Visitor: A Foreigner Novel

by C. J. Cherryh

  But reasons? Explanations? Value-sets? Morality?

  Perhaps science had to be the key. The laws of physics were not open to interpretation. Perhaps he needed to put Jase and his esoteric physics to the fore of this meeting and just step back and hope. Or should he rely on a nine-year-old who had met a kyo with a child’s curiosity and a young aiji’s brash confidence—and bet on emotion and moral sense? He was so used to questioning emotion, to fencing it off and controlling it around atevi—had he a blind spot in that category? Did he trust it too little?

  Ilisidi had made no attempt to modify her approach to accommodate a different species. Hell no. She had simply assumed that, being intelligent enough to have starships, they would be intelligent enough to communicate with her. And she had confronted them with an of course attitude that had made it clear she was attentive and expected answers that would make sense to her. She had made a very critical difference, and done it without knowing a word of Prakuyo’s language. Prakuyo had made his own interpretation. Prakuyo had concluded she was authority, and was treating him with courtesy, which itself had to be comforting.

  Suddenly, his heart stopped pounding. Even skipped a beat.

  And who else, he asked himself, do you intend to delegate to solve this problem? Gin, Jase, Geigi? Ilisidi? God, he was generating his own panic. Run away from the challenge? His entire life fitted him to figure this out. And panicking, when all those people needed him to use his science and get this solved? That self-assessment left a very sour taste in his mouth.

  Cajeiri, innocence and curiosity, had gotten the figurative door open. Ilisidi, power and curiosity, had shoved it wide. Now he had to walk through it, use his own science, and deal. His mistakes, more than the others’, might come back to haunt them, involving the only world they had, and a species capable of reaching them, for good or for ill. But in his own lifetime, he had a hope of fixing whatever mistakes he did make.

  Walk through a door. Go where he had to. Even if—God help him—it meant going where he didn’t want to go. Boarding their ship and maybe not coming back for a very long time—or ever.

  It was what the paidhiin did. They’d done it on the planet. It might require—going much farther.

  Maybe that had been part of the nightmare, too. He’d been, in that dream, alone with them. He’d been on their ship. There’d been no exit. No way back. Just forward.

  And he hadn’t been able to summon up a word. Any word. He’d frozen.

  He was scared—deeply scared. He’d faced life and death situations, made snap decisions that could change the shape of a world, with less fear than he felt now.

  This time, he had nothing solid upon which to base—anything. It was all a structure of best guesses. And he’d run out of time to find answers.

  He stared into those unblinking, green eyes in the dark, seeing not the lights, but a night terror, the unknown personified. He was good, damned good at his job, but this was different. This didn’t have the University behind him with centuries of records and a dictionary. This couldn’t be solved with Tabini-aiji’s authority. Or his bodyguards’ firepower.

  Bottom line, they were all relying on him for this one. He had to make aggressive guesses about structure, and make mistakes and hope not to insult anyone. If he insulted someone, he had to get past it and fix it.

  They’d met without words—but they’d managed. Pings. Flashing lights. Tiny forty-nine by forty-nine pixel black-and-white animations. They’d negotiated a temporary peace without words.

  And he’d conceived that communication on the fly, standing on the ship’s bridge, with the kyo ship’s guns likely aimed straight at them.

  You want your person back. We want the people out. Deal.

  And deal it had been. Quick. Efficient.

  Adrenaline had been his ally. Quick thinking had arrived at quick response. It was this damned extended waiting and preparation that prompted the night terrors.

  But caution was the constant constraint on the paidhi. Observe reaction, get one safe word, the meaning of which seemed plain.

  It was the way paidhiin had operated—but with a larger dictionary—for generations.

  Until finally, in his tenure, in Tabini’s, humans and atevi had thrown convention and caution to the winds and ventured to speak together, freehanding a conversation.

  It had only taken them two hundred years.

