When we last left our heroes, they had brought a handful of Reunioner kids from the station to the planet to visit Cajeiri. During their visit, all hell breaks loose (because of course it does), and Tatiseigi, the notorious human-hating curmudgeon, develops a fondness for the human kids when they admire his collection of artefacts.
At the beginning of this duology1 (Tracker, Visitor), the kids and Jase go back up to the station, where politics awaits. In the middle of an extremely messy intra-human conflict, the kyo show up. Because they know so little about the kyo, everyone decides that it’s best if they send the same three people as last time up to the station to meet the envoys, so Bren, Cajeiri, and Ilisidi venture up to the station. The human conflict comes to a head while they’re there, and they have to fix it before the kyo arrive. They do so, and Bren can get back to the important task of figuring out how the kyo language works.
One of the things Bren has to consider is how the people at Reunion acted when the kyo ship first arrived, so he interviews former stationmaster Braddock and his secretary (who happens to be the mother of Cajeiri’s associate Irene). Braddock is hostile toward Bren’s line of questioning, and he says he didn’t see any pattern in the flashing lights, so he ignored them. The series of events Bren hears from these two and what information he can suss out of the ship’s records (left by the late Captain Ramirez) conflict with each other. He then realizes that they’d been assuming so far that the humans had caused the conflict through their actions, based on the fact that the atevi conflict had been largely caused by human actions. But what if the kyo had made a horrible mistake, and it wasn’t originally a communication problem at all?
Before the start of the series, Ramirez had taken the ship toward the kyo home planet, then ran away when he saw their ship. The kyo are at war, and thinking Phoenix was one of their enemy’s ships, they followed its back-trail and blew up the station they found there. But the station didn’t return fire, so the kyo ship remained, sitting there and watching them for many years because it didn’t make sense. They even sent a person, Prakuyo an Tep, to investigate. The disaster at Reunion was possibly a terrible mistake that resulted in thousands of deaths among people who had no idea what they’d done to deserve it. It was doubly a tragedy, in that case.
The kyo have more than one reason to visit Alpha Station, as it turns out. First, they told Bren they would come visit, and they kept that promise. This part is a continuation of the first contact scenario they had at Reunion, where they’d been able to work out vocabulary and grammar by talking to each other. Bren has a brilliant flash of insight, and he creates an electronic dictionary with pictures and videos of objects, activities, etc, and recordings of them speaking the words, which Cajeiri takes to readily, and the kyo do, too.
It’s this part Bren is terrified of messing up. So much is riding on their being able to communicate with the kyo and explain that they’re peaceful. The kyo have vastly greater firepower, and they could easily wipe out the entire planet. Once the kyo envoys are on the station, the reader learns more and more about various aspects of the kyo language as Bren works it out. It’s interesting, but it’s not the most interesting linguistic conflict in this duology.
The second and main reason for the kyo’s visit is that they have a human POW on their ship, and they want to see how Bren reacts to seeing him. Bren is completely shocked at his existence, but he realizes that the kyo’s mysterious enemy must be humans, which explains why they thought Reunion was an enemy outpost (because the technology is similar and their sensors pick up similar readings). Bren now has an internal conflict: if he tells Cullen, the other human, about the society they’ve built on the atevi planet, he could then tell his humans about it, and they might come claiming ownership. But it doesn’t seem fair to Bren to keep this secret; it’s deception, and he doesn’t want to deceive this poor guy. He also doesn’t want to tell the Mospheiran government about the existence of these humans on the other side of kyo territory, because that might create a further division, where some Mospheirans and ship-people want to go back to the Earth they’ve been looking for for 250 years and others don’t. He ultimately decides to keep Cullen in the dark and to tell a select few people back on the planet.
When Bren first meets Cullen, he notices that Cullen’s speech is slightly off and some of the syllables are barely voiced, but the two men can understand each other. This may be the most Linguist sentence ever written in this series: “A part of him wished he had a recording of Cullen to analyze, because the degree of change […] offered clues, a clock set on the time of separation from the point of common origin.” We are just Like That, you see—even those of us who eschew formal linguistics.
