Visitor

  “I sincerely believe that’s not why they’ve held on to you, Mr. Cullen. I doubt after the passage of years that you know anything they’d be interested in, that optics couldn’t figure out. I do think you’ve been a puzzle to them. And that’s a bit of a wedge, Mr. Cullen. Maybe you can do more than survive. Maybe you can do some good for the wider situation.”

  “I don’t know anything about any situation. I just want out of here. I’m nobody, do you understand? I’ve got nothing for them.”

  “I don’t know what you’re capable of—yet—but I think a man who’s held up through what you’ve been through is something more than nobody. I can’t change everything. I can’t undo what’s happened. But I can give you a way forward from here.”

  Cullen stood, silent, at about arm’s length.

  “Well, Mr. Cullen? Will you listen to me?”

  A shaggy-headed nod. Arms folded, as if the overheated air had an edge of chill.

  “That’s good, Mr. Cullen. Very good. I’m going to leave now. I’m going to see about that razor.” Prakuyo sat in a very dim room some distance up the hall, in a bowl-chair among other chairs, with an extendable platform at his elbow. There was a lighted screen on that platform, of a sort not unlike their tablets. There were a number of chairs, and a low table. Several objects sat on that table. One was an incense burner, the representation of a kyo sort of mythic being, vented, here and there. Another was a wand of unknown use. And a small closed pot. The incense burner was not lit, but it exuded a smell that hovered not unpleasantly between spice and burning wood.

  “Want talk,” Bren said, standing in that small room, with Prakuyo alone, seated, and Banichi and Jago behind him. Tano and Algini remained outside, watching the hall. “This man . . . is the war. This is the kyo’s enemy. Yes?”

  Soft boom, loud enough, given the enclosed space. In the dim light, with the light coming up from the little screen, the details of Prakuyo’s face became different, severe, like a model of a kyo by lamplight. “Enemy. Yes.”

  God. Where did he go from here? Where did he start?

  “Prakuyo hear talk?”

  “Yes,” Prakuyo said. “Want know.”

  “The man’s name is Cullen.”

  “Cullen.” It came out kh’-yen.

  “Bren ask Cullen where Cullen ship is. Cullen says kyo fight Cullen’s ship.”

  “Yes.”

  “One human? Not more?”

  “One,” Prakuyo said. Prakuyo shifted in his chair, and leaned back, expectant of information.

  “Want open Cullen’s door. Talk to Cullen. Fix Cullen’s—face.” He made a gesture to his own clean-shaven face. His hair. “Cullen says yes.”

  “Tea,” Prakuyo said. “Bren, aishid tea. Prakuyo go up, talk to associates. Tea. Here.”

  Prakuyo was going up to talk to his associates and he, and his aishid, were graciously offered tea, and a chance to reflect. Atevi custom, excepting their host leaving. Time to reflect, time to talk together, all built into the gesture. Think about it. Talk about it. Discuss the situation.

  And it would be no more private than any kyo conversation had been in the hospitality they had offered Prakuyo.

  One was absolutely sure of that.

  • • •

  Cajeiri touched the mark on the screen that triggered a random image of some already established word. Flowers appeared. Trees. A garden.

  “Kaksu,” he said, maintaining the appearance of study, even as he strove to hear Cenedi’s latest report to mani.

  The garden image flashed red along the border. He tried again.

  “Kak aksu.”

  The light went green.

  “Garden,” Hakuut said, though it sounded more like Kargen. But the clever device had learned Hakuut’s mouth’s limitations, as it had learned the limitations of his, and flashed green.

  The place seemed scarily quiet. Matuanu sat, just sat, doing nothing, watching everything. Nand’ Bren’s door was shut. Jase was somewhere Cajeiri had no idea. Mani’s door was shut. Cenedi and mani had been talking.

  Hakuut was willing to sit down and talk—to keep busy. But Hakuut was listening to things that went on, trying to find out things. So was Matuanu, Cajeiri was sure.

