Invader

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Hardly prudent,” Jago said.

  “Nevertheless,” he said.

  “If some human reason prompts you to justify the dowager,” Banichi said, “I would urge you, paidhi-ji, to accept atevi reasons to reserve judgment.”

  Things were at a bad pass when his atevi security had to remind him where things atevi began and things human ended.

  “One respects the advice,” he said. “Thank you. Thank you both—for your protection. For your good sense, in the face of my … occasional lapses in judgment—and security.”

  “Please,” Jago said, “stay within our guard at Taiben. Take no chances.”

  He looked straight at Jago, and imagined, the way he’d imagined Jago avoiding him for the number of hours, that she intended the meeting of the eyes, that she looked at him in a very direct, very intimate way. Which made him flinch and duck.

  “Considering all this,” he said, trying to recover his train of thought, “in atevi ways the paidhi may be too foreign to reckon—how did Ilisidi know about Barb the morning after I’d gotten the news? How do you think she knew that fast, if not directly from Damiri’s staff? And why should Damiri and Ilisidi associate?”

  There was a sober look on both opposing faces.

  “Tabini has asked himself that very serious question,” Banichi said. “And one does recall where Ilisidi is guesting today.”

  “Has he asked Damiri about it?” a human couldn’t refrain from asking.

  “Far too direct,” Jago said. “We do lie, nadi-ji. Some of us do it very well. Certain of us even take public offense.”

  “Do you believe Damiri to be honest?”

  “One can believe that Damiri-daja is quite honest,” Banichi said, “and still know that she might be closer to her uncle’s wishes than Tabini would wish. That is honest, paidhi-ji.”

  The only thing showing under the wings at Taiben was the endless prospect of trees, and at the very last the rail that ran between the airport and the township at Taiben, and the estate of Taiben, at opposite ends of the small rail line, two spurs.

  And one was aware, watching that perspective unfold, that other short lines ran up to various townships, villages, hunting lodges and ancestral estates—including those of the Atigeini, and the other three lords of the valley.

  The paidhi did have the rash and foolish thought that if, after collecting their luggage, they asked for a train not to Taiben but up to the Atigeini holding, in the north of the valley, they might actually have a civilized reception, a fair luncheon with Ilisidi, an exchange of civilized greetings, and a train ride back again to meet Tabini for supper at Taiben.

  That was the way things went when lords met.

  When the Guild met—other things resulted, and he wouldn’t throw Banichi and Jago up against Cenedi and others of Ilisidi’s household, not for any urging and not for any cause that he could prevent. Not that he lacked confidence Banichi and Jago would deal with the situation. And Cenedi. Who would be equally determined, at Ilisidi’s order, though they’d fought together, cooperated, shared all the struggle at Malguri. In some ways, he suspected, humans who thought they had a monopoly on sensitivity couldn’t imagine the feelings atevi had when some damned fool or some lord’s ambition threw them into a conflict they didn’t want and weren’t going to win—in any personal sense.

  So he was quite glad not to find any delegation from Cenedi waiting for them once they were on the ground; he was exceedingly glad that a quick security mate-up with personnel Tabini had had the foresight to send in last night in the dark had already ascertained that there was no bomb, no ambush and no accidental derailment to worry about on their route to Taiben. Everyone worried, at least aloud, about the paidhi’s physical comfort, and asked how the flight had been, and the paidhi smiled and said it had been very pleasant.

  More pleasant than security, who’d had to dislodge Ilisidi from the premises last night, damned sure; security who’d gotten no sleep whatsoever last night and, looking a little less crisp than the wont of Tabini’s personal guard, undoubtedly hoped that they could get some rest very soon, now. So he asked no questions whatsoever of his own and boarded the rail for a rattling, slightly antiquated train ride to the south.

  It took a winding long time getting there—no one who came to Taiben was supposed to be in a hurry—

  Thinking about the lander, and the drop out of space; and the fact that the trip to push the lander into the atmosphere was actually underway by now, if he remotely understood the distance the station sat from the world, or the speed of the craft shoving the lander into final descent.

