Visitor: A Foreigner Novel

by C. J. Cherryh

  But one dared not trust it. All those pieces had to stay in orbit, nothing dropping, until he could say they were individually true, or false.

  But at least, and to his relief . . . he no longer felt any need to deal with Braddock. Whatever insights he might have gotten from that quarter had been gotten. With luck it would help him ask the right questions to extract and understand the kyo side of those events.

  “One has absolutely no idea what, if anything, about these two witnesses’ testimony is true, nadiin-ji, but in their two reports, I have pieces to work with, possibilities which may well help us to understand the kyo’s actions and the kyo’s way of thinking, and I shall try my utmost. My absolute utmost. Let us hope Prakuyo’s own account will provide a felicitous third, clarifying the details. Continue to consider the transcript and all else involved. Help me where you see anything I may have missed. I have sent a translation of the interview to the dowager, and I shall value her insight, but you have your guild’s unique experience to draw on. Consult the Guild Observers where you will. There will be nothing secret from the aiji or those who advise him, so they may have all the information you deem good for them to know.”

  “Yes,” Banichi said, and the others nodded solemnly.

  11

  Mani rested, reading some letter nand’ Bren had sent—but that was not all mani had been doing. Cajeiri understood that. Mani had her staff arranging a dinner that well could have served a full table of guests, not for them to eat, no, but to send up the hall to relieve Lord Geigi’s staff, who were doing their best to provide for people who had come away with no baggage, no possessions but the clothes they wore.

  Lord Geigi’s staff had pulled the several wardrobe cases from storage, one of which was Irene’s, so it had come to mani’s door, and mani’s staff had pulled out the pretty clothes Irene had had on Earth. And Lord Geigi’s staff, in addition to getting the crates from storage for Gene and Artur, had sent orders to shops on the Mospheiran side to get clothes for Bjorn and the parents. With help from Gene and Artur, they had gotten sizes, and requests, and nice clothing and all manner of small things were due to arrive before dinner.

  “Go, go,” mani said, dismissing them both. Mani mostly rested and read, besides giving the major orders. “You may assist, but make no troublesome suggestions that would entail more work for staff. Advise them that dinner will be sent, so they may rest. See that things have been done that should be done. And yes, you may stay for dinner.”

  “Yes,” Cajeiri said, for himself and Irene, and back they went, with his aishid, and under constant watch from guards in the hall.

  He and Irene had new things to tell the others. He knew, for instance, there were security people from Lord Geigi’s staff busy packing up everything but the furniture in all their guests’ homes in the restricted sections, and putting it in crates and moving it to secure storage, so that all their property would be safe. That would be good news for everybody, particularly Bjorn’s father—except Irene said she wished they would send all hers into space so she could just start over.

  “There will surely be some things you want,” he said.

  Irene shook her head. “No,” she said. “Nothing, Jeri-ji. Nothing.”

  He could not imagine that. Every piece of furniture, every carpet, every ornament in his own suite at home, he had picked from storage in the Bujavid’s underfloors, and it had been owned, a lot of it, by people a hundred years ago. Every carpet, every vase that Irene had so admired in Lord Geigi’s house, and in the Bujavid, had a history, and hands had made it, and all the details like where it came from were recorded, even to what sort a glaze was, or who had gathered the clay and who had fired a pot. A piece like that, when not used, went to storage, to wait for some other person to want it. He felt very lucky to have found so many wonderful things. Even if his own mother had not quite admired his choices.

  Throw it all away, Irene said. So she could start over.

  That was just—wrong. So he caught the attention of Lord Geigi’s major d’ when they arrived and said, “Reni-nadi may tell you throw all her property away. Do not argue with her, but do not throw it away, either. Tell security save it in case she changes her mind someday.”

  “Yes,” the answer came.

  The new clothing came. There were also things like lotions, because the air was dry; and such personal things as toothbrushes and combs, and there were personal bags, too, so they could keep their belongings together—and everybody was happy with that. Bjorn had no atevi clothes, but he had gotten a number of sweaters and trousers such as Mospheirans wore, and he was pleased; and Gene’s mother cried a little, but Gene said that was because she was happy with her clothes—one hoped that was so.

  Irene went from one to the other, translating occasionally, mostly talking quietly to Gene and Artur and Bjorn, who at one point, when she seemed unhappy in all the confusion, patted her shoulders. Gene put his arms about her as if she were a child, which was a little shocking. But that was what humans did, and Cajeiri just stood aside and understood that for all Irene’s strong denials—Irene was not calm inside, whatever she was feeling.

  But Irene wiped her eyes and put on a cheerful face afterward.

  Staff brought refreshments, and they had, with their new clothes, what was almost a party, despite everything going on.

  And they, he and his associates, and Bjorn, sat at a little table apart from the grown-ups, and had a chance to talk. He knew he should not stay too long, and that when he did leave, he might not get to come back before the kyo had come and gone. So he sat with his associates and told them, quietly, what he knew about the kyo ship, and showed all of them the little book he carried constantly now, which was his same little notebook where he had written down human words and kyo, from way back on the voyage.

