Invader

by C. J. Cherryh

  Odd how the feelings had just been there, on the edge of out-of-control, as long as he was talking to her—emotion had gotten in the way of any sane communication; now that he’d had a moment to calm down, the atevi world closed in again, the sights, the smells, the sounds of his alternate reality. Barb’s world grew fainter and farther again, safely fainter and farther.

  He supposed part of it was that he’d made an investment in Barb, an investment of energy, and time—and youth. And innocence, in a way. In Malguri, a short week ago, when he’d found himself afraid he’d die, he’d found himself at such a remove from humanity he couldn’t reach any regret for the human people he’d leave—

  And he couldn’t gather it up now. Then it had scared him. Now—now maybe his real fear was not having the free years left to connect with someone else, with all that investment, with no more sense of love, whatever that meant—he wasn’t sure, on this interface of atevi and humans, what normal humans felt, who didn’t have to analyze what they felt, thought, wanted, did and didn’t do. But he did. He had to. He’d become a damn walking laboratory of emotions.

  And maybe if you preserved it in acrylic and set it on a shelf, love didn’t look quite as colorful or lively or attractive as it did flitting across mountain meadows. Maybe you killed it trying to understand it, attribute it, classify it.

  Hell of a way human beings functioned. At least the ones he knew. His mother. Barb. Toby. One could say the paidhiin had generally had trouble with their personal lives. Wilson, God knew, had been a dried-up, tuned-out, turned-off personality, monofocused in his last years on the job. As good as dead when his aiji died. Say good morning to the man and the face didn’t react, the eyes didn’t react. Not just atevi-like. Dead.

  So what did you do when the human part of your life started atrophying from want of exercise? Hello, Mother, hello, Toby, sorry about the phone calls, sorry you can’t go to the store without the chance of being accosted, sorry about all of that, nothing I can do from here—don’t know what it’s like to go to the store, buy a loaf of bread, catch the bus to the office. Can’t imagine taking kids to school, family bike rides, family vacations.

  Wish that Mother would move to the North Shore, to a far smaller, less political environment. But one never got Mother these days to do a damned thing she hadn’t done before, and Toby’d moved up there, one suspected, to put a little distance between mom and wife.

  The wind shifted, that had been carrying a spatter of rain against the glass. He stood in the dark with his drink, in the new quiet. Curtains billowed out at him, white gauze in the dark, touched him, all but wrapped around him.

  Childhood memory. Himself in the living room. The wind from the sea. Mom and Dad in the bedroom. When life was perfect.

  He shut the doors, and the draperies deflated.

  The air was still. The whole apartment was still, nothing but the soft footsteps of servants—he never needed a thing but that someone was there. Never made a request but that servants hurried to do it. But the silence—the hush about the place tonight oppressed him.

  He went back to his room, found his traveling case to put in it what he needed for the run out to the observatory—had servants hovering to see if they could help with that, but he found no need.

  It was the first time, the very first time since he’d landed in Shejidan, that he’d had a chance to sit down on the bed and open the medical folder and read it.

  “Dammit!” he said. And called, none too moderately, for scissors.

  “Nadi?” a servant asked, confused. But he couldn’t deal with gentle faces and gentle confusion at the moment.

  “Just get me the damn scissors, will you?”

  Then he was mad at himself and the world in general, because he’d raised his voice to the servant, and he apologized when she came running back—apologized and worked the point under the thumb-hole in the cast and started working at the layers of bandage.

  Gouged his wrist for good and proper.

  “Nadi!” Jago said, from the doorway, and clearly meant to stop him; but he didn’t mean to be stopped. Didn’t want to discuss it. He kept sawing at the bandages, with the blade inserted, his wrist not cut, and with no inclination to give up the angle he’d gotten for Jago’s damned well-meaning interference.

  But Jago came and caught his hand as the servants hadn’t dared do.

  And really it ought to be hysterically funny, the misery he’d suffered, when just reading the damn instructions would have set him free—to protect the fusion during the flight, the note said, and then important to maintain good circulation and moderate exercise, by flexing and bending and moderate activity.