  But nobody’s hearing could reach to the ship out there. Everybody was waiting for somebody to call. That was all.

  And nobody was going to be happy until somebody did.

  • • •

  Personnel appeared, bringing a pot of something like tea, and cups, and set it on the table, then departed, with bobs and bows. The light stayed dim. The incense smell obscured the scent of the tea. The chairs were deep for atevi frames, entirely uncomfortable for a human. He had met kyo-designed chairs before, and found a way to sit on the padded rim, feet on the floor.

  Tano had come in. Algini had come. They all sat, in chairs about the small table.

  Jago quirked a brow, with a shift of the eyes toward the tea service.

  Shall we trust it? was the obvious question. “We may serve it ourselves,” Bren said, and added pointedly, “One wonders how the aiji-dowager and the young gentleman are faring at the moment. One hopes Prakuyo will be in contact with his own associates to reassure himself. One trusts he knows he can do that.”

  Tano moved to the pot, poured five cups, and served them.

  Bren took a cup of tea, which smelled vaguely like fruit. There was absolutely no percentage in the kyo poisoning them—at least for atevi or human logic there was no percentage. As for accidental poisoning, he was relatively sure they had sampled this tea once and twice, on the kyo ship two years ago, without adverse reaction. He tasted it, waited a minute to see whether there was any slight tingle, a burning, or a sweetness that exceeded a fruitlike flavor, before he ventured a sip.

  His aishid observed similar caution, except Algini, who merely made a ritual pretense of drinking. That was the rule. There was never a time, under a foreign roof, that all of them made the same commitment.

  Bren set his cup down. The others did.

  “His name is Cullen,” he said in Ragi, and gave a little upward shift of the eyes, as good as saying—they’re listening. But of course they were. He felt the tension in his bodyguard, unabated in the whole venture—not extreme, but wary of every sound, wary of presence, wary of the lack of it.

  And he chose his words, even in Ragi, to avoid ambiguity that might cause mistranslation to those listeners . . . and to plead their own case to an upstairs audience.

  “This man is not from Reunion, not from Phoenix, not from Mospheira. He speaks a language I can understand, though time and separation changes a language, and I estimate from these changes that several hundred years lie between his language and ours. One suspects, to one’s great distress, nadiin-ji, that Cullen comes from a human world somewhere beyond the territory kyo claim. One further suspects that the ancestors of the humans in that far region are the humans who built Phoenix and sent it out hundreds of years ago. These Cullen-humans’ ships, their stations, likely come of a similar tradition of architecture with Phoenix and Reunion. They may strongly resemble each other, to kyo observation, even after all these centuries.”

  “Hence the attack on Reunion,” Banichi said.

  “Indeed. Hence everything, nadiin-ji. As the Phoenix records have it, Phoenix, being lost and off course, traveled to the Earth of the atevi, searching for a green world, food, and fuel. But a world with inhabitants was not a world they could claim. Hence Phoenix left the Earth of the atevi—preserving Alpha Station as a base. They kept going, looking for the home they had lost, looking for those other humans, to restore contact—trade, association—with those who had sent them out in the first place. One suspects, given Cullen’s presence, that some key records were not destroyed, that someone within Phoenix, likely senior ship-aijiin, knew at least in which direction human home space lay. They looked in
that direction and saw at great distance a star and a world that might serve for their colony, perhaps more than one such star and more than one such world. They built Reunion as a point halfway between Alpha and another destination, a station with no green world to tempt its people to settle. It was only to provide fuel and services for the ship, perhaps to provide people, over time. All this is what I guess. What I know is only that Reunion was built in the direction of human space and that between Reunion and human space is kyo territory.”

  “The ship-folk did not know about the kyo?” Banichi said.

  “That remains a question. It seems doubtful the people who built Phoenix were aware of the kyo. Cullen says the war began about a century ago. He doesn’t know why. Possibly it was over territory. Possibly because some human ship did precisely what Ramirez did. One simply does not know. Whatever happened, happened long after Phoenix arrived at the Earth of the atevi.

