Paidhi is an atevi word, known wide in the universe of C.J. Cherryh’s long-running Foreigner series. After the War of the Landing, a war between the majority and native atevi and the more technologically-advanced humans, a war in which the victorious atevi threw the humans’ advanced weaponry into the sea, the human refugees from the defunct station (see last week’s installment, link below the fold) found themselves exiled on the large island of Mospheira. By treaty, only one human is allowed on the atevi mainland, the paidhi.
To the Mospheirans, the paidhi is a translator, a collector of language, empowered to dole out advanced tech to the atevi as he (yes, he, and we’ll get into that at another time) deems it appropriate, the pace sufficiently slow so as not to destabilize atevi culture. By long custom, the paidhi doesn’t speak the local language, Ragi, but only writes it. Slow, painstakingly slow and cautious progress, avoiding the conditions and misunderstandings that led to the war in the first place Paidhi’s are trained by the University of Mospheira, and answer to both the University and the President.
Add two hundred years and shake well.
At the beginning of Foreigner, the old paidhi, Wilson, has just been relieved. Forcibly retired, as it were, and, in the opinion of our protagonist, Bren, after years of isolation and silence, not entirely sane. The new ruler of the atevi, the aiji, is Tabini, who goes through a number of replacements, none of whom suit him or his purposes, not until, scraping the bottom of the metaphorical cupboard, the University sends one very young, very unprepared Bren Cameron:
…The man at the desk looked up. Beckoned in the atevi way, with one move of his hand, then pushed his chair back.
Tabini-aiji surprised him with his youth. He was twenty-three with an athletic build and he stood taller than most of a very tall people. Eyes were paler gold than most, unnerving and capable of a cold, cold stare.
Tabini gave a little head-tilt, impatient, as if to say, Say something, fool. My time is valuable.
“Bren Cameron, nand’aiji. You requested my presence.”
A dark brow lifted. Another tilt of the head, this time in evident surprise.
“You talk.”
— Visitor, p. 174
Talking in Ragi breaks a bunch of rules and gets Bren into trouble with the University, which normally would be a career-killer. But Tabini sees in Bren someone he can work with and, after Bren is disgraced and recalled to Mospheira, insists that Bren is the paidhi he will work with, and no other. Much against the wishes of the academic department that trained him, Bren has the job.
For the record, Cherryh splendidly captures the inner workings of academia in all of its best and worst aspects. Linguistics is the department that trained Bren; it’s also headed by a faction that would like nothing more than to see him weighed with chains and tossed into the strait. I want to go into this more in a future diary about human nature and politics in Foreigner, since it’s clear that Cherryh can and will pull off some top-grade trolling, and has survived more than one brush with academia.
Back to Bren: Who is this Guy?
Bren is more than protagonist; he is the character who, for most of the series, mediates the reader’s viewpoint. Exclusively. The entire series is told from a close third person point of view, much of it inside Bren’s head. What he sees, we see; what he thinks, we learn. Revelations to the reader come through Bren only, until Cajeiri grows up enough to become a viewpoint character in his own right. Bren has to be interesting enough, through twenty-odd books, that we don’t get bored with him.
It’s tempting at first to characterize Bren as an Everyman, but he’s not. To have independent qualities sufficent to render him useful to Tabini, Bren can’t be in the mold of every paidhi who preceeded him, communicating with the atevi only in carefully-written messages, taking note of every new word or usage, dispensing technology like a paternalist Imperialist doling out treats to backward savages. For one thing, the atevi are highly civilized, manners and protocol governing almost every aspect of their society. For another, at the beginning of Foreigner the long-absent starship Phoenix has just appeared in the sky docked to the defunct space station Alpha, and everything is going to have to change. Quickly. Atevi are going to space. Bren has to be smart enough to navigate both a Byzantine political system run by people who are not human and don’t play by human rules, and the more technologically-advanced but far more provincial humans of his home country.
