Invader (39 page)

Pachiikiin, fat and sleek with the summer. He was in a vastly better mood and didn't care if the shoulder ached.

He'd scared Tano and Algini with his sudden reaction to the animals. They tried to settle unobtrusively, but he knew he'd alarmed them — and they'd looked for some agency that might have spooked them, that was the way their minds worked.

"I miss Malguri," he said to them, by way of explanation. He didn't think they justly should miss the place, Algini in particular, with his bandages — and he had to ask himself what Algini could do, slow-moving as he still was, if there was a security problem.

Safer than the Bu-javid, Jago had said. Which was probably true.

And a thirty-minute ride, during which he saw no few examples of mountain wildlife, brought them within sight of the Saigiadi Observatory dome. A handful of minutes more brought them to a debarkation at the small depot that verged — inelegantly but efficiently — on a storeroom.

Students met them, bowing and offering to carry anything that wanted carrying — excited students, thrilled, as the student leader said, that the paidhi came to dignify their school, and offering a — God help him — small presentation copy of the observatory's work, which he was relieved to see consisted not of a recitation but a written report, a history of the place, with photographs, put together in that scrapbook way that very small businesses used to promote their craft, their wares, their trade.

"Please keep it, nand' paidhi," they wished him, and he was quite touched by the trouble they'd gone to, and vowed to look through it and see — he was moved to such extravagance — if the observatory could not be recipient of some of the first data that they derived from the ship's presence —

Which he was very willing to do if only he could get through the ceremony to talk to the venerable astronomer emeritus, who was, the students assured him, quite brilliant, and very willing to talk to him, but who — it developed after a quarter-hour of close questioning — was asleep at the present moment, and the students didn't want to waken the venerable, who waked when he wanted to wake and who, it developed in still more questioning, this time of the senior astronomer who put herself forward to explain the astronomer emeritus, became irritable and difficult if waked out of a thinking sleep.

"The paidhi has come all the way from Shejidan," Tano objected, which was the thought going through the paidhi's mind, too. But on Banichi's warning that the man was elderly and noncommunicative… the paidhi thought it better to be politic.

"When does he usually wake?"

There was embarrassed silence, on the part of the senior astronomer, her staff, and the students.

"We pleaded with him, nand' paidhi. He said he'd thinking to do, he took to his room, and we — can
try
to wake him, if the paidhi wishes."

"Against your advice."

"Against our experience, nand' paidhi. Assuring the paidhi that the emeritus by no means intends a slight."

"He does it in classes," a student said, "nand' paidhi."

One began to get the idea.

"Perhaps," he said moderately, "the faculty and staff could work on my answers."

"We have," the senior said, bowing again.

"For two days," the second senior said.

"You have my questions, then," he asked, and, oh, yes, the senior said, on receipt of them — no regard to any secrecy of the aiji's seal, oh, no — they'd posed them to the whole class and they had every reference looked up with all propitious calculations — so far as they had data.

"But the shape of the universe," the senior said, "that persistently eludes speculation, as the paidhi may know, since the imprecision of measurements taken from the earth, together with its deviations — which are negligible in the scale of the earth, and considerable in such precise measurement as one makes of the stars —"

"Together with atmospheric flutter and distortion," the second senior said, and dug among his papers while the senior diverted herself to maintain she had taken that into account in her sample figures —

The paidhi was getting a headache, and the head of astronomical philosophy, nand' Lagonaidi, was handing him sheets and sheets of arguments on cosmological theory — while Algini and Tano sat quietly by the door and perhaps understood one word in ten.

"Actually," the head of Philosophy broke in to say, "the Determinists have taken the imprecisions of earthly measurement as a challenge. But all scientists in astronomical measurement are automatically suspect."

"Because of changing measurement."

"Because, among other things, of eccentricities of position. — Which can be explained, by modern astronomy — — -"

"Mostly," the senior astronomer interjected.

