Invader Read online

  He went with Banichi and Tano through the sitting room and on to the inner chambers. The rest of the rooms were a geographical jumble in his mind, but he knew where the bedroom was.

  “Will the paidhi want a bath tonight?” Banichi asked. “Or had the paidhi rather go directly to bed?”

  “Bed, nadi. I’m very tired.” He was grateful that Banichi had reverted to formality, Banichi’s cure for too much intimacy, perhaps: it cooled the air and quietly distanced him from the problems of the world, the most important of which certainly weren’t the paidhi’s botched-up personal life, the paidhi’s nonexistent personal life.

  The paidhi had had a lot else on his mind for no few days prior, Barb had probably been trying to reach his office in Shejidan time after time without getting him—chasing him down with a telegram at his Mospheira office had probably been her last resort. Barb wasn’t an ungracious person—was a very kind, very gentle person, in fact, which was what he was most going to miss, and he hoped that Paul Saarinson appreciated what he’d won. He hoped there’d be a chance to take them both to dinner and wish Barb well.

  The gracious thing. The civilized thing to do. God knew he was civilized. He took his losses with entirely professional perspective.

  But, dammit!

  “Nadi,” Tano said, and wished to help him with his shirt cuffs. He’d never felt comfortable letting servants, or security only masquerading as a servant, dress and undress him. It was the one atevi convention he’d evaded.

  But he was the prisoner of a cut-up, taped-together shirt, a human-style shirt the Department must have come up with, because the one he’d arrived in at the hospital had been a total loss, and the hospital had turned up the next afternoon with this, which they’d cut to accommodate the cast.

  He didn’t, come to think of it, know how he was going to get into a shirt in the morning, or how he was going to bathe except with a sponge. For God knew how long. He was numb.

  It hadn’t, he knew, quite sunk in yet about Barb.

  It hadn’t altogether sunk in yet about what Tabini had pulled, and what he’d done downstairs, either. It kept coming back to him in flashes, snatches of what he’d said and what Tabini had said, like a recurring nightmare.

  He managed the trousers on his own, kicked the shoes off, and intended to sit down on the bed just as a female servant, arriving out of nowhere, flicked down the covers. He was so tired he flinched at the whisk of coverlet and sheets from under him and sat down suddenly, jolting the arm.

  A servant tried to kneel—he bent to cope, one-handed, with the socks, before she took that over. He was appalled, locked, he began to realize, in an atevi lady’s female household, with servants accustomed to do things he’d never wanted servants to do for him, and no provisions at all for a man’s privacy.

  “I’m terribly tired,” he said in a wobbly voice, an appeal to Banichi for peace, for quiet, for some kind of guard against a troop of women relentless in their hospitality. “Please,” he said. “I’d like a small light left burning, Banichi-ji. I’ve been in too many strange rooms lately, and I’m afraid if I have to get up, I’ll walk into a wall.”

  “Perfectly understandable,” Banichi said, though one was certain Banichi would never do such a foolish thing; Banichi passed the requisite orders with more fluency than the paidhi could manage at the moment—and the women absconded with his clothes, shoes, socks and all.

  “The shirt will he a problem in the morning.” Small obstacles preoccupied him, looming up as insurmountable. He turned querulous, close to tears, for no sane reason. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “The staff will have them adjusted, nadi,” Tano said. “It’s all taken care of. We’ll manage.”

  “They gave me a folder for the doctors. —Pills. I’ll want my traveling case by the bedside. Water.”

  Such things arrived, from one source and another, servants going hither and yon. He fumbled together a nest of pillows, there being no scarcity of them in the huge bed, and stuffed them about him to rest his arm and his shoulder, while Banichi and Tano and random female servants hovered over him.

  “Do you want your medicine, nadi?”

  “Not right now,” he said. The arm ached—but he’d been moving about, and he hoped it would ease without it. He’d regretted taking the painkiller this afternoon. They hadn’t warned him it would make him dim-witted. He’d made one mess of things this evening. He didn’t want to wake up stupid in the morning.