Here’s what we know of Bren Cameron: he’s white, blond hair and blue eyes, medium build and average looks. There’s some Japanese in his ancestry. Cajeiri thinks of him as “all the colors of a sunny day,” while his brother Toby is brown — brown hair, eyes, and deeper tan. Trained as a linguist, he expected to spend his life writing dictionaries, not serving as a premier diplomat and occasional action hero. Although he’s learned to maneuver expertly in political situation, he never learns to deal with his mother’s manipulation, neither the tensions that come from being his mother’s favorite son nor his guilt over his brother Toby’s long-suffering attempts to fill his shoes. In a country where most people are affluent enough to enjoy a high standard of living and secure enough to not care much about politics or anything unless it infringes on vacation, leisure and early retirement, Bren is an oddball. Self-selected and strange, in love with Ragi and atevi culture and, by a trick of fate, promoted to become the only human allowed to live on the mainland.
Not exactly an average guy. Bren spends the first part of the series overwhelmed by circumstances. He’s young, in his early twenties, when his education in atevi culture begins, and it begins at the hands of one of the greatest characters ever to grace the pages of SFF: Illisidi, the aiji-dowager, who brings out the best in Bren.
But first, she has to bring out his worst; she tests him, tests his loyalty, measures his man’chi, has him tortured and convinced he will be killed. Faced with death, when Bren’s life flashes before his eyes:
He’d believed the game in the cellar, when they’d put the gun to his head—they’d made him think he was going to die, and in such a moment, dammit, he’d have thought he’d think of Barb, he’d have thought he’d think of his mother or Toby or someone human, but he hadn’t. They’d made him stand face-to-face with that disturbing, personal moment of truth, and he hadn’t discovered any noble sentiments or even human reactions. The high snows and the sky was all he’d been able to see, being alone was all he could imagine—just the snow, just the sky and the cold, up where he went to have his solitude from work and his own family’s clamoring demands for his time, that the truth they’d pushed him to, not a warm human thought in him, no love, no humanity—
Foreigner, p. 339
Bren is a refreshing and engaging character because he knows himself thoroughly; after his time in the cellar he has no illusions about himself. (Well, other than the youthful hubris that makes him think himself essential to world peace. When he comes back from Reunion to find that Tabini was overthrown and Murini is in power, he wonders if it all went to pieces because he wasn’t there to mediate. Only later does Tabini reveal that he knew revolution was likely and he sent Bren, Illisidi and Cajeiri into space to protect them, and Bren realizes that what he doesn’t know would fill large volumes.) Throughout the series Bren is a blend of competence, honesty and self-doubt.
In space for two years, he writes a 1500-page letter to his brother Toby, admitting,
I think so much of home. I’m a little desperate today. I wish I had answers I don’t have.
But I can’t govern the changes that have already happened.
I can’t govern what happens to me on the way. I never could. And every change has been away, not toward, and every change makes the circle of those who’ve been through this with me smaller, not larger, until at this moment I think I’m becoming a sort of black hole, and I’m going to pull everything I know into a pinpoint so none of us can get out, and then I’ll stop existing at all in this universe. I’m terrified of never getting home, that you’ll never get this letter.
— Explorer, p. 91
Bren’s terrors are abiding: that he’s losing his touch with humanity, that he’ll never see Toby again (interestingly, family politics appear to be universal: whether in space or on earth, a manipulative mother who wields love as a weapon is one to be resisted at all points), that he’ll fail the people who depend on him and who he loves, whether they’re human or atevi. You’re my “younger brother,” he tells Jase. “So I take care of you” (Visitor, p. 303). Despite his love for Toby and Jase, his very human affection for Illisidi and Cajeiri and his immediate-family ties with his aishid and his staff, nothing stands between Bren and his job.
The Mospheirans see the job of paidhi as the ambassador from humanity to the atevi. As the atevi achieve technological parity and in many ways exceed human capacity, Tabini and Illisidi begin to change the paidhi’s responsibilities to bring the job more into line with atevi traditions, employing him to bring Machigi into alliance with Illisidi, and then to negotiate secondary trade agreements among the various players. A paidhi isn’t a translator but a negotiator. Instead of having two sides meet across a table to hammer out an agreement, a paidhi shuttles between the two. Bren thinks of himself and Jase, both employed on parallel trajectories:
Intermediaries, both, trained to mediate, to communicate—both of them grown into an authority neither of them had planned to hold and a job nobody had imagined would exist. Mediators. Negotiators, Translators not just of language, but of mindsets and cultures.
