Foreigner 7: "I'm not a cursed dinner-course!"
Very well then, as promised - the WAFFiness* (or not, we'll see) of 'ships in the Foreigner universe. --Not all relationships are, I remind probably no regulars, sexual, of course: there are other sorts of interpersonal entanglements, little though you might guess it from fandom sometimes, and some of them are no less important, though fangirls might not believe it, depending on the individual situations."Jago - how does a person get a license?"
"To do what, Bren-ji?"
"You know. The Guild." He wanted not to tread on sensibilities with Jago. He was sorry he'd wandered into the territory.
"To be licensed to the Guild? One elects. One chooses."
It told him no more than before, what pushed a sane person in that direction. Jago didn't seem the type - if there was a type to the profession.
"Bren-ji. Why do you ask?"
"Wondering - what sort of person is after me."
Jago seemed to ignore his question then, looking off to the window. Into rain-spatter and nothing.
"We're not one kind, Bren-ji. We're not one face."
None of your business, he supposed. "Nadi," he said, departing, willing to leave her to her own thoughts, if he could only shake his own.
"What sort becomes paidhi?" she asked him, before he could take a second step.
Good question, he thought. Solid hit. He had to think about it, and didn't find the answer he'd used to have...couldn't even locate the boy who'd started down that track, couldn't believe in him, even marginally.
"A fool, probably."
"One doubts, nadi-ji. Is that a requirement?"
"I think so."
"So...how do you vie for this honor? In what foolishness?"
--Yes, as you might have gathered from preceding exerpts there's a lot of UST going on between the paidhi-aiji and nadi Jago, licensed Assassin of the Bu-javid Security team, which isn't really all that surprising, given that he's not obviously committed to anyone on either side of the water (yes, Bren thinks of his long-term girlfriend at home as a permanent fixture in his life, someone who's always there when he needs a vacation, and yes this turns out to be a problem for everyone down the line, because people aren't vacation cottages on the lake waiting for you to come by at your convenience, and it helps if you talk about long-term life plans with your sexual partners rather than going on assumptions and "love means never having to say" whatever) and there's enough anatomical congruence there between the two dominant sentient species of these distant earths to make even respectable people wonder if there's even more--
And yes, Jago, though petite for an ateva, is as much taller than he is, as most human males are than I, or than most females for that matter. (Given regional trends and variances of course.) --About the same height-weight difference, in fact, as that between the guy who used to live down the road from us and his Korean wife, they'd met and married in the service and settled thousands of miles away from where either of them was originally from. The range of normal Terran human species variation, in fact, and leaving out mutations both harmless and harmful, and even extremely unique populations like the !Kung and Masai at the furthest ends of the spectrum, equals or exceeds that between average Mospheiran adults and atevi, both across and along gender lines, and not simply explainable by differences in available nutrition or healthcare.
It doesn't seem to have stopped us, in either combination, and even occasionally despite gender-height disparity conventions...
But yes, it would be more than a little odd, all things considered. Which hasn't, as the security discussion over possible unsecured keys touched on, and other remarks in the first fifty pages which I didn't quote, stopped the women of Shejidan from considering it, a fact which for many, many reasons Cameron prefers not not to consider and to pretend he isn't aware of and doesn't hear in the halls.
But the possibility remains, like it or not, and doesn't decrease with the continued close proximity of their working relationship. How many books it takes for Cameron to admit to the existence of UST on his side, and what, if anything, he chooses to do about it - is a spoiler for another day, sorry. At this early juncture, a little more abstract - the nature of all sorts of frustrating interpersonal relationships, and the one thing that underlies even the most completely sexual, so long as it is a relationship of some sort.
And that's the one that we, in English, use the word "like" for. Does s/he like me? Does s/he not really like me? I don't even like him/her, but I like sleeping with him, only not sleeping, if you know what I mean-- I like them a lot, they're good people - I don't know if they like me there, or if they're just faking it-- From childhood on, it's really the most important thing, in human relationships: we all know, or remember, that unnerving sense that someone isn't being honest with us, a friend at school who assures us that they are, but gives us reason to doubt that they truly like us, or like us better than our playground enemies; the even more troubling feeling that one's own parent/s don't really like us--
I like chocolate. I love chai with honey. I liked that Star Trek movie with the Borg Queen a lot. I liked the character arc in this novel. I don't like tomato sauce. I love Josquin des Pres. I didn't really like the way Joss handled season 3, but I love Alexis Denisof/Charisma Carpenter - yummm! No, of course I don't know him/her don't be silly. And yes, I know they're together, so? I like working with you guys. I love X/Y/Z, I would do anything for them, they're my [pick important familial relationship]. I don't like you when you're being this way, go do something someplace else for a while until you snap out of it. I like him/her, but I don't like [certain things] about them. Do you like cookie-dough ice cream? Escargot? Swiss Chard? Robotech? Merengue dancing?
--Okay, tell me what "like" means. Or "love." Pretend I'm a non-native speaker with little-to-know familiarity with English lit. Explain to me why we use the same word to mean all these different nuances - and radical disjunctions - of human behavior.
But you know, P@L! You just do. You know the context, like the rest of us. Stop being obtuse--
Yeah, I know. Who wants to go there? It's embarrassing, and worse, it's seriously meta. Of course we know. We use the damn words and we understand each other, right? We don't need to think about them, silly!
Unless you're the paidhi, in which case you can't not think about them. Ordinary Mospheirans squabbling over building a new sports center in Jackson don't have to; and for the Foreign Office types and their resident experts at the University, it's all academic speculation, and they don't have to worry about putting foot firmly in mouth or mortally insulting someone with a small private army, or arsenal, by indulging in said speculation.
