Invader (11 page)

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 rejection 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 die 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 trying 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.

Enough to make him think about the pill and the water on the bedside table. If he didn't need his brain tomorrow. But it was a toss-up how the lack of sleep was going to help find a solution, either. He needed a jolt of adrenaline. If he could just summon it up for about six hours tomorrow, he had a fighting chance of thinking his way through to what he ought to do.

Damn, he said to himself. Damn.

He wanted to go back and replay the meeting with Tabini and do it all differently.

He wanted to have made that second phone call from his office, before he'd gone to the airport.

Oh, Barb, you damn fool.
Paul
, for God's sake.

But when they'd broken his shoulder and he'd believed he'd die, he'd not been able to think about Barb, or Toby, or anybody — just the mountains. Just his mountain and the snow... And he'd felt hollow, and didn't know why he couldn't think of Barb or find any feeling in himself. He'd found it disturbing that he couldn't scrape together any feeling about it — he'd tried,
tried
to reconstruct his feeling for Barb, but he couldn't get it back the way he remembered it being, not then — not when he'd gotten home.

He'd thought to call her.

He'd been worried when he couldn't reach her — last thought he'd had going under anesthetic, where was Barb? So he'd felt something.

He'd felt real pain when he'd read her message, felt it right in the gut; he was losing Barb — when he didn't know he'd ever
had
Barb, had no reason to think what they had amounted to a life, didn't know if he loved her — just — a feeling that blinked out on him under the gun in Malguri and blinked on again when he got back to familiar referents and places he was used to being.

So what was it? Love or a habit he'd gotten into? Or what in hell was the matter with a man who hadn't been able to remember Barb's face when he was in the worst trouble he'd ever been in? What was the matter with a man whose deepest feelings blinked on and off like that?

Too long on the mainland, maybe. Too long wrestling the demons of atevi emotions, until what he'd studied grew commonplace to him and what he'd been grew foreign. He was fluent, he was good, he could find his way among atevi by the map he'd made,
he'd
made, whole new understandings that humans hadn't had before — but he wasn't sure he'd charted the way back.

Snap. And he was playing by human rules and he loved Barb.

Snap. And he was deep in atevi thinking and he didn't know how to do that.

He was scared. He was really scared.

It was two hours before dawn, by the watch he'd pulled out of his office drawer. And he had to function tomorrow. He had to pull his wits together tomorrow.

He
had
to get some sleep. He daren't take the pill, now; he'd sleep half the day and drag through the rest and he couldn't afford that.

He tried counting. By hundreds. To the highest numbers he could think of.

He tried thinking about committee meetings, reconstructing lord Brominandi's speeches to the Transport Committee, sane lawmakers arguing for fifteen solid days whether requiring airports to maintain computer records on flights could accidentally assign infelicitous numbers and cause crashes.

He woke up dreaming about atevi shadows asking him questions, about an urgent meeting he had to get to — and woke up again with the impression of a beast leering at him from the bedroom wall. But the beast wasn't here, it was in Malguri.

He'd flown home. He'd flown back. He'd met with Tabini, that was where he was. The outlines of the room were strange. He was in an atevi lady's apartment, in a bed a man had died in. He was supposed to solve the ship problem tomorrow.

Stave off the invaders.

Hold the world economy together.

Try to shave and take a damn bath.

Thirty minutes before dawn. If the servant staff started moving about right now and woke him up, he'd have them all assassinated. He wanted at least two hours sleep. He wasn't budging until he'd gotten those two hours. Not if the ship orbiting over their heads started firing death rays down on the city.

Then he started worrying about the computer files and couldn't get back to sleep.

The servants began stirring about in the farther halls.

Don't touch me, he thought. Don't dare come in here.

If I don't move, they won't make any noise. If I don't move, they won't bother me maybe till they think I'm

But he had to find out whether the files had transferred.

And he
didn't
have that much time to prepare: Tabini had said it, people could die — and he had to be right about the translations, which couldn't —
couldn't
convey anything atevi could construe as irrevocable threat to them: the answer Tabini got back had to be something that would reassure atevi, not something that would hit the evening news with panic — he had to go over the entire vocabulary he'd allot himself in dealing with the matter; after that he could ad lib all he liked — but not until he was sure of extended and obscure meanings.

He stuck a foot out from under the covers; he got his working elbow under him, unstuffed pillows from under him and made a try to turn on the light.

Knocked the water glass over.

On the carpet.

The pocket-corn followed. And the pill bottle. And the lamp.

The room lights went on.

