Visitor

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 was 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.

  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 the 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 b
e 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.