Invader

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Nand’ paidhi,” a servant came to the tableside to say, “nand’ paidhi, the telephone.”

  Jase, he thought, and left his chair in haste. His glum mood evaporated—he was ready to get on with the business of the ship, the site, the landing, the whole future that otherwise he couldn’t deal with.

  “Bren?”

  Barb.

  “Hello? Bren?”

  It took a second to catch his breath, switch mental gears, switch languages so he could think what Barb wanted. “Yeah,” he said.

  “Bren, what’s the matter?”

  “There’s nothing the matter.”

  “You asked me to go over to your mother’s.”

  He remembered. He remembered the conversation with Toby, which didn’t rest in the same memory area with Tabini, Ilisidi, and Jase Graham. “Yeah.”

  “Bren, are we all right to talk?”

  “Yeah, yeah, go ahead.”

  “She’s all right. A little spooked. Somebody wrote some letters, somebody kept calling on the phone, leaving messages on the system, got some of her private numbers.”

  “Private numbers.”

  “Just things they shouldn’t have accessed. She said she was all right. The police are on to it.”

  Things they shouldn’t have accessed. Access numbers. Access to systems. Not random off-the-street trouble, then. That smelled like the Heritage agitators. Connections. Professionals, who’d ring your phone and drive you crazy. “Yeah. Yes. You tell her I’m fine?”

  “Sure.” A silence followed. “So how are you?”

  “Fine.”

  “You sounded a little vague when you picked up.”

  “I suppose I did. I was expecting a business call. Sorry.”

  “So how are you?”

  “The cast is off. No real problems. Thanks for chasing that down.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Bren.”

  “So how are you getting along?”

  “Fine.” Another small silence. “I sort of expected you to call me.”

  He didn’t know what he’d heard for a moment. He replayed it twice in his head and drew a measured breath.

  “Bren?”

  “Barb, there is no choice. There is no choice. I won’t be calling you. You did what you had to do, I think you did the right thing—” He found a certainty in his own mind that he wasn’t going back to Mospheira again. Not soon. Or not the same.

  But he couldn’t say it. Not to Barb. Not to Shawn. He couldn’t let them draw the conclusion, or Tabini lost his fair broker. “I think you ought to work on it, give it a chance. Paul’s a nice guy.”

  “I love you, Bren.”

  It wasn’t even painful to hear that maneuver, except in the response and comfort-giving it asked of him. And in what it said about her that he’d never wanted to face. That had rung alarm bells the last time they’d talked. And the timing of the phone calls. And her message to him after he’d left. And her not showing up at the hospital. He’d thought in her turning away from him she was giving him the reality dose. He doubted all of a sudden that she had it to give.

  “Bren?”

  Tears. He heard the quaver.

  “I can’t help you,” he said. “I can’t fix it. You hear me?”

  “Bren. You don’t know what it’s like, you don’t know, you’ve got the whole government around you, and we protect you from it, everybody protects you from it, because you come home to rest, but we live with it, we live with it all the time, your mother’s scared to answer her phone, your brother’s scared—they’re saying you’ve gone over, they’re saying you’re selling us out, and people believe it—people at work believe it, and it’s our fault, isn’t it? And we’re left here shaking our heads and saying, Oh, no, Bren’s not like that, Bren wouldn’t do that, Bren’s just getting what he can get—but I’ve got reporters ringing my phone, I’ve got messages stacked up on the system, my parents are scared—”

  “All the more reason to keep your distance from me,”

  “They say you’re not coming home.”

  “Who says that?”

  “People. Just people.”

  “I’m doing my job, Barb. Same as always.” He hadn’t been in the habit of lying to Barb. It was one more curtain falling. It was no worse for his mother or Toby than he’d already found out. That they hadn’t come to the hospital began to make a certain amount of sense. And maybe it was a good reason and a good time to say a firm goodbye. Leave the game to those who had signed on for it. “You take care, Barb. Don’t pay attention to fools. Don’t tolerate them, either. If you’re getting those calls, you call the police.”

