Invader (34 page)

He couldn't help but grin, to a featureless phone. "I'll pick you out a soft one, Mr. Graham. My name is Bren. Call me that, please. I've never been 'sir.'"

"I'm Jase. Always been. I really look forward to this. After I'm down there."

"Jase. I'm going to be very depressed if you don't make it. Please have those techs double-check everything. Tell them the world will wait if they're not sure. The aiji will. Under no circumstance would he want you to compromise your safety."

"I'm glad to know that. But I guess we're on that schedule unless they find something. To tell the truth, I'd just as soon be done with that part of it."

"We're on the end of our time." Thunder crashed, shocked the nerves. "That was a loud one. I should sign off now."

"Understood. Talk to you later. Soon as I can, anyway. Thanks."

The tea had cooled. The wind from the open doors was fresh and damp. Toby'd been right, the storm had swept right on past Mospheira and on to them in all its strength. The plane with the requested tomato sauce probably still hadn't made it in, and the paidhi had let his tea cool in that wind, talking on the phone with a man born in space at a star other than the sun.

A star the man still hadn't named for reasons that might not be chance.

Jason Graham claimed twenty-eight as old Earth measured years. The faxed-down information that preceded the call gave his personal record — his and his companion's, Yolanda Mercheson, thirty-one and an engineer trainee. Nice, ordinary-looking woman with what might be freckles: the fax wasn't perfect. Jase had a thin, earnest face, close-clipped dark hair — which was going to have to grow: ateyi would be appalled, and understand, because, different from centuries ago, they understood that foreigners didn't always do things for atevi reasons.

But two people of a disposition to fall miles down onto a planet and be separated from each other by politics, species, and boundaries for reasons common sense said surely weren't all altruism, or naive curiosity — he didn't understand such a mentality; or he thanked God it wasn't part of
his
job. He supposed if they talked very long, very hard —

He still didn't know, and he believed Jason Graham saying he was scared. The ship had come up with its volunteers very quickly. Which might be the habit of looking down on places, and the nerve it took to travel on such a ship — he had no remote knowledge what their lives were like on the ship. It was all theoretical, all primer-school study, all imagination. Atevi occasionally had a very reckless curiosity. But he didn't think that curiosity was all that motivated Jase Graham and his associate: humanly speaking, he couldn't see it, and he couldn't find it in himself to believe someone sounding so disarmingly — friendly. For no reason. No —

— reason such as he had to trust the tea he was drinking. Because the woman who served it had
man'chi
to Damiri… he was relatively sure; and Damiri had, toward Tabini, whatever atevi felt for a lover… he was relatively sure. Above all else…

He supposed the ship folk had their own set of relatively-sures, and were prepared to risk his on his say-so. That that was the case… he was less sure; but it was the best bet, the only bet that led to a tolerable future.

It was just daybreak, and he was sitting in the absent lady's office. He shot his dataload up to the ship. Another war of dictionaries.

Of grammar texts and protocols.

He started, then, to phone down to Hanks, and stopped himself in time, remembering the hour was still godawful, and Hanks would justifiably kill him.

Doubtless Ilisidi was at breakfast, on her balcony below his. She might accept a visitor at this hour. He almost wished he were there. But Ilisidi's was a company too chancy for a man grown suddenly human and vulnerable this morning. He wished for bright sunlight, for the atevi world to take shape around him and make his existence rational again. He couldn't afford the impulses that were running through him now, things like instinctual trust, irrational belief in someone on a set of signals that touched something at a level he no longer trusted existed. Not really. It was safe to believe in some other business.