This is also a real thing that some researchers (mostly evolutionary biologists) are doing. They use mathematical models to determine separation from a common point of origin, and they draw it in a clade diagram. This is called glottochronology, and, of course, it’s controversial. The assumption is that language changes at a constant rate over time, and it doesn’t really work that way. As a first-order approximation, though, it’ll get you in the ballpark. In 2003 Gray & Atkinson used this methodology to posit an earlier origin of Proto-Indo-European than is generally assumed. A discussion of the original article is available here, but the article itself is unfortunately behind a paywall.
So, anyway: Bren has encountered a human who is held captive by the kyo, and he sees in this human an opportunity to end their war. He decides to make Cullen into a paidhi for the kyo. He teaches Cullen what he knows so far about the kyo language, along with some basic diplomacy, and, most importantly, how to learn/teach himself. He only has a week to do it, and he also has to work out a treaty with the kyo that says the peoples of the atevi world will leave them alone, and vice versa, and if they want contact, they can go as far as Reunion, but no further.
Bren sees the conflict between the other humans and the kyo as similar to the human-atevi conflict, which they solved through learning to communicate with each other, and this included gaining intercultural competence. He believes that having an envoy between the two species—one who understands why both species do what they’re doing and who can explain it to the other in words they understand—is crucial for peace. We don’t see whether his hypothesis works out in this book, but he’s hopeful.
So, what do you think about Cullen and Bren’s decision to keep their planet secret? Do you think Cullen will succeed at being a paidhi? What about Cajeiri and his human associates and his association with Hakuut, which I didn’t even talk about here? Or are there any other thoughts you had? Do you think the other humans could be part of the Alliance-Union universe? Discuss in the comments!
CD Covington has masters degrees in German and Linguistics, likes science fiction and roller derby, and misses having a cat. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise 17 and has published short stories in anthologies, most recently the story “Debridement” in Survivor, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke. You can find her current project, a book on practical linguistics for writers, on Patreon.
[1]Convergence belongs more with books 19-21 and will be discussed in that post
It wasn’t such a ‘twist’ when considered in retrospect, of course, but the way she pulled off the reveal that the enemy the kyo are fighting on the other side of their space was the rest of humanity……. had me putting the book down and looking around my living room as though to somehow find someone else there to discuss how freakin’ cool that was! And of course, now I want a spin-off series following the other paidhi on the other side of kyo space and how that whole war came to be and continues on now that they can communicate….
Fans of Cherryh know that humans also make an appearance in her Chanur books as well.
I adore, ADORE this series and this was such an exciting reveal. Cherryh has such a fine skill at inventing aliens that seem … human-ish until some weird physiological curveball arrives (like the Atevi’s lack of “friendship/loyalty” or how the how the Kif can’t help but submit to a leader with Sfik), and I do have to say that the Kyo are actually more “human” seeming than the Atevi (I picture them as these large plodding, pleasant featured beings sorta like the Mystics from the Dark Crystal – one nice touch is that the Kyo have different colored eyes, some of them have green, some have purple, etc.)
Can someone remind me do we ever encounter Cullen’s humans again? Also, I can’t recall, does the Atevi-verse co-exist with the Compact books?
By the way, I reread both books last week. Nice timing! Reading it again, it was a bit scary how much Prokuyu kept pushing Bren’s negotiating team to learn more and more about operations on the Station and then refused to give up any information whatsovever about themselves.
I also came away from my reread with big questions about what particularly was Prokuyu’s job among the kyo. He certainly wasn’t an aiji, as Bren has to present information to ship seniors during the treaty finalization process. Was he in fact a high level intelligence officer? A scout? A military officer following up on the strike at Reunion? Curiouser and curiouser, the more I thought about it.
I was a little bit miffed by this twist when it came out.
I enjoy and expect Cherryh’s worldbuilding, yet in the Foreigner series the tech bits seemed a little off. As if they really didn’t matter in writing the series because Old Earth was really, truly, irrvocably lost.Compare the introductory sequence from Foreigner with later flights. And then the shipwrecked humans were unable to detect known quasars. So:
– Phoenix might have suffered even more grievous losses than we/Bren understood with the death of Taylor, Greene, LaFarge, etc. Generations since then have been operating the ship at a fraction of her capabilities because they just don’t know better. Cargo cult engineering, Press this button and the ship looks for the position. It says “no match.” Why? How? They have no idea. But then how did they build new stations?
