Visitor: A Foreigner Novel

by C. J. Cherryh

  Suddenly, out of the chaos, a word surfaced: reciprocation.

  The one thing they had established in their encounters with the kyo—was reciprocation. Reciprocation in the messages. Echoes. Signal for signal. Exact.

  Things once associated were always associated.

  Reciprocation. Echoes of messages, exact echoes.

  To the logic of what motivated this visit, that possibly mattered. Were they establishing some sort of symmetry in the relationship? A neighborly return visit . . . bringing teacakes?

  Was it—could it be—conceptually that simple? Did he dare—

  He blinked. Blinked again, was sitting in a chair with Jago standing in the doorway, looking at him. Two seconds, maybe. He’d been two years ago and back again. But not all the way back. Not yet. He was still dazed. Phoenix and the kyo ship seemed more real than his own office.

  The past was still trying to drag his attention to something urgent.

  “Bren-ji, you were asleep. Will you go to bed?”

  Blink. “Not yet, Jago-ji.”

  Asleep? No, though it might have appeared so. He’d not phased out like this since—since two years ago, when he’d last worked so hard on the language. It was like being drugged. The brain was doggedly trying to join two frayed ends of thoughts that just couldn’t get together in any sane way, though he could feel his brain struggling, trying to force that union. The room kept shorting out, bright lights giving way to kyo darkness and the miasma of incense, deep tones that vibrated through the air, and went straight to the gut. Plants growing madly, tiny cars racing down a tiled corridor . . .

  That was it. That was where he needed to be. That was the mindset he’d been seeking since he got the news the kyo ship was coming. But he couldn’t stay long enough. Jago called him back . . . or he’d flinched away. He blinked back to his own apartment on the station.

  He was afraid. He’d been afraid when he’d had to venture aboard the kyo ship, and Jase’s parting shot had put him right back into that terror-filled moment.

  Right where he needed to be, however, on that ship. That old hollow feeling was back, a feeling that he was trapped, bouncing helplessly between two places, two modes of expression that could white-out one’s thinking altogether. He wanted not to leave the memory before he had the answer, but Jago was here, pulling him out. He tried to put a mental marker there, just in case. He had to come back to that foreign place, that moment.

  He wasn’t entirely certain he could. And that uncertainty—scared him.

  “Will you have tea?” Jago asked.

  Two blinks. “Glass of brandy,” he said, desperate, aware of Banichi and Jago, now Tano and Algini. And Jase. Jase had come back into the room. When had that happened? “One regrets, nadiin—nandi.” He saw their worried faces, but they seemed to be in the dim lighting of the kyo ship, memory vividly painting over the bright light around him. “I am rather tired.”

  Exhaustion was not all the cause, not half. He recognized the fugue state, the brain persistently conjuring what was possibly relevant to a single lost and desperate thought battering its way up like a swimmer from the depths—and just not getting to the surface. The brain had finally let down the gates, because Jase and Gin and Geigi were all there, all taking care of those things that didn’t, couldn’t matter to him, and he could turn loose of all other worries. He could go back to that foreign ship, walk that remembered corridor, and see the kyo, every detail.

  Massive folk, gray, robed in geometric patterns and shadows, expressionless to first observation—but not expressionless, if one had paid attention, while talking to the one kyo they knew.

  He let the thought spread out like a chart: curiosity, suspicion, all those things at once. He recalled the kyo’s expressions, detected one kyo’s attention dancing between him and the dowager and a precocious child, not one species meeting another, but three species in face-to-face encounter, with the kyo trying to figure it all out at once.

  A toy car on the table.

  That was the instant that had opened the door for them: the gestalt of the visit to their ship was not a statement, but a question—who are you? What are you? A question coming from three sides and four. A child, and an elder, a woman, a man, and two species all stood connected in the same instant. Something was before them that the kyo hadn’t even conceptualized. Everything was laid out—and nothing that either side had thought they understood was immediately understandable.