"Nadi?" Jago asked, all concern, her hand on the light switch. "Are you all right?"

«
^
»

I
t was a strange
perspective, either on the scale of human problems or human capacity for delusion, that one hour of daylight could dull acute, even rational, concerns and persuade an exhausted man he'd had 'a night's sleep.

At least he'd achieved a functional distance from the insanity he'd slept with, the carpet had survived the water, the lamp had survived the fall, a breakfast of tea and toast and jam to cushion the necessary antibiotics — not the pain pills — hadn't upset his stomach, and the breakfast room turned out to have a beautiful view.

More, life on earth had not after all ended with his relationship with Barb. He couldn't fix it from where he was, he probably hadn't the right to fix it — it was the old story: it was going to be too late for him to do a damned thing by the time he had a chance to do anything.

Meanwhile he had urgent work to do, and the context-sensitive language programs he needed to work out his translation appeared to have made it into his machine.

So after a tolerably leisurely breakfast in a privacy for which the paidhi's bathrobe was completely if informally sufficient, he sent Tano to attack the bowlful of mail, so that, excused by his injury, he could sit in said bathrobe in the solarium in view of the magnificent Bergid range, rummage through his Mospheira-origin computer message files and wait for the voice records Tabini had promised him would arrive as soon as possible.

The message download was immense. Whenever he logged on at his Mospheira office port he'd inevitably acquire, through the filter that censored and frequently made hash of what it let him have, a mishmash of messages, some official, some scholarly inquiries, some the advisories of the hard-worked staff that supported the paidhi's office, from the devoted crew that sifted the outpourings of the phone-ins of every ilk, to the more reliable information that came to him down official channels, and to the Mospheira news summaries, neatly computer-censored for buzzwords and restricted concepts the paidhi couldn't take with him across the strait. That he'd gotten anything on his flags reassured him that, Hanks or no Hanks, he was getting cooperation from official channels, and he did have his authorizations intact.

His message-load held personal letters from a list of correspondents he'd flagged as always full-text, at least as full-text as the censors let him have, ranging from university professors of linguistics and semantics, to old neighborhood friends giving him news of spouses, kids and summer vacations.

And came the State Department output, which was not, this time, highly informative: information on pensions. Helpful. God.

Some of it had to go — he ordered Explore, and saw the Interactives come back with characteristics and content of the files; he asked it next to Search
ship/Phoenix/station/
history content, and it came back with lists.

And lists.

And lists.

With tags of correspondents both regular and names he didn't at all know: everyone with access to the Foreign Office had had an opinion and offered it when the news broke about the ship returning, that was what had happened — he'd done such a fast turnaround the staff hadn't had the time they usually had to weed and condense — meaning he had the whole damned load, God help him, every crackpot who could find the address in the phonefile.

Several of the files were absolutely huge. University papers. Theses. Dissertations.

He hadn't thought it possible to crowd the memory limits. It was a
big
storage. He checked through the overlays, scared something might have started a memory resident to chewing up the available space, but nothing checked out as active but things that ought to be, and nothing was actively eating memory. It was just that much data he'd sucked up in his connection time.

It wasn't going to be an easy sift-out. The computer was going to have to search and search.

And there was one thing he had to do, before he sank all the way into study: he asked Saidin for a phone, sat down in his bathrobe and, calmly composed, called through the Bu-javid phone system with a request for Hanks-paidhi.

Not available, the operator said.

"Message to her residence," he said patiently, very patiently.

"Proceed, nand' paidhi. Record now."

"Hanks-paidhi," he said in the atevi language. "Kindly return my call. We have urgent business. End, thank you, nadi."

The bloody
hell
Hanks wasn't available. He took a deep breath, dismissed Hanks and her maneuvers from his list of critical matters, and went back to his chair and his computer.

He set his background search criteria, then, to his needs, defaulted to print-matches-to-screen at his own high-rate data-speed, which was damn fast when he was motivated and the criteria were subject-narrow: a lifetime of foreign language, semantics, dictionary work and theoretical linguistics gave him some advantages in mental processing and rapid reading, and what he did in his head with the files was a personal Search and Dump and Store that didn't even half rely on conscious brain. Just the relevant stuff reached the mental data banks, a process that rapidly occupied all the circuits, preempted the pain receptors, turned off everything but the eyes and the fingers on a very limited set of buttons.

What came through to him was an impression, variously derived from his university scholar correspondents and the mishmash from correspondents both authorized and not, of a degree of concern about the ship's long absence, and its careful questioning of Mospheiran officials.