their vacation schedules, their kids’ schools, and their various annual community festivals. That was the public the activists of whatever stripe had to deal with, a public that didn’t grow exercised over any situation until it inconvenienced their plans: that was the Mospheiran political reality, in a system without real poverty, real threat, real anxiety, a system where stress was a rainy spell during your harvest celebration. Nobody got involved in politics except the few with an agenda, and la
cking sources for funds and door-to-door campaigners, politics became a land of long-term benevolent chair-warmers and occasional agenda-pushers.

  You only hoped to get the chair-warmers in office. And the pro-spacers, who were generally idealistic sorts—except this small, this hitherto mostly laughable nest of people who believed atevi were secretly building rockets to hurl at Mospheira—had been a private lunacy, not practiced in public, so the Secretary of State was secretly scared of atevi. It wasn’t critical to the operation of the Foreign Office, which was Treaty-mandated, therefore set in concrete, and university-advised, therefore too esoteric to matter to the purveyors of corporate largesse that fed the successive Secretaries of State.

  Until now.

  There was public ignorance out there—fertile ground for fears.

  There were people who’d never bothered to educate themselves about atevi because it wasn’t their job to deal with atevi. The public just knew there was a different and far more violent world beyond their shores; the conservative parry, which made a career out of viewing-with-alarm and deprecating esoteric scientific advances as costing too much money—those whose whole political bent was to conserve what was or yearn for what they thought had been, feared progress toward any future that didn’t fit their imaginary past.

  And they played to an undereducated populace with their demands for stronger defense, more secrecy, more money for a launch vehicle to get humans off the planet—which, of course, they could get by spending less for atevi language studies, and nothing at all for trade cities, as giving too much to atevi.

  Lately the conservatives had tried to get three perhaps ill-advised university graduate students’ grant revoked for teaching atevi philosophy as a cultural immersion experience for human eight-year-olds.

  And in the ensuing flap, the more radical conservatives had tried to get all atevi studies professors thrown off the State Department’s university advisory committee. Everyone had thought that an extreme reaction. Then. Before the ship.

  The list of attempts to nibble away at the edges of intercultural accommodation went on and on, and it all added up in the paidhi’s not apolitical mind to a movement that wasn’t in any sense a party, wasn’t in any sense grassroots, an agenda that only a minute fraction of the population agreed with in total.

  But the closer atevi and human cultures drew to each other, the more the radicals, turning up in high places, generated issue after issue after issue—because the majority of humans, while not hating atevi, still had just a little nervousness about their neighbors across the strait, who did shoot each other, who looked strikingly different, who were ruled by a different government, who couldn’t speak Mosphei’; and people, be they human, be they atevi, always wanted to feel safer than they did, and more in charge of their future than they were.

  The fact was, living on an island and hearing for nearly two hundred years of their government turning more and more sophisticated technology over to atevi—and lately knowing that the highest tech humans owned was on the negotiating table, and that within their children’s lifetimes, the remaining technogap was going to close—could one wonder that humans who hadn’t made atevi studies part of their education were becoming more than a little anxious?

  On the atevi side of the strait, an ateva who sincerely believed there were secret human spaceships lurking on the great moon was very likely to be outspoken, to be known throughout the structure of his man’chi as holding those opinions, and not be appointed to office.

  But on Mospheira nobody had ever asked, when a candidate stood for public office, or stood for appointment, whether that candidate was a separatist. A State Department appointee could believe that atevi were stealing human children to make sausages, for God’s sake, and none of that belief could turn up in the legislative review of fitness for office, because it wasn’t a belief polite people expressed in public.

  From totally insignificant, in the one hour of that ship’s arrival, the separatists had come within reach of the kind of power that could keep them, they were sure, safe.

  Because up there any human could deal with the Pilots’ Guild for political power, for management authority over the station, while hiring the pro-spacers and their own malcontents to go risk their rears doing the real work.

  The Pilots’ Guild didn’t know the situation on the planet, even if it had the best intentions in the world: it had to trust what it was told, and by all the history he knew the Pilots’ Guild didn’t care that damn much what they dealt with so long as it agreed with their agenda. The number of times the Guild had switched sides back in the debate over the Landing—even double-crossing the station management, then to patch things with the station, double-crossing the Landing faction—damned well ensured that the station population would be so bitterly divided and angry at each other that negotiation became impossible: that was the state of affairs he’d learned from his professors’ unpublished notes. The station’s demise had been virtually certain once the ship left, because station management was, in the view of the workers, compromised, untrustable, and lying through their teeth.