  Prakuyo an Tep. The kyo they knew, years locked in a cell, the kyo that they had set free, that they had fed, and returned to his people—was there gratitude? Could one assume that emotion in another species? It was common to humans and atevi—but the underlying reasons were not identical.

  Again that word surfaced: reciprocation.

  We came to their ship to talk, he thought. And we managed, from that risky beginning. Those were the pieces we had. That was the situation.

  Might this visit now be the reciprocation? The echo?

  They’d offered the kyo peace. Understanding. If this visit was reciprocal . . .

  The past . . . slipped away like oil, taking the fear with it.

  Jago set a glass in his hand, the brandy he had asked for. He took a sip, tasted, smelled, felt the sip go down.

  The shadows in front of him were not kyo. They were his people. The room was his room. He sat where he had always sat, feeling fragile, feeling exhausted—feeling embarrassed for the momentary lapse; but able now to conjure the memory of that ship, its sounds, smells, ambient urgently trying to overlay the sight of his own people, and the bright lights of a sitting room that was not his home on Earth.

  If he let it.

  “One had lost the thread,” he murmured. “One had lost the beginning . . . not forgotten it, but lost it. Quite lost it.” He was not sure how much time had elapsed just now—a few seconds, he thought. No, long enough for Jago to fetch a glass of brandy. But in that interval, one critical meeting had flowed through his head, and spread out in all its detail of color, texture, sound, smell, sense of gravity and light. Vibrations of kyo expression. He hadn’t been able to remember the detail until now. He had needed to remember, and hadn’t been able to, because he had lost that one essential connection. That moment of seeing the whole picture. “Dreaming awake, I think. I think I am tired.”

  Other images came back to him. An airport in Shejidan. The beginning of everything. Tabini’s downstairs office. Ilisidi, sitting by the fireside in Malguri. Jase, when shadows and earthly sky had sent Jase’s mind into chaos.

  The beginnings of understanding. The start of everything.

  The start of everything with the kyo had truly involved a seven-year-old boy, a toy car, and a plate of teacakes.

  When the goal was to understand, coexistence was possible. Mistakes could be forgiven. Motive . . . surely meant something.

  He’d intellectually remembered that. But so many things had come between, so much re-interpretation. Now he had remembered that moment from the inside. He had opened that door. Now he could go back there at will and look at the details, remember the sounds, and the texture.

  “I remember,” he said, and heaved another sigh. Blinked, and made his eyes focus. And his hand felt the glass he held. “If I drink this I fear I shall fall over. My mind needs to settle. One has remembered things one ought not to have forgotten.” Which did not make thorough sense. “I remember.” Third deep breath. He held out the brandy glass for Jago to take. “I have had enough, Jago-ji.”

  “Will you go to bed, Bren-ji?” Banichi asked.

  “Yes,” he said. His body was leaden. He was not sure he could get up. But he made the effort. “Jase. Sorry.”

  “Rest,” Jase said. “You need to be sharp.”

  Sharp. He stifled a wry chuckle, nodded, and let Jago’s hand on his elbow guide him out of the room . . .

  13

  Everything was ready for the meeting, the guards in place, the kyo proceeding in their slow way toward the appointed meeting room.
They were using Phoenix and not the station for this second meeting. He could not remember why.

  But he saw Prakuyo an Tep, or one among very similar faces who might be the kyo they had rescued.

  He bowed. He wished to say hello, or what passed for a greeting. It was a simple word.

  And he suddenly, absolutely, could not think of it. His mouth wouldn’t shape it. Prakuyo an Tep addressed him in ship-speak, but he could not get the meaning from that either.

  He stared at all those faces, and suddenly, the venue was kyo, aboard their ship, in dim lighting, amid strange smells, with gravity pulling him into the floor. And Ilisidi was depending on him. She was at risk, and Cajeiri was, and he could not summon a single word.

  He could not remember. He simply could . . . not . . . remember.

  He waked, heart pounding, in bed, in the dark.

  God—had it happened? Was it true?

  Had he just lost not only the words, but all the time between?