  In point of fact, it had taken him, when he’d first arrived to deal with Tabini—two days to make that leap. Two days . . . and one cold moment when he’d been dead certain he’d made a misstep and they were about to start their relationship as adversaries . . .

  • • •

  . . . The man at the desk looked up. Beckoned in the atevi way, with one move of his hand, then pushed his chair back.

  Tabini-aiji surprised him with his youth. He was twenty-three with an athletic build and he stood taller than most of a very tall people. Eyes were paler gold than most, unnerving and capable of a cold, cold stare.

  Tabini gave a little head-tilt, impatient, as if to say, Say something, fool. My time is valuable.

  “Bren Cameron, nand’ aiji. You requested my presence.”

  A dark brow lifted. Another tilt of the head, this time in evident surprise.

  “You talk.”

  • • •

  A conversation had followed. A conversation of few words. But a conversation.

  His predecessor, Wilson, had never uttered a sentence in Ragi. Not in forty years of service. Forty years of written communication with everyone he dealt with.

  The man, when he retired, had not been altogether sane, in Bren’s opinion. But he hadn’t so much retired as been fired. Tabini had come into office, a new aiji, a man impatient to get on with the business of his own administration.

  Tabini had rejected the next paidhi, Wilson’s recommendation. And a second, with teaching experience. And rejected a third, a week later. And a fourth. The State Department, running near the bottom of its short list of qualified candidates, had sent papers on another candidate, much younger, with no publication to his name, one whose graduate thesis was, in Ragi, A Consideration of the Cultural Impact of Food Preservation Technology in the Aishidi’tat.

  He’d never really had proof Tabini had read that paper. He was quite certain that his youth and that vacuous-looking graduation photo had put him at the bottom of the State Department’s list—and set him at the top of Tabini’s.

  One sentence. And another. Two very young men, new to their respective positions, had found each other a challenge. Tabini, who’d likely planned to bully the next paidhi into major concessions such as Wilson had given, had a paidhi who’d explained to him, in limping Ragi, how Wilson’s technological concessions could pose a serious threat to the atevi culture, and what they could do to turn those items to assets.

  Two young men—who could laugh, rather than take offense, at the inevitable mistakes.

  The University hadn’t found out about his mortal sin—dealing in the spoken language—until after he’d worked his way to reasonable fluency.

  The University hadn’t been happy. They’d called him back. But Tabini had insisted he had exactly the paidhi he wanted. So the University had given their representative a severe cautionary lecture, first of many, and sent him back.

  He knew all the reasons for the cautions. Humans and atevi had gone too far, too fast, too early, when desperate humans had ridden the petal sails down and made contact with atevi in numbers. They’d gotten along right well in that process. The War of the Landing hadn’t been fought between atevi and the first humans to come down to Earth, oh, no. It had happened well into a period of trust and cooperation. It had happened in too much trust, too much cooperation and confidence.

  Wrong moves. Wrong assumptions. Culturally destructive assumptions that had led two perfectly rational species right over the brink. From happy picnics to full-blown warfare.

  Because no one had considered the inescapable biological triggers inside t
he languages, and what certain assumptions might do.

  One could hardly blame subsequent generations for being just a bit cautious. But the fact was, two hundred years later, he’d seen problems growing in their refusal to deal more openly with the aishidi’tat.

  Truth was, he’d hoped for the chance to take the office in a more aggressive direction. He’d just hoped to do it more slowly than he had. He’d had that much sense. But, God, he’d been too confident, shiny new and an absolute novice in atevi politics.

  Wilson managed to get onto the Committee on Linguistics, the all-important Committee that regulated the department—the Committee that had once had oversight of Wilson, as now it had oversight of the new young man in the office. He was quite certain Wilson was behind the early maneuvers that subjected every submission he made to months of peer review. From the beginning, Wilson had called him reckless. In recent years . . . likely it was just as well Wilson was no longer privy to such information. He’d done the job that needed to be done, the job as the atevi understood it to be, and it had been years since that job had involved adding words to the official dictionary.