But not in international politics. Not when there were people, human and atevi, who were very, very good at being credible, whose whole stock-in-trade was sounding so straightforward you couldn't doubt. He wished to hell Jase Graham had affected him otherwise. But the man scared hell out of him — scared him
for
Jase Graham, if he could believe the man, and scared him how ready he was to jump to those instincts, inside. If it was real, he hadn't time to give to another set of human relationships than the ones he had, flawed as they were, and it wasn't fair of fate to hand him a human being he could learn to like, that could waken instincts he couldn't otherwise trust, that could divert his attention from a very vital job —

Ironically — it was something like atevi described, that damned flocking instinct, that biological something that intervened in the machimi plays, and diverted some poor damned fool from the
man'chi
he'd thought he had to the
man 'chi
he really had, and the poor damned fool in question stood center stage and agonized over the shattering of his mistaken life and mistaken relationships — before he went on to wreak havoc on everything and everyone that remotely seemed to matter to him.

A human watched the plays, trying to puzzle out that moment of impact. A human studied all the clues and knew there was something there.

A human might have finally found it on his own doorstep, in this unformed dawn, this gray, slow-arriving day, shot through with lightning flashes.

One could see the Bergid, now. One could see the earliest lights in the misting rain.

He hadn't premeditated the invitation to informality, but he'd felt comfortable with Jase Graham, even —

Even knowing now that dawn and sanity were arriving, that he had a daunting task in the man — someone who might — what? Trail years behind him in fluency, have a different cultural bias, a constant matter of explaining, defining, reexplaining, a lifetime of study crammed into — what, a handful of years, after which the ship left and another human link went away, left, went dead.

They might not even get here if the pod failed. The thought upset his stomach, unsettled him at some basic level he wasn't accessing with understanding. It was beyond self-pity this morning, it was all the way to stark terror: he was feeling lonely and cut off from humanity, and that — say it —
friendly
— voice had shaken his preconceptions, gotten through his defenses. He ought to know better. You wanted something and it never, ever quite —

Matched up to expectations? Hell, he wasn't the first human in the world to marry a job, break off a human relationship. He talked to a human being he marginally responded to and all of a sudden his brain was scrambled and he was facing that parachute drop along with Jase Graham as if he had his own life riding on that chute opening.

All those forbidden things he'd disciplined himself to write off, except Barb, who'd turned out as temporary as he'd planned at the start of their association, and he couldn't fault that in Barb. He was the one who'd gotten too close, broken the rules, come to the end of what he shouldn't have relied on lasting in the first place.

And he was damned close to another dangerous precipice, an expectation of some outcome for what he did. Write that off double-fast: it didn't happen, any more than for the paidhiin before him, that he'd ever look back at the accomplishments of a lifetime and say, We won; let alone, It's all solved. It wasn't that kind of a job: it didn't just happen in one paidhi's lifetime. Atevi in space, humans returned to the station, the whole bispecies world enabled to break down the cultural and psychological barriers and live and work together in some Utopian paradise of understanding —

That was the God complex they warned you about when you embarked on the program and reminded you of it anytime you grew extravagant in your proposals to the committee. They showed you the pictures of the dead and the wounded in the war and they told you that was where too much progress too fast led you, right down the fabled primrose path to the kind of damage atevi and humans could do each other now that atevi and humans had much more advanced weapons — not only because certain ideas could be dangerous, but because change had to reverberate slowly through atevi society, and that it wasn't wise to add another set of vibrations before the first set had dissipated down to harmlessness, or one risked an untoward combination of effects that humans just weren't able to foresee.

Damned sure it wasn't the moment to lose his head and start expecting things were going to work. It was his job constantly to anticipate the worst, and to expect the parachute wasn't going to open. Most of all,
baji-naji
, the demon in the design: never expect common sense on both sides of the strait at the same time.

He walked out of the office and toward the breakfast room, as servants, some doubtless nursing hangovers, paid rapid bows and hurried off to that communications network they had that assured him if he sat down at the table his breakfast would turn up very soon.

He opened the glass doors onto the balcony and enjoyed the cool, damp wind. He had to brief Tabini, he ought to brief Hanks, he ought to brief Mospheira if he could get a call through to the Foreign Office.