  Or was this the greatest case of test anxiety in history?

  God.

  He couldn’t afford this. If he’d broken down, if he couldn’t manage the interface he’d come up here to reestablish, everything could break down. And they were dealing with people who’d destroyed a space station in a single shot.

  He couldn’t remember getting here. Didn’t know where here was. He couldn’t remember anything but the kyo ship.

  But he wasn’t there. Definitively he was not aboard the kyo ship. Gravity was normal.

  If he was truly in his own bed, in this blind darkness, he would hear fans, which there were, and he would see two small lights, right next to the door, indicators for the door lock. Which there also were.

  And the two lights were green, so that staff could come and go. And Jago could.

  Jago. Jago had gotten him to bed. He was not on Phoenix. Nor on the kyo ship. He was on the station. In his bedroom, in his apartment. He wanted to be here, safe, with time left. He desperately wanted to be here, and wanted that disastrous, blank-minded meeting never to have happened.

  The two tiny green eyes stared at him, reassuring him it was his bedroom in his station apartment.

  Memory sifted back. He had seen Jase last night. That was where things stood. He still had time. A fair amount of time to prepare for the meeting.

  Jago had gotten him here. She had sat on the bedside briefly before he went to sleep. She had said sternly, that he needed sleep, which he had agreed was very much the case, though he had been wide awake, in that ship, at the time. And he thought—he didn’t know when he had shut his eyes. In the dark, sometime after, he had slept.

  He didn’t, however, feel rested now. He felt wrung out, the nightmare still vivid, heart still beating hard. And the truth behind the nightmare really was the truth. He didn’t have enough shared words, not of kyo, not of Ragi or Mosphei’. The interface with Prakuyo had been a shifting amalgam of all three. They had managed with pointing, with gestures, with diagrams.

  And if the kyo they called Prakuyo wasn’t on the ship, he hadn’t at the moment a chance in hell of communicating anything he really needed to tell them.

  Bren. Ilisidi. Cajeiri. The first voice message from the ship had said. Prakuyo an Tep. Speak.

  Prakuyo an Tep. He’d responded. Bren-paidhi. Come.

  And a final message from the ship: Prakuyo come.

  So simple. So straightforward . . . if they could trust that transmission. Was it the kyo they’d met? The one who had shared teacakes and basked in Cajeiri’s enthusiastic attention? Or was Prakuyo an Tep a title? Had Prakuyo passed on what he knew of the languages to another kyo ship and were they using it gain access to Alpha? Why? What if it wasn’t even a kyo ship? What if the kyo’s enemies had taken that ship, and Prakuyo and—

  God. Was that the source of the nightmare? If it was a probe from the kyo’s enemies, using the kyo’s language could set up assumptions they truly didn’t want.

  His heart began to race again. He sternly reined in that entire line of thought. He had no basis for that panicked flight of fancy, and more than enough reason to believe the most likely option, namely that the kyo they knew as Prakuyo was going to come aboard the station once the kyo ship docked, and that he and Prakuyo, who did owe him, were going to pick up where they’d left off, as far as communication was concerned.

  But no species traveled lightyears for a chat over tea and cakes. The kyo would be looking at everything, analyzing . . . everything.

  What would the kyo perceive of the context they saw here? If they’d come looking for the we that was human coexisting with atevi, would they find what they needed, and would they be reassured, or alarmed?

  They’d see a station fundamentally the same as Reunion. Same blueprints. Same structure. Same species signature, nothing atevi about it, except that, here, atevi had begun to make changes in the layout of residential space, commercial space, office space. So it was not identical to Reunion—just similar on the outside. They might see that atevi influence in their quarters here, but would they recognize it as different? Atevi as yet had no style of station-building that would say to the kyo—this is different. This is our way of building in space.

  But they’d see primarily atevi folk in the corridors and meeting rooms. Atevi were in charge of the interface with the kyo. Dared they let the kyo see the other interface, human with atevi?