  “I have. A lot of times you don’t know about. I mean, a long time before this, Bren. A lot of times.”

  “Best I can do, Barb. Best I can say. I won’t be calling. Hear? Don’t put off the rest of your life. You made a good decision. Stick by it.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that!”

  “You know Wilson. That’s my reality. It’s not yours.”

  “Dammit, no—Bren, don’t you hang up on me!”

  “Don’t overdramatize, Barb. It won’t work. Good night, see you sometime, get it straightened out.”

  Her phone slammed down.

  Good, he thought, and stood there a moment, aware there were servants near him. Always. Always witnesses. Atevi didn’t have a single word for lonely. Just—without man’chi.

  He laid the handset in the cradle and stood there holding the aching arm against him; stood, with nowhere to go, now that he’d put paid to the account. He was hurt. He was disappointed in Barb. He’d thought Barb had things better put together. He’d thought—he didn’t know. He’d thought maybe he was the one who lacked—whatever it took to form relationships. But it was one too many turnabouts, it was one too many richochets from decision to decision—and Barb expecting rescue. Barb expecting praise for living, which in his book, people just—somehow—did.

  Maybe that was what he’d been for Barb. The fantasy life. The rescue from mundanity. When the real world piled up—when it rang phones and intruded on her in her life—she’d fled to Paul. When it kept after her and Paul didn’t solve it—now she was mad at Paul and she loved him. Angry people on the street wasn’t what Barb wanted to confront. That wasn’t the fantasy she had. She just wanted the relationship to look forward to. The pie-in-the-sky fix-up … when he got home…. Always when he got home.

  Not a charitable analysis. But from hurt, he was back to damned mad, and two totally disparate things fell into place: Paul and his computers. Him and his absences. It came to him that Barb didn’t want engagement, didn’t want day-to-day reality in a relationship. She wanted to wait. That was what she did. She’d go on waiting. No matter how he wrenched his gut to try to offend her—he couldn’t. They’d fought before, and she’d find a reason to forgive him for the way he’d signed off; she’d stop being mad, she’d wait for him. She’d chatter with her friends at work, them with their on-again, off-again relationships. She’d top all their crises with hers. She’d fantasize about him coming back. What she had—was always garbage. What she waited for—was always wonderful.

  Far from charitable.

  Damn right. But he was madder than he’d ever been in their relationship, and it went back to that not-so-chance-timed message she’d blasted him with. He was a man agencies used; transactions he understood, transactions he was used to tracking and evaluating. And he had a sense when the use had gotten outrageous, he recognized crisis-oriented timing, the phone calls timed to get your attention and leave you with no damn choices—every damn phone call she’d made was right when she damn well knew he was finishing his day and trying to get to sleep. He knew pressuring an opponent down to the limit, and a behavior that twined itself around late-evening emotionally fraught messages instead of level-headed waking-hour phone calls for an ex-lover assumed a pattern that really, really set off alarms in his gut; a pattern that argued that his subconscious had been better informed on the feelings he’d been getting
than his waking brain had been for the last several years.

  Tabini shoved you to the wall. The Department would.

  The Department had. But you didn’t have them in your bed, you didn’t have them telling you they loved you: atevi didn’t have the word, the Department had it flagged under restricted usage, and Barb just used it for what she currently wanted.

  God, he’d learned at least some few things in semantics.

  And while his mind was still in human-mode, and while he had his head momentarily clear of his own brand of wishful thinking, he picked up the handset again to deal with the other unpleasant and inevitable phone call on his own schedule, before he had to write that damned letter to Ilisidi.

  “Nadi,” he said to the Bu-javid operator, “ring Hanks-paidhi: this is Bren Cameron.”

  “Yes, nand’ paidhi.”