Insheibi doesn't remotely correspond to "politically incorrect," btw. Except insofar as it's probably an unsafe political bet to insult someone with a rude personal question, who happens to have a small private army...
"I relate to you the way I relate to Swiss chard. Which I find delicious."
Tell me if that's a compliment, an insult, an obscene remark, or what. --And what I'm supposed to do about it, or in response to it, by any cultural standards you please. (Except run, fast and far.)
Oh, and the person who keeps saying these things, to individuals of both sexes, isn't just a non-native speaker, but is the agent of a foreign power, and may just possibly have sold us all out to shadowy hostile forces of uncertain alliance and intent. There's no way to tell, except by watching him. --Oh, and whatever you say back? --It's going to be wrong. Whatever you say or do, it's going to depress him and make him say even wierder things. And don't forget, the future of the whole nation depends on you not blowing this, as well as him not being a traitor.
--No, secret service agents aren't allowed to scream, tear their hair out, or beat their heads against the stone walls. --Sometimes it's a little hard not to stomp out of a room after one of these conversations, though.Bren snapped the book shut. Banichi looked back in startlement, he had that satisfaction. Banichi's nerves were that tightly strung.
"Where's Jago?" Bren asked.
"Outside. Refusing your reasonable questions, too."
"Banichi, dammit!" He stood up, little good it did - he still had to look up to Banichi's face, even at a distance. "If I'm under arrest and confined here, - tell me. And where's my mail? Don't regular planes come to Maidingi? It looked like an airport to me."
"From Shejidan, once a week. Most of the country, nadi, runs at a different speed. Be calm. Enjoy the lake. Enjoy the slower pace."
"Slower pace? I want to make a phone call. Don't tell me this place doens't have a telephone."
"In point of fact, no, there isn't a telephone. This is an historical monument. The wires would disfigure the--"
"Underground lines, Banichi. Pipes overhead. The place has plenty of wires."
"They have to get here."
"There's gas, There's light. Why aren't there plug-ins? Why can't someone go down to the town, go to a hardware and get me a damned power extension and a screw-in plug? I could sacrifice a ceiling light. The historic walls wouldn't suffer defacement."
"There isn't a hardware. The town of Maidingi is a very small place, nadi Bren."
"God." His head was starting to hurt, acutely. "Banichi, why is Tabini doing this?"
"Doing what, nadi? I don't think the aiji-ji has a thing to do with hardwares in Maidingi."
He wasn't amused. He leaned his back against the stones, folded his arms and fixed Banichi with an angry stare, determined to have it out, one way or the other. "You know, 'doing what.' I could feel better if I thought it was policy. I don't feel better thinking it might be something I've done, or trouble I've made for Tabini - I like him, Banichi. I don't want to be the cause of harm to him, or to you, or to Jago. It's my man'chi. Humans are like that. We have unreasonable loyalties to people we like, and you're going far past the surface of my politeness."
"Clearly."
"And I still like you, damn you. You don't shake one of us, you don't fling our liking away because your man'chi says otherwise, you can't get rid of us when we like you, Banichi, you're stuck with me, so make the best of it.
There wasn't a clear word for like. It meant a preference for salad greens or iced drinks. But love was worse. Banichi would never forgive him that.
Banichi's nostrils flared, once, twice. He said, in accented Mosphei', "What meaning? What meaning you say, nand' paidhi?"
"It means the feeling I have for my mother and my brother and my job, I have for Tabini and for you and for Jago," Breath failed him. Self control did. He flung it all out. "Banichi, I'd walk a thousand miles to have a kind word from you. I'd give you the shirt from my back if you needed it; if you were in trouble, I'd carry you that thousand miles. What do you call that? Foolish?"
Another flaring of Banichi's nostrils. "That would be very difficult for you."
"So is liking atevi." That got out before he censored it. "Baji-naji. It's the luck I have."
"Don't joke."
"I'm not joking. God, i'm not joking. We have to like somebody, we're bound to like somebody, or we die, Banichi, we outright die. We make appointments with grandmothers, we drink the cups strangers offer us, and we don't ask for help any more, Banichi, what's the dammned point, when you don't see what we need?"
"If I don't guess what you like, you threaten to ruin my reputation. It this accurate?"
The headache was suddenly excruciating. Things blurred. "Like, like, like - get off the damned word, Banichi. I cross that trench every day. Can't you cross it once? Can't you cross to where I am, Banichi, just once, to know what I htink? You're clever. I know you're hard to mislead. Follow, Banichi, the solitary trail of my thoughts."
"I'm not a cursed dinner-course!"
"Banichi-ji." The pain reached a level and stayed there, tolerable, once he'd discovered the limits of it. He had his hand on the stonework. He felt the texture of it, the silken dust of age, the fire-heated rock, broken from the earth to make this building before humans ever left the homeworld. Before they were ever lost, and desperate. He composed himself - he remembered he was the paidhi, the man in the middle. He remembered he'd chosen this, knowing there wouldn't be a reward, believing, at the time, that of course atevi had feelings, and of course, once he could find the right words, hit the right button, find the clue to atevi thought - he'd win of atevi everything he was giving up among humankind.
He'd been twenty-two, and what he'd not known had so vastly outweighed what he'd known.
"Your behavior worries me," Banichi said.
"Forgive me." There was a large knot interfering with his speech. But he was vastly calmer. He chose not to look at Banichi. He only imagined the suspicion and the anger on Banichi's face. "I reacted unprofessionally and intrusively."
"Reacted to what, nand' paidhi?"
A betraying word choice. He was slipping, badly.
There is something more than a little pathetic about Bren's yearnings for something that will confirm that Banichi, particularly (but also Tabini-aiji too), thinks of him as a friend regardless of that word not translating properly. It is, in fact, more than a little reminiscent of someone trying desperately to attract the attention/affection of an aloof mastiff belonging to someone else.