— Tracker, p. 3
It’s a bit of a shock to the University when, as Illisidi suggests to Tabini, the aishidi’tat let Mospheira see the paidhi-aiji and the long-deferred confrontation with the Linguistics Department occurs, Bren cautions his bodyguards to not react to the department’s hostility. Wilson accuses him of showing up,
“With the same arrogance. With the same reckless procedures,” Wilson said. “Your dress, your armed guard—you’ve fairly well gotten above your responsibilities to this government.” …
“You’ve perfectly well acknowledged what you represent, which is not Mospheira.”
“Correction, Mr. Wilson. I represent both parties in a dispute. That is the nature of paidhiin as the office is defined by the people who created it. If you have mistaken the nature of this office, I am sorry. I am quite clear on it.”
— Emergence, p. 274, p. 278
In Visitor, when the kyo visit and summon Bren to their ship, he fears that he might be taken off to serve as a negotiator in their war. Despite that he thinks there’s a strong chance he might never come back, not even that is enough to stop him:
Walk through a door. Go where he had to. Even if — God help him — it meant going where he didn’t want to go. Boarding their ship and maybe not coming back for a very long time — or ever.
It was what the paidhiin did. They’d done it on the planet. It might require — going much farther.
— Visitor, p. 173
Instead of being the negotiator, he meets Cullen, a double-edged and knotty ethical problem.
“One does not know how much authority Prakuyo has on this ship, but I shall attempt to reach an understanding with him. I seek no association with Cullen. I shall do as much as I can for Cullen’s comfort.” He drew a deep, desperate breath. “Nadiin-ji, I am taking a decision on myself that is far, far beyond any authority I hold, and that pains me greatly. But there is no other course.”
“Tabini-aiji appointed you to decide such things, nandi,” Banichi said, “when he appointed you Lord of the Heavens.”
That meaningless title.
That suddenly utterly relevant authority to bind things in the heavens with the authority of the aiji who sat in Shejidan.
— Visitor, p. 327
Bren’s solution: to prepare Cullen to become him, to serve as paidhi for the kyo and negotiate an end to the kyo war. In readying Cullen, Bren explains the significance of his hair ribbon:
“The white ribbon isn’t purity. It’s no color at all. It’s neither side. You represent the kyo honestly and accurately. And when you speak for humans you represent the humans you represent the humans honestly and accurately. That requires you be both honest and accurate, which means understanding the kyo beyond anything you imagine. That’s how you get power. And that’s how you use it.”
— Visitor, p. 369
Bren has grown considerably from the naive young man who crossed the straits without a map, or a clue. Grown, but still fundamentally the same person. After being whipsawed by crises and setbacks, Bren gains some equalibrium. In the most recent two volumes, Convergence and Emergence, with Bren’s sections set largely on Mospheira, the paidhi knows himself better.
“I am remembering the city,” Bren answered. “I wonder how my brother is faring out there on the water, and what he knows that we do not.” Two questions begged the felicitous number, three, to settle the universe in order. “I wonder why the young gentleman is traveling alone. And I am becoming very anxious to be home.”
Home. It was curious to stand here on the island of his birth and say that, but it was true. Beyond any doubt he had had left, it was true.
—Emergence, p. 4
Home is Najida, where Bren is lord, and where Toby is a welcome visitor and now back-up paidhi. Bren is different, but still the same:
He’d been a risk-taker in years past. With nothing to lose, he’d cast himself down mountain slopes and let himself fly in a set of decisions that had no delay and no second try. He’d found skiing cleared his head for his regular problems. It had kept him from expressing his opinions in the Linguistics Department, it had kept him and Toby in touch, no matter his mother’s favoritism, it had prepared him to deal with Tabini, God help him.
There were just some times he had stopped and looked back and thought — God, was I there? Did I just go down that hill? I’m an absolute fool.
— Emergence, p. 283
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