Invader

by C. J. Cherryh

  But by everything he could access at this point, looking through the window of truly esoteric math from the outside, and studying atevi philosophy from the outside, and without the neural hardwiring atevi had, he didn’t know how in hell to translate what didn’t, emphatically didn’t, fit into the ordinary framework of the language. There had to be forms as yet not in the dictionary, or acceptable forms had to be created that wouldn’t violate felicity—

  Which wasn’t exactly a job for a human proceeding past the limits of his own education.

  And if pedestrian and literal-minded atevi (and there were such) believed that computers through demonic processes assigned infelicitous numbers to airplanes, he didn’t know what he was going to do when the numbers began to describe processes of an imperfectly perceived universe.

  Atevi demanded perfection in their numbers. It was the demon in the works, that both kept atevi from sliding back into dark ages once they’d made an advance: and kept atevi from advancing as fast on a single front—because they had to adjust all their philosophy to accommodate new concepts. The numbers of a situation entered philosophy, integrated with it—and numbers could take forever to find proof enough for someone to try a new thing.

  Or they could, absent the gadfly effect of human presence and human tech that patently and demonstrably worked, stop all progress while atevi worked out perfection, while amateur ’counters and philosophers rose up to claim the space program would puncture the atmosphere—

  I detest amateurs, Banichi had said, in so many words. The paidhi thought the same. God save them all from paidhiin who revealed translight physics with no understanding that to atevi the math involved was far more earth-shattering than the ship was; no understanding that atevi would take the mathematics of folded space and integrate it at every level of their languages, their philosophies, their thinking, until, if humans had trouble understanding atevi logic now, humans were in for a century of real, devastatingly confusing adjustment, right when the whole world had a lot else to adjust to.

  It was a wrench in the works for sure. If he’d spent months thinking of exactly what mathematical concept he wouldn’t want to toss into the atevi-human interface at this precise moment in history, he thought that folded space would probably sit at the top of the don’t-mention list. But it was all on the negotiating table now.

  Not everyone they had to deal with had Geigi’s brand of courage. He liked the man. The same recklessness that had gotten Geigi into financial difficulty had evidently moved Geigi to that blunt, public question, and if there was an influence among the opposition to Tabini that deserved preservation right along with Ilisidi, Geigi’s blunt willingness to confront the paidhi and demand a truth that might wreck him had the paidhi’s respect.

  With a word in the right ear—he might be able to help Geigi. He was moved to help Geigi—and damned right the paidhiin in occasionally took wide decisions, and played, he hoped, lifesaving politics without consultation. He checked it through the professional filter: he believed he acted independently of human emotion, though human emotion appreciated what Geigi had done; intellect evaluated Geigi’s character. And the value of a man who asked reasonable questions, he was convinced, did cross species lines. Any way he could take to help the man—he resolved to use the channels he did have.

  Adjournment proceeded, on a vote of the committee, to reconvene in five days for a presentation by the paidhi on FTL.

  The paidhi smiled and looked, he hoped, serene in the prospect.

  It wasn’t what the paidhi felt. And if Hanks had financial expertise, and if, if he could rely on her, Hanks still couldn’t rescue him from this one. Financial modeling just didn’t exactly suit the problem.

  Jago had walked him down to the meeting, since Algini, who might have drawn the duty, was still feeling the effects of his injuries. Reasonably, he expected Jago to be waiting outside to walk him back to the apartment, but it was Banichi instead, standing with his shoulders against the wall, easing, one suspected, the stress on his lately injured leg.

  “Banichi,” he said, and Banichi stood upright quickly enough, though caught by some surprise, which one could rarely do with Banichi, as the committee adjourned without the usual fuss and members walked out the door.

  Banichi was tired and in pain, Bren suspected. That rarely showed, either. One could almost guess Jago was taking the walking jobs and Banichi was handling those that didn’t require that much; he’d sent Tano, the other of his security with two good legs, off looking for offices, another job his security shouldn’t have to do.

  “That was well done,” Banichi said as they walked toward the lift.

  “I hope so,” Bren said.

  “Tabini was pleased.”

  “How did he know?” He was startled into asking the unaskable; and Banichi returned:

  “In the Bu-javid? Of course he knew.”

  Possibly through Banichi, who knew? Banichi carried a pocket-com that might have a sensitive enough mike. Banichi didn’t say. But Banichi next spoke to someone on the pocket-com, probably clearing their passage to the lift: security’s code was verbal and seemed to change day by day.

  “Do not take gifts with you into secure areas,” Banichi said.

  “What gift?” he asked, like a fool.

  And remembered.

  “The pin.” He was utterly chagrined.

  “Fortunately it’s Tabini’s.”

  “Why?”

  “He was anxious about Hanks.”

  “As if she’d leap on me? Hardly.”

  “One wasn’t certain.”

  “She might have use. She might use better sense. I don’t know.”