  As much as anything, he didn’t want to move from where he’d settled, not until daylight, not maybe for the next five days.

  Banichi laid a pocket-com on the table in front of his face.

  “What’s that for?”

  “In case, nadi. Don’t go wandering about if you need something. Please call. One of us will come, very quickly. Don’t walk into a wall.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and Banichi and Tano found their way to the door—put out the lights, but left the one he’d requested.

  Barb was married. Well, he thought—hell. They’d talked about marriage, in a couple of foolish moments when, early in his career, he’d thought his life would be so routine he could arrange regular trips to Mospheira. But she’d said no, said she didn’t want marriage—and she’d probably known he was dreaming.

  Paul Saarinson was stable. Solid. Paul would be there, all the time.

  The one thing he for damn sure couldn’t give her. He was the occasions, the events, the flying trips onto the island for a glittering weekend on a far from modest, saved-up salary—then off again, with promises and dates that somehow didn’t turn out to be available.

  She was right. You couldn’t build a life off weekends. He knew that. He guessed Barb just had never told him what she really wanted.

  He blinked. The dim light shattered, rebuilt itself. You could get used to pain.

  Part of the job, wasn’t it? He seemed to have made himself a hero to the atevi around him. They appreciated him in their way, which hadn’t anything to do with the sense of human companionship he had from Barb; but it wasn’t a bad thing, if you couldn’t have other things, to be appreciated by the people you most associated with.

  Appreciated, hell, tell that to Tabini. Tabini appreciated him. Tabini appreciated him the way an atevi lord appreciated any useful, entertaining, personally pleasant resource you could put on the spot and get solid value out of.

  You couldn’t say love, you couldn’t say friendship, you couldn’t say all sorts of things that resonated off human nerves and satisfied human feelings. That was a trap the first settlers had walked right into, sure that atevi, who laughed at the right times and seemed perfectly agreeable, did, in their own way, understand such feelings; or thinking that atevi would somehow learn to understand, that humans would teach these godlike, tall, reserved natives of the world the way to access their own repressed emotions.

  The simple fact was atevi weren’t wired for what humans wanted, they weren’t in the least repressed, and they didn’t feel all the same impulses humans felt. He couldn’t take Jago’s little outburst of support for him in the foyer and build off it the fantasy that behind that momentarily fractured reserve Jago felt anything like human sympathy. Jago felt. No question that Jago felt strongly about the situation, but you couldn’t warp it into what a human wanted to understand, or you missed everything that was Jago.

  And did her a great disservice in the process—one always had to remember that, on the other side of the equation. As the ateva she was, Jago was wonderful, reliable, and brave. Banichi—God love him, which Banichi wouldn’t at all understand—Banichi had seen him in distress and saved him from total embarrassment out there in front of Tano and the staff, because Banichi had reacted to defuse a charged situation, for whatever reasons ran through atevi nerves, be it only Banichi’s sense that protecting the paidhi meant protecting the paidhi’s dignity.

  A human wanted a familiar tag to call things, and Banichi was a lot of things that humans the other side of the stra
it would be scared to death to share a room with. So was Jago. And when they’d risked their lives to save yours, you could love them so much—if you didn’t need to be loved back.

  Like Ilisidi, the other ateva he’d grown close to—God, if he shut his eyes he could have nightmares of the bone snapping and ligaments tearing, which hadn’t been the nicest experience of his life—but he figured if nothing else he’d won points with Ilisidi and her associates simply by surviving, and backing off that invitation of hers would lose everything he’d won.

  If somebody did make a move to assassinate Tabini—and him—Ilisidi was one of the likeliest perpetrators. But she asked the paidhi to breakfast at his earliest convenience.

  Made perfect sense.