"But," Philosophy reprised, "where does one possibly find smooth transition from the finite to the infinite when the numbers only grow more and more vague? I confess I find it disturbing — but I have moral confidence that such a system will evolve. And necessarily along the way toward such perfection, atevi will quarrel over the branchings of the path only to discover that some paths have woven back together in harmony. There will be gaps in our understanding, not in the order of the universe."

"They have to be perfect numbers," the senior astronomer said. "Numbers to make more than delusory and misleading sense need to be perfect numbers."

"I assure you they're perfect numbers," Bren said, feeling out of his depth, but fearing to let the conversation stray further toward the abstract. "Since stars are definitely there, at a distance and a continual progress of positions relative to our own which is quite specific if one knew it."

"But the wobble in the earth itself —" Philosophy said, which launched another argument on divine creation versus numerical existentialism that left the paidhi simply listening and despairing he could gain anything.

Lunch… was a formal affair involving the head of the village in the valley, the local justice, the chairman of the Caruija Hunt Association, the Caruija Ridge Wildlife Management and Research Organization, the regional head of the Caruija Ridge Rail Association, as well as spouses, cousins, and the legislative representative's husband, the wife being in the hasdrawad, currently in session.

Not to mention the junior poetry champion, who read an original composition praising the region, followed by a local group of children who, with drums, sang a slightly out of unison popular ballad.

The paidhi kept shielding his arm from chance encounters and hoping simply to get through the day. His notes were very little more than he'd arrived knowing, held words the exact meaning of which he was still trying to pin down, and he'd escaped to the academic meeting room where he was due for his next session, with Tano and Algini to hold the door against early arrival.

He had aspirin with him. He dared take nothing stronger. He asked Tano for a cup of water from the nearest source, and sat trying to make his elbow and his shoulder work — his intellectual occupation for the moment.

"I think they're quite mad," Algini confided in him. "I think the faculty has been out in the mountains too long."

"They're a small village," Tano said, bringing him the requested cup of water. "And a truly important visitor and the aiji's personal interest is an event."

"We can only hope," Bren said, "for a felicitous outcome. I do begin to ask myself —"

But the staff was arriving in the room, and the session resumed, with a brief address by the senior astronomer and another by the head of Philosophy, the latter of which was at least contributive of a history of the impact of philosophy on astronomical interpretation, and the formation of major schools of thought. A small and respectful contingent of students sat in on the speech at the back of the room, furiously taking notes; the paidhi took his own, writing, and not recording without formal consultation — he wanted, he made a note to himself, to obtain a copy of the speech. Which he thought might please the elderly gentleman.

"Lately," the gentleman said, "the funding for research into astronomy has sadly declined from the magnificent days of the Foreign Star, in which the science of telescopy was funded by every aiji across the continent, particularly among the Ragi. The estimation that humans have far more exact and secret data, nand' paidhi, has made aijiin and the legislatures certain that such will be handed them on some appropriate day and that funding atevi astronomers is superfluous. Which I do not believe, nand' paidhi. We have dedicated ourselves to the proposition that it is not superfluous to study the heavens in our own way. We hope for the paidhi's consideration of our proposal, for the quick release of human observations of the heavens, and human —"

There was a disturbance at the back of the room. Tano and Algini came to sudden alertness where they stood, at either side of the room, and Bren turned his head, ready to fling himself to the floor.

An elderly ateva had wandered in, in a bathrobe, barefoot, hair in disarray. "The answer," he said, "the answer, to the dilemma of the philosophers: the universe does not consist in straight lines, and therefore the path of light is not economical."

"The emeritus," someone said, and the students rose in respect to the old man. Bren rose more slowly.

"Aha!" the emeritus said, pointing a finger. "The paidhi! Yes, nadi! I have the proof —" The emeritus indeed had a sheaf of papers in his fist and brandished them with enthusiasm. "Proof of the conundrum you pose! Elegant! Most elegant! I thank you, nadi! This is the corrob-oration I've been searching for — I've written it in notation —"

"Tea and wafers," the senior astronomer ordered, and arrived at Bren's elbow to urge, in a hushed tone: "He's quite old. He will
not
remember to eat!"