  They were still using the back ways, avoiding the main hall and any ordinary traffic that threatened the casted arm; but the paidhi was considering other things than his surroundings—until he waited at the lift, watching the faces of other committee members, covert glances that came his way, all speculative: a small group hung about Geigi and his aides, and looks came his way.

  He found his breath freer, despite the damned tape that went on binding and chafing. Matters came into clearer focus on all fronts. Hanks would do what she had to do or Hanks would go straight to the worst of the conservative elements on Mospheira, but Hanks, as a problem, was not the problem, not the one that could harm atevi. The problem that could blow the Western Alliance apart was standing right over there—that was why he hadn’t been able to see a path through the rest of it.

  It was magical, how freely the mind jumped once a burden of necessity was off the little problems. He couldn’t do what Hanks did. He wasn’t capable of replacing the entire university advisory committee. Neither was Hanks, and before all was said and done, no matter if Hanks turned up the most brilliant paper of her dubious career, he knew where the real bombshells lurked and he knew the paidhi had to be forearmed.

  But as the lift took them in, and Banichi pushed the button to take them to the third floor:

  “Banichi-ji, I have an odd request. I need to talk to mathematicians. People whose math describes space. The shape of the universe.”

  “The shape of the universe, nadi?”

  “Universe” was difficult in the atevi language. It as well described the Western Association as stars and space. “Stars. Physics of stars, velocity—space. That universe.”

  “I know of some very respected mathematicians, some resident in the Bu-javid. But none that deal in such things as that. The shape of the universe. Bren-ji, I know no such things.”

  “Galaxies and distances.” Atevi made no constellations. Stars were stars. “The physics of light.”

  The lift let them out into the hall. Banichi said:

  “Maybe humans have such things. I’d expect them to.”

  “This human doesn’t have these things with him: the phones are down on Mospheira’s side of the strait, and anyway, I don’t think the human answer would help me that much. The math of fields and physics, Banichi. How atevi view the universe beyond the solar s
ystem. What it’s shaped like. What’s out there, beyond the last planet. What light does in long distances. The shape of space.”

  “The shape of space.” Clearly that thought didn’t make sense to Banichi. “Pregnant calendars?”

  He laughed. “No. I’ve got the right word. I’m sure I’ve got the right word.”

  They’d come to the apartment door; Banichi had his key and let them in past the security precautions, to the ministrations of the servants and Saidin’s oversight—“Nadiin,” Bren said, and to Saidin, who evidently considered it her duty to meet her lodger at all his comings and goings, “nadi-ji.”

  “Will the paidhi care for supper in, tonight?”

  “The paidhi would be very grateful, nadi, thank you.” God, was it that late? He caught a look at the foyer table, where messages had overflowed the bowl and stacked on the table surface in Tano’s absence. “God—save us.”

  “Nand’ paidhi?” Saidin asked.

  “An expression of dismay,” Banichi said.

  “Tano’s looking for office space,” Bren said. “And professional staff. I don’t know how I’m to deal with it otherwise.”

  “The staff can sort these,” Saidin said, “if the paidhi wishes.”

  “The paidhi would very much like that, daja-ji, thank you. We hope to have staff soon. If the phone lines clear. If—God, I don’t know.”

  “The paidhi would like tea?”

  “The paidhi is awash in tea. He just got out of a committee meeting. The paidhi would like something much stronger. Without alkaloids. Thank you, daja-ji. —Banichi, I have to have the mathematicians. I’m desperate. I need to talk to people who understand the shape of space itself. Astronomers.”

  “Astronomers?” Banichi gave him a frowning, considering look, and he suddenly remembered Banichi, all-competent Banichi, was from the provinces; there was that back-country mistrust of the astronomers—the old failure. If there were humans in the heavens, how could the astronomers have failed to find them? If numbers ruled the universe, as devout atevi believed, then how could atevi astronomers, measuring the universe, have numbers with discrepancies in them, as they argued about distances?

  In some religious minds, that was heresy. The numbers of the universe had no discrepancies. That was the very point the Determinists and the Rational Absolutists fixed as unshakable.

  “I fear that’s who I need to talk to, yes, astronomers.”

  One rarely saw Banichi at a loss. “There’s an observatory in Berigai, in the Bergid. That’s an hour by air.”

  “None closer? The university? I mean legitimate astronomers, Banichi. Not fortune-tellers. This is a legitimate observatory in the Bergid, there’s a school—”

  “There is. We can call them. We can ask.”

  “Would you—” The paidhi was tired, and the security station was at hand. “Would you mind terribly giving them a call, asking if they have anyone who can answer my questions? I’ll write my essential question out, given faster-than-light flight and the Determinist objection, and if you could ask them if there’s anyone who can answer it—”

  “No,” Banichi said, which meant he didn’t mind—one answered the question asked, not the question implied, as the paidhi’s tired brain should have recalled.

  The paidhi went to sit in the sitting room, write down his question for Banichi, and have the servants bring him a drink. He wished the ship had called. Or his mother had called, or someone. He took the little glass the servants offered, sat and stared at the Bergid, floating in its misty serenity above the city, wondering whether Banichi was having luck getting anyone, or whether he was totally on his own.