  Maybe, the thought came recurring to him during the course of a troubled, hallucinatory night, maybe he should nerve himself, swallow his pride, and call Barb. Maybe there was more to the Paul business than he understood. He didn’t like it that he’d gotten the answering machine when he’d called—he didn’t know where she’d have been but home on a work night. If she’d moved uptown to Paul’s place, her number should still route her calls to her.

  Maybe she’d left the answering machine on precisely because she knew he was flying home and just didn’t want to deal with the news on the phone—she hadn’t meant to blindside him back on the mainland with that letter. He refused to believe that.

  That letter had, he was absolutely convinced now, chased him from his office to the hospital and back to his office, then transferred right across the strait on the automated system. He’d messaged her that he was going into hospital for some minor repair work—he hadn’t elaborated. Maybe she’d planned to see him before he left. She’d certainly had no way to know Tabini was going to request him to do a twenty-four-hour turnaround back to Shejidan.

  And he couldn’t blame her for the timing. There just was no good time to tell him a piece of news like that. There’d never been a good time to tell each other much of anything: that was the trouble, wasn’t it? Never a way to discuss the future, no real complaint except that he’d worked too long and given too much to the job, and he’d always known the office he’d trained for was mistress, wife, mother and sister—he couldn’t talk about what he did, he couldn’t offload his troubles to anybody without an equivalent security clearance, and he damn sure wasn’t romantically inclined toward the Foreign Secretary.

  Time after time he’d come back wound tight as a spring and so atevi-wired he couldn’t speak or think Mosphei’ for the first few hours; and Barb would be the first refuge after the debriefing, someone who, unlike his relatives, never met him at the door with a list of must-dos and a catalogue of family feuds. He and Barb hadn’t put a load on each other, that was the whole idea of R&R, wasn’t it?

  But maybe she’d been too good-hearted—she’d known from the start she was the refuge, the safety valve for an occasionally available and generally stressed public servant the whole human race relied on. She’d ask him no classified questions, which was almost everything he knew; she’d never met him at the door with her troubles, never complained about his job, having the sense to know that he and the job weren’t ever separable.

  She’d laughed and she made him laugh—and he’d lost that without ever imagining it was threatened. That was what felt unfair. To him. Not unfair, he told himself, to Barb.

  Hell, maybe human caring was a survival disadvantage. Who knew? It sure screwed up lives.

  And where in human hell did this Paul business come from? Paul—God, Paul was so damned dull, so damned safe, a real Department man, never any interest in anything but his computers. He couldn’t imagine party-loving Barb sitting in front of the television knitting while Paul was off in computerland. The whole scenario was unbelievable.

  If he’d only thought to call again, when he’d stopped by his office on the way to the airport. He’d been so anxious about the travel order, so worried about getting the computer commands in….

  He hoped those files he’d requested had all transferred. They’d rushed him, the car had been waiting on the street—he should have delayed to check the contents. He couldn’t exactly call up Mospheira now and say, Hello, I’m planning to violate Departmental policy, and I need the files you didn’t send me….

  The State Department was where actions the Foreign Office knew atevi wouldn’t tolerate ran head-on into humans who wouldn’t remotely understand the atevi view. The State Department refused to admit that the paidhi in the field had authority to negotiate, although it accepted his negotiations for debate; it believed since it selected the paidhiin, that the paidhi, meaning the Foreign Office, should take orders from the State Department, a small disparity in what the Treaty meant to atevi and what humans insisted was the legal reality on their side of the strait.

  Translation was going to be worrisome, even paper translation, let alone real-time dealing with the language with a raft of new concepts.

  He could make semantic mistakes. He had no Mosphei’ dictionary at all, a human-language dictionary being a forbidden item on this side of the strait; the Department and a university committee even censored the entirely atevi-to-atevi dictionary and semantic/contextual reference he could take with him across the strait, since there were, in the usage of certain atevi words (in the active imagination of the committee), ways the paidhi could deliver semantic clues Mospheira didn’t want in atevi hands—or minds, as the case might be—until Mospheira was sure officially that they were there.