  Jago tried to take the scissors away, as if she thought the paidhi had completely lost his mind. And maybe he had; but she didn’t apply force enough to disengage his fingers and he couldn’t half breathe, and didn’t want to explain. The constriction around his ribs afflicted him with temperous, claustrophobic frustration—the paidhi wasn’t damned well in possession of his faculties, he wasn’t damned logical, he wasn’t handling the interface well at all at the moment, and he didn’t want Jago’s damned reasonable calm trying to tell him wait and consult anybody.

  “I know what I’m doing,” was all he could get out. “I know what I’m doing, dammit, Jago.”

  “Is there pain, Bren-ji?”

  Damned right there was pain. Every breath he drew. Every move he’d made for days. The tape was cutting in, the shoulder had a fixed angle he’d not been able to relieve in days, and the damned Department shoved him overseas with painkillers too strong to take and a briefing from some damn Department-worshiping fool who hadn’t told him to read the damn instructions—

  He wasn’t winning in his struggle with Jago. He wasn’t losing either, Jago risking her fingers, his effort getting nowhere, and Jago, unstoppable in her level-headed, insistent sanity, didn’t let go.

  “It’s supposed to come off,” he found the coherency to say.

  “That’s very good, Bren-ji, but perhaps a doctor should do it.”

  “I don’t need a doctor. I’m supposed to have taken the damn thing off, Jago, I don’t want a doctor.”

  “Are you quite sure, nadi?”

  “I’m not stupid, Jago.” Which all evidence around him seemed to deny.

  “One knows that, Bren-ji, but why now—”

  “I just read the damn instructions. In the case. It’s all right. It’s all right, Jago, let me alone to be a fool, all right?”

  “You might cut yourself.”

  “I can handle a damn pair of scissors.” He was aware of servants watching from the door and began to be mortally embarrassed. “Just leave me alone, all right, I won’t cut myself.”

  Jago looked in that direction, too. “It’s all right, nadiin. I’ll manage. Please shut the door.”

  They might doubt the paidhi was going to be reasonable at all. But they shut the door, then, the first time he’d been that isolated since he’d arrived in Shejidan. It was just him and Jago and the scissors, which was not, at least, a crowd.

  “Let me,” Jago said, and when he resisted: “Bren-ji, let me. I’ll cut it. Just sit still. —You’re quite sure.”

  “I’m quite sure. Jago, dammit, it’s all right. I can read!”

  “One believes so, nand’ paidhi. Please. Sit still. Let me have the scissors.”

  Small scissors, in Jago’s hand. He’d gouged his wrist enough to sting. She set a knee on the bed and worked around where she could get a good, straight cut up the back of his hand, little snips that sliced the bindings of the foam cast as far as the forearm.

  “Say if I go too deep,” she advised him, and then, “Bren-ji, the shirt must go.”

  It had to. He unfastened it and Jago laid the scissors on the bedside table and helped him take it off.

  “The tape around my ribs,” he said. That was the truly maddening stricture.

  “Let me do this in good order, Bren-ji. Let’s be sure.” She’d taken from somewhere about
her person a small spring-bladed knife he suspected had more lethal purpose, and delicately sliced along the bindings above the foam cast.

  “I’m very sorry,” he found the sanity to say, very meekly and very quietly.

  “It’s no difficulty at all. But are you quite sure? If we take this off—”

  “I’m quite sure. I was a fool. I didn’t read the things they sent me.”

  “Then we can do that very easily. I believe I can split the cast right up the top. Let’s be sure of the shoulder before we worry about the ribs, nadi.”

  “Quite all right.” He held his breaths to small ones, and held still as Jago sliced delicately along the cast surface, starting with the hand, splitting the foam apart between the knife and the grip of her hand.

  It gave. She had to resort to the scissors again, to make the final cut of tape and free his hand from the elastic bandage.

  Which ached, freed from confinement; and he could see atevi-sized fingerprints gone purple on his wrist, likewise the marks of cord on his skin, still red, when the marks on the other wrist had begun to fade.