  Atevi philosophy had used to hold, with misleading but reasonable argument, that the farthest events in the heavens were the least changeable, because you could see more of them.

  And he supposed if there weren’t atevi constellations, as the paidhiin had from the beginning known there weren’t—no constellations such as humans from age immemorial had made out of the brighter stars, and still tried to make out of the atevi sky—then it followed that ordinary atevi didn’t grow up with much curiosity about the night sky—hard, without those pictures, and without popular names for them, to tell where one was in a seasonally changing sky. Ask a farmer, maybe. Maybe a sailor, among nonscholarly types.

  But, point of constant difference with human history, a significant part of the atevi food supply didn’t depend on the stars and never had: they domesticated no food animals. They counted the winds from the sea, the turning of the wind from the south, as a reliable marker for seasons. Animals bred as animals pleased and the stars had nothing to do with it.

  And in fact there was a dearth—he had heard it in school—of reliable bright stars, compared to the sky of the long-lost human earth.

  Certainly the elite of the Assassins’ Guild wouldn’t take overmuch time memorizing random lists of stars and locations, except perhaps as it did affect navigation. But the far-faring ships of atevi history had, another long-understood point of atevi science, always hugged the coasts and felt out the abiding currents for direction.

  A significant point for the paidhi’s journal to pass on to the university: nobody had made a real study of atevi star-lore, because there wasn’t any atevi star-lore to speak of. Though they’d marked the appearance of the Foreign Star, as, a most strange event in atevi skies, the ship had built the station—astronomers, in those days a cross between fortune-tellers and honest sky-charters, had correctly said it foretold something strange, and maybe fearsome.

  But atevi astronomers hadn’t known what it was, and they never had recovered their popular respectability, which the paidhiin knew. But the paidhiin had, so far as he knew, never risked the topic of atevi astronomy—never dared seek out astronomers—because they didn’t want the specific questions astronomers could ask. He understood a risk in the undertaking that was precisely of more and closer questions than Geigi knew how to ask.

  Or in wasting time with a discipline allowed through benign neglect to wander off into star observations and fortune-telling, a discipline which was, as far as he knew, half philosophy.

  But that might be exactly the sort of people to talk to the Determinists. Someone at that level had to have made the kind of rationalizations that answered the Geigis of the world. He only hoped not to bog down in sectarian disputes and abstruse systems. He hoped not to waste a great deal of time on a matter which he wanted quietened, not expanded to side questions and, one always risked it, controversy between philosophies.

  Banichi finally came to him, looking perplexed as a man might who’d just had to discuss warped space with academics.

  “There is a man,” Banichi began.

  “Have a drink,” Bren said, and gestured toward a chair—the servants must perch on the edge of visibility at all times: it was almost predictable that there was a young lady at Banichi’s elbow before his weight had quite settled into the cushions. Banichi ordered one that was alkaloid, straight, and propped his injured leg on a footstool.

  “This man?” Bren said.

  “Very old. They say he’s brilliant, but the students don’t understand him. They wonder if he’d be of any help to the paidhi.”

  “Banichi, among other things that have changed overnight, it’s suddenly become relevant what stars lie near us, what concepts atevi hold of the wider universe, and the paidhi isn’t studied up on these things. Ask me about rocket fuel baffles. Ask me about low earth orbit and pay loads. We’re dealing with near stars and solar systems.”

  “This faster-than-light controversy?” Banichi said.

  “Very much so. Asking humans does me no good. I’ve consulted the words I do have, in what study I can make of it, and I don’t know I can find what I want—I’m not sure the average atevi knows, if any atevi at all know what to call it.”

  “Faster-than-light. Doesn’t that say it?”

  “I mean concepts. I need mathematical pictures. Ideas, Banichi. I’m not sure that faster-than-light is
the best word. Mosphei’ has no precision about it.”

  “Translate. Is that not what the paidhi does?”

  “Not when there may be precise atevi words.”

  “For faster-than-light?” Banichi was clearly doubtful.

  “For foundational concepts. For the numbers. For ways of looking at what nature does.”

  “I fear the astronomers aren’t the best method. They invite the paidhi to come in person and talk to this venerable. But—”

  “But?”

  “Such a meeting could generate controversy in itself.”

  “You said they were respectable people.”

  “I said they were scholarly. I didn’t say they were respectable, nadi-ji.”

  “And are atevi astronomers still fortune-tellers? We’ve released a certain amount of astronomical data to your universities—measurements, data about stars, techniques of measurement—I doubt that the numbers your astronomers have are vastly different from our numbers. I don’t see how they could be. I want to find out how they express the math. I want to find out if someone can take Hanks’ statement and resolve the paradox the Determinists make of it. Clearly they see things differently than humans. Possibly it’s simply terminology.”

  “There will still be controversy.”

  “Do they still tell the future? I’d be vastly surprised if they did.”