  Thinking about Deana Hanks, and his having listened to her explanations, and halfway believing her—that was what made him angry: he’d asked for her help, given her the looseness in contacting atevi sources which she’d probably used to get two good men killed—

  He was mad, he was damned mad. And feeling betrayed, in a very personal sense, in his own judgment of another human being—he’d have thought instinct was worth something; and he’d argued with Banichi that she’d been upset at the attack, she’d tried to warn her guards—

  One of them was a fool. Again. He’d fallen for her line about searching for him because it was noble, because it was what he’d have done—the search for him was her damn excuse for contacting what Tabini called unacceptable persons, for going outside the lines; God, she’d had a field day in the atevi opposition, and not a theoretical opposition. She’d dropped FTL into the mix, all right, and maybe that had been a mistake, but she’d also damned near fractured a province and damned near taken out Geigi’s influence—Geigi was one of the most scientifically literate lords in the tashrid and in the scientific committees. Geigi had fallen into her arguments, and so had he—refused to maintain his intellectual conviction that she could possibly be the ideologue he’d thought and still do a credible job—he’d held out in the contact they’d had, because at the back of his mind had been the fear of being alone, the need for somebody human to check with, to have her contrary but human train of thought to consider. He’d needed her.

  But right now, if something happened in the landing and the ship concluded atevi weren’t civilized enough to deal with directly, that would suit her and her friends on Mospheira and her friends in the tashrid. They wanted something to go wrong. The radicals of both nations had found common cause. And he’d seen it possible—but he’d not seen it coming from the angle it had. He’d counted on Deana slowly gaining an understanding of atevi—God, how did you work that closely with them and still maintain humans had to have absolute dominance?

  And how did atevi lords not see what she espoused—if not that it was so damned uniquely human?

  He thought about aijiin, and antiquity, and how, yes, humans had studied the Padi Valley origins of the Western Association, but in the way of humans not hardwired for such understandings, humans hadn’t known instinctively, as would have been obvious to atevi, that that formerly powerful association would never turn the participants loose, not so long as they retained any territorial holdings here, not so long as they remotely had interests here—The hierarchies would still operate and the rivalries would still exist.

  (Mecheiti on the hillside, shoving each other dangerously for position, because there was just one mecheit’aiji, one leader, and there was a rival, and there were almost-rivals—and those far enough down the order of things they didn’t contend.)

  Humans concentrated on the competitions of economics and never saw the opposition of the tashrid to Tabini as significant. They saw atevi adopting a human pattern, democratization following a rise in the middle class.

  Wrong.

  Very damn wrong. Democratization had happened before the economic rise of the middle class, democratization in order to secure the rise of a middle class, maybe because the first paidhi, in his need to communicate about human decision process, had let slip something to his aiji as disturbing in its day as FTL to Geigi’s philosophy.

  There wasn’t such a thi
ng as a solitary creature in all the world. The wi’itkitiin perhaps came closest. But even they nested in associations. If there was one—there’d be others. Crawling their way uphill from their brief flights, doggedly, determined in their courses, they got back to their cliffs, those that survived the predators. Damned stubborn. As atevi were. As mecheiti were. They didn’t give up on a project. They didn’t give up on an effort. Lords didn’t give up. It could go thousands of years; they didn’t give up, the way, perhaps, wi’itikiin didn’t give up their ancestral nests on ancestral relative heights on ancestral cliffs. Atevi wrote down their purposes, and told them to their children, so they never damned well forgot.

  Very bad enemies, he thought, watching the valley unwind in front of them, watching the distant brown tile roofs of Taiben appear in the distance above the trees.

  Humans who didn’t know that, didn’t know the atevi. Not their good points nor their bad. Deana didn’t know what she’d tied into. Deana was still operating—he was willing, in the face of all other misjudgments he’d made, to bet on this one as truth—on the theory that what one saw in atevi now had always been true; that the opposition to Tabini was a political and not a biological impulse; that economics drove atevi to the same extent and in the same way as it drove Mospheiran humans.

