Visitor: A Foreigner Novel

by C. J. Cherryh

  “Hraksuhi ha Ahko.”

  That took some work. He said it twice before Prakuyo said, “Yes.” And had no clue whether it was a poetic name or some other designation.

  Bren went on, planet to planet, giving atevi names.

  Then, up close with the Earth and Sun. Orbit of the planet. Year. Rotation of the planet. Day. Hour. Minutes. Seconds. They had time in their collective knowledge.

  “Kyo planet?” he asked then, casually, and Hakuut said something that was half a thump.

  A rapid, soft sound from Prakuyo, one Bren didn’t recall hearing before. Hakuut’s skin pattern flared, spots coming into view and fading.

  Reciprocity, offering information, then asking it in return. It might be a pattern. It might be an ethic. He might have burdened them, offering information, then asking a return.

  Pushing too far too fast. Ramirez had done that.

  Then Prakuyo said, “Kyo planet name is Tuan.”

  It was, however, a good time to state principle.

  Tuan could mean forbidden. Could mean almost anything. He ventured to confirm what it was.

  “Tuan. Earth. Two planets. Earth is atevi planet.”

  “Tuan is kyo planet. Atevi planet is Earth.” Then. “Earth is atevi and human planet?”

  Oh, that was a sharp question. And not an easy one to explain. They’d traveled that territory before—back at Reunion, and never quite explained it to Prakuyo’s satisfaction. Now they were orbiting the reality of that question. They were on a station where that question mattered.

  And he’d prepared a graphic.

  “Earth is atevi planet.” He tapped the screen. There was so much to tell—from the human viewpoint nearly inexplicable. How did you possibly explain you’d misplaced your whole solar system?

  Explaining the accident to the ship—was impossible.

  Explaining the atevi perspective was far easier.

  He showed an atevi country cottage. Children playing.

  Showed a night sky, and pointed to a bright star. “Star comes. Atevi see it. Atevi look with telescopes.” He showed that picture. “They see Alpha. Many years.”

  Discussion. “Human make Alpha Station?” Prakuyo asked.

  “Yes. Phoenix came to the Earth of the atevi. They built Alpha. Many years. Humans on Alpha see the Earth, want go to Earth, make association with the atevi. Phoenix says no. Phoenix not want association. Phoenix goes. Humans on Alpha come down to the Earth of the atevi.” Picture of a parachute. “Humans come down to the atevi. Ask help.”

  “Help.”

  “Food. Houses.”

  Photo of same. Two people. Children, playing in front of the house.

  Photo of the world. And indication of a point on it. “This is an island. Water all around. Island. This big island is Mospheira. Atevi give this island to Alpha humans. All happy. Alpha humans are now Mospheiran humans. Mospheiran humans give atevi machines. Atevi give Mospheirans food. All safe, all good.”

  Discussion, then, a fairly lively one, in which he caught the words station and planet, atevi and human.

  “More,” he said, and changed the image to Phoenix.

  That brought silence. Sharp attention.

  “Phoenix, two hundred years, makes number two station. Reunion. Mospheirans do not see Reunion. Two hundred years, humans on atevi planet do not see, do not hear Phoenix. One year Phoenix comes to Alpha. Phoenix says not good at Reunion. Kyo are upset. Bad. Bad upset. Please come help Reunion humans come to Alpha. Atevi say—yes. We go. Atevi help Reunioners come to Alpha. Atevi send dowager, Cajeiri, Bren on Phoenix.”

  He left it there. Going much further led to risky places. And no use trying to explain the warring factions, either on the station or on the Earth.

  Silence persisted a moment. He waited. Nobody stirred.

  “Reunion,” Prakuyo said then. “Phoenix go Reunion. Come. Go. Come. Many years.”

  What was that human ship up to? Why this going and coming?

  Really good question, that one.

  “Phoenix goes from Reunion, wants to see a star and planets. Kyo come. Phoenix upset. Big upset. Phoenix goes quick.”

  They had not yet discovered a word for mistake. Or sorry. Or bad move.

  Tea quivered in the cup. The table might be vibrating ever so slightly. Human ears didn’t hear it. Waveforms would surely show it. There was such a feeling of danger. Of apprehension. Like a thunderstorm in the distance.