I make this comparison most deliberately, although it would be as abstract and incomprehensible on an empirical level to Cameron no less than to the atevi, as much as the mythic "goose that laid the golden eggs" which has become a common proverb in the Western Association, hounds being as alien to this earth as avis speciosi. There are things that fill that niche on the planet, just as there are things that take the place of geese in the food chain. But I am, presently, speaking to Terran humans, not colonial Mospheirans, and in our own idiom appropriately using the most economic choices-- "Give him room, nand' paidhi. Some things aren't within your office."
"I understand that," he said, telling himself he hand't understood: he'd been unreasonably focussed on his own discomforts last night, to the exclusion of Banichi's own reasonable distress. It began to dawn on him that Banichi might have wanted things from him he just hadn't given, before they'd parted in discomfort with each other. "I think I was very rude last night, nadi. I shouldn't have been. I wasn't doing my job. I think he's right to be upset with me. I hope you can explain it to him."
"You have no job toward him, Bren-ji. Ours is towrd you. And I much doubt he took offense. If he allowed you to see his distress, count it for a compliment to you."
Unusual notion. One part of his brain went ransacking memory, turning over old references. Another part went on vacation, wondering if it meant Banichi did after all like him.
And the sensible, workaday part of his brain told the other two parts to pay attention to business and quit expecting human responses out of atevi minds...
What Bren wants from Banichi is not at all slashy, although I have no doubt that dedicated fangirls could turn out some proper horrors, if they ever discover Cherryh, and wouldn't content themselves with Jordan and Paul or Justin and Grant, alas (or even Tano & Algini) - what he wants, he thinks, is to be liked, and to know that he is liked, on a level that isn't even possible between two human beings of the same culture and age and language and all other frames of reference. He wants it from Banichi, he wants it from Jago, he wants it from his liege lord Tabini, he wants it from all the atevi of the Western Association that he meets, in some degree. (Have you ever been the only new student, in a class?) And yet, that kind of comforting certainty - cannot be had, cannot be bought at any price, can only be held as a matter of faith, if a rational one; but we can camouflage that from ourselves, and project the illusion that another is giving us what we need and desire and give in return to them,* much easier on someone who does not act and react in ways that are so far different from our own paradigms.
"Everyone needs to trust someone," I was told many years ago, in a college coffee shop discussion of, well, I suppose my existential paranoia, altho' it started out as a conversation on epistemology/ontology - how do you know what you know about how things are, and how are they, and how do you know if what you think that you know just ain't so?**
And we never did reconcile the two sides of the debate, myself and everyone else, the position that you should only trust when you had good reason to trust, with the view that to trust was some sort of biological imperative like to hunger, and better to fill the need for human contact, for being liked, with something non-real, non-nourishing, than go without; while I felt that doing so was more akin to eating poison, as opposed to fasting: one would eventually kill you, if unsatisfied, but the other certainly would, but that even this was overstating the "need" aspect of it. If nobody likes/loves you, but is only pretending to do so, out of pity or less noble motives, why pretend with them, and delay the inevitable rejection? If everyone around you is liars, if all are out to use you, then the realist never relies on any of them. But tries like hell to figure out if this is or is not the case.
...he found himself standing still in the now familiar glory of the light and viewing it with a new and poignant emotion. Out of this heaven, these happy climes, they were presently to descend - into what? Sorns, human sacrifice, loathsome sexless monsters. What was a sorn? His own role in the affair was now clear enough. Somebody or something had sent for him. It could hardly be for him personally. The somebody wanted a victim - any victim - from Earth. [...]His mind, like so many minds of his generation, was richly furnished with bogies. He had read his H. G. Wells and others. His universe was peopled with horrors such as ancient and mediaeval mythology could hardly rival. No insect-like, vermiculite or crustacean Abominable, no twitching feelers, rasping wings, slimy coils, curling tentacles, no monstrous union of superhuman intelligence and insatiable cruelty seemed to him anything but likely on an alien world. The sorns would be...would be...he dared not think what the sorns would be. And he was to be given to them. Somehow this seemd more horrible than being caught by them. Given, handed over, offered. He saw in imagination various incompatible monstrosities - bulbous eyes, grinning jaws, horns, stings, mandibles. Loathing of insects, loathing of snakes, loathing of things that squashed and squelched, all played their horrible symphonies over his nerves. But the reality would be worse: it would be an extra-terrestrial Otherness - something one had never thought of, never could have thought of. In that moment Ransom made a decision. He could face death, but not the sorns......A new world he had already seen - but a new, an extra-terrestrial, a non-human language was a different matter. Somehow he had not thought of this in connection with the sorns; now, it flashed upon him like a revelation. The love of knowledge is a kind of madness. In the fraction of a second which it took Ransom to decide that the creature was really talking, and while he still knew that he might be facing instant death, his imagination had leaped over every fear and hope and probability of his situation to follow the dazzling project of making a Malacandrian grammar. An Introduction to the Malacandrian language - The Lunar Verb - A Concise Martian-English Dictionary...the titles flitted through his mind. And what might one not discover from the speech of a non-human race? The very form of language itself, the principle behind all possible languages, might fall into his hands. Unconsciously he raised himself on his elbow and stared at the black beast. It became silent. The huge bullet head swung round and lustrous amber eyes fixed on him. There was no wind on the lake or in the wood. Minute after minute in utter silence the representatives of two so far-divided species stared each into the other's face.