  The kyo might well assume the station was of atevi design as much as human. Possibly more so: from their viewpoint, it might well appear that atevi had been in command of Phoenix. Atevi had negotiated the evacuation. The force that had rescued Prakuyo from Reunion had been atevi, and Prakuyo had seen primarily atevi, once he’d boarded the ship.

  But Prakuyo had seen only humans for the six years he spent on Reunion. He might well have accurately understood that that was a human domain.

  Humans had built Reunion in an area of space the kyo claimed.

  Humans had built another station here, in space that belonged to atevi.

  How were the kyo to interpret that history? Did two instances mean a pattern of behavior that only confirmed what the kyo suspected? That humans were expansionist—aggressively so?

  They might wonder, was this solar system the origin of humans, and were atevi the power behind human behavior? Or was it the other way around? He had tried to clarify that point in their first meeting aboard the kyo ship, using a kyo pad and pen to draw pictures on a screen. He’d tried to show that the human home world was not the atevi home world, that humans had come to the atevi world and built the station. That the human ship left while the station humans went to the world of the atevi and became part of it. That association had occurred here, while the ship went off and built Reunion in kyo space.

  But what if they hadn’t gotten that from that small scattering of pictures?

  He wished he had that drawing, for reassurance, if nothing else, but it was, as far as he knew, lost forever, unless the kyo chose to save it in their files. Save it. Review it . . . and possibly read into it what they or some higher authority wanted to see.

  There were so many ways for their visitors to draw a wrong conclusion. Clarification required words, and vocabulary was still very much table, chair, floor, food, drink—except for some bad language Prakuyo had picked up on Reunion in ship-speak.

  Those, and a handful of uniquely atevi words Prakuyo had latched on to, some of which, like association, he strongly suspected had vastly different connotations for all three species using it. They’d found it easiest to speak, such as they could, in Ragi, but that did little to help him understand the kyo. Working in the kyo language was beyond puzzling. It seemed to maintain an insanely flexible dividing line between nouns and verbs.

  The kyo had to conceptualize some difference between substance and action. It had to be there. There was a fundamental difference. Or . . . was he locked in some mental box that happened to be common to humans and atevi, unable to imagine beyond it?

  Making sit and chair one word w
as either incredibly primitive, or reached into concepts that sounded like Jase discussing physics.

  Or was it more philosophical than that? Perhaps for the kyo form without function . . . didn’t exist. Association? Were humans and atevi associated because they performed a unified function?

  He couldn’t go down that road. Wasn’t mentally ready. He hadn’t nearly enough data.

  Human language had had a bad start with the kyo, as it had with the atevi. There were far too many ambiguities of meaning, too many emotionally charged experiences behind Prakuyo’s ship-speak vocabulary. Ragi was neutral—and seemed to strike some happier chord with Prakuyo. Maybe the sounds were easier for the kyo mouth to form, maybe it was the way the grammar fitted together.

  Or maybe it was that the words had come first from an atevi child, who had come armed with a child’s picture book and a happy, feckless way of expecting goodness from people. He credited Cajeiri with the real breakthrough—perhaps, though it was dangerous to guess—just the boy’s childish innocence had communicated a peaceful intent. He didn’t know.

  He simply . . . didn’t . . . know.

  His heart still pounded. That fear, the memory of that first encounter was in that dream. Fresh. He could go back to that dream and try to hammer out an understanding inside it, but he was, he began to think, truly scared to go back there—not physically scared, the way he’d been that first time, but psychologically terrified. When he dreamed, he dreamed he could not do what three species needed him to do, and he did not need a mental roadblock built on self-doubt. He had worked on the vocabulary he had. He had run up against concept—a wall that ought to be permeable, if he could just take for granted kyo logic was anything like atevi or human logic, and that was a dangerous step to take, one that might go right off into dangerous error.

  They had been able to deal in concepts involving tangibles, like people, station, and getting the Reunioners aboard. They had arranged a deal. Give us time. We get your fellow out. We get fuel, we get the people out. We leave.