  In deep silence Narani came over and substituted clean cups. Bindanda quietly poured tea. They might have heard it. Human ears could not.

  “Atevi and Mospheirans,” Bren said, “want kyo all happy. Phoenix does not go to kyo space.”

  Audible thump. The cups quivered.

  “Bren say ship not go. Ship say?”

  Does the ship take your orders? Another really good question. And one with a complicated answer.

  “The dowager says ship not go. Mospheirans are not happy to hear Phoenix upset the kyo.”

  Two times Prakuyo struggled to say something, ending in a triple thump deep in his throat and a slight shake of the head. “Not good,” Prakuyo said. “Not good the ship comes to kyo place.”

  “Good the kyo come to Alpha,” Bren said quietly, maintaining calm. “Good Bren and Prakuyo and dowager talk.”

  Emotion showed in the booms and thumps. What it showed, there was no knowing. Not-good covered so damned much territory. Good. Not good. Black. White. Shades of gray were the very devil to manage when one started with table, chair, food. Abstracts were like so many grenades, apt to go to wrong places and blow up on them. Alien minds, alien cultures, alien ethics—all, all unpredictable in combination. Substances that became actions. Actions that had substance.

  Low booms came from Prakuyo, slow and somber.

  “Bren. You. Bren. Atevi human.”

  “Yes. I, Bren. Atevi human.”

  “Not ship human. Not Reunion human.”

  “No. Mospheiran human.”

  “Polano—” Prakuyo said the name very carefully, as he would a word he was trying to get right, and Bren nodded. “Polano ship-human. Jase-aiji ship-human.”

  “Yes.”

  A rumbling discussion with his associates, then Hakuut colored brightly and said, in careful Ragi:

  “Kyo-we see Bren, see dowager, see Cajeiri, see Polano, see . . .” A nervous tension, a glance at Prakuyo. “ . . . Much atevi.” Holding his hands wide. “Atevi and atevi and atevi. Much atevi? Yes?”

  “Many atevi. Yes.”

  “Good!” Hakuut’s voice gained confidence. “Atevi food. Atevi bed. Kyo-we want go see all the station human. Want see the many station human. Many ship-human. Yes?”

  Hakuut was quick. And armed with vocabulary. Did the subordinate ask the pointed question, giving Prakuyo the chance to disown that question? Possibly. Prakuyo hadn’t disowned it yet.

  Did he accept the question, from the one who seemed juniormost?

  Ilisidi certainly might not. He was, however, just the translator.

  “Here. They are all here.” He brought up a picture of Alpha, touched one side . . . it lit up. “This is atevi side of station.” He touched the other. “This is human side: they are Mospheiran.”

  “Mospheiran.” There was no luck with the m sound in initial position. It came out an h. So did the ph.

  “Mospheirans do not speak Ragi. Atevi do not speak Mospheiran. Associated—” He pressed his hands together, then opened them wide. “Not one.”

  God, he hoped they got that. But Hakuut blinked, then spoke rapidly to Prakuyo, who hummed.

  Then Prakuyo said: “Jase-aiji is in Bren room. Yes?”

  God. Subsonics. What did they have? Radar? Could they hear the voices? The movements behind two walls?

  Jase had been in ops. Jase had talked to the kyo ship. Prakuyo had identified that presence, right along with his.

  “I shall call him,” he said matter-of-factly, and took out his pocket com, with no reference to the listening that was alread
y going on, and the likelihood that Jase already knew his name had been invoked. “Jase-ji? Prakuyo heard your voice. He’d like to see you. Will you come join us?”

  “No problem,” Jase answered smoothly, and Bren translated it: “Jase-aiji is happy to come.”

  How much else might they have heard? He had no idea. Guild could drop into their own modes of expression.

  But, God, there were the Observers, as well as those more accustomed to strangers. One only hoped they were circumspect.

  A door opened in the larger room. Steps crossed the tiles, and the carpet. Even human ears could follow that set of sounds. Jase, in ship’s uniform, arrived in the doorway of the kyo sitting room, gave a little bow, atevi-style, and offered a pleasant face.

