Long, long stare. “I hear what you’re saying.”
“Good.”
Another pause, then: “You said two hundred years? You named, that first time we met . . . what? A ship? Two? Phoenix? Reunion? Never heard of either of them.”
“Probably a footnote in the loss column of some long-forgotten company ledger. Likely not the only one. The universe is a big place. I suspect humanity’s shed itself in more than a few odd spots in space, not all of which are connected to your lot, not all of which want to be known to your people, especially while you come with a war attached. That war of yours did spill over into our area. The kyo mistook us for you, mistook an exploratory mission for, well, a reconnaissance mission not, I suspect, unlike your own, and attacked. When we didn’t fight back—and this is important—I think the kyo tried to talk to this one lot of strayed humans, a splinter off our group. Prakuyo’s team was killed. He survived, locked six years in a room like this one, unable to talk to anyone, damned near starved to death on the diet. He was half his current weight when we got him out, whether or not it was intentional, or just food he had trouble eating. So I suspect your case interested him for very personal reasons. I don’t know enough of the language myself to ask him that. But you haven’t starved here, whatever else.”
“No,” Cullen said soberly. “I haven’t.”
“He brought you to me—posing me a question, perhaps. Atevi were the first to really talk to him, atevi I work with. I think he wanted me to talk to you, to make you able to talk to him. He saw my function with the atevi—at least he’s got a notion what I do. He understands my sort of humans aren’t yours. And I’m not sure yet that he has a clear idea what the possibilities are, but I do know. I know that if you attach yourself to him, and the two of you manage to understand each other, the both of you, together, can do much the same that the first of my office did, two hundred years ago, when they stopped a war neither side could understand. What we built is something neither of us could have done alone. That’s what I’m handing you. That’s what I want you and Prakuyo to do.”
Long silence. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“You have started. So has he. You’ll figure out the rest.”
“God. I don’t know if I even believe you.”
“That’s all right. The language is real. The chance to stop your war is real. Anything else is . . . irrelevant. In seven days, you’ll have enough words to ask for things and say please and thank you, and for you to talk to Prakuyo. He sent you a pillow, for God’s sake. What more do you want of him?”
Cullen began to laugh, tucked up a knee, leaned his head on it, and folded his arms about his head, laughing, then crying, quietly, the two intermingled.
Tano and Algini, a little removed from where they sat, looked worried.
“It is not a concern, nadiin-ji,” Bren said quietly, and just waited, while Cullen regained control, and wiped his eyes, and went on wiping them.
“All right?” Bren asked eventually.
“Fine,” Cullen said.
“You understand me.”
A nod. “Not wholly sure. But—yes. I just—it’s crazy.”
“Nice pillow,” Bren said. “I’m sure he’d like to have had one, in his situation. He didn’t have a bed.”
“I get it,” Cullen said. “I do get it.” His voice shook, steadied. “I’ll take care of that damn pillow. I will.”
“I think we could both do with a few hours of sleep. The brain processes things in your sleep. You’ll wake having forgotten some things you thought you knew and remembering things you can’t even remember learning.”
A weary chuckle. “Not that different from engineering, then.”
“Not that different. I’ll show you how to manage the alphabet, next lesson. I need to figure that myself. It will give you a feeling for how I approach a problem. Reading is real helpful, when you’re trying to immerse yourself in the language. The more hours you can spend using the kyo language, the better.”
“When you go—that’s all I’ll have.”
“That’s all there’ll be,” he said, “until you can talk to Prakuyo. And until you can rescue more of your people. But two cautions on that score. One: don’t spend too much time in the human way of thinking. It will undermine your connection to the kyo.”
“Makes a strange sense. And the other?”
“It was after we got to talking, after we were sure we were friends, humans with the atevi, that we went to war with each other.”
“Why?”
“That’s another thing I need to explain to you, tomorrow. We solved our problem. But it’s real helpful for you to know, and for Prakuyo to know, why that happened. I can’t tell him right now—I don’t know what the touchpoints are with the kyo. But between you, you can figure it out. You’ll discuss it with him. You’ll come up with your own ways to solve it.” He stood up with the weight of hours on him—too many hours, no sense of day or night, too much kyo tea and nerves at raw ends, but over all, it was a good time to quit. “See you at breakfast.”
• • •
Four days. Four days since nand’ Bren had departed for the kyo ship. Four days spent trading words and playing board games with Hakuut, at hours that mani’s orders kept regular.
Four days in which one’s thoughts wandered back and forth between the ship and the game and the words and pictures of the tablet, which changed only with what Hakuut was doing and what he was doing—not the way they did when nand’ Bren was also working on the dictionary. Maybe it was because the tablets’ messages could not reach the ship. Reports came in on com, every ten and a half hours from Tano or from Algini, reports that satisfied Cenedi. Antaro and the others talked with Cenedi, quietly, properly, asking his questions that were not useful to ask mani, and Cenedi’s word was simply that nand’ Bren was safe, and that nand’ Bren was where he wished to be.