  He’d become a lord of the atevi, in order to efficiently represent Tabini in the way Tabini wanted him to do, lord first of a small coastal estate, and then—in order to have the power he needed for the trip to Reunion—Lord of the Heavens.

  That . . . was a bit of responsibility he’d never have anticipated—a title he was embarrassed to claim anywhere near humans.

  Unfortunately since the voyage to Reunion, he hadn’t sent routine reports to Mospheira, beyond the one massive report he’d sent to the President. He’d just forged ahead with getting Tabini back in power and getting the shuttles back in service, and God, no, he hadn’t Tabini’s permission to tell the Mospheiran government about the aishidi’tat’s internal problems, let alone let the problem loose in University politics.

  On the other hand, thank God, his old ally in the State Department, Shawn Tyers, trumped the Committee on Linguistics these days, being the sitting President in a succession of terms. Likely Shawn was getting hourly communications from the State Department, and the Linguistics Department was likely hammering at the doors of State, wanting to know what was going on, wanting to be in control of the kyo interface, and getting nowhere.

  So here he was in the very first paidhi’s position—entirely on his own, in the early stages of communication with another, and demonstrably dangerous, species.

  Go back to the first rules? Build a dictionary, word by disconnected word—for two hundred years? Develop a list of safe words, taking no chances, until something near catastrophic forced a change?

  Or pursue the personal contact fate had thrown in their laps and go for broke? Was there more danger in failing to make full contact, than in keeping at a careful distance?

  They were not going to have another War of the Landing on his watch. On that, he was determined.

  Perhaps the real answer lay in a middle course. Humans and atevi had the experience of the War of the Landing: they knew the pitfalls.

  But might he have, in Prakuyo an Tep, the kyo equivalent of Tabini? Someone eager for solutions . . . someone who could have an emotional reaction at a seemingly simple word—we—and yet, rather than shut down, figure it out, and manage to use it?

  Someone who could take mistakes in stride. That had happened with Prakuyo. More than once, in their short time together. He had dealt with Prakuyo under stress. He had seen Prakuyo’s resiliency, his ability to reconsider a situation.

  They weren’t in the situation humans and atevi had been in. He knew how to spot the pitfalls. They weren’t sharing a planet. They had room to be separate. They also had a chance to be something else. He didn’t know yet what was wise to be, because humans and atevi had never been here before.

  He really had considered, on the voyage home from Reunion, turning all his kyo notes over to the University of Mospheira—and its Department of Linguistics. But, one, the notes contained information that might scare hell out of people. And, two, the University didn’t have tight security, and it wouldn’t stay contained. He’d meant to work the notes over, deliver part of them, but somehow that hadn’t happened either, and not just because he’d been just a bit busy with Tabini’s reinstatement.

  Because there was a third reason, a reason he hadn’t even admitted to himself until now. He didn’t trust them. Didn’t trust the entire department. They’d proceed by a process they’d worked out and used for two hundred years. They’d want to write papers, involve the State Department, and go by the departmental rules of contact, with, God help them, Wilson on the committee, telling the Mospheiran legislature how to deal with the kyo when they did arrive.

  The politics of it . . . the notion of arriving at a rigid one-to-one correspondence of selected words, the bizarre notion that they could shape another species’ concepts by their controlling the dictionary, that had muddied the human-atevi interface for two hundred years . . .

  Arrogant on his side, perhaps, to think he could ignore two hundred years of that work, but the one thing he couldn’t give the University was the experience of sitting across the table from Prakuyo and watching his response. He’d begun to get a feeling for the language. He’d gone into a couple of transits aboard ship while thinking on kyo grammar, kyo concepts, and he’d become—spooked, much as he hated to admit it. Spooked in an intellectual way, because the logic was there, and then not.

  Yet.

  Time was, Ragi must have seemed as strange to the first landed. The constant reference to numerology, wading in it, breathing it, must have confused hell out of those first humans who tried to communicate. He’d never been spooked by the numbers. They came easily to him.

