Ethuun

Chapter One: The Word for Arriving

Ethuun turned below the observation blister like a stone dropped in milk — white streaked with black basalt, the long scars of rift valleys steaming where the crust had split. Jena Valcourt had been watching it for two hours. She had watched it while the station's night cycle came and went, while the recycled air went cold and then warm again, while three crew members drifted past her and decided not to speak.

She was memorizing the way the aurora moved.

On most worlds an aurora was a polar thing, a crown. Ethuun's ran in ribbons across the whole nightside, green and violet, twisting into shapes that came apart and reformed. The planet's magnetic field did not have two neat poles. It had six, then four, then eleven, wandering across the crust like oil on water. Every few decades the whole arrangement reorganized itself.

That was the thing she had come nine light-years to understand.

"You're doing it again."

Ivo Torvaine stood in the hatchway with two cups of something hot. He was a broad man with a soldier's economy of movement and an administrator's careful face, and he had been the mission commander at Ethuun Station for six of the eleven wasted years.

"Doing what," Jena said.

"Staring like the planet's going to tell you something." He handed her a cup. It was the tea substitute, which tasted like warm paper. "Nine envoys have stared out that window. It never talks."

"Eight envoys." Jena took the cup. "Uttrin didn't count. He was recalled before he made planetfall."

"Uttrin counted. Uttrin cost us two years." Torvaine settled beside her, elbows on the rail. "Briefing's in forty minutes. Sleep at all?"

"I slept on the transit. Eleven months of sleeping."

"That's not sleep, that's storage."

She let herself smile. She had liked Torvaine on the crossing — he had a directness that was rare in the diplomatic service, an unwillingness to dress a hard thing in soft cloth. She would come to understand later that directness and honesty were not the same instrument, but that morning she still confused them.

Below, the terminator crept west across a continent. Jena watched a single point of light flare on the dark side — a volcanic vent, or a city. Probably a vent. The Vaathi did not build cities that could be seen from orbit. They built downward, into the warm rock, out of the wind.

"Tell me the honest version," she said. "Not the version for the record."

Torvaine drank. "The honest version is that you have one season. Local season — that's about a hundred and ninety standard days. If there's no signed instrument by then, the file transfers to the military council and I stop being the person you talk to."

"That's not what my orders say."

"Your orders say 'best endeavors, indefinite mandate.' Mine say something else." He turned to face her, and his expression was almost kind. "Jena. Ethuun sits at the junction of the Sedharu and Vess corridors. Anything moving between the inner arm and the frontier passes within four light-days of here. We need landing rights and a refueling depot. If we don't get them by consent, the council has authorization to establish them by other means. That authorization exists. It's signed. It's sitting in a drawer."

"By force."

"By 'unilateral establishment of transit infrastructure in an unclaimed jurisdiction.' The Vaathi have never registered a planetary claim with anyone, because the Vaathi don't have a legal entity capable of registering one. That's the whole problem in one sentence, and it's also the loophole." He shrugged. "I didn't write it."

"But you'd use it."

"I'd rather you made it unnecessary." He set his cup on the rail. "That's why I fought for you. Eight failures, and every one of them a career diplomat who arrived thinking the Vaathi were being difficult. You're the only candidate who wrote a paper arguing they were being *accurate*."

Jena said nothing. The paper had been ten years ago, at the Institute. It had nearly ended her career; she had argued that the Vaathi refusal to sign was not obstruction but a category error on the human side, that the Compact was trying to buy a promise from a people whose grammar could not manufacture one. The senior faculty had called it romantic. The Foreign Directorate had quietly filed it and, apparently, remembered it.

"There's one more thing," Torvaine said. "The Oshu circle has stipulated that you descend alone. No support team, no security, no medical. You'll have a suit beacon and a resupply drop every twenty days and that's the extent of our reach."

"I know. I agreed to it."

"You agreed to it in a document. I want you to hear it out loud from someone who's going to have to write the letter if it goes wrong." He looked at her steadily. "Alone means alone. If you break a leg two hundred kilometers from Oshu, you die of it."