  That was, amid all the other things, so strange—that all of them could sit in regular chairs and do what they had used to do in the tunnels, under bright light now, with hot tea and little cakes, in Lord Geigi’s apartment and with the parents in the room—as if one world or the other was a dream.

  Bjorn was one they had lost. Bjorn since they had gotten him back had been so quiet, and reserved, and clearly a little overwhelmed, and maybe feeling left out. Bjorn was the oldest. He had always been the one most clever about locks and accesses and systems. He had never been the one who knew least, and now that was how things were.

  Bjorn asked, quietly now, in Ragi far from fluent, “Where we go, Jeri-ji? Where we go, all done? My father, scared.”

  Little words. Old words. Words from the tunnels. It seemed likely that Bjorn had composed that question by himself, struggling for words, and not asking anybody.

  “Why Reunion?” Bjorn asked. “Why are kyo upset? My father ask . . . why now here?”

  It was an old question, what the kyo wanted, one they had asked in the tunnels and never understood. He was much older than seven, now, and he had seen things he had not seen, the first time he had tried to answer that question.

  Would he have been brave enough to approach Prakuyo an Tep now, the way he had done then?

  Maybe he would not have been that brave. Or as stupid.

  Artur said quietly: “Maybe they were scared of us. Maybe they’re scared now. They’re only one ship, coming to visit us.”

  “To do what?” Bjorn asked.

  To do what was indeed the question.

  “To know whether they were right to let us go,” Irene said. “Wouldn’t you want to know?”

  “It does make sense,” Bjorn said.

  “Are you scared?” Gene asked.

  Bjorn gave that tiny finger-measure, the old answer to an old question, the old joke, from days in the tunnels. And they all laughed a little.

  • • •

  Long day. Very long day. Bren’s supper was past—sandwiches with his aishid before returning to his office, in what had become a full day’s work, at variance with any regular station shift. A breakfast invitation had just arrived from the
dowager saying, uncharacteristically, At the paidhi’s convenience, should he have the leisure.

  Breakfast, for the dowager, on her ordinary schedule, was far too few hours away and leisure, for him, was nonexistent. He had reports still to write, one to Tabini and another to Shawn, advising them of the mission’s situation—and then there was the necessary memo to the Guild Observers, specially worded to explain to them how to interpret the situation. They were sharp, and they were in constant communication with Guild on station, including his aishid and the dowager’s, but there were points they needed to understand, one of which was the simple fact that the paidhi was making the personal effort to keep them informed.

  The difficulty was not so much the effort of writing those reports. It was nailing down what he did think, and what he was doing, which was in a state of formation, not finality—fluid as it had to be, until he had better information. He rested his head against his hands, wishing he didn’t have to make Braddock and the situation with Ramirez make sense to traditional-minded Guild, when he wasn’t sure it made sense to him. But the effort kept him grounded, so to speak, kept him aware that he did have to make sense, ultimately, to the legislature on the continent, and get it to understand how little the average Reunioners had been responsible for their own misfortune, and why Tabini felt justified in diverting the shuttles to Reunioner relocation.

  Answering close questions for the Mospheiran legislature, and the inevitable committees—that, at least, was likely going to be Gin’s job.

  Part of him so longed to be at that breakfast tomorrow. He wanted to talk to Ilisidi, assure himself that she understood what he had learned—beyond that transcription he’d sent her—and hear her astute reckoning of all things political, because her insights were always thought-provoking and generally worth hearing . . . and because, on Earth, it was always his habit, like a touchstone. Whenever the dowager issued the slightest whisper of an invitation, he moved schedule to be there, not only because At your convenience had never really meant his convenience: it meant hers. It meant that he would find it more convenient than anything else he might have scheduled to hear what she had to say. It meant: be there and be prepared to stay late.

  But here—here it had to be different. Here, the problems were human, the incoming ship was a puzzle not emitting enough clues, and he was, hand over fist, unraveling an incomplete record of human actions in which a human mind kept finding only logical gaps and more questions.

  He had to believe the dowager, being wise, well knew what the paidhi was doing, or trying to do, and he had to assume for once the if really meant if.

  But he still wanted to go. For one thing because he had not been eating on any kind of schedule. Bindanda had done his best to keep everybody fed, but mealtime had been a moving target since the hour his feet had hit the deck, with none of the ordinary time for reflection and reassessment.

  For another, he had a See me from Captain Ogun languishing on his desk as of an hour ago, and Jase had signaled him that Ogun’s message was about Braddock—a topic he was not, at the moment, interested in discussing with the senior captain.

  Ilisidi’s invitation did offer him an escape from that—at least as regarded where he had to be tomorrow morning on Ogun’s shift. But that invitation might well bring up an equally unwelcome topic: Irene, who had been swept up into the dowager’s household, not, one suspected, to the dowager’s great delight. He did not want to be asked for a solution to that question tomorrow morning, or any morning until the kyo were a vanishing point in the distance.

