Invader (30 page)

"The paidhi would very much like that, daja-ji, thank you. We hope to have staff soon. If the phone lines clear. If — God, I don't know."

"The paidhi would like tea?"

"The paidhi is awash in tea. He just got out of a committee meeting. The paidhi would like something much stronger. Without alkaloids. Thank you, daja-ji. — Banichi, I have to have the mathematicians. I'm desperate. I need to talk to people who understand the shape of space itself. Astronomers."

"Astronomers?" Banichi gave him a frowning, considering look, and he suddenly remembered Banichi, all competent Banichi, was from the provinces; there was that back-country mistrust of the astronomers — the old failure. If there were humans in the heavens, how could the astronomers have failed to find them? If numbers ruled the universe, as devout atevi believed, then how could atevi astronomers, measuring the universe, have numbers with discrepancies in them, as they argued about distances?

In some religious minds, that was heresy. The numbers of the universe
had
no discrepancies. That was the very point the Determinists and the Rational Absolutists fixed as unshakable.

"I fear that's who I need to talk to, yes, astronomers."

One rarely saw Banichi at a loss. "There's an observatory in Berigai, in the Bergid. That's an hour by air."

"None closer? The university? I mean legitimate astronomers, Banichi. Not fortune-tellers. This is a legitimate observatory in the Bergid, there's a school —"

"There is. We can call them. We can ask."

"Would you —" The paidhi was tired, and the security station was at hand. "Would you mind terribly giving them a call, asking if they have anyone who can answer my questions? I'll write my essential question out, given faster-than-light flight and the Determinist objection, and if you could ask them if there's anyone who can answer it —"

"No," Banichi said, which meant he didn't mind — one answered the question asked, not the question implied, as the paidhi's tired brain should have recalled.

The paidhi went to sit in the sitting room, write down his question for Banichi, and have the servants bring him a drink. He wished the ship had called. Or his mother had called, or someone. He took the little glass the servants offered, sat and stared at the Bergid, floating in its misty serenity above the city, wondering whether Banichi was having luck getting anyone, or whether he was totally on his own.

Atevi philosophy had used to hold, with misleading but reasonable argument, that the farthest events in the heavens were the least changeable, because you could see more of them.

And he supposed if there weren't atevi constellations, as the paidhiin had from the beginning known there weren't — no constellations such as humans from age immemorial had made out of the brighter stars, and still tried to make out of the atevi sky — then it followed that ordinary atevi
didn't
grow up with much curiosity about the night sky — hard, without those pictures, and without popular names for them, to tell where one was in a seasonally changing sky. Ask a farmer, maybe. Maybe a sailor, among nonscholarly types.

But, point of constant difference with human history, a significant part of the atevi food supply didn't depend on the stars and never had: they domesticated no food animals. They counted the winds from the sea, the turning of the wind from the south, as a reliable marker for seasons. Animals bred as animals pleased and the stars had nothing to do with it.

And in fact there was a dearth — he had heard it in school — of reliable bright stars, compared to the sky of the long-lost human earth.

Certainly the elite of the Assassins' Guild wouldn't take overmuch time memorizing random lists of stars and locations, except perhaps as it did affect navigation. But the far-faring ships of atevi history had, another long-understood point of atevi science, always hugged the coasts and felt out the abiding currents for direction.

A significant point for the paidhi's journal to pass on to the university: nobody had made a real study of atevi star-lore, because there
wasn't
any atevi star-lore to speak of. Though they'd marked the appearance of the Foreign Star, as, a most strange event in atevi skies, the ship had built the station — astronomers, in those days a cross between fortune-tellers and honest sky-charters, had correctly said it foretold something strange, and maybe fearsome.

But atevi astronomers hadn't known what it was, and they never had recovered their popular respectability, which the paidhiin knew. But the paidhiin had, so far as he knew, never risked the topic of atevi astronomy — never dared seek out astronomers — because they didn't want the specific questions astronomers could ask. He understood a risk in the undertaking that was precisely of more and closer questions than Geigi knew how to ask.

