Explorer (57 page)

And Prakuyo, seeing him in his court splendor, looked, well—judging any expression on that broad face was difficult—excited, at least. Prakuyo made a nice little bow. He reciprocated with good grace.

“Come,” he said, “nadi-ji. Come sit.”

Prakuyo seemed amenable, though a little disappointed. Ah, Bren thought: Prakuyo had hoped they were going straight to the ship. And still the working of hydraulics went on, the lift system racing to deliver cars to the airlock and passengers to four-deck, just over their heads . . . crew had to be scrambling, too, on last-moment needs and adjustments.

All of which might persuade an anxious guest that those sounds might include a docking in progress.

They went to the dining hall, sat down at a corner of the large table, and he immediately sketched out themselves, the station, an approaching ship with a directional arrow.

“Prakuyo’s ship is coming,” he said in Ragi. Measured with his fingers a very small distance. “Close.”

“Close.” Prakuyo was attentive and cooperative, though rubbing his face in the way of a man with too little sleep. “Close.” Measure of two thick fingers, fingers with nails so broad and thick they wrapped half the end of the digit—nails that, when they first dealt with him, had been broken and rough. Now they were manicured, filed short. “Good. Good.”

Bren started naming bits of his sketch. And then asked, “Prakuyo talk.”

It got only puzzlement. His request wasn’t expected, he thought. Six years, and maybe nobody had ever asked Prakuyo to use his own language.

“Table,” Bren said. Then said the same in Ragi, and indicated Prakuyo. He did the same for chair, then: “Prakuyo talk.”

“Akankh.” Prakuyo muttered. Then pointed at the table. “Noph.” The language had a difficult popping consonant.

Bren tried it. Prakuyo repeated it three times. There might be a fine distinction on the popping sound—a language with several similar consonants, it might be; and Bren made his utmost effort. “Noph.”

Prakuyo gave him, in short order, pen, paper or notebook, floor, ceiling—demonstrable words. Ship. Station, available in the picture.

“Sit,” Bren said, and Prakuyo gave him that word. Words they had established, they could call up. Sit and stand. Walk. Give and take. They had fourteen words. With three hundred—a body could get through his entire day, fluently.

Fourteen, however, didn’t all apply to what they had to discuss. He had his mental list of vocabulary he wanted. Station, stationer, go. And a frightening decision to take on oneself—but he conceived of very little chance Prakuyo’s folk wouldn’t cross paths again with atevi, and best try to define that inevitable meeting, set a purpose, try to establish a protocol . . .

Trade.
Trade
was a concept he illustrated by a human and an atevi figure facing a Prakuyo-like figure, with directional signs and representative goods changing hands. Beads on a string. A shirt. A pitcher. A plate of food. He exhausted his artistic skill with those items; and he wasn’t sure he had gotten the right words. There were horridly complicated alteratives: tribute, marriage-gifts. God knew whether Prakuyo had understood that human-atevi concept and given him the right word back.

But he kept trying, concentratedly. In all the universe there was only this. In all the wide universe, there was only this one necessity—to engage Prakuyo’s equally exhausted wits and to get some sort of communication in three hours before that ship arrived. It didn’t matter what Ginny and Sabin were doing; it didn’t matter what
exchanges Jase was making with Sabin via courier and whether the whole situation was about to blow up. If that happened, the new situation was going to need vocabulary, understanding, negotiation; and this was the safest, fastest way to get it. Down here, things took as long as they took, and the good will of this tired, perhaps questionably sane stranger was all-important.

His notebook disassociated into sheets of paper. He made diagrams of spatial relationships: to, from, toward, away from, off, over, under. He formed hypotheses and rudimentary sentences in this new language in which verb-forms seemed simple and directional elements seemed ungodly complex. Prakuyo, with his newly-refined fingers and a pen delicately held, drew stick figures of his own—not skinny, one-line beings, but beings of substance, rounded beings, beings with U’s for legs and arms and heft to the outlines . . . was it surprising?

“Human,” Bren said of his own skinny short ones. “Atevi,” of the skinny tall ones. He tapped one of Prakuyo’s. Twice.

“Kyo,” Prakuyo called them. They had not ironed out singular, dual, or plural. His species seemed to be that. Or it was simply the word for man, intelligent being, or us.