  There was some sense behind that view—there were concepts, even nontechnological concepts, that the committee rated too risky, too culturally based, too biologically based to address in the current atevi-human context, even if the paidhiin had devised reliable ways to express them in answer to questions atevi themselves had asked him.

  The whole university/Foreign Office review process meant that the words the paidhi used on the mainland often ended up not being, in the classified official dictionary, the same as what his predecessor had proposed. The damned thing was constantly out of date—or subject to revision once atevi, moving consistently faster than the committee, came up with their own expression in popular usage—

  Which the committee still debated, as if they could veto what atevi themselves had decided to call a thing.

  More, even the Mosphei’ equivalents remained flagged for censorship in documents the computers let cross the strait, computers which made electronic lace out of documents—brilliant decisions like censoring the Mosphei’ expression air traffic control system, because supposedly, in the astute minds of the committee, air traffic control system had Defense Department connotations—a censorship that had lasted until well into the implementation of an atevi ATC system on the mainland, part of which, on a technological level, he was still trying to get installed past the objections of provincial atevi lords who thought directing air traffic and assigning landing sequence smacked rather of associational preference, a bad word on this side of the strait.

  And faster-than-light?

  God help him. They trusted him with a computer with defense codes in its layered programs and restricted him from comprehensive dictionaries.

  Meanwhile atevi, miffed at their inability to gain a dictionary of human language (though atevi had compiled one, he was dead certain) didn’t allow comprehensive atevi dictionaries into the paidhi’s hands on this side of the strait. And he’d bet his unused paychecks that there were atevi who could marginally understand Mosphei’. Banichi came equipped with a little understanding of Mosphei’, which surfaced just now and again; Jago had a very little; Tabini very frequently surprised him with a word he’d picked up.

  More and more interest from atevi in learning Mosphei’ in recent decades, when it became clear that computers, read human number theory, were all bound up in that language, and, oh, damn, yes, even conservative atevi were interested in knowing the human numbers that described the universe. They were avid and eager learners of anything numerical—passionate in r
ejection of certain human ideas, even ones that patently worked, where they contravened some elegant and elaborate universal number theory; and suddenly, in the last ten years, atevi were presenting elegant solutions to classic problems that the computer people and the mathematicians were still trying to work into their own theory—and spy out further elaborations thereof.

  The servants, the security that kept the paidhi safe, doubtless spied on his library and kept it pure of atevi reference.

  Damnable situation. A war of dictionaries. A duel of conceptual linguistic ignorance—when the only thing that had brought the real war to a halt was a farseeing aiji in Shejidan and a scholar on the human side who had, in fact, reached the concept of “treaty” as equivalent to atevi “association” and thereby stopped the bloodshed and the destruction—the dictionary again, victorious.

  Meanwhile Hanks stayed, in danger of an assassination that was apt to fracture the Treaty. And Tabini through, he was sure, no wish of his own, had the Association legislatures in session, not only the hasdrawad and tashrid, but the provincial legislatures, in districts whose lords were ready to make a grab for power at any moment Tabini remotely looked like stumbling.

  Damned right Tabini needed him to do something fast; Tabini, damn his conniving heart, needed a miracle, ideally a piece of drama pulled off right in front of the joint legislatures—the whole atevi world was waiting for official answers from the Bu-javid, from the aiji and from the paidhi’s office.

  God only knew what Hanks had actually said. Inexperienced humans, even humans who’d sweated through advanced mathematics courses in the candidacy courses, never believed at gut level how quick atevi were to work math in their heads. The language with its multiple plurals set up a hell of a quick-reckoning system that was a major barrier to a human dying to learn it as a second language; Hanks wouldn’t be the first translator who in the simple struggle to handle the verb forms in conversation had edged her way into deep linguistic trouble.

  Thoughts like those chased each other in circles for what felt like hours, intermittent with the shoulder aching until he could only count the pulses of the pain and wish in vain for sleep.