Or in wasting time with a discipline allowed through benign neglect, to wander off into star observations and fortune-telling, a discipline which was, as far as he knew, half philosophy.

But that might be exactly the sort of people to talk to the Determinists.
Someone
at that level had to have made the kind of rationalizations that answered the Geigis of the world. He only hoped not to bog down in sectarian disputes and abstruse systems. He hoped not to waste a great deal of time on a matter which he wanted quietened, not expanded to side questions and, one always risked it, controversy between philosophies.

Banichi finally came to him, looking perplexed as a man might who'd just had to discuss warped space with academics.

"There is a man," Banichi began.

"Have a drink," Bren said, and gestured toward a chair — the servants must perch on the edge of visibility at all times: it was almost predictable that there was a young lady at Banichi's elbow before his weight had quite settled into the cushions. Banichi ordered one that was alkaloid, straight, and propped his injured leg on a footstool.

"This man?" Bren said.

"Very old. They say he's brilliant, but the students don't understand him. They wonder if he'd be of any help to the paidhi."

"Banichi, among other things that have changed overnight, it's suddenly become relevant what stars lie near us, what concepts atevi hold of the wider universe, and the paidhi isn't studied up on these things. Ask me about rocket fuel baffles. Ask me about low earth orbit and pay-loads. We're dealing with near stars and solar systems."

"This faster-than-light controversy?" Banichi said.

"Very much so. Asking humans does me no good. I've consulted the words I do have, in what study I can make of it, and I don't know I can find what I want — I'm not sure the average atevi knows, if any atevi at all know what to call it."

"Faster-than-light. Doesn't that say it?"

"I mean concepts. I need mathematical pictures. Ideas, Banichi. I'm not sure that faster-than-light is the best word. Mosphei' has no precision about it."

"Translate. Is that not what the paidhi does?"

"Not when there may be precise atevi words."

"For faster-than-light?" Banichi was clearly doubtful.

"For foundational concepts. For the numbers. For ways of looking at what nature does."

"I fear the astronomers aren't the best method. They invite the paidhi to come in person and talk to this venerable. But —"

"But?"

"Such a meeting could generate controversy in itself."

"You said they were respectable people."

"I said they were scholarly. I didn't say they were respectable, nadi-ji."

"And are atevi astronomers still fortune-tellers? We've released a certain amount of astronomical data to your universities — measurements, data about stars, techniques of measurement — I doubt that the numbers your astronomers have are vastly different from our numbers. I don't see how they could be. I want to find out how they express the math. I want to find out if someone can take Hanks' statement and resolve the paradox the Determin-ists make of it. Clearly they see things differently than humans. Possibly it's simply terminology."

"There will still be controversy."

"Do they still tell the future? I'd be vastly surprised if they did."

"Certain ones do."

Bren took a sip of the liquor, found his hand trembling considerably: fatigue, he supposed. He was tired. He thought he'd found an answer and it was turning itself into a further problem. "I assure you our data does no such thing," he said, but he saw how astrology might still have greater attraction than astronomy for some atevi, and how the paidhi's simple inquiry after better terminology might offend other, more learned atevi. "We have far more uses for star data than telling the future, I assure you, and I would assume at least some atevi share that interest. Perhaps this old man."

"Their mathematics is reputedly highly suspect, Bren-ji, at the university. That's all I know."

That wasn't good news. For more than scientific reasons. "The university itself doesn't believe them?"

Banichi drew a long breath. Had a sip. "They hold that the stars should agree with the numbers humans provide. There are, I'm told, discrepancies. Changes."

"Banichi —" He was exasperated, and asked himself whether he might do far better looking into the truly eosteric corners of atevi physics, not observational astronomy — but that, considering the topic Hanks had broached, was a source of questions he wanted less than the ones observational astronomers might ask. "Banichi, stars move. Everything's moving. So is our observation point. We've put this forth time and time again. It doesn't mean the astronomers are wrong."

"I don't say it makes clear sense," Banichi said, "not to me."