  Jago reached the bend of the elbow, and slowly gained ground, up to the chafing spot at the shoulder.

  Where she hesitated. “Are you quite certain, nadi?”

  “I’m certain. I’m more than certain. I want it off.”

  Jago put a finger under the cast at the neck and carefully cracked the last. The arm began to ache, the more widely the cast split, and then truly to hurt, as Jago kept going all the way down to the elbow, and to the wrist, by which point he was struggling to breathe easily and not to let on it hurt the way it did—he wanted no delays, and took firm resolve as Jago cracked the cast as far as it would go without cutting the tape on his ribs.

  “Nadi?” Jago said, having—while his vision was other than concentrated—turned up a curious object from inside the cast, a piece of paper wrinkled and curled and sweated and conforming to his arm. “What is this?”

  What is this? indeed. He supported his elbow on his knee and snatched the paper, perhaps too rudely, too forbiddingly, from his own devoted security. It was a printed sheet, with the Foreign Office header, and a simple:

  Do what you can do. I’ll stand behind it, long as they leave me here. HD’s on my back. I’m using all the credit I’ve got to get you back to the job. Maintain the Treaty at all costs. Codeword emergency call my line is Trojan 987 865/UY.

  HD. Hampton Durant. With Shawn’s signature. He had an access code.

  Jago clearly understood where it was from and that it didn’t belong there. His hand was shaking, but it was only confirmation at this point—only backing what he’d already done: he and Shawn had always been on the same wavelength.

  “Silly—silly joke,” he said. “Staff. My office. Told me. Do what I’ve already done. Doesn’t do any good now.” He let it fall. “Get the damn tape, Jago-ji. I’ll regard you highly forever if you cut that damn tape off.”

  He turned, Jago maneuvered, and got the scissors-point under the edge of the tape on his back, snipping carefully. The split foam cast was still holding the arm braced outward, and Bren took larger and larger breaths, as centimeter by several centimeters he felt the tape give way, Jago peeling it and pulling its mild adhesion away from his ribs.

  “Pull,” he said, knowing it was going to hurt. “Just pull it, dammit.”

  Jago pulled. With her greater strength.

  Which at once pulled the surface of his skin and jerked the support of the cast from under the arm he had propped on his knee, all that kept the arm from falling—that and his own quick grab at his elbow as the whole god-awful arrangement parted. Muscles frozen for days in an uncomfortable attitude and a joint that hadn’t flexed since the bone was fused—all moved. Ribs lately broken—expanded on the reflexive intake of breath.

  He thought he said something—he wasn’t sure what; he curled over sideways on the mattress while he cradled the elbow, with spots in front of his eyes. His mouth tasted of copper.

  “Nadi?” Jago asked, clearly afraid something wasn’t according to meticulous plan.

  “No, no, it’s—quite all right, Jago, just—it’s not used to moving.”

  “One still thinks—”

  “No!” he said, surly and short-fused—holding on to his arm as tightly as he could, as if he could curl the pain inward, spread it out, get it out of the sensitive spots. “No damn doctor.”

  He thought Jago went away. He hadn’t meant to snarl. He really hadn’t. But after a time still curled into a ball, he thought she was there again, and immediately after, felt the cold of some kind of salve on his arm—which might not be the best idea with a recent incision, especially given the poisonous character of local medications, but he was out of moral fiber to protest anything and, hell, it was, in a moment more, killing the ache—he was aware finally of the servants in the room, and of, quite improbably to his way of thinking, being lifted bodily up off his face. Jago let him go and steadied him sitting, and he sat up long enough for the arm to find a new sore angle and for the servants to take down the bedcovers.

  At that point he didn’t need Jago’s suggestion he lie down. He rested on his face, trying not to move the joint, and trying to protect it, while Jago’s smooth, strong hand worked salve across the sore spots. It stung on the new skin of recent incisions, but it diminished the pain, and he gave up his whole arm to Jago’s ministrations, burrowed his face in the crook of the other arm, and relaxed completely, finally, eyes shut, just—comfortable, out of pain, out of discomfort for the first time in days, and sinking into a dark, dark pit.