Kyo.
So was Prakuyo, then, a personal name, or a rank, or a species distinction?
Was
there a concept of individuality? One thought so, since Prakuyo identified him and the dowager by name quite accurately.

Bindanda brought a tray and provided fruit juice. They gained the words for cold and hot. Ice and water; juice, or fluid.

“Banichi and Jago are awake, nandi,” Bindanda informed him, with the tray. “The dowager likewise.”

He was not surprised, then, when Banichi and Jago turned up in the dining hall, their arrival noted, but not interrupting the flow. They listened—sitting at the end of the table, though their habit was to stand. They knew what he was attempting. They knew—the national experience of atevi and Mospheirans—how desperately risky it was, this speaking to strangers. They remained unobtrusive.

Bren drew pictures, trying to make structure, and pushed for new words, pushed while Prakuyo was still willing. He had by now more than a hundred new words jostling around in his head. A hundred words could be an hour’s conversation. Unfortunately one had to know the
useful
words, the ones attached to their personal
situation. They hadn’t yet communicated trust, or don’t blow up our ship, please-thank-you, or, you can have the station; we don’t want it any more.

Negatives, God, the negatives, the not’s and no’s and neither’s and nor’s and other rejections. They were an unexpected headache, with distinctions that just didn’t make sense—a sort of subjunctive of negativity, related—he decided—to degree of reality. There was not, really not, and no way in hell possible; but there was also future-not, and past-not. And—one began to get the nightmarish picture—there were similar distinctions on various other modifiers.

God help him. More to the point, God help the people he represented. He began, for the first time, to believe he’d undertaken the humanly impossible.

He couldn’t figure the past tense. He suspected a similar difficulty. And began to suspect Prakuyo’s language, besides having an array of nots, didn’t use I, was shaky on you, and worse, took truly emotional exception about he and they.

Which wasn’t wholly a linguistic worry. It was, granted Prakuyo was sane, a window into a mentality that really wasn’t quite human
or
atevi, that had all along had trouble with that he-they concept, and wasn’t happy with the you-word, either.

That was where they’d taken their last break. And his brain was fogging. He had a hundred and one methods for getting vocabulary out of an interview and he didn’t know how to get past the pronoun problem. It seemed one of those right-wrong things, one of those trained-from-birth things, downright invisible to the owner of the reactions, but yes, Prakuyo got upset about pronouns, and, complicating matters, in adult Ragi, their preferred language of communication, atevi continually shifted the number of persons in
you
or
me.

And somewhere in the hard-wiring of Prakuyo’s own massive body, this damnable elusive quantity was, clearly, so simple—if one were Prakuyo. If one’s brain had the sights and sounds and smells and emotional context of being Prakuyo. Which a human hadn’t, and wasn’t, by a long shot.

“We.” Prakuyo said that last in ship-speak. And pointed at him, and Banichi and Jago.

Wrong. That should be a you, and he opened his mouth to say so.

And shut it. Prakuyo looked—dared one think—quite earnest about that mistake.

Bren followed a gut instinct. Pointed to himself and Banichi and Jago. “We.” To himself and Prakuyo and Banichi and Jago. “We.”

Prakuyo got up quickly, making that alarmed booming sound. Banichi and Jago were on their feet just as fast.

But Prakuyo subsided back into his chair as if the air had been let out of him, and thrummed and boomed and clenched his hands together in front of his mouth—not pleased. Or at least—not feeling particularly stable at the moment.

And at a loss for words.

“Not
we?” Bren pushed the point.

He won a dark-eyed, distraught look.

Banichi and Jago sat back down, stoic and impeccable.

“We.” That word again, indicating him, Banichi and Jago, but not including Prakuyo.

Don’t include me. Don’t assimilate me. Don’t absorb me.

We—some quality of we—was as disturbing to Prakuyo as it was ordinary and all but invisible to humans and atevi. But not a take-for-granted among atevi; and not, even in his lifetime, an easy given between humans and atevi. A fogged brain began to gather, beyond the obvious answer of a xenophobia Prakuyo never had demonstrated, that he simply had no wish to be included, and did not give his consent to be included. That somehow, with him and with his kind,
we
was a fenced-off, difficult word that might imply anything from visceral distaste to outright hatred of outsiders—no evidence in Prakuyo for that; though that hole in the station might attest differently.