  Screwed over, screwed up, and now the great holy Ship was back, offering paradise in space and the sun, the moon and the stars to anybody who’d come up there, risk their necks in the service of the all-important ship.

  The same damned business all over again.

  The same damned lot that had—perhaps not shoved Gaylord Hanks’ daughter over here—

  But certainly bestirred itself to keep her here. Maybe—they were not even aware as yet the degree of trouble she was stirring up, but just pushing their candidate in place, and pushing. A blow-up in atevi relations might be exactly what would put a finish to Bren Cameron’s liberal dealings, could render the atevi interface unworkable and, in the minds of the opposition, put everything in their hands at a time when there was power to be had.

  It was too stupid to be a reason. It was too far removed from sanity.

  But his political sense kept up a persistent itch that said: A, Given ignorance in the mix, stupidity was at least as common in politics as astute maneuvering; B, Crisis always drew insects; and, C, Inevitably the party trying to resolve a matter had to contend with the party most willing to exploit it.

  He found himself, with this voice-tape, sitting in possession of information that led him places he didn’t at all want to go—conclusions that on one level were suspect, though informed: a set of conclusions that—even if they didn’t fit present reality—still described its behavior—and the Hanks situation—with disturbingly predictive accuracy.

  If he went down, humanity was in for a long, long siege of trouble—and might not win the ensuing civil wars, the breakdown of atevi peaceful tech and the acceleration of weapons development: witness planes in Malguri dropping homemade bombs, when Mospheira had made every design attempt to keep atevi aircraft stall rates where it would discourage that development. Humans never reckoned on atevi ingenuity, and even the best of the academics kept relying on human history to predict what atevi would logically come up with next.

  But atevi ability to solve math problems, applied to design, meant everything you gave atevi mutated before sundown.

  And some humans thought you could double-cross atevi, outnumbered in their solar system, and keep them planetbound and out of the political question?

  That, or there were people with notions of dealing with atevi that the paidhi didn’t even want to contemplate.

  Departmental policy said: Don’t discuss human politics. Don’t discuss internal and unresolved debates.

  It wasn’t the paidhi’s business to steer atevi policy to oppose a Mospheiran choice. He didn’t have that level of information. He wasn’t appointed by any election or process to do that.

  But he was elected—and appointed—and trained—and briefed on an executive level on this side of the strait. He did know atevi on levels that nobody else, even on the university advisory committee, could inform the State Department.

  H
e sat for a while, while the tape ran down to its end, and there was no more information, there were no more bombs, but the one was enough.

  It wasn’t that the President had chosen to accept the offer—it was that the political process of decision had been set into motion, and the process was going to be dirty, full of fast-moving politics a slow-moving government wasn’t going to stay on top of. Thanks to that apparently generous offer, very dirty, very destructive elements were going to push an agenda that could, if somebody didn’t take fast action, crack Mospheira’s insular, safe little world apart.

  Meaning issues that didn’t have a damned thing to do with reality. Mospheira didn’t understand atevi. Mospheira had never needed or wanted to understand atevi. Just the paidhi did. That was why they appointed him. That was what they paid him to do. So they didn’t have to.

  And he had to talk to Tabini. Before the legislatures formulated policy. Before they took a public position.

  He cut off the first recorder and went in search of Saidin, his coat, and Tano.

  It was already a trying day: an unscheduled but urgent luncheon briefing in Tabini’s own residence that postponed a scheduled agricultural council meeting downstairs in the Blue Hall and probably started a flood of rumors.

  And trying through that stressful affair to convey—to a man who could with a word start an interspecies war—some sense of the dynamics at work in the Mospheiran population: the small percentage of the opposition involved, the substantial danger to atevi interests and claims on the space station of letting relations deteriorate, and the need to hold firm and resolved in the face of hysterical or bribe-bearing voices on either side of the strait who could only want to aggravate the tensions.

  That meant coming up with an atevi negotiating position that took into account the things humans were going to need: the paidhi could count off on both hands, at least if not more knowledgeably than the President of Mospheira, critical raw materials and some finished goods needful to the space effort that humans didn’t have available on the island—and the paidhi knew what humans either on Mospheira or on the ship would be able and willing to trade—namely money, designs, and full atevi participation in space, once human prejudice and patronage had had its say and sober realization set in—in order for the ship to get what they had to have: workers in numbers going up to that station.