  “Prakuyo-nandi!” A bow and then, in kyo. “Good see Prakuyo. Hakuut. Matuanu. Good see.”

  The two kyo rose and bowed and bobbed, Prakuyo acknowledged the arrival with a lift of his hand. “Jase-aiji good see. Sit, yes.”

  Jase, with a glance at Bren, slipped into the chair next to him. There was, naturally, the solemn quiet of tea service, a quiet sip or two, time to factor Jase’s presence into the situation and give Jase a moment to settle.

  Jase had kept ops chatter confined to charts and diagrams, Jase had assured him. Hadn’t tried verbal communication, except small words like go, and yes. No freehanding of conversation.

  Had he identified himself to them? Possibly, so routine a matter Jase might not have registered it.

  But how much detail of a voice did kyo pick up—granted sound might be a far, far more important sensory gateway for them than it was for humans or atevi?

  They’d not gotten nearly as much booming and thumping in their meetings with the kyo at Reunion. Had that been profoundly restrained—not to give way to emotion in the negotiations?

  Prakuyo had had less restraint—personally. They had remarked that at the time.

  Prakuyo and the other two showed no such restraint now, among themselves. A group of kyo all emoting, he suspected, could more than rattle a teacup. All upset at once was something he didn’t want to see.

  “Good Jase-aiji come,” Prakuyo said. “Kyo-we want see Reunioner. Want see Mospheiran. Want see atevi. Want see station.”

  Jase drew in a breath, made a face, and kyo eyes flicked his way, wondering, possibly, what that twitch could possibly mean.

  Bren knew. “Security nightmare,” Jase said.

  “They want to see the association,” Bren said in ship-speak. “They want to see— Cooperation.” The image of kyo in the broad main corridors with random traffic, God, no. With the general apprehension, the recent brush with a Reunioner-Mospheiran quarrel breaking into riot. No. Quiet areas. Where there were humans. “We can take them to Central,” he said. “Let them witness a handoff. Take them to human Central, then over to atevi Central at the handoff. Gin. Geigi. Their staff is steady—we’ve had proof of that.”

  “To do that, we have to take them through the crossover,” Jase said.

  A public area. Random persons. Security could make it a little less random.

  “Can we fix that?”

  “I can do it,” Jase said. “Shall I?”

  “Yes.” He shifted to Ragi and said to Prakuyo. “Yes. Jase is going to talk to the station. This night we sleep. Tomorrow we go to see the station.”

  He hoped Prakuyo would take the delay and not interpret it as a setup, which it somewhat was. He wanted to close down the session and get some rest—the adrenaline was running out. He wanted to sleep. Finally. Things were working. The situation hadn’t blown up. He wanted to sleep.

  “More words,” Prakuyo said. “Go tomorrow. More words now. Talk. Listen.”

  God. At least the word for the visit upstairs was tomorrow, one Prakuyo had remembered on his own.

  They were set. It was working. The kyo were working on their own charge of excitement, everything new, and quite possibly they’d gotten regular sleep on the trip in.

  He’d last. Staff would.

  18

  Narani, Bindanda, Banichi and Jago all stayed staunchly on duty, with minor absences . . . sitting down for a while, one hoped.

  Bren, meanwhile, worked through more associated picture groups, on tea-fired nerves, and with a very different perspective, now, on what he’d once naively thought to refrain from saying, and what perceptions had, like the tapestry of associated words, knit itself into inescapable association.

  Hide their level of technology? No. It wasn’t possible.

  Everything the Earth of the atevi owned was oh, very clearly laid out. From their orbital vantage, simple optics was all they’d need to read the street signs in Port Jackson. Right below the kyo ship were seas and mountains, grasslands and forest, cities and towns, and not that extensive a technology. Planes flew . . . trains moved, particularly on the continent. Cities were few. Townships were far more frequent. It might not be as evident to starfarers like Jase, in his steel-and-composites world, drinking energy in monstrous quantities, breaking materials into elements and making them something else—but to people more familiar with the economy of earth and fields, water and wind? Achingly evident what level of population, what utilization of resources, built what level of technology—and the technology that made the table they were using was not the same that had made that bit of driftwood on the dining table.