  He took a breath while the phone was ringing, leaned his shoulders against the wall to ease his legs and rest a slightly aching head, waited. Hoped Hanks wasn’t in a mood. And swore that if she was, and if she crossed him, she was going to run into a meat grinder. He wanted a fight on equal terms, near at hand, nothing long-distance. He wanted, dammit, a human conversation, on whatever terms. Hanks at least fought fair and Hanks wasn’t a long-distance call.

  Obsessive behaviors. Late-evening phone calls. Barb upset his sleep.

  Four rings.

  “This is Deana Hanks.”

  In atevi. In polite atevi.

  “Good evening, Ms. Hanks. How’s the report coming?”

  “I’m working on it. Fast as I can. —On my own, Cameron. Using your information.”

  He dropped into Mosphei’. “A little news I thought you’d like to know. I ran out to a local observatory, talked with the astronomers there on the theory we don’t have the full range of concept words we need. I got a report back. I don’t know what the whole gist of it is, but I did submit the faster-than-light business to them as a paradox—and there’s a gentleman who’s been working on something about human origins that at least has the astronomers and the mathematicians talking. I don’t know if it has the merit of solving anything—I’ve a lot of nervousness about it. But it’s atevi. And it seems to be on the right track.”

  A silence. “I thought that was what you didn’t want.”

  “It’s there. Slip or not, what you said, you can’t stop it being there, not now. The atevi gentleman seems to have struggled up to a notion of a spacetime environment—a glimmer of an answer maybe waiting for the right question. It’s the old speculation: atevi theory finally pulling ahead of the engineering.”

  Another long silence. “On FTL?”

  “Other sciences, all playing catch-up to what we keep throwing at them—that’s filled their time. But astronomers haven’t had our input on any scale to occupy their whole attention. Their work’s all been vindication of what they missed, and why they missed it. We’ve been their focus: where we came from. Why they didn’t know. No showy engineering. Just wondering if they could trust their measurements. Asking how to know the real distances.”

  “That’s pretty incredible, Cameron.”

  “And going from there to the hard questions. How old is the universe? How did a ship get here? Is there substance out there? Is there really an ether?”

  “You’re setting me up. Right?”

  “No setup. I just thought you’d like to know what’s going on.” The adrenaline had run out. He let himself relax against the wall, let a breath go, actually relieved to have a sane, self-protective reaction on the other end of the line. “We can have our differences, but let’s be professionals: nothing to the atevi’s detriment. We both make mistakes, that’s all. We’re bound to. We haven’t got a damn lot of Departmental help here. We could blow something up. Major. Let’s please try not to.”

  “What’s this about, Cameron? What do you really want?”

  “The sound of your voice. It’s been a day. The ship’s still dealing with the atevi and Mospheira, so you know. We still haven’t got a landing site—I’m still waiting for a call.”

  “My sources say a lander is the vehicle. An old lander the station didn’t use.”

  “Your sources are right.”

  “Graham and Mercheson?”

  “Right again. Where do you get your information?”

  “Exactly where and when your people let me have it, I’m damn sure.”

  “Not my orders.”

  “The hell.”

  “If I could depend on you taking orders, certain atevi could get some sleep, now, couldn’t they? So could we both. I’d like to, Deana. We’ve got one job to do, keeping the peace. Neither of us wants it broken. We don’t see eye to eye, but at least we agree on what we don’t want.”

  “So what’s the news in the great outside?”

  “Committee meetings. More committee meetings. Briefings. The mathematicians are holding court.” He’d slipped out of Mosphei’ and into atevi without thinking, the moment he hit the schedule. “How is the report coming, seriously? Have you got everything you need?”

  “I have some detailed questions.”

  “Anything I can answer?”

  “I need transport figures. What’s the month by month availability on tanker-cars and flatcars, age, type, tonnage, that kind of thing, on the northern lines?”

  “God, I can get it. I could tell you, roughly.”

  “Garbage in, garbage out. But it’s a plug-in figure if you want me to play with it and give you for-instances.”