"By all means," Bren said, and to the elderly gentleman: "Nand' emeritus, I'm anxious to know your opinions — I fear I'm no mathematician, nor an astronomer, merely the translator — but —"

"It's so simple!" the emeritus declared, and descended on him with his sheaf of papers, which he insisted on giving to Bren, and then, with the students and the astronomers crowding around, began to make huge charcoal notes on the standing lectern pad —

The paidhi sat with notepad in hand and copied furiously. So did the senior astronomer, though, thank God, the charcoaled paper simply flipped over the back, as good as computer storage. And the emeritus began to talk about orders of numbers in terms the paidhi had never quite grasped. There were notations he'd never used. There were symbols he'd never met. But he rendered them as best he could, and rapidly decorated his notes with annotated commentary in as quick a hand as he could manage.

A handful of determined local officials were standing on the tarmac in the plane's lights, a group which faded away into stars as the plane lifted.

Then the paidhi was landing at Malguri Airport, and in the distance his beast wandered over reduced-scale hills, over which other, smaller game fled.

But the subway arrived, a dark figure beckoned and he had to leave his beast; the subway delivered them back to the basement station in the Bu-javid much after supper, and one had to wake the emeritus
—
to tell him something urgent, and in the dream he said it, but he couldn't himself hear it, or understand the words
.

But Banichi was at hand to meet them, with a handful of the Bu-javid officers, and a handful of passes, which lodged the students and nand' Grigiji upstairs, wonder of wonders, in the residence of the dean of the university, who proclaimed himself interested in this theory, and they were holding national meetings on the matter.

He himself couldn't get into the meeting. He'd arrived late, and all the doors were locked. He could see the emeritus standing at the lectern and he could see all the atevi listening, but the paidhi was locked out, able only to see the mathematical notations on the pad, which held symbols that he couldn't make sense of.

Then he tried to go by another stairway to get in by the back entry to the hall
—
and lost his way. He tried door after door after door in the hall, and they led to more stairs, and other halls, increasingly dark places that he thought were unguessed levels of the Bu-javid. He was supposed to address the assembled scholars, but he couldn't find his way back and he knew that he was the only one that could make the symbols on the notepad make sense to the hasdrawad, which otherwise wouldn't listen to the emeritus.

He wandered into a place with a door that let out into the hall above the lecture hall. But he couldn't find a stairway down. At every turn he found himself isolated.

He found a lift, finally, and pushed the button for 1, or he thought he'd pushed that button. The car's light panel developed numbers and symbols he didn't understand and kept traveling. He knew Banichi and Jago would be angry at him for getting into a car and pushing buttons he didn't understand. But they'd looked fine when he pushed them.

He called on the emergency phone, and Jago answered, but she said she had an appointment this afternoon, would tomorrow be acceptable? And he said, he didn't know why he said, that he couldn't wait, and he was going to get off at the floor where it was going.

Which eventually did come, and let out into a gray and brown haze in which he was totally lost. He called Jago on a phone that turned up, and Jago said, sorry, she would be there tomorrow. He'd have to wait. So he kept walking, certain that sitting still here would never get him to the meeting on time. He came to the turn in the lower hallway.

And became aware that his beast was following him, and that it was the hall outside his bedroom in Malguri. He was out of sandwiches. But the beast was hunting small vermin that ran along the edges of the hallway.

It passed him, snuffling for holes in the masonry, and left him in the dark, looking toward the crack of light that came from under his own bedroom door, beckoning him out of the nightmare and into the warmth of the familiar, if he could only get there. He walked and walked, and there always seemed progress, but he couldn't reach it. The light became the cold light of dawn, and then it was possible, but he had to leave, he had something to do, and couldn't remember what it was…