  It was not the foundations of a star-hopping civilization, down there. The advanced technology had come in from the heavens, with humans, and his own account to them had said as much. Several of the trains they might spot down there were steam engines. The world had two real spaceports and two airports whose landing strips could accommodate a shuttle. He had so foolishly imagined, from the ground, trying to pretend otherwise—but from this perspective there were no secrets at all, no way to pretend there were other ships than Phoenix. There was one stalled in building—the story of that was equally complicated, and itself tangled in the mess at Reunion.

  There were Gin’s robot miners. There were two shuttles aloft, more on the ground. The mast itself could accommodate one more shuttle, with a starship in dock, no more than that. God, even getting into the station—on the conveyor line system that had never improved since construction days—must have struck them as dangerously primitive.

  They were fooling no one. What they posed to the kyo was not a threat—so much as a mystery. What existed at Alpha was a creation from outside. What existed on the planet came from the earth itself.

  Could the kyo possibly see a threat in a steam locomotive? Could they see one in a satellite system that was only this last year beginning to offer weather predictions on the Southern Ocean?

  It was not the same technology. It was as hybrid as their civilization.

  And when he thought of it not from the planet’s surface looking up, how did his explanation of Phoenix make sense to them—a ship building yet one more station, out in the middle of nowhere, and that one ship using all the resource that station could gather over a matter of years—to go out—to do what? Look for a home they’d lost, when an accident had thrown them far, far off their intended course? How could he explain that, with their limited vocabulary?

  Well, steam trains and scattered airports and all, they were all laid out below, the result of that one ship and desperate colonists quitting the station and heading for the green, good world below, the lifebearing star-system that also had, close by, the abundance of iron and ice the ship had needed.

  Phoenix had built a station they fully intended to leave. And they’d done it again at Reunion. How did he make that make comfortable sense to the next solar system they’d set their sights on? It didn’t make comfortable sense to him. Why? If the goal was to search for human space, why not just refuel and keep moving? The question still nagged him. Had Ramirez truly planned to abandon Reunion—to build—what? A Phoenix captain’s world was the ship, and stations served it. Was it still a mission, in Ramirez’ mind?

  It hadn’t been an issue to trouble M
ospheirans and atevi—until Ramirez went where he shouldn’t have.

  A closer look, Gin had said. There were things you wouldn’t know, if you didn’t look close up.

  Was that how Ramirez had made his mistake?

  He couldn’t ask. He couldn’t get into that issue. Not yet.

  He had pictures. That was what he had to work with. And time. As much as he could get, while the kyo were interested in listening.

  They had touched on authority. And who had it.

  He called up a picture of Tabini-aiji. Shawn Tyers. “Number one atevi. Number one Mospheiran human. Tabini-aiji is aiji on the continent. Shawn Tyers is aiji on Mospheira.” He showed the vast expanse of the continent. And, again, the island that was Mospheira.

  “Small,” Hakuut observed.

  It had always been big enough—big enough to be the whole world when he was Cajeiri’s age. But they were looking down from the heavens, seeing the proportion of it—atevi to human.

  “Small, yes,” he said. “City here is Port Jackson. Airport here. Big mountain is Mount Adams. Atevi lived on Mospheira. Then humans come down. Atevi aiji give Mospheira to humans. All humans here. All atevi—on the mainland.”

  “Humans come to Earth of the atevi—want—?”

  Second time for that question. “Food. Want to be safe. Want children.”

  That provoked a discussion, which concluded in:

  “Atevi planet.”

  “Yes.” He showed a picture of a mecheita rider, one of the Taibeni, a living exemplar of the old culture . . . part of the forested landscape. “Atevi planet.”

  The picture—they found astonishing, though whether the ateva, the mecheita, or the trees, or just the act of riding triggered that astonishment was unclear. He had a video clip showing the rider mounting and the mecheita running—that astonished them. A picture of the dowager’s home, Malguri, on its hill. The stone building intrigued them, and they seemed to find something comparable to discuss.

  They worked out build, building, and house. Man. Woman. Mother. Father. Baby.

  Train. Boat.

  That was a photo of his own, Barb and Toby, on the Brighter Days, on a sunny day. The bay sparkling behind them. Both were smiling. Wind was blowing Barb’s hair.