  “It’s even possible that, by backtracking along its original course—Phoenix found the star that should have been its destination centuries ago. It would be ironic if that were the case—that it should work so hard to recover its course, only to find a kyo star and fall into a war that they themselves might have triggered centuries earlier. Mind, this is only my speculation—but the people of Phoenix had no idea that the kyo existed.

  “Did Ramirez know? It seems likely: spacefaring technology leaves many traces. On the other hand, perhaps this star system Ramirez had chosen has no inhabitants, but simply lies within territory the kyo consider to be theirs. Perhaps it has a kyo presence at some times, but not others. Gin-nandi reminded me that optics and other detection devices the ship-folk use are limited more by time than they are by distance. If we could see Reunion now—even if it no longer exists—we would see it as it was many years ago.”

  “One has heard,” Banichi said, “but it makes no sense.”

  “Yet—we would. So Gin says. So perhaps what Ramirez saw from a distance was not the state of affairs when he arrived. Something surely surprised him. We know that Ramirez-aiji ordered children born, Jase-aiji and Yolanda-nadi, and that he ordered them to learn several languages of the Earth of humans, but never told Jase or Yolanda why. Did Ramirez-aiji intend them to be paidhiin to the kyo—or did he hope to meet humans? He is dead, and we may never know. He met a kyo ship. He recognized it as not human. And he ran. For whatever reason, he ran, and in running, so I believe, triggered the entire chain of events.

  “The kyo saw Phoenix as similar to the ships they were fighting, and perhaps they had observed it more than once. Perhaps they had been watching Reunion develop on their flank, so to speak, at a great remove from other humans, and thought perhaps there was a wider human presence than they had suspected, all but enveloping them. They observed it. Perhaps they had seen the Earth of the atevi at very great distance, and wondered whose it was . . . but because they were looking into time—we remained a mystery.

  “Ramirez-aiji apparently never tried to use his two translators, who were still very young. He fled, hoping to divert pursuit. But at this point, the kyo acted to remove Reunion, believing it was their enemy. They acted, and then realized they had not struck a military base.

  “Prakuyo’s ship waited, at that point, simply waited to find out what this place was, and what would come in as a consequence of what had just happened.

  “Ramirez-aiji had taken an evasive course. When he did bring Phoenix back, the kyo were watching, doing nothing.

  “But Phoenix fled again. No other ships came. There was no other reaction for years. The kyo might guess where Phoenix had gone, to that other Earth they had seen . . . but everything the kyo believed about Phoenix confused them.

  “They watched Reunioners rebuild. They did not know what these people were, or whether they were in fact the same as their enemies, or whether the similarity of Phoenix to their enemies’ ships had led them to attack completely innocent foreigners.

  “All this is my surmise. Prakuyo made an attempt to contact them, or at least to have a closer look. The station found the means to destroy an unarmed shuttle and take one survivor prisoner.

  “Prakuyo’s ship resumed its watch over the station, perhaps having some means of communication with higher authority, or not. The kyo observed at least that no one came to rescue these people—but if I am right in my conjecture, between the direction of their appearance and the unpredicted behavior of Phoenix and Reunion, they feared they had indeed struck a completely uninvolved people, and might potentially have widened their war in a disastrous way.

  “We appeared with Phoenix and we accepted contact. They tested us, and we agreed to attempt the recovery of Prakuyo, whom they assumed to be dead. I believe they recognized Phoenix, and they were trying to figure who we were, and what we were, and whether we were allied to their enemy, with implicit consequence for their war. We offered to remove Reunion. That was a reassuring move for them.

  “But with the return of Prakuyo, new questions must have come up, thanks to Cullen. Prakuyo had learned something of the language Reunioners and the ship-folk use—enough, perhaps, to suspect that Cullen’s language is related to the language on Reunion and on Phoenix—and because he could see that humans have atevi for allies—Prakuyo had to wonder what our alignment may be.

  “So there remain very serious questions that the kyo cannot answer.