Ransom rose to his knees. The creature leaped back, watching him intently, and they became motionless again. Then it came a pace nearer, and Ransom jumped up and retreated, but not far; curiosity held him. He summoned up his courage and advanced, holding out his hand; the beast misunderstood the gesture. It backed into the shallows of the lake and he could see the muscles tighten under its sleek pelt, ready for sudden movement. But there it stopped; it too was in the grip of curiosity. Neither dared let the other approach, yet each repeatedly felt the impulse to do so himself, and yielded to it. It was foolish, frightening, ecstatic and unbearable all in one moment. It was more than curiosity. It was like a courtship - like the meeting of the first man and the first woman in the world; it was like something beyond that, so natural is the contact of sexes, so limited the strangeness, so shallow the reticence, so mild the repugnance to be overcome, compared with the first tingling intercourse of two different, but rational, species.
The creature suddenly turned and began walking away. A disappointment like despair smote Ransom.
"Come back," he shouted in English. [...]
Supporting the shell in its two arms, it extended them towards Ransom. The intention was unmistakeable. Hesitantly, almost shyly, he advanced and took the cup. His finger-tips touched the webbed membrane of the creature's paws and an indescribable thrill of mingled attraction and repulsion ran through him; then he drank. Whatever had been added to the water was plainly alcoholic; he had never enjoyed a drink so much.
"Thank you," he said in English. "Thank you very much."
The creature struck itself on the chest and made a noise. Ransom did not at first realize what it meant. Then he saw that it was trying to teach him its name[...]
It took him only as far as where it had got the shell, and here to his not very reasonable astonishment, Ransom found that a kind of boat was moored. Man-like, when he saw the artifact he felt more certain of the hross's rationality. He even valued the creature the more because the boat, allowing for the usual Malacandrian height and flimsiness, was really very like an earthly boat; only later did he set himself the question, "What else could a boat be like?" The hross produced an oval platter of some tough but slightly flexible material, covered it with strips of spongy, orange covered substance and gave it to Ransom. He cut a convenient length off with his knife and began to eat; doubtfully at first and then ravenously. It had a bean-like taste, but sweeter; good enough for a starving man. Then, as his hunger ebbed, the sense of his situation returned with dismaying force. The huge, seal-like creature eated beside him became unbearably ominous. It seemed friendly; but it was very big, very black, and he knew nothing at all about it. What were its relations to the sorns? And was it really as rational as it appeared?--from Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis, 1938 (pub 1943)
There is a very real way in which the Foreigner saga is the proper sequel to Out of the Silent Planet, far more so than Perelandra, much less That Hideous Strength. The reactions of the paidhiin, both the first and the latest, to the beauty and danger of the natural world and the Others they must live among, the constant careening from dread to delight, from longing to loathing, xenophobia to xenophilia and back again, and the pride at human technological achievement overwhelmed by shame at humanity's history of wars and exploitations, all echo and amplify those of Dr. Ransom the kidnapped linguist in Lewis' reworking of the BEM* tropes of Golden Age SF. Ransom, after all, goes back home to Earth; there is no going home for the shipwrecked colonists, although as we have seen they have not fully internalized this: they still dream of going back into space and finding their old homeworld, someday, all the while they enjoy their life in this balmy and generous climate.
And meddle, with the inhabitants - who are, however, able to at least hold their own, and then some....a foolish human, who'd let himself in for this - who'd chased after the knowledge and then the honor of being the best.
Which had to be enough to go to bed with, on nights like this. Because there damned sure easn't anything else, and if he let himself--
But he couldn't. The paidhi couldn't start, and twenty-six atevi years of age, to humanize the people he dealt with. It was the worst trap. All his predecessors had battled it. He knew it in theory.
He'd been doing all right while he was an hour's flight away from Mospheira. While his mail appeared on schedule, twice a week. While...
While he'd believed beyond a doubt he was going to see human faces again, and while things were going outstandingly well, and while Tabini and he were such, such good friends.
Key that word, Friend.
The paidhi had been in a damned lot of trouble, right there. The paidhi had been stone blind, right there.
The paidhi didn't know why he was here, the paidhi didn't know how he was going to get back again, the paidhi couldn't get the emotional satisfaction out of Banichi and Jago that Tabini had been feeding him, laughing with him, joking with him, down to the last time they'd met.
Blowing melons to bits. TAbini patting him on the back - gently, because human backs fractured so easily - and telling him he had real talent for firearms? How good was Tabini more to the point? How good at reading the paidhi was the atevi fourth in line of his side of the bargain?
Tipped off, perhaps, by his predecessor, that the paidhiin had a soft spot for personal attachments?
That the longer you knew them, the greater fools they became, and the more trusting, and the easier to get things from?
But - the political is always personal, politics isn't some Rube Goldberg device of abstractions and absolutes, any more than anything is. Sometimes making a fool of one's self, or feeling like one has, with a good grace, making the effort to communicate across the gap, fumbling in the darkness, with good faith - because the Idea of the Alien only faintly masks the Res of which it is the Symbol, the most frightening truth of all: that we do not understand each other, not simply the Stranger, but those closest to us, because we do not really understand ourselves...The experts said atevi couldn't think outside hierarchical structure. And Jago said they could? His heart was pounding. His common sense said hold back, don't believe it, there's a contradiction here. "So you can feel attachment to one you don't have man'chi for."
"Nadi Bren, --are you making a sexual proposition to me?"
The bottom dropped out of his stomach. "I--No, Jago-ji."
"I wondered."
"Forgive my impropriety."
"Forgive my mistaken notion. What were you asking?"
"I--" Recovering objectivity was impossible. Or it had never existed...
('Shippers, don't get too excited if you haven't read so far - the conversation ends with a promise to loan him a book on obscure heretical sects from the hinterlands. This is Cherryh, not ffnet.)
*WAFF - Warm And Fuzzy Feelings, acronym descriptive of what certain sorts of fanfic are supposed to evoke; also - WAFFy, WAFFishness.