"Then I won't break a leg."

Torvaine laughed, short. "Right." He pushed off the rail. "Forty minutes."

When he had gone, Jena took the message capsule out of her jacket.

It was a standard courier slug, thumb-sized, and it had traveled with her the whole eleven months, arriving in the same shipment she had. Yula had recorded it three weeks before departure and given it to her in the hallway of the transit hostel with the studied casualness of a nine-year-old who has decided not to cry in public.

Jena had watched it forty times. She watched it again.

Her daughter's face filled the little projection field, slightly too close to the lens, the way children always held recorders. Behind her was the kitchen wall of the apartment on Sedharu Station, the yellow one, with the dent where Jena had once dropped a pan.

"Okay, so," Yula said. "Grandmother Delu says I have to say something meaningful because you'll be listening to it for a year. So here is the meaningful thing." She took a breath. "I looked up Ethuun in the almanac. It's cold and it has earthquakes and nobody there wants us. I think that's stupid of them. Not the earthquakes, the other part." A pause. Her chin did something complicated. "I'm not going to say don't go, because you already went. So instead I'm going to say: send me things. Not presents. Just — tell me what it's like. Every time. Even boring things. Especially boring things, because if it's boring you're not in danger."

She leaned closer, filling the frame.

"That's the deal. You tell me, and I tell you. Okay? Okay." And then, quickly, before the recording could catch her: "Bye."

The field collapsed.

Jena put the capsule back in her jacket and looked at the aurora until it was time to go.

The briefing room held nine people, seven of whom she would never speak to again. The eighth was Torvaine. The ninth was a small, immaculately dressed man in a corporate mauve tunic who introduced himself as Reshan Gol, Attaché for Resource Liaison, and who shook her hand with both of his.

"Enormous admirer," Gol said. "The positional-grammar paper. I read it twice."

"Most people didn't read it once."

"Most people aren't in a business where being early is the entire margin." He smiled. He had a very good smile, the kind that had clearly been an asset for a long time. "If there's anything my office can do, Ambassador. Logistics, survey data, anything at all."

"Thank you."

She did not think about him again for six weeks.

The briefing was ninety minutes of things she already knew, delivered by a xenology officer who kept saying *the Vaathi believe* when he should have said *the Vaathi experience*. Jena wrote three words on her slate and underlined them twice: THEY ARE NOT PRETENDING.

At the end, Torvaine cleared the room and put a chart on the wall.

"Last item. Your guide."

The image was a Vaathi, photographed at the Oshu landing field in poor light. Taller than a human by a head, with the long limbs and heavy shoulders of a species evolved for cold and for climbing. The skin was slate grey, faintly ridged along the jaw and forearms in the pattern the xenologists called scaling and the Vaathi called nothing at all, because it was simply skin. The eyes were large, dark, with a horizontal pupil. The face was hard to read and Jena had trained for four years to read it, and still she got, from the photograph, only a strong impression of somebody who did not want to be photographed.

"Kassu," Torvaine said. "That's the whole name, as far as we can tell, though the whole-name question is one of the things you'll be untangling. The circle assigned Kassu to you. We weren't consulted."

"What's the background?"

"Exile. Not criminal — nothing they've told us reads as criminal. Some kind of civic stripping, five years ago, following a public dispute with a magistrate named Norit in the province of Illeth. They were bond-partners." He tapped the chart. "Since then Kassu has no seasonal standing. Which as I understand it means Kassu can't hold office, can't testify, can't own, can't inherit, and, crucially, can't be accused of bias, because there's no civic person there to be biased."

Jena studied the photograph. "So the circle assigned me a non-person."

"A non-person guiding a non-person. You're not a Vaathi, so you have no standing either. It's very tidy." Torvaine's mouth twisted. "I think it's an insult, personally. Analysis says it might be an accommodation. Your call."

"It might be both." Jena leaned forward. "Do we know if Kassu speaks Compact Standard?"

"Fluently, apparently. Self-taught off intercepted broadcast. Which should tell you something."

"It tells me Kassu was curious about us before we were assigned." She stood. "When do I go down?"