  He weighed the next offer very carefully. But all the Transport members but Kabisu were solidly Tabini’s: that committee was an area of minimal potential damage. “I could set you up with some committee time, if you’d like to have a meeting. I’d do setup with aides first, let them know what you’re going to want.”

  “So what’s the catch, chief?”

  “None. I see no problem. Fix your vocabulary list in advance. Don’t embarrass us.”

  “Cameron—”

  “—Or be an ass.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  Definite improvement in the temperature level. “I’ll set it up.”

  “When?”

  “I’ll see the minister tomorrow, at least I hope to, barring other glitches. A lot of these committees are running on limited sleep these days. But Commerce, Trade, Transport, any and all of them—they’re pretty well staffed, and it’s an important piece of work. Just no damn politicking, Deana.”

  “Don’t tell me—”

  “—Deana. —All right?”

  “All right.”

  He let go a clenched-up breath. “I want to tell you—”

  “Yes?”

  “Deana, I appreciate the cooperation. You had a damn hard landing on the job, I’m realizing that. I just wanted to tell you—”

  “Let’s not drown in sentiment, here.”

  “No danger of that. Can we just—”

  “I know—God!—oh, God!—Baighi? Baighi?”

  “Deana?”

  Something popped, dim and dull. Baighi was security. He heard the phone fall, he heard Deana’s voice, muffled—he had the presence of mind to push Record—and to leave the phone open as he ran out into the hall. “Algini!” he yelled, and ran as far as the center hall, with servants staring in shock.

  “Nand’ paidhi!” Algini met him halfway to the foyer, gun in hand, servants gathering all around. “What’s happened?”

  “Hanks-paidhi’s in trouble. Something’s happened. Get security down there. I think it was gunfire. I was on the phone with her. Hurry!”

  Algini didn’t ask—Algini ran back for the security station and he turned back from the dining room through a gathering of anxious, frightened servants.

  “Just stay inside,” he said to them. “Doors locked. Where’s Banichi and Jago?”

  There was a babble of answers, wide, frightened eyes. No one seemed to know. Tano was out on business. Algini was by himself. Saidin arrived, late and anxious. “Nadi,” he s
aid to her as calmly as he could, “an armed attack on Hanks-paidhi. Call the aiji. Warn him. Check all the doors to the hall.” He wanted to go back to the phone again and hear what he could—but there was no assurance where the attack was aimed or where it might aim; he ducked into his bedroom, flung open dresser drawers, one after another, desperately searching beneath stacks of clothes for the gun Banichi had told him was there.

  Sixth drawer on the left. He pulled it out from under sweaters, checked the clip as Tabini had shown him, his hands starting to shake as he shoved the clip back in. He stood up, tucked it in his coat under the bad arm, and exited his bedroom, headed down the hall to the private rooms, where he’d left the phone open to Hanks’ apartment.

  Security the aiji could relax at will. Jago had said that. He remembered it as he reached the office and picked up the phone.

  The line sounded dead, now. He couldn’t tell. He stayed on a moment, thinking of the arrest order he’d courted—looked toward the half-darkened hall. Light stopped where he was, at the office. The rest, toward the lady’s personal apartment, was dark.

  He laid down the phone, left the recorder going. The apartment around him resounded faintly to doors opened and closed, servants hurrying presumably wherever they had to perform security checks. He went back out into the hall, light to his left, darkness to his right—covering darkness, darkness that didn’t cast a shadow. He longed to take a fast look from the balcony down toward the garden courts where Hanks’ apartment was to see whether it was a single attack or anything wider going on—wider, meaning an action against the established order. Or failing that—to ask Algini if he’d found out anything. But it was a risk even crossing the wide-windowed rooms in the lighted section of the halls to get back to the foyer where Algini was.

  The other direction offered, for someone confident of the furniture and knowing his way in the dark, a chance to look out without silhouetting himself against lights, a chance to spy down from the height at least to see if there were lights below, and where, and if the search was tending higher or lower on the hill.