** q.v. The Truman Show.
*** ibid.
**** BEM - Bug-Eyed Monster.
Excerpts from Foreigner, ©1994 C. J. Cherryh
"To do what, Bren-ji?"
"You know. The Guild." He wanted not to tread on sensibilities with Jago. He was sorry he'd wandered into the territory.
"To be licensed to the Guild? One elects. One chooses."
It told him no more than before, what pushed a sane person in that direction. Jago didn't seem the type - if there was a type to the profession.
"Bren-ji. Why do you ask?"
"Wondering - what sort of person is after me."
Jago seemed to ignore his question then, looking off to the window. Into rain-spatter and nothing.
"We're not one kind, Bren-ji. We're not one face."
None of your business, he supposed. "Nadi," he said, departing, willing to leave her to her own thoughts, if he could only shake his own.
"What sort becomes paidhi?" she asked him, before he could take a second step.
Good question, he thought. Solid hit. He had to think about it, and didn't find the answer he'd used to have...couldn't even locate the boy who'd started down that track, couldn't believe in him, even marginally.
"A fool, probably."
"One doubts, nadi-ji. Is that a requirement?"
"I think so."
"So...how do you vie for this honor? In what foolishness?"
--Yes, as you might have gathered from preceding exerpts there's a lot of UST going on between the paidhi-aiji and nadi Jago, licensed Assassin of the Bu-javid Security team, which isn't really all that surprising, given that he's not obviously committed to anyone on either side of the water (yes, Bren thinks of his long-term girlfriend at home as a permanent fixture in his life, someone who's always there when he needs a vacation, and yes this turns out to be a problem for everyone down the line, because people aren't vacation cottages on the lake waiting for you to come by at your convenience, and it helps if you talk about long-term life plans with your sexual partners rather than going on assumptions and "love means never having to say" whatever) and there's enough anatomical congruence there between the two dominant sentient species of these distant earths to make even respectable people wonder if there's even more--
And yes, Jago, though petite for an ateva, is as much taller than he is, as most human males are than I, or than most females for that matter. (Given regional trends and variances of course.) --About the same height-weight difference, in fact, as that between the guy who used to live down the road from us and his Korean wife, they'd met and married in the service and settled thousands of miles away from where either of them was originally from. The range of normal Terran human species variation, in fact, and leaving out mutations both harmless and harmful, and even extremely unique populations like the !Kung and Masai at the furthest ends of the spectrum, equals or exceeds that between average Mospheiran adults and atevi, both across and along gender lines, and not simply explainable by differences in available nutrition or healthcare.
It doesn't seem to have stopped us, in either combination, and even occasionally despite gender-height disparity conventions...
But yes, it would be more than a little odd, all things considered. Which hasn't, as the security discussion over possible unsecured keys touched on, and other remarks in the first fifty pages which I didn't quote, stopped the women of Shejidan from considering it, a fact which for many, many reasons Cameron prefers not not to consider and to pretend he isn't aware of and doesn't hear in the halls.
But the possibility remains, like it or not, and doesn't decrease with the continued close proximity of their working relationship. How many books it takes for Cameron to admit to the existence of UST on his side, and what, if anything, he chooses to do about it - is a spoiler for another day, sorry. At this early juncture, a little more abstract - the nature of all sorts of frustrating interpersonal relationships, and the one thing that underlies even the most completely sexual, so long as it is a relationship of some sort.
And that's the one that we, in English, use the word "like" for. Does s/he like me? Does s/he not really like me? I don't even like him/her, but I like sleeping with him, only not sleeping, if you know what I mean-- I like them a lot, they're good people - I don't know if they like me there, or if they're just faking it-- From childhood on, it's really the most important thing, in human relationships: we all know, or remember, that unnerving sense that someone isn't being honest with us, a friend at school who assures us that they are, but gives us reason to doubt that they truly like us, or like us better than our playground enemies; the even more troubling feeling that one's own parent/s don't really like us--
I like chocolate. I love chai with honey. I liked that Star Trek movie with the Borg Queen a lot. I liked the character arc in this novel. I don't like tomato sauce. I love Josquin des Pres. I didn't really like the way Joss handled season 3, but I love Alexis Denisof/Charisma Carpenter - yummm! No, of course I don't know him/her don't be silly. And yes, I know they're together, so? I like working with you guys. I love X/Y/Z, I would do anything for them, they're my [pick important familial relationship]. I don't like you when you're being this way, go do something someplace else for a while until you snap out of it. I like him/her, but I don't like [certain things] about them. Do you like cookie-dough ice cream? Escargot? Swiss Chard? Robotech? Merengue dancing?
--Okay, tell me what "like" means. Or "love." Pretend I'm a non-native speaker with little-to-know familiarity with English lit. Explain to me why we use the same word to mean all these different nuances - and radical disjunctions - of human behavior.
But you know, P@L! You just do. You know the context, like the rest of us. Stop being obtuse--
Yeah, I know. Who wants to go there? It's embarrassing, and worse, it's seriously meta. Of course we know. We use the damn words and we understand each other, right? We don't need to think about them, silly!
Unless you're the paidhi, in which case you can't not think about them. Ordinary Mospheirans squabbling over building a new sports center in Jackson don't have to; and for the Foreign Office types and their resident experts at the University, it's all academic speculation, and they don't have to worry about putting foot firmly in mouth or mortally insulting someone with a small private army, or arsenal, by indulging in said speculation.
Insheibi doesn't remotely correspond to "politically incorrect," btw. Except insofar as it's probably an unsafe political bet to insult someone with a rude personal question, who happens to have a small private army...
"I relate to you the way I relate to Swiss chard. Which I find delicious."