  After which the lights were down, some covering was on his shoulders, and something heavy was weighing down the mattress edge. Which was Jago, sitting on the floor asleep against the edge of the bed.

  “Nadi,” he said, and worked about to reach out a hand, but she waked at the mere movement, and lifted her face and made a grimace, rubbing a doubtless stiff neck. “You should have gone to bed,” he said.

  “One worried, nadi.”

  He reached out to pat her shoulder, and bumped her cheek with the back of his hand, instead, being not quite on his aim, which Jago didn’t mind, which led to a more intimate gesture than he’d intended, and a more intimate return on her part, her hand on his.

  “Jago-ji,” he said, attempting humor, “you shouldn’t. I’d hate to offend Banichi.”

  “In what?”

  Translation interface. He tried to wake, wary of wrong words, and the situation. And while he was being apprehensive, and trying, muzzily, to compose a request to go to sleep that wouldn’t sound like a rebuff, Jago’s fingers laced with his, and in his inaction, wound around his wrist, and wandered up his arm to his back.

  After which Jago got up, and sat down on the edge of the bed, took off the towel that was covering his skin, and began to work another dose of salve into his back and down the injured arm, which was enough to make a weary human’s bones melt, and his recently wary brain all but disengage.

  All but—disengage. After the nagging pain subsided, it waked up enough to remind that Jago’s reactions of recent days hadn’t been impersonal. And he remembered, while Jago’s hands were sliding very comfortingly along his backbone, that Banichi had joked about Jago’s curiosity from the very start.

  The fact that the personal relationship between Banichi and Jago never had been clear to him, and that he was alone, and that the temptation more than intellectually dawning in the forebrain—was already settled and willing in the hind-brain, and beginning to interfere with his capacity to think at all.

  “Jago-ji. Please stop.” He feared offending her, and he roiled over and propped himself on his good elbow to give an impression, a lie, of a man well awake and sensible, but he was facing a looming shadow against the night-light, that gave human eyes nothing of her expression—such as she might show in a moment of rebuff. He tried to touch Jago’s arm, but the arm he wasn’t leaning on wouldn’t lift all the way, and fell, quite painfully. “Jago, na
di, Banichi might come after me.”

  “No,” Jago said, one of those enigmatic little yes-no’s that maddened human instincts. But it was very clear Jago knew what she was doing.

  “I just—Jago—” He was awake. He didn’t know what reality he’d landed in, but he was aware and awake.

  “One need say nothing, Bren-ji. No is sufficient.”

  “No. It’s not. It’s not, Jago.”

  “It seems simple. Yes. No.”

  “Jago—if it’s curiosity, then go ahead, I’ve no objection. But—” Breath came with difficulty. Sore ribs. A fog coming over the brain, that said, Why not? “But,” the negotiator got to the fore, “but if it’s more than that, Jago, then—give me room. Let me understand what you’re asking. And what’s right.”

  Jago had sat back on her heels at the bedside, elbow on the mattress. A frown was on her face—not, it seemed, an angry frown, but a puzzled one, a thoughtful one.

  “Unfair,” Jago declared finally.

  “Unfair?”

  “Words, words, words!”

  “I’ve offended you.”

  “No. You ask me damned questions.” Jago gained her feet in one fluid motion, a shadow in the night-light as she turned, stiff and proper, and walked to the door, her braid the usual ruler-line down her back.

  But she stopped there and looked back at him. “Nand’ paidhi.”

  “Nadi?” He was struck with anxiety at the formality.

  “One asks—is there danger from Mospheira?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  No immediate answer. Jago was a darkness. A near-silhouette against the hall light as she opened the door to leave.

  “Jago? Why? That paper? It advised me only of how to contact my office. Of persons not to trust.”

  He had only her profile now. Which became full face, a second glance back.

  “Is Hanks-paidhi a danger?” Jago asked.

  “Always a danger,” he said, but added, in fear for Hanks’ life: “but not the sort that would require your action, Jago-ji. The abstract sort of danger. Political rivalry.”