"Shuttle's fueled. Weather window in six hours."

Jena went back to her quarters and packed the third of her three cases she had not yet decided to bring. Then she stood at the port for a while, watching Ethuun turn.

The Compact liked to describe first contact as *opening a conversation*. Jena had always disliked the phrase, because a conversation implied someone had already begun speaking and someone else had chosen to answer, and mostly what the Compact did was arrive in orbit and start reading terms aloud.

Down there, twelve million people had been having a conversation with their own planet for forty thousand years. She was going to walk into the middle of it and try to be understood.

The descent was rough. Ethuun's atmosphere was thin at altitude and vicious below it, and the shuttle bucked through eleven minutes of shear before it broke into clear air over a plain the color of ash and old bone. Jena saw the Oshu rift from thirty kilometers up: a black seam in the white, forty kilometers long, exhaling steam. The city was inside it. The Vaathi had not built beside the crack in their world; they had built into its walls, terrace on terrace, warm rock at their backs, the sky a narrow blue strip overhead.

The landing field was outside the rift, a flat of packed volcanic gravel with three stone windbreaks and nothing else. The shuttle set down. The pilot, a young woman named Ferro, said, "Good luck, Ambassador," and did not open the hatch until Jena had her hood sealed.

The cold came at her like a hand.

Minus forty-two, the suit said. Wind out of the north at thirty. She walked down the ramp into it and the shuttle lifted behind her almost immediately, per the stipulation, and then she was alone on a gravel plain on another world with two cases and a beacon and the sound of the wind in her ears.

A figure detached itself from the nearest windbreak.

Kassu was taller in life. Two and a quarter meters at least, in a long coat of some grey pelt worn over a garment of woven fiber, hood back, apparently indifferent to a cold that would have killed Jena in an hour. The face was the one from the photograph. The eyes were larger than she had expected, the horizontal pupils contracting against the snow-glare.

Jena had rehearsed this for four years.

She set down her cases. She raised her left hand — not the right, the right meant something else — with the palm turned inward, and she said, in Vaathi, in the greeting form she had drilled ten thousand times:

"*Coming-toward-you, at the edge of the cold season, from the sky-side, one-who-speaks greets the-one-who-waits.*"

Kassu looked at her for a long moment.

Then, in accentless Compact Standard: "That was summer grammar."

Jena's hand stayed up. "I'm sorry?"

"The construction you used. *Coming-toward-you.* That's a rift-lake form. Equatorial, warm season, low-field. Here it's the fourth week of the cold turn and the field is running at eleven hundred nanotesla off the northern anomaly." Kassu picked up the larger of her two cases with one hand as though it were a lunchbox. "In this grammar, coming-toward-me is what a debt-collector does. Or a landslide."

Jena lowered her hand slowly. "The corpus I trained on—"

"Was recorded by the Iravet mission, eleven years ago, in the ninth week of the warm turn, at the Suneth rift-lakes." Kassu started walking. "Every off-worlder learns summer Vaathi and arrives in winter. It is one of my favorite things about your people."

Jena picked up her other case and went after Kassu, boots crunching. The wind pushed at her. "You could have let me finish."

"You did finish."

"You could have let me *believe* I'd finished well."

Kassu stopped. Turned. In the flat white light Jena saw something move across that unreadable face — not a smile, the Vaathi mouth did not smile, but a slackening around the eyes that she would learn to read as amusement.

"Eight of you," Kassu said. "Eight envoys. Do you know what the last one did, at this spot, when told the greeting was wrong?"

"No."

"Repeated it louder."

Jena laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, a sharp puff of frost in the cold.

Kassu regarded her for another second. Then turned and kept walking. "It is nine kilometers to the rift lip and your suit is rated for four hours in this. Walk faster, Ambassador."

"Jena."

"That is a fixed name. I will use it, since you have no other, but understand that when I do I am naming you the way one names a rock or a river. Something that does not change." Kassu's voice came back over the wind. "Among us that is not entirely a compliment."

"Among us it's called a *person*."

"Yes," Kassu said. "That is what we are going to have to talk about."