  Naturally. It was her specialty. What was her paper? Economic determinism?

  It wasn’t his field, but he knew the premise: that industrial society ultimately produced like social institutions.

  No need for Deana to struggle with nuances of the language—atevi would grow more and more like humans. She’d just deal with the atevi that agreed with her position. Her friends in the Heritage Party didn’t want to understand atevi—just deal with them. Just the way it was when Wilson was in office.

  Right, Deana. No arguing with success.

  21

  The servants were waiting on the rustic back porch of the lodge as the train pulled in to the platform. They insisted on snatching his bags and they chattered at him about the accommodations.

  And perhaps it was the sight of familiar ground, where, at every visit, only pleasant things had happened; perhaps it was, despite the crowd of female servants, the comfortable recognition of an odd stone in the porch wall, the sight of its unshaped wood, its muted browns and stone grays, the plain character of its timber-and-stone halls—he felt as if he’d shed the Bu-javid at the door, as if, here, the landing itself was finally real, and he could actually do something about the problems it brought with it. He walked from the train depot door, down the hall with its hunting memorabilia and the leather couches and wooden benches, let his baggage find its way to the other wing while he lingered in the formal reception hall with the benches and the fireplace. To his pleasure, the servants or, more likely, Gaimi and Seraso, chief of the permanent, year-round ranger staff, who used Taiben when the family wasn’t in residence, had a small fire going to welcome him, mostly of aromatics, the sort of thing the rangers laid by after clearing brush. The room smelled of evergreen and oilwood.

  Beyond that was his room. His room, when he stayed at Taiben, a very comfortable room, with country quilts as well as the furs, a bedstead that could have stood in an earthquake, a trio of tables, and a wood-carving of a stand of seven trees that wasn’t grand art or anything, but elegantly executed and pleasant.

  His bed. A mattress he knew. A bathroom with a propane heater for winter. Shower tiles with wildflowers hand-painted on them. He realized he’d drawn a deep, deep breath, and that something in his chest had unknotted the minute he’d stepped off the train.

  Then Tabini’s security staff arrived to say they had chosen two rooms next to his for the foreigner paidhiin, if he would care to inspect them, and his mind snapped back to the business of descending landers, terrified spacefarers probably enroute at the very moment.

  He viewed the rooms, one after the other; rooms like his own, one with a sling chair made of marvelously shaped driftwood and red leather, one with a human-high carved screen showing a hunting party, and asked himself what they’d think, surrounded by stone and wood and live flame, which was, he was sure, very unlike the station or the ship. But he assured Naidiri’s two assistants and the servants that they were magnificent rooms fully proper for foreigner paidhiin—they didn’t, he was thinking to himself, have trophy heads on the walls, which was probably just as well.

  A senior servant came in with a bouquet of wildflowers of, she assured him, felicitous color and number, and said that such rooms and such a place would surely help assure harmony, as the servant said, “The numbers of the earth run through this house. They can’t be infelicitous with the numbers of the heavens.”

  “One certainly agrees, nadi,” he murmured, finding a comfort in the reckoning that wasn’t humanly rational—just that atevi thought it worked, atevi arranged things with good will in mind, very simply conceived good will that said they should all be harmonious and fortunate. “I think it’s very well done. Very well thought, nadiin. They should feel well taken care of.”

  He could relax, then, at least enough to leave the servants to install his small amount of clothing in the drawers and the closet and to press what wanted pressing. He went outside to stand on the porch and breathe the free air, looking out over the hillside.

  Taiben sat on a gentle slope, its rearmost sections camouflaged in the edge of a hillside forest, its porch shaded by trees. In this season, in the nightly chill of the hills, grasses were just turning from green to gold: a hundred meters on, trees and brush began to give way to meadow-lands which ran on and on, interspersed with trees, to what they called the south range—and the landing site, a good drive distant.