  Part of him wanted to turn off the desk console and lock his door on all those extraneous problems, and focus on nothing but the kyo. He kept trying, desperately, to get his mind back to where it had been a year ago . . . before that moment of freezing that situation and inundating his consciousness with Tabini’s grave situation, a Guild conspiracy, a threat to the aishidi’tat that had developed because the ship . . .

  No. He did not want to go there either. That causality was not in his hands, not now, and the problems that had caused Tabini’s problem might have to get worse, with the need to solve the problems up here.

  No. He needed to go back, mentally a year, two years—back to when he first began grappling with the kyo grammar and making tentative structures. That was the moment he had to travel back to, a frustrating puzzle lacking pieces, a puzzle which did not do well with current distraction.

  But every time he began to resurrect that mindset, every time he tried to imagine the significance behind a kyo word, questions regarding the events leading to his meeting with the kyo would rise and his thoughts would skitter helplessly back to Williams’ story or Braddock’s account of the attacks on Reunion and begin spinning over the same old problem.

  He couldn’t figure those two individuals out—and they were human. It was a shaky premise on which to imagine what the kyo side of the event was.

  Tempting . . . so very tempting simply to assume the simplest explanation. To assume a species at war had simply mistaken who and what they were dealing with.

  Expectations. Assumptions. Therein lay a trap. Kyo might in some points behave as humans would. Humans in some regards behaved as atevi would. But the limited exchanges with the kyo had given him no understanding of their instinctive behavior or their abstract concepts or their intentions.

  Except . . . the kyo had no easy sense of we, at least as he’d tried to express it. Expanding a simple pronoun grouping of himself, the dowager, and Cajeiri to include Prakuyo had raised violent objections. Prakuyo, it seemed, was not and would not allow himself to be included in we without suitable consideration, which Prakuyo at that time had not been willing to make.

  But association, it seemed, was not only acceptable, but, perhaps, inevitable.

  Association. It was a key word in the atevi language. Prakuyo had sensed that significance and begun to use it, along with its peculiar pronouns, with a meaning Bren couldn’t begin to guess. He’d tried to remember when it had first become an issue. He thought it had involved several stick figures and the terms humans and atevi. Groups, perhaps. Whereas “we” had been in reference to specific individuals. But one thing was certain, Prakuyo had used “association” to mean something Prakuyo understood, to a people for whom it had biologically ingrained connotations. That had become worrisome. Fortunately, the atevi involved in that meeting knew as well as he not to assume a mutual understanding.

  There was one concept Prakuyo had tried to emphasize.

  That association could not be broken.

  But what, exactly, did that mean? That things that had met would—what? Be doomed to go on meeting? That the outcome would always be the same? That this association could not be broken. Or that their several species could never undo the contact—which had, at their parting, never been resolved.

  The concept worked on a planetary surface where oceans and mountain ranges shaped the contacts one was bound to make, but space was not that way.

  Unless one counted that star systems, which developed in clusters and strings, as Jase had explained in some detail once—with empty spots and dust like mountain ranges and oceans. Starships didn’t jump into empty space. They jumped to the next safe and adequate point of mass, and set up bases—stations—at stars with useful resources.

  The fact remained that Prakuyo had been determined to characterize their small group, which included three distinct species, male and female, young and old . . . with that term association. A group that sat around watching vids and eating teacakes. And laughing.

  Where did one start, with that? Might its meaning to the kyo be something far more simple? Those who had met, could not unmeet? Perhaps it had an even broader scope: what was done couldn’t be undone—

  Kandana—major domo—opened the office door, entered quietly with a little bow. “Has the paidhi an answer for the dowager’s staff?”

  Do or do not. He had to decide. Now.

  He had to stay focused, bottom line. Half of him was beyond
curious whether the dowager herself had any insights urgent and helpful on the issues raised in that transcript, but he suspected she had not. He suspected that Irene and staff problems with the guests was the matter of the dowager’s interest; and the body so wanted simply to plead exhaustion and sleep late for one, just one night’s—

  Running steps sounded in the hall, crossing from the foyer.

  Running, in an atevi household, never heralded good news.

  Kandana frowned and opened the door again—admitted Asicho, who bowed deeply.

  “Nandi. Nand’ Gin says—one cannot understand entirely—please call immediately. One wished her to delay but she hung up. She named the kyo. One does not know the detail.”

  A tick upward in heartbeat. “Thank you, nadi, nadiin. I shall manage.” Asicho was not the most fluent of his staff where it came to dealing with humans, Gin had a little Ragi, if only on certain topics, but the message came through. Asicho bowed and left, Kandana followed, closing the door silently behind him.

  The adrenaline surge stayed.

  Bren swung his chair about, punched two presets on the desk console, one the video display, first of which tracked the kyo position and clocked the routine ping of their mirrored message.

  The message wasn’t due yet. The position showed nothing changed, not rate of approach, not direction.

  Second preset was active Central, whichever Central was active, but preset number eight was one he’d established this afternoon, attached to Gin’s personal com.

  “Gin, Bren here. What’s going on? Has something changed?”

  He glanced at the clock: a little more than two hours before handoff to the atevi. Gin was not scheduled to be in Central at this hour. She had already had a long day, getting both shifts online and communicating with Ogun.