– The introduction of Foreigner etc. represent truth as known to Bren and he is played for a fool by the human powers that be. We were told, early on, that the education of paidhi-candidates was deliberately censored in security-relevant fields. Does that include history?
– The new group of humans is yet another Reunion-style settlement founded by Phoenix, one we aren’t told about. Or founded by Reunion without telling Phoenix.
Lady Belaine – The only human contact we have had (and I think I’ve ready every novel published) is with humans on Mospheria & with ship humans.
I would love to see Kyo culture explored more, and how the war between humans and kyo got started.
I wold also love to see o.m.’s question about whether Bren’s understanding of history was contrained by his training as paidhi developed into a story arc.
I had been eagerly awaiting a connection between the kyo’s opponents as humans, so was excited to see the appearence of Cullen in Visitor. There are many directions this story could develop in, but I suspect we may have to look to fan fiction for some of it. Cherryh seems in the next few books to be focussing on bringing the southern people in closer assciation with the northerners, and I’m not sure she’ll have/take time to develope the kyo-human connection. It seems to me she’s setting it up to be something Cajerri’s generation has to handle.
I too LOVE this series — and the others, earlier, established by Ms. Cherryh. As an older person (in my seventy-ninth year) who has largely survived first the politics of the recent years and then to date COVID through the existence and immersion in the lives of these friends-in-print, I both crave “more” and fear that Ms. Cherryh as a person some months my elder will lack the interest or energy to continue to birth or nurture the extant, much less furnish more. I most certainly do NOT want her to “franchise” her creations as has become practice, allowing others to create “with” her in these realms. So, yes, I’d be interested to learn more about Cullen and where in the Alliance Universe this all falls both in time and space, I do not want to lose the Atevi or have them diminished in any way. For example, Cajieri (whom I first resented when he popped up) that charming and precocious youngster with all the aiji-qualities who is clearly mad for “space” and the valorous Irene, what possibly comes for them? Will Bren EVER outgrow his own needs for second guessing himself — and will he then become a monster? Have we simply ourselves outgrown any harkening to the mechieti? And, of course, I dread losing the Dowager; can she live forever?
So, all I really want to know is, when is the next installment — and the ones after that? Can we clone Ms. Cherryh and into how many to give us all more, more, more….
I loved these books. Typical that the station is in disarray when the Kyo turn up.
I was a little doubtful about Bren’s choice to keep some things quiet. While he’s always been discreet, as an honest broker, he has previously told parties the truth, even when they don’t want to hear it. Interested to see how this plot line turns out.
o.m. at 5, miambw @@@@@ 6 –
re: Cullen’s group of humans. I must admit my recollection is hazy. Is Cullen a representative of another offshoot of the same ship that ultimately seeded Mospheira and the Phoenix/station culture OR is he from the same civilization that sent the Phoenix off in the first place (i.e original humanity?) who are on the far side of Kyo space?
I’m glad I’m not the only one who immediately went, “… Alliance-Union-verse?” She has such a huge oeuvre and I don’t remember every detail from books I read 15+ years ago – but I have a vague memory of encountering kyo in an A-U book. Did I make it up, or is it real?
re o.m. @5 – In this re-read, I’ve been paying a lot closer attention than usual, and I made several notes (mostly in the epilogue that was Bren & Geigi’s history of atevi-human contact) that it didn’t match what we’d been told earlier. So is it a retcon, or is it a “the victors write the history books” type of thing? Looking back, everything fits together and makes sense — and Bren realizes some things in the last 4 books which made me go “ohhh, damn.” I can look through my extensive notes and see where the hints were dropped.
I believe she’s working on a pre-Company Wars book atm (based on a Balticon panel) which I think is a sequel to Alliance Rising but I missed that sentence. I hope she has extensive notes on the atevi world in case something terrible happens!