"The earth goes around the sun. In winter it's at one point of its orbit and in the summer it's the opposite. If you're looking at a star and want to know its real numbers, you can measure by taking the numbers from the earth at opposite extremes of the earth's orbit. But the margin of error rapidly gets larger than the measurement itself. We're dealing in very great distances, Banichi, very big numbers, and they have nothing to do with forecast or philosophy: stars have to do with burning hydrogen, that's all."

"Then what use are they?"

"The sun's rather useful."

"What's the sun to do with anything?"

He was perplexed, now, and flung out the obvious. "The sun's a star, Banichi-ji. Close up, the stars look like the sun."

"I believe you," Banichi said after a moment. "I can see your point, I think. But do you wish to add philosophical extremes to the debate? I counsel you, nadi, surely you can come up with something else."

"The ship up there has been to other stars, Banichi, almost certainly. We came from another star very much like the sun."

"This may be true, nadi, and I surely wouldn't dispute the paidhi's word."

He'd gone beyond impatience. He was arriving at curiosity himself, on topics the paidhiin
didn't
often ask atevi. "Well, where did you
think
we came from?"

"From another star, nadi."

"Like one of those little points of light up there."

"Actually —" Banichi said, "one had rarely wondered."

"Did you think we lived
on
a star?"

"Well…" Banichi said with a shrug. "People just don't ask such questions on the streets, nadi-ma. I think if you want such explanations for lord Geigi, you're only going to confuse him."

"I've got to do better than that, Banichi. Geigi at least has a scientific background. He understands the solar system."

"Better than I do," Banichi said. "But still, in public, I wouldn't make a great issue about the sun, nadi. I don't think many people will understand you."

He took a slow sip. He'd never in his administration had access to the astronomical faculties, never had recourse to them — he supposed Wilson-paidhi hadn't, nor — if one went on — earlier paidhiin — and that got into increasingly more primitive science. No one in the prior century would have wanted to raise questions of cosmology — or provide, God help them, heavily mathematical data to atevi — except the information that more or less accompanied certain stages of technology, much as knowledge of the ionosphere went along with radio, and the solar wind and the source of auroras would be, he was well sure, a part of current science curriculum — since it mattered. But, but, and but — no study he'd seen had ever speculated on the reach of systematic knowledge of cosmology into the popular understanding —

Of — damn — course. Atevi mentality integrated smaller systems quite well. But atevi truly didn't readily think of the whole earth, didn't have a word for universe that didn't equally mean one's immediate personal world. Atevi didn't have a real interest in understanding the theory of Everything, just in getting the right numbers on their individual circumstances. Philosophers were there to care about larger systems while ordinary atevi adhered to the dominant philosophy of their personal set of associations and trusted the philosophers to get the big picture right — that was exactly what was at stake with lord Geigi, who understood his philosophy better than the average atevi. Geigi had been led deep into that understanding because he'd pursued a scientific education, and he'd been forced to integrate astronomy into his personal system. What fell outside that meticulously ordered system — challenged that system. What couldn't be integrated — challenged that system.

And no wonder people with busy lives, people like Banichi, were content to let the philosophers hammer out the major, theoretical problems, and — in Banichi's and Tabini's case — take all philosophy with a large grain of salt, possibly because they dealt with multiple philosophies, and thought of them in terms of atevi political motives, not underlying fact. Tell Banichi the sun was a star? All right. It didn't shatter Banichi's world. He wouldn't lie awake thinking about it tonight. He might think about it when he had leisure. But he wouldn't worry about his personal universe falling apart because he couldn't integrate that information.

But those atevi who'd invested the time and hammered out the highest, most tenuous and difficult interrelationships of knowledge would lose sleep. And if
those
people were shaken in their confidence and debate filtered down past the pragmatic sorts like Banichi and became public doubts — a lot of people had invested heavily both financially and politically in what they considered fortuitous systems. A lot of people had paid money to numerologists who'd advised them to certain personal, political and financial courses in which, depend on it, they had a lot of emotional as well as monetary investment. Tell a man that his world wasn't as secure as he'd paid money to have it be, and damned right he was upset.