  “I think they have come here to answer those questions. And I tell you, my associates, my household, I am as afraid of this man Cullen as the kyo themselves may be fearful of him, because Cullen is one of the humans the kyo are at war with, he is from the place Phoenix was seeking, and if Mospheirans and ship-folk find it out—Mospheira and the Reunioners and the ship-folk will all be in turmoil. Perhaps a few—only a few will want to rush off to join Cullen’s kind. The wiser and more cautious ones will know that Cullen’s people pose a threat—to their way of life, certainly, and possibly to their lives, considering this war. We know nothing of Cullen’s government, nothing of his way of life, and nothing of his leaders’ character.

  “Cullen’s existence is an even greater problem for atevi, who have nothing to do with this human war. I will tell you, nadiin-ji, that my own man’chi is deeply, definitively, to Tabini-aiji. I am deeply distressed to see this man’s situation, but I am more deeply distressed at this war in which atevi and Mospheirans alike have nothing to gain and everything to lose.”

  He finished. He had poured out everything, all the while parsing it in two languages and keeping much of the word choice to words Prakuyo knew. There was prolonged silence after, faces who were family to him, all, all profoundly troubled, all—knowing him—perfectly capable of understanding what he had just done.

  It was Banichi who asked the question . . . with all the implications regarding Guild action.

  “What do you urge, nandi?”

  “I do not wish Cullen any harm. I shall seek Prakuyo’s permission, and Prakuyo’s advice, if he will give it. I am going to try to find out something about Cullen without telling Cullen anything about us, because should he ever go back to his own people, I have no wish to have him tell other humans we exist. I have been very careful to tell him only that I am an atevi representative, I have said nothing at all to explain the existence of other humans, nor have I stated that this ship is in dock at a station. I have let him assume, if he will, that this is a meeting in deep space and that I am from some unknown source, working only with the atevi.

  “One does not know how much authority Prakuyo has on this ship, but I shall attempt to reach an understanding with him. I seek no association with Cullen. I shall do as much as I can for Cullen’s comfort.” He drew a deep, desperate breath. “Nadiin-ji, I am taking a decision on myself that is far, far beyond any authority I hold, and that pains me greatly. But there is no other course.”

  “Tabini-aiji appointed you to decide such things, nandi,” Banichi said, “when he appointed you Lord of th
e Heavens.”

  That meaningless title.

  That suddenly utterly relevant authority, to bind things in the heavens with the authority of the aiji who sat in Shejidan. There was no way in the world Tabini could have foreseen the current circumstance.

  But Tabini had known there were things in the heavens no one on Earth could predict or judge. In creating that title, in ordering the paidhi-aiji to go up and figure those things out—Tabini had given him personally the authority to make a binding decision, should it become necessary.

  Indeed, he had met that necessity.

  “Certain few will need to know what we know,” he said. “But even those, not immediately. Not until this ship clears dock and takes Cullen with it, beyond any likelihood of return. Nothing must prevent that. And Phoenix could raise an objection, if they knew.”

  “Yes,” Jago said, and the rest said, “Yes.”

  21

  It was not strange that Prakuyo turned up at the door of the little room again, not strange that he came with two aides and ordered a new pot of tea. The little room had enough chairs, but Banichi and the rest distributed themselves as the Guild usually did, two outside the room, guarding the door, two inside, to hear the conversation. Prakuyo’s aides also stood.

  They shared tea, he and Prakuyo, one, two, three sips. Then Prakuyo set down his cup, leaned forward, picked up the wand, the tip of which began to glow, and lit the incense. Smoke curled up, threatening to bring woodsmoke and spice nearly to painful levels in that small place, but if it soothed Prakuyo, that was to the good.

  “You talked to your aishid,” Prakuyo said. Then he drew over the lighted tablet that had remained on its stand, waved his hand over it, touched, and a recording began—every word they had just spoken.

  One refused to be at all shocked. “Yes,” Bren said.

  “Say all in ship.”

  “Say it in ship-speak?” Bren asked.

  “Yes. Say.”