Tell me if that's a compliment, an insult, an obscene remark, or what. --And what I'm supposed to do about it, or in response to it, by any cultural standards you please. (Except run, fast and far.)
Oh, and the person who keeps saying these things, to individuals of both sexes, isn't just a non-native speaker, but is the agent of a foreign power, and may just possibly have sold us all out to shadowy hostile forces of uncertain alliance and intent. There's no way to tell, except by watching him. --Oh, and whatever you say back? --It's going to be wrong. Whatever you say or do, it's going to depress him and make him say even wierder things. And don't forget, the future of the whole nation depends on you not blowing this, as well as him not being a traitor.
--No, secret service agents aren't allowed to scream, tear their hair out, or beat their heads against the stone walls. --Sometimes it's a little hard not to stomp out of a room after one of these conversations, though.Bren snapped the book shut. Banichi looked back in startlement, he had that satisfaction. Banichi's nerves were that tightly strung.
"Where's Jago?" Bren asked.
"Outside. Refusing your reasonable questions, too."
"Banichi, dammit!" He stood up, little good it did - he still had to look up to Banichi's face, even at a distance. "If I'm under arrest and confined here, - tell me. And where's my mail? Don't regular planes come to Maidingi? It looked like an airport to me."
"From Shejidan, once a week. Most of the country, nadi, runs at a different speed. Be calm. Enjoy the lake. Enjoy the slower pace."
"Slower pace? I want to make a phone call. Don't tell me this place doens't have a telephone."
"In point of fact, no, there isn't a telephone. This is an historical monument. The wires would disfigure the--"
"Underground lines, Banichi. Pipes overhead. The place has plenty of wires."
"They have to get here."
"There's gas, There's light. Why aren't there plug-ins? Why can't someone go down to the town, go to a hardware and get me a damned power extension and a screw-in plug? I could sacrifice a ceiling light. The historic walls wouldn't suffer defacement."
"There isn't a hardware. The town of Maidingi is a very small place, nadi Bren."
"God." His head was starting to hurt, acutely. "Banichi, why is Tabini doing this?"
"Doing what, nadi? I don't think the aiji-ji has a thing to do with hardwares in Maidingi."
He wasn't amused. He leaned his back against the stones, folded his arms and fixed Banichi with an angry stare, determined to have it out, one way or the other. "You know, 'doing what.' I could feel better if I thought it was policy. I don't feel better thinking it might be something I've done, or trouble I've made for Tabini - I like him, Banichi. I don't want to be the cause of harm to him, or to you, or to Jago. It's my man'chi. Humans are like that. We have unreasonable loyalties to people we like, and you're going far past the surface of my politeness."
"Clearly."
"And I still like you, damn you. You don't shake one of us, you don't fling our liking away because your man'chi says otherwise, you can't get rid of us when we like you, Banichi, you're stuck with me, so make the best of it.
There wasn't a clear word for like. It meant a preference for salad greens or iced drinks. But love was worse. Banichi would never forgive him that.
Banichi's nostrils flared, once, twice. He said, in accented Mosphei', "What meaning? What meaning you say, nand' paidhi?"
"It means the feeling I have for my mother and my brother and my job, I have for Tabini and for you and for Jago," Breath failed him. Self control did. He flung it all out. "Banichi, I'd walk a thousand miles to have a kind word from you. I'd give you the shirt from my back if you needed it; if you were in trouble, I'd carry you that thousand miles. What do you call that? Foolish?"
Another flaring of Banichi's nostrils. "That would be very difficult for you."
"So is liking atevi." That got out before he censored it. "Baji-naji. It's the luck I have."
"Don't joke."
"I'm not joking. God, i'm not joking. We have to like somebody, we're bound to like somebody, or we die, Banichi, we outright die. We make appointments with grandmothers, we drink the cups strangers offer us, and we don't ask for help any more, Banichi, what's the dammned point, when you don't see what we need?"
"If I don't guess what you like, you threaten to ruin my reputation. It this accurate?"
The headache was suddenly excruciating. Things blurred. "Like, like, like - get off the damned word, Banichi. I cross that trench every day. Can't you cross it once? Can't you cross to where I am, Banichi, just once, to know what I htink? You're clever. I know you're hard to mislead. Follow, Banichi, the solitary trail of my thoughts."
"I'm not a cursed dinner-course!"
"Banichi-ji." The pain reached a level and stayed there, tolerable, once he'd discovered the limits of it. He had his hand on the stonework. He felt the texture of it, the silken dust of age, the fire-heated rock, broken from the earth to make this building before humans ever left the homeworld. Before they were ever lost, and desperate. He composed himself - he remembered he was the paidhi, the man in the middle. He remembered he'd chosen this, knowing there wouldn't be a reward, believing, at the time, that of course atevi had feelings, and of course, once he could find the right words, hit the right button, find the clue to atevi thought - he'd win of atevi everything he was giving up among humankind.
He'd been twenty-two, and what he'd not known had so vastly outweighed what he'd known.
"Your behavior worries me," Banichi said.
"Forgive me." There was a large knot interfering with his speech. But he was vastly calmer. He chose not to look at Banichi. He only imagined the suspicion and the anger on Banichi's face. "I reacted unprofessionally and intrusively."
"Reacted to what, nand' paidhi?"
A betraying word choice. He was slipping, badly.
There is something more than a little pathetic about Bren's yearnings for something that will confirm that Banichi, particularly (but also Tabini-aiji too), thinks of him as a friend regardless of that word not translating properly. It is, in fact, more than a little reminiscent of someone trying desperately to attract the attention/affection of an aloof mastiff belonging to someone else.