  He’d hiked a lot of the grassland. And the south range. Tabini had dragged him here and there around the reserve—an easy matter for Tabini, whose long legs never felt the strain. Which wasn’t fair—in a man who spent his life in the Bu-javid and came out here to wear the paidhi to a state of exhaustion.

  A lot of dusty hiking about, and firing guns, which the paidhi wasn’t supposed to do, and which, not so long ago, the paidhi would have been just as glad to skip in favor of sitting about the fire all day and resting—when he’d come here, he’d usually been on the end of a long, long work schedule. He was now.

  But if he’d the choice, he’d like to leave the porch and take a long walk off into the meadow. Which would be about the stupidest thing the paidhi could think of. When atevi security said, Stay in sight, they meant, Stay in sight. They were understandably short-fused, and being very efficient, very polite. He’d no desire to make their job harder.

  So he trudged back inside, called for a pot of tea and watched—rare sight—the play of flames in the fireplace for the better part of an hour while servants hurried about their business and security crawled about in places atevi didn’t fit, installing security devices, some of which might be lethal: he didn’t ask.

  Banichi came back with traces of dust and gravel on his knees and said he’d appreciate a pot of tea himself. Which meant, he was sure, Banichi had overtaxed his recent injury and was feeling it.

  “Game of darts?” Banichi said when he’d had a chance to catch his breath and sip half a cup of tea. It was one human game atevi had taken to with a passion approaching that for television. He suspected he was going to lose.

  Worse, as happened. Banichi offered him a handicap. He refused to take it. Banichi shrugged and still backed up a couple of meters—“Longer arm,” Banichi said. “Let’s be fair.”

  It was a slaughter, all the same. Four rounds of it.

  “I don’t think you can miss,” Bren said.

  Banichi laughed, and put one in the margin. “There. What do you say? No one’s perfect?”

  Bren made his best try to put one dead center. Which got him a finger’s breadth out. “Well,” he said, “some of us miss better than others.”

  Banichi thought that was funny, and sat down and stretched his legs out on a footstool.

  “Sit down,” Ban
ichi said. “Enjoy the rest.”

  He did. He sat down, and without clearly realizing how tired he was, nodded off in the chair. And finally gave way to sleep altogether, a comfortable nap, with Banichi close by him.

  “He’s quite tired,” Banichi said to someone quietly. “Keep the noise down.”

  People were walking nearby, a lot of people, and the paidhi finally had to pay attention to it. He heard Banichi talking to someone, and rubbed the soreness in his neck, blinked the room into focus and realized by the preparations and the conversations that Tabini was coming in, and with him, he was sure, Tano and Algini. Commotion preceded the aiji like a storm front: running through the sitting room and the kitchens, armed security headed through back halls of Taiben where the discreetly camouflaged rail station had its outlet on the side of the building, a station blasted out of the living stone of the hillside. Tano and Algini in fact came in, carrying their own baggage and a couple of heavy canvas cases that looked to hold electronics.

  And if the place had felt homelike in his arrival, it felt far other than that now, with weapons in plain sight, Tabini’s personal security with armored vests and heavy rifles—Tano and Algini in similar dress and no longer occupied with the ordinary business of clericals and offices: that was surveillance or communications equipment, he was certain.

  If Saidin had—and he was sure that she had—put an Atigeini Guild member in the staff—it wasn’t such an obvious presence; it was one of the quietly efficient women in soft, expensive fabrics and soundless soles, who whispered when they spoke among themselves and who had such a hair’s breadth sensitivity to a design out of adjustment.

  Damiri’s. Or even Tatiseigi’s.

  While Damiri was, he recalled with a jolt, still in the Bu-javid—wasn’t she?

  In the Bu-javid, where her life might not be secure if an Atigeini moved against Tabini at Taiben. Atevi didn’t take hostages, as such. But you damned well knew when you were in reach, and Damiri was—evidently voluntarily—staying in reach.