What was behind that reaction? Prakuyo’s wrist was as large as a human upper arm. Strength, immense strength: this wasn’t a species that, in its evolution, easily hid or ran; it might, perhaps, take direct solutions; but with complementary delicacy, these hands had built spaceships. Prakuyo’s kind must have made pots, learned agriculture, domesticated animals, made villages, made towns, made cities, made whatever political structures
let Prakuyo’s kind cooperate and launch itself into space.

But Prakuyo’s people had trouble including other species with itself.

Or Prakuyo had trouble being included by others, or by them, specifically.

Politics? Social structure? Something that disgusted or frightened?

Prakuyo, however, was willing to sublimate that feeling enough to talk, to learn, even to express enjoyment.

And suddenly something reverberated through the hull, a deep, distant shock. Banichi and Jago both got up, and Banichi left them.

A shot? Bren wondered with a chill. Hostilities with the station, or had that ship out there moved in and simply decided to blow its own way into the hull?

Was all time up?

Prakuyo was incapable of looking worried, in human terms, but he looked at the door, looked about him, the same.

“Hear,” Bren acknowledged the event. He had not yet gotten words for
know
and
not know,
was unsure of those pesky soft-tissue conditionals
if
and
then.
His attempt to extract them with a flow chart had produced uncertain results—which, along with the absence of pronouns, could mean bad news. A set of conditionals that didn’t jibe with Mosphei’, which was relatively simple, nor Ragi, which wasn’t simple at all.
If
that was an explosion, nadiin,
then
we have a problem . . .

He was losing his focus, getting wobbly.

“Nandi,” Jago said, from the doorway, and he looked at her. “Jase reports that the alien craft has arrived and established a connection.”

Adrenaline ran like static through nerves already on overload.

Then the habits of the aiji’s court came to the rescue, providing stability for a small bow, an utter microfocus on the Prakuyo matter. “Prakuyo ship, Prakuyo-ji. It has come. Go up.”

Prakuyo absorbed that information and solemnly rose. Bren started for the door, then remembered the notes, frantically gathered them up and gave them to Jago as they reached the door. “These must get to Jase. To C2.”

“Yes,” Jago said.

As their party ran up against the resident seven-year-old, rigged out in lace and red and black brocade, and behind Cajeiri his great-grandmother, in much the same, with gold; and behind the dowager, Cenedi and reinforcements.

The dowager didn’t move that fast. Someone had been in close touch with Jase while he had been locked in the throes of new vocabulary.

“This has gone on long enough,” Ilisidi said, and banged her cane against the deck. “We have our invitation, one supposes, since the ship has complied with Jase-aiji’s instruction. Prakuyo-ji, we shall see this ship of yours and settle this business.”

Prakuyo bowed, deeply, even gracefully. The change in dress had provoked no comment—of
course
the staff had come up with something suitable: the dowager expected such miracles, and was prepared to lead the way.

“My best car,” Cajeiri said, holding it safely in his arms. A bow. Very best behavior, as well.

Banichi came out of the security station and quietly waited for them.

A second stamp of the dowager’s cane, a motion down the corridor toward the door. “Well,” she said. “Shall we dither here, or have this business on the road?”

“Nandi,” Bren murmured, and drew a deep breath, and fell in with her, and with Prakuyo, Cajeiri closing up ranks and staying rather closer to his great-grandmother—not a swift progress: not in the dowager’s company, but steady. They gathered up Banichi by the security station, and how the papers got passed, or what arrangements flew in a handful of words between Jago and Asicho, he had no idea, but he trusted the ship would ultimately have diagrams if he needed them.

The guards at the farthest doors opened them, and they walked to the lift and requested a car. Bren drew out his pocket com and requested through to Jase during the wait.

“Jase,” he said, “I understand we’ve got a connection to the ship. We’re on our way. Looking reasonably good.
Got some graphics coming up to you.”

“
We’ll handle it,”
Jase said.
“Bren. Bren, take very good care. I wish I was backing you.”