I make this comparison most deliberately, although it would be as abstract and incomprehensible on an empirical level to Cameron no less than to the atevi, as much as the mythic "goose that laid the golden eggs" which has become a common proverb in the Western Association, hounds being as alien to this earth as avis speciosi. There are things that fill that niche on the planet, just as there are things that take the place of geese in the food chain. But I am, presently, speaking to Terran humans, not colonial Mospheirans, and in our own idiom appropriately using the most economic choices-- "Give him room, nand' paidhi. Some things aren't within your office."
"I understand that," he said, telling himself he hand't understood: he'd been unreasonably focussed on his own discomforts last night, to the exclusion of Banichi's own reasonable distress. It began to dawn on him that Banichi might have wanted things from him he just hadn't given, before they'd parted in discomfort with each other. "I think I was very rude last night, nadi. I shouldn't have been. I wasn't doing my job. I think he's right to be upset with me. I hope you can explain it to him."
"You have no job toward him, Bren-ji. Ours is towrd you. And I much doubt he took offense. If he allowed you to see his distress, count it for a compliment to you."
Unusual notion. One part of his brain went ransacking memory, turning over old references. Another part went on vacation, wondering if it meant Banichi did after all like him.
And the sensible, workaday part of his brain told the other two parts to pay attention to business and quit expecting human responses out of atevi minds...
What Bren wants from Banichi is not at all slashy, although I have no doubt that dedicated fangirls could turn out some proper horrors, if they ever discover Cherryh, and wouldn't content themselves with Jordan and Paul or Justin and Grant, alas (or even Tano & Algini) - what he wants, he thinks, is to be liked, and to know that he is liked, on a level that isn't even possible between two human beings of the same culture and age and language and all other frames of reference. He wants it from Banichi, he wants it from Jago, he wants it from his liege lord Tabini, he wants it from all the atevi of the Western Association that he meets, in some degree. (Have you ever been the only new student, in a class?) And yet, that kind of comforting certainty - cannot be had, cannot be bought at any price, can only be held as a matter of faith, if a rational one; but we can camouflage that from ourselves, and project the illusion that another is giving us what we need and desire and give in return to them,* much easier on someone who does not act and react in ways that are so far different from our own paradigms.
"Everyone needs to trust someone," I was told many years ago, in a college coffee shop discussion of, well, I suppose my existential paranoia, altho' it started out as a conversation on epistemology/ontology - how do you know what you know about how things are, and how are they, and how do you know if what you think that you know just ain't so?**
And we never did reconcile the two sides of the debate, myself and everyone else, the position that you should only trust when you had good reason to trust, with the view that to trust was some sort of biological imperative like to hunger, and better to fill the need for human contact, for being liked, with something non-real, non-nourishing, than go without; while I felt that doing so was more akin to eating poison, as opposed to fasting: one would eventually kill you, if unsatisfied, but the other certainly would, but that even this was overstating the "need" aspect of it. If nobody likes/loves you, but is only pretending to do so, out of pity or less noble motives, why pretend with them, and delay the inevitable rejection? If everyone around you is liars, if all are out to use you, then the realist never relies on any of them. But tries like hell to figure out if this is or is not the case.
...he found himself standing still in the now familiar glory of the light and viewing it with a new and poignant emotion. Out of this heaven, these happy climes, they were presently to descend - into what? Sorns, human sacrifice, loathsome sexless monsters. What was a sorn? His own role in the affair was now clear enough. Somebody or something had sent for him. It could hardly be for him personally. The somebody wanted a victim - any victim - from Earth. [...]His mind, like so many minds of his generation, was richly furnished with bogies. He had read his H. G. Wells and others. His universe was peopled with horrors such as ancient and mediaeval mythology could hardly rival. No insect-like, vermiculite or crustacean Abominable, no twitching feelers, rasping wings, slimy coils, curling tentacles, no monstrous union of superhuman intelligence and insatiable cruelty seemed to him anything but likely on an alien world. The sorns would be...would be...he dared not think what the sorns would be. And he was to be given to them. Somehow this seemd more horrible than being caught by them. Given, handed over, offered. He saw in imagination various incompatible monstrosities - bulbous eyes, grinning jaws, horns, stings, mandibles. Loathing of insects, loathing of snakes, loathing of things that squashed and squelched, all played their horrible symphonies over his nerves. But the reality would be worse: it would be an extra-terrestrial Otherness - something one had never thought of, never could have thought of. In that moment Ransom made a decision. He could face death, but not the sorns......A new world he had already seen - but a new, an extra-terrestrial, a non-human language was a different matter. Somehow he had not thought of this in connection with the sorns; now, it flashed upon him like a revelation. The love of knowledge is a kind of madness. In the fraction of a second which it took Ransom to decide that the creature was really talking, and while he still knew that he might be facing instant death, his imagination had leaped over every fear and hope and probability of his situation to follow the dazzling project of making a Malacandrian grammar. An Introduction to the Malacandrian language - The Lunar Verb - A Concise Martian-English Dictionary...the titles flitted through his mind. And what might one not discover from the speech of a non-human race? The very form of language itself, the principle behind all possible languages, might fall into his hands. Unconsciously he raised himself on his elbow and stared at the black beast. It became silent. The huge bullet head swung round and lustrous amber eyes fixed on him. There was no wind on the lake or in the wood. Minute after minute in utter silence the representatives of two so far-divided species stared each into the other's face.
Ransom rose to his knees. The creature leaped back, watching him intently, and they became motionless again. Then it came a pace nearer, and Ransom jumped up and retreated, but not far; curiosity held him. He summoned up his courage and advanced, holding out his hand; the beast misunderstood the gesture. It backed into the shallows of the lake and he could see the muscles tighten under its sleek pelt, ready for sudden movement. But there it stopped; it too was in the grip of curiosity. Neither dared let the other approach, yet each repeatedly felt the impulse to do so himself, and yielded to it. It was foolish, frightening, ecstatic and unbearable all in one moment. It was more than curiosity. It was like a courtship - like the meeting of the first man and the first woman in the world; it was like something beyond that, so natural is the contact of sexes, so limited the strangeness, so shallow the reticence, so mild the repugnance to be overcome, compared with the first tingling intercourse of two different, but rational, species.