Nand’ Jase was not entirely happy. Nand’ Jase spent time in nand’ Bren’s apartment, but nobody knew any more than what Cenedi relayed to them, that said nand’ Bren was safe, and that “things” were progressing. Not even Narani knew any more than that, or admitted he knew it, and nand’ Jase frowned a great deal, and went back and forth between Lord Geigi, and the guests in Lord Geigi’s apartment, and Gin. His aishid said that Cenedi suspected nand’ Jase was under pressure from the ship-aijiin, who were not getting any more information. At one point, nand’ Jase directly asked mani, which was because nand’ Jase had no aishid capable of asking Cenedi, and Cajeiri somewhat held his breath, because that could be said to be pushing, on the part of the ship-aijiin.
But mani was patient with him, and had tea with him—to which Cajeiri was also invited—and told nand’ Jase only that there were regular, scheduled reports to assure their continued safety and ability to communicate, but that was all they knew.
Nand’ Jase said, too, that Bjorn’s household was being moved from Lord Geigi’s apartment, that there were questions Gin-nandi wanted to ask Bjorn’s father, that there was an investigation into the company Bjorn’s father worked for, and that Bjorn’s father had gotten his papers back, and that he would get title to his portion of them, and that the others who might have title might get it by his voluntary sharing, or by lawsuit. Bjorn’s father said he would share—Gin worked that out—and Asgard Company, that Bjorn’s father had dealt with, would find itself in legal trouble regarding the rights for which they had gotten Bjorn his tutoring—somebody might file on them in the Mospheiran way, which was not Intent, but Mospheiran law was involved, and maybe Tillington was. So the company was going to give up the rights to Bjorn’s father and continue Bjorn’s lessons and Bjorn’s father and other people were going to have a safe residency Gin was providing—while Tillington and certain other people were going to have to explain things to the investigators.
It was a lot of news. Gin-nandi was not a patient sort of person, and the people who had gone with her on the ship were just like an atevi household. If Gin wanted someth
ing done, people did it and gave each other orders, everybody trying to be quick about it.
So yes, Gin was a not a person who was going to be patient with Tillington.
And he hoped Bjorn was going to be all right.
“The Andressen house will go down to the planet,” Jase-aiji said. “They will have to pass the same tests as other people do to go up and work on the station.”
“Is Andressen-nadi to be respectable?” mani asked. “Shall he be disgraced for his dealings?”
“Under the circumstances, nand’ dowager, one expects he will gain respectability: his dealings were with property he rescued, the existence of which he declined to reveal to Phoenix command, and to his fellows, but he did preserve the materials. He used them in illicit barter, but he did so in the constraint of the situation, to help his family survive and gain status that might save them being shipped to Maudit—never a good plan. Gin-nandi will protect him—she will certainly protect Bjorn’s interests. I have spoken to her about that.”
It was good news. It was very good news.
But it was not news about nand’ Bren and the situation they all were in, even Hakuut and Matuanu.
The ship-aijiin were growing impatient, asking Jase what was going on and what nand’ Bren might be saying and promising.
“He will promise only such things as he must promise,” was mani’s judgment, “to secure a safe outcome and a fair relationship. The ship should do nothing.”
“Ship command is being very cautious,” was Jase’s answer. “They ask. I have told them—when you have information, I shall know it and relay it.”
“That is the case,” mani said.
Very possibly, Cajeiri thought, Hakuut and Matuanu were listening to all of it. They were not taking pains to keep it otherwise.
But Hakuut did ask, once he and Hakuut resumed their session at the dining table, “What Jase-aiji say? Ship-aijiin upset?”
“Not upset. Worried. Think-this, think-that. Ask when Bren will come back, what kyo ask, what nand’ Bren say.”
Hakuut said: “Matuanu and me worry same.”
Oh, there were questions he could ask . . . questions about what Matuanu had told Hakuut. Ever since that day, there were moments Hakuut would fade away from whatever they might be doing and stare across the room.
Listening? Trying to hear secrets that might pass beyond the walls?
He wished he could hear all the way into that ship out there. He wished mani would volunteer whatever Tano and Algini had had to say to her and Matuanu, when they made their visit.
But if mani wanted to say that, she would, and she had not.
• • •
We—remained a hard word. We, even I, was problematic—as if whatever we might be was so enmeshed with I, or vice versa, that kyo just felt—intruded upon if someone assumed it.
Ragi had an impersonal one. And kyo had an impersonal. It finally came clear, dealing with Huunum and Ukess. They were we. One boomed, the other did—it was that simple. But get a mob together . . .
“Many, many kyo are not a good we,” as Huunum put it. “Crazy. Two, three, good. Kyo choose two, three learn, report, talk to number one kyo. Much more fast decide.”
Well, it was not the way atevi decided things, unless one counted clans, but it appeared that agreement-groups among the kyo were not by birth, gender, or political rank. They were somewhat by personal affinity. They were, in fact, whatever kyo wanted them to be.