  He and Tabini had more than once discussed that truly dangerous word friendship. Tabini had tasted it at times, worried a little over it, laughed about its craziness, dismissed it from relevance, the same bewildered way his paidhi-aiji fretted over man’chi and tried his lame best to imagine how it felt.

  Step and step and step. It had worked. Two individuals, wired differently but aware of it, had managed not to solve their deepest failures of understanding, but to understand they had them, and to build a bridge across them. He’d had help from Tabini’s side of the table.

  As he’d had help from Prakuyo two years ago.

  He needed to pick up, ideally with Prakuyo, where they’d left off.

  But on the station. In a sterile box of a room, void of familiar images and obvious situations and common interests, and far across space . . . where did he find the threads?

  That had been part and parcel of the nightmare—that he stood in a barren, metal place and faced the kyo with no words to speak and nothing to point at, no way to find them.

  No way? With his training? With the resources of the ship and an entire world to draw on?

  Hell. He was better than that.

  Prakuyo had tried. Prakuyo, even under miserable circumstances, had made a start on his own. If the kyo had sent Prakuyo here, then they were not going to start from zero. And if they hadn’t sent him—

  If they hadn’t, well, he could start from what he had.

  He had one core word in the kyo language: association. From cores—other words formed, assembling bits and pieces around them, a modular toolkit, mutating meanings, but likewise associating concepts in a relationship that carried history, instilled a way of thinking and directed thoughts down certain paths.

  Two languages, unrelated even by species origin.

  A boy, a toy car, the dowager, a plate of teacakes, and children’s picture books—

  And a memory: Cajeiri trying to reproduce a word, making a sound he had corrected . . . but Prakuyo had not. Cajeiri had deferred to him, but had Cajeiri been right all along? Atevi hearing was more acute than human. Atevi heard things humans did not. Heard frequencies the human ear couldn’t. Human and atevi language overlapped, phonetically. The kyo language . . . the kyo’s lips had limited mobility. Much of
the sound came from deep in their throats. But was he hearing all of it?

  He had ideas, God, his head was flowing with ideas, but they would take time to become reality. He wanted strong tea, he wanted Jase, and he wanted Geigi, in that order.

  He wanted technology to pull up the images he needed at a moment’s notice. He wanted technology to manipulate them. He wanted technicians who could record and analyze every sound Prakuyo uttered. And he wanted several trained and utterly trustworthy individuals working on the sound problem, real time, from the moment he entered the conference room and faced Prakuyo.

  Then there was Ilisidi’s method.

  His thoughts spun to a sudden halt.

  Ilisidi was the one who’d made the critical breakthrough with him, in the early days of his career as paidhi-aiji. He’d already broken rules left and right, communicating with Tabini. But she’d opened her own communications with him—damn near killed him with a cup of tea, then challenged him, pushed him, dragged him into her context and gotten understandings with him because, granted Ilisidi had decided to engage with him, she was going to pull him into her world, and not the other way around.

  She’d done the same with Prakuyo. Well, except the poisoning.

  She hadn’t remotely attempted to be what she was not. She’d been what she was, acted as she always acted, let the kyo see an ateva who wasn’t as outgoing as a child’s innocence, or as malleable as a translator trying to live in all possible worlds at once.

  The translator could well have given some false clues, being too willing to adapt. Like dealing with quicksand.

  Ilisidi had offered Prakuyo the fixed point, the rock that did not budge, the one to whom atevi and human showed unwavering respect. She was proud, imperious . . . and polite. Her expectations were plain.

  Be sensible. Be polite. And expedite a solution. Do not waste her time.

  She’d met other kyo and they’d understood that, in her, there was a point around which an entire universe revolved. There was a child in her care, and there was her translator, who tried to be all things to all people . . . and gave off constantly shifting signals. Bren Cameron could be the one who didn’t mind making guesses, who didn’t mind conjecture. He could make the necessary moves, risk mistakes, absorb any blame, backtrack if he had to . . . that was his job.