God knew — he really ought to call the presidential staff and explain to George. Take a couple of antacids and see if he could work up the stomach to talk directly to the head of staff on the phone — assuming that Mospheira let the phones work this morning, and that the FO could get him patched through.

But he had a Policy Committee meeting before noon. He had a meeting with Tabini to set up. He had an interview upcoming with network news — a request had been waiting for him with the morning tea, and he'd confirmed it: the news service had found out, one assumed, that the paidhiin were holding conferences, that there were answers, that there was, in fact, another Landing imminent. He had a flight out to the Bergid and back staring him in the face.

He ate breakfast while he ran a voice-to-written copy of the tape, one of the mind-saving as well as finger-saving pieces of software he'd cajoled the censors into allowing across the strait. The program wasn't worth using for dictation; he was far more fluent without thinking about it and the damn thing mistook phonemes with no consistency or logic whatsoever, that he could discover: it took more head work to figure out what word in Mosphei' the thing had distorted than it did to do it in the first place, but on a transcript of a considerable amount of recorded speech it was a help.

Especially if it let the paidhi have breakfast while it ran. And a little fuss with spell-check and a visual once over let him fix the truly inane conversions that had gotten past the software and send it through the second phase translation, that at least gave him a framework to render into atevi script.

Half an hour's work and he had two sets of copies: of the tape itself, for the Foreign Office, for his records, and for Hanks —
With my compliments
,' he sent to Deana, expecting a retaliatory note. And, while he had a line to Mospheira, with his mother's number:
Drop me a line on the system. I'm worried about you
.

Of the translation — a copy first to Tabini, with:
Aiji-ma, I find the tone and purpose encouraging. I have undertaken to meet their descent and to find a suitable landing site such as serves for the petal sails. I wonder is the plain below Taiben suitable and reasonable, being public land
? To the hasdrawad:
nadiin, I present you the transcript of my first conversation with the chosen paidhi from the ship. I find him a personable and reasonable man
. And to Ilisidi, with:
One has reason to hope, nand' dowager
.

To his own security, then, via the house security office:
I
am encouraged by the tone and content of my initial conversation I have had with this individual. I hope that he and his companion make a safe descent. I look forward to dealing with this gentleman
.

"This seems a judgment of feeling," Tabini observed, when they had a chance, over lunch, to talk in Tabini's apartment. "Not of fact. There is no actual undertaking on their part to perform in any significant regard — and they're dealing with Mospheira. One would think they mean to bargain down to the last moment."

Right to the soft spot. Count on Tabini.

"I've tried very analytically to abstract emotion from my judgment," Bren said. "I agree that there's a hazard in my interpretation: I'm apprehensive of my own instinctive reactions to the man I talked to, aiji-ma, and I'm trying to be extraordinarily cautious at each step. I do judge that these are brave people, which makes them valuable to their captain, there's that about them: among humans, their willingness to take risk means either the risk is small, they're sensation-seeking fools — neither of which I think is the case — or they're people with an extraordinary sense of duty above self-interest."

"This
man 'chi-like
'duty.' To whom?"

"That's always the question, aiji-ma. They're very plain-spoken, very forthcoming with their worries about the descent, their worries about being stranded down here. They asked straightforward questions… well, you'll see when you read the transcript. We discussed landing sites. I did warn them very plainly they should land here rather than Mospheira, and that it was a matter of protocol. I hope I was convincing."

"This choice of Taiben," Tabini said. It was a private lunch, only Eidi to serve them, while Tano waited outside with Tabini's other security. The violence of the morning storms had passed and the daylight was, however gray, far stronger beyond the white gauze of the curtains. "Taiben — is an interesting idea. Among other sites with other advantages. Let's see what the ship people think important. Speed of transport — Taiben certainly has. And with public lands, there's no clearance to obtain."

"The south range is flat," Bren said. "And unwooded. It's a very dangerous thing they're attempting. I've serious doubts they understand this technology very well. There's a knack to stone axes, so I'm told, that makes it no sure thing for moderns to do."