“I think,” Bren said to Cullen, in the long sessions which, a day ago, had moved to the conference room, “that it expresses what we call affection, and consensus, what atevi call man’chi, and clan, and their decision-making may be something we had rather approach the way they do, in small groups that build into a network of little groups. Quiet that way. Easier on human nerves.”
“Can they get anything done that way?” Cullen asked.
“Clearly they do, don’t they? You can work with it. You’re smart. You adapt. Thank God.”
“You say—tomorrow we’ll start using just kyo. Just kyo.”
“You have to.”
Long pause. Bitten lip. Cullen was struggling with something. There’d been more than one such moment.
“Going to miss human language,” Cullen said in a shaky voice. “Haven’t heard it for so long. Don’t want you not to use it.”
“And you want to make sure you don’t lose touch with it,” Bren said. “You’re going to need it as much as the kyo language if you’re going to negotiate a peace. Prakuyo can use it. Not easy for him to pronounce the lip sounds. He makes them somewhere inside. But you can talk to him when you have to.” He understood the loneliness. He’d been there, in the early days. And he’d started using Ragi with people all around him—because he couldn’t be like his predecessor, perpetually silent, solitary, withdrawn, communicating only in writing. He had to talk to people. He was that way. It had caused him a lot of trouble, in the Department of Linguistics.
Cullen wanted to talk. Cullen hadn’t had the skills to learn more than a handful of expressions, and his captors hadn’t helped him—Prakuyo could have, but hadn’t wanted, Bren strongly suspected, to compromise the test he was running: to bring the two of them face-to-face and find out whether they were the same species, the same culture, the same political entity. Prakuyo had needed to know that, and now Prakuyo did have his answer, and Prakuyo, who had spent his own time with nobody to talk to—a very terrible thing for a kyo—definitely wanted to talk to Cullen.
Prakuyo had set up a meeting—because Prakuyo was not the highest authority on the ship. There were two higher, two from whatever shape Prakuyo’s government took. Their names were Kokrohess an Ye and Heyyen an Crus, and they were, Bren began to suspect, part of an attempted “we” involving Prakuyo, a situation that had yet to work itself out, in kyo terms—and persuading them was important . . . to everybody.
Understand it all? Learn the kyo mindset? He had two days left of the seven he’d promised—and yes, he very likely could change that. He could volunteer another day—another seven days—but there would never be an end of things to learn, mysteries of behavior, mysteries of concept. There would never be a time in any near future he could unravel anything without uncovering another mystery, in a species so different.
No. What he discovered along the way, he passed to Cullen. He gave Cullen as much as he could. But the first paidhi among atevi hadn’t been a linguistics expert, only a man who’d fallen into the right place to learn, and who’d understood what atevi wanted and who’d done the best he could, making it all up as he went along.
Cullen at least had somebody to show him how to make tables, how words built other words, how minds differed, how to show respect and how to show good will—how to utter those important words, whatever they really meant in kyo, to say that one had meant better than had just seemed, and that one was happy with what had just happened. That was where it started.
Beyond that . . .
“I’ll talk in human language tomorrow,” he said, ceding the point, because he could. “I wanted to help you as much as I can—but you’ll have long enough to practice in kyo. We’ll do as much of it as seems useful.”
“And then you’ll leave.”
No equivocation. “And then I’ll leave.”
23
The sixth day. The sixth day, there was the usual message, called in—so Antaro and the others said. And it was the day before the last day.
Cajeiri had learned words until his head felt stuffed—but he hoped nand’ Bren would be happy with what he and Hakuut had added to the dictionary. He was particularly eager to show him the kyo writing system he was rapidly committing to memory. He wished that he could be cheerful. He tried to be. But he worried. He worried that something might be wrong, aboard that ship, that nand’ Bren and Banichi and the rest might be in trouble. He would not expect Hakuut knew anything about it, but he could believe it of Matuanu, who in all these days had said very little, that only to Hakuut, and spent
a great deal of time sitting in a chair near the kyo apartment door, watching.
Just watching. And maybe listening . . . to absolutely everything that went on in the area.
“What is Matuanu doing?” he had asked Hakuut once, and Hakuut had just bobbed and hunched his shoulders, which seemed to be a kyo sort of shrug.
Nand’ Bren had told his aishid, who had told Cenedi, who had told his aishid, that Matuanu might be something like Guild.
And Guild sitting and watching and watching for hours with his principal absent was not a happy situation.
Matuanu was watching. And listening. He could probably hear the lifts going up and down and Jase coming and going and all the staff going about and Cenedi having meetings with people who did not talk out loud.
Matuanu was mapping the patterns of the station, what was normal, what was not, the noise of staff at work, the lack of noise when Guild met Guild. That was how Antaro described what Guild did when they were set to watch a situation—like hunters in Taiben forest, listening, learning from everything that moved and failed to move. Matuanu watched and listened. Cenedi watched and listened through the eyes of staff as well as Guild, and maybe with things that Guild was not supposed to talk about. And meanwhile the Guild Observers sat and watched everybody, mostly inside their own quarters, speaking only to other Guild.
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