Visitor

  He’d always been able to make periodic visits to Mospheira. He’d always been able to renew his human way of thinking. Of being. He could talk to family. Visit familiar places.

  Even so, he’d long since lost track of the Bren who had first crossed the strait, naive and completely without a map.

  “Make the kind of relationships kyo can make,” he said to Cullen. “Find out what relationships they can make. They may meet you on your own territory, to a degree you can’t imagine now. There’ll be individuals you want to attach to, individuals you want nothing to do with, and some that may take a while to get to know—but turn out something different than you thought. People, in other words. Good ones and bad ones.”

  Long silence. “What if,” Cullen asked, “I went over to your atevi? What if I went—wherever you come from?”

  He’d dreaded a repetition of that question—profoundly dreaded it.

  “No. Right up front. No. Don’t hope for it. The government I represent won’t allow it while this war goes on.”

  Cullen looked at him, just stared, with feelings too muddled and disappointed even to read.

  “But,” Bren said, “the kyo do want you. They want you.”

  “What if I don’t want them?”

  “They need you. You have the history with them. You’re much closer to understanding them than I am. What you have to do is stop your war.”

  “Stop the war.” Another grim laugh. “How?”

  “That’s something you have to figure out, Mr. Cullen. I can’t. I have a job. You’re the one who has to figure out the kyo, and live with them, and figure out what started this war, because that may be the key to why it continues. It’s pretty certain the kyo in charge of this ship don’t want it, and probably people in your government don’t want it, either. Look at all this vast space where you might be, and, instead, you’re locked together killing each other. Figure out how to stop that. Figure out why it started and convince both sides to back off, because there are plenty of territorial alternatives, and a lot of room out there, if you don’t trek across sensitive territory, which seems to be what somebody has done. It may be just that simple. And unfortunately just that complicated. Because you won’t be dealing with common sense and common goals. You’ll be dealing with personalities—on both sides—with their own agendas and their own phobias, who’ve maybe done some very bad things they won’t want to admit were a mistake. It’s your job to straighten that out, or maneuver to give power to people who’ll make a different choice.”

  “How the hell do I do that?”

  “Pick and choose who you talk to. This is vitally important. Pick the best people to talk to. And be accurate. Give accurate warnings. Give the people that work with you results that make them important to other people. You may not know a thing about kyo politics. But you have at least one potential ally, if you’ll work with him. If you want to resign it all and live out your own life taking no chances, that’s on you. But I’m telling you right now . . . there’s no one else in your position. I can’t do it. I won’t desert the people I work for.”

  There was a long silence then, Cullen staring at him with anger evident, then at his hands, maybe thinking it over, maybe refusing to think at all.

  He could lose Cullen, he thought. He could have Cullen leap up right now and declare he’d had enough, and wanted no more to do with him or his help.

  But what did a man do, who’d not seen another human being in—long enough to decline to the state he’d been in?

  What did a man do, presented with a chance to end that isolation, and what did a man do who might never in his life see another human being, whether things went right or wrong?

  Cullen would someday find out what he had kept from him, and hate him for it. Prakuyo knew. Everybody on this ship knew. So someday Cullen would know . . . everything.

  That was as it had to be.

  “I’m not sure I can do it,” Cullen said.

  “If you were sure,” Bren said, “I’d say you weren’t bright enough to do it. There’s no guidebook. I can’t predict what you’ll meet. I don’t know. If I tried to advise you, I’d be wrong. You only know when you see the situation in front of you. That’s how it’s done.”

  Cullen spent a while in a disconsolate knot, arms on his knees, head resting on his arms. Bren waited, leaned all the way back in the chair and waited. Banichi and Jago, never leaving him but what Tano and Algini took their turn at watch. The cell door stayed open. The whole corridor was quiet, the whole territory given over to them.

  Was it safe to sleep in the cell with Cullen? It was as safe as his aishid made it. And Cullen had never made a try even to walk out the open door, not that there was much to gain in that direction.

  Bren got up very quietly and went back to the conference room, as he did now and again. He had lost all awareness of time passing, of day or night.

  • • •

  This time he did, unintentionally, fall asleep in the conference room, tucked up in a large padded chair, and he waked to find Banichi and Jago doing much the same in the chairs over against the wall, which meant that Tano and Algini had gone on watch with Cullen. He got up very quietly, with no illusion that he could move softly enough to avoid waking Banichi and Jago, but he tried; he availed himself of the facility adjacent to the conference room, washed his face in cold water, and went back down the curving hall to the cell, where Tano and Algini were awake and on watch.

  Perhaps, he thought, he might call his bodyguard back, quietly lock the cell door and let them all catch a few hours of sleep, hoping that would draw them back from the edge they’d been on. But Cullen was not asleep. Cullen hauled himself to the edge of his seat as Bren arrived, sat crosslegged there, hands locked on his ankles—tense.

  “Thought you might not come back,” Cullen said.

  “I fell asleep.” Bren sat down in the chair he used. “I wish I had easier answers. I wish I had a happier situation for you. I don’t. I can’t. It’s going to be hard at first, damned hard. But I hope there’ll come a time when a few more humans join you, to learn from you, to become translators in their own turn. I hope so. That’s for you and Prakuyo to figure out. I’ll say only one thing on that matter: if that happens, you have to have some sort of authority over others. You will have to have. You and Prakuyo . . . what you can build between you will be unique. This opportunity to immerse yourself, one human partnering with this one kyo may never happen again. More than one human living among the kyo, learning from you—that’s something for you to explore, when it happens; and it may. It has advantages. Mental health, for one. Multiple minds, multiple talents working on the problems, for another. That’s all on you to develop, within whatever framework you can work out with Prakuyo.”

  “That’s—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a long way from where I am. It’s not real to me.”

  “Make it real. Dare to dream. And have the practicality to make it happen.”

  Cullen carried a shaking hand to his head, rubbed his brow. “I’m nobody, actually. Not—not a government sort. Electronics.”

  “That’s all right. I trained to write dictionaries. You’ll get it. The language? Three-year-old kids manage to learn one language. You did. It’s all practice. Names of things around you. Things you want to eat. You learn the things you use. Then you move on to the big things.”

  “Seven days.”

  “Plenty of time for what I have to offer. I can’t give you the language on a plate. I’m still learning that, myself. What I can give you are the keys, the structure, as much of it as I’ve figured out. A technique for learning, and enough words to ask questions. After that . . . I’ve nothing more to give you. You’re the one with the chance to become fluent. One day, with luck, you’ll be teaching this to another human. Telling another human what you know. Keep that in mind as you learn. Reali
ze you’re going to have to explain as well as use it.”

  “And after seven days, you’ll go back to—where?”

  Question repeated. And maybe a chance to make sense to Cullen—with caution.

  “A place we have,” Bren said quietly. “A group of humans and a world full of atevi. We didn’t start out so well. We had ourselves a war. But a few humans and a few atevi figured out how to stop it and do something different, two hundred years ago. We gained that expertise. That’s the thing I’m trying to pass to you—how to do what I do, as the appointed contact. And it all starts with two reasonably ordinary, smart individuals learning that their way isn’t the only way. You’ve got a potential partner. Don’t lose him. Don’t mess it up for him. Or for you. It may not be the work of one lifetime. It wasn’t for us. I’m one of a long, long string of translators, who’ve finally gotten wars stopped. Not conflict. We’ve still got that. But wars—no. We don’t do that.”

  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 q
uestions 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 something 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.