The creature suddenly turned and began walking away. A disappointment like despair smote Ransom.
"Come back," he shouted in English. [...]
Supporting the shell in its two arms, it extended them towards Ransom. The intention was unmistakeable. Hesitantly, almost shyly, he advanced and took the cup. His finger-tips touched the webbed membrane of the creature's paws and an indescribable thrill of mingled attraction and repulsion ran through him; then he drank. Whatever had been added to the water was plainly alcoholic; he had never enjoyed a drink so much.
"Thank you," he said in English. "Thank you very much."
The creature struck itself on the chest and made a noise. Ransom did not at first realize what it meant. Then he saw that it was trying to teach him its name[...]
It took him only as far as where it had got the shell, and here to his not very reasonable astonishment, Ransom found that a kind of boat was moored. Man-like, when he saw the artifact he felt more certain of the hross's rationality. He even valued the creature the more because the boat, allowing for the usual Malacandrian height and flimsiness, was really very like an earthly boat; only later did he set himself the question, "What else could a boat be like?" The hross produced an oval platter of some tough but slightly flexible material, covered it with strips of spongy, orange covered substance and gave it to Ransom. He cut a convenient length off with his knife and began to eat; doubtfully at first and then ravenously. It had a bean-like taste, but sweeter; good enough for a starving man. Then, as his hunger ebbed, the sense of his situation returned with dismaying force. The huge, seal-like creature eated beside him became unbearably ominous. It seemed friendly; but it was very big, very black, and he knew nothing at all about it. What were its relations to the sorns? And was it really as rational as it appeared?--from Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis, 1938 (pub 1943)
There is a very real way in which the Foreigner saga is the proper sequel to Out of the Silent Planet, far more so than Perelandra, much less That Hideous Strength. The reactions of the paidhiin, both the first and the latest, to the beauty and danger of the natural world and the Others they must live among, the constant careening from dread to delight, from longing to loathing, xenophobia to xenophilia and back again, and the pride at human technological achievement overwhelmed by shame at humanity's history of wars and exploitations, all echo and amplify those of Dr. Ransom the kidnapped linguist in Lewis' reworking of the BEM* tropes of Golden Age SF. Ransom, after all, goes back home to Earth; there is no going home for the shipwrecked colonists, although as we have seen they have not fully internalized this: they still dream of going back into space and finding their old homeworld, someday, all the while they enjoy their life in this balmy and generous climate.
And meddle, with the inhabitants - who are, however, able to at least hold their own, and then some....a foolish human, who'd let himself in for this - who'd chased after the knowledge and then the honor of being the best.
Which had to be enough to go to bed with, on nights like this. Because there damned sure easn't anything else, and if he let himself--
But he couldn't. The paidhi couldn't start, and twenty-six atevi years of age, to humanize the people he dealt with. It was the worst trap. All his predecessors had battled it. He knew it in theory.
He'd been doing all right while he was an hour's flight away from Mospheira. While his mail appeared on schedule, twice a week. While...
While he'd believed beyond a doubt he was going to see human faces again, and while things were going outstandingly well, and while Tabini and he were such, such good friends.
Key that word, Friend.
The paidhi had been in a damned lot of trouble, right there. The paidhi had been stone blind, right there.
The paidhi didn't know why he was here, the paidhi didn't know how he was going to get back again, the paidhi couldn't get the emotional satisfaction out of Banichi and Jago that Tabini had been feeding him, laughing with him, joking with him, down to the last time they'd met.
Blowing melons to bits. TAbini patting him on the back - gently, because human backs fractured so easily - and telling him he had real talent for firearms? How good was Tabini more to the point? How good at reading the paidhi was the atevi fourth in line of his side of the bargain?
Tipped off, perhaps, by his predecessor, that the paidhiin had a soft spot for personal attachments?
That the longer you knew them, the greater fools they became, and the more trusting, and the easier to get things from?
But - the political is always personal, politics isn't some Rube Goldberg device of abstractions and absolutes, any more than anything is. Sometimes making a fool of one's self, or feeling like one has, with a good grace, making the effort to communicate across the gap, fumbling in the darkness, with good faith - because the Idea of the Alien only faintly masks the Res of which it is the Symbol, the most frightening truth of all: that we do not understand each other, not simply the Stranger, but those closest to us, because we do not really understand ourselves...The experts said atevi couldn't think outside hierarchical structure. And Jago said they could? His heart was pounding. His common sense said hold back, don't believe it, there's a contradiction here. "So you can feel attachment to one you don't have man'chi for."
"Nadi Bren, --are you making a sexual proposition to me?"
The bottom dropped out of his stomach. "I--No, Jago-ji."
"I wondered."
"Forgive my impropriety."
"Forgive my mistaken notion. What were you asking?"
"I--" Recovering objectivity was impossible. Or it had never existed...
('Shippers, don't get too excited if you haven't read so far - the conversation ends with a promise to loan him a book on obscure heretical sects from the hinterlands. This is Cherryh, not ffnet.)
*WAFF - Warm And Fuzzy Feelings, acronym descriptive of what certain sorts of fanfic are supposed to evoke; also - WAFFy, WAFFishness.
** q.v. The Truman Show.
*** ibid.
**** BEM - Bug-Eyed Monster.
Excerpts from Foreigner, ©1994 C. J. Cherryh