Invader by C. J. Cherryh Page A

the paidhiin had devised reliable ways to express them in answer to questions atevi themselves had asked him.
    The whole university/Foreign Office review process meant that the words the paidhi used on the mainland often ended up not being, in the classified official dictionary, the same as what his predecessor had proposed. The damned thing was constantly out of date — or subject to revision once atevi, moving consistently faster than the committee, came up with their own expression in popular usage —
    Which the committee still debated, as if they could veto what atevi themselves had decided to call a thing.
    More, even the Mosphei' equivalents remained flagged for censorship in documents the computers let cross the strait, computers which made electronic lace out of documents — brilliant decisions like censoring the Mosphei' expression
air traffic control system
, because supposedly, in the astute minds of the committee,
air traffic control system
had Defense Department connotations — a censorship that had lasted until well into the implementation of an atevi ATC system on the mainland, part of which, on a technological level, he was still trying to get installed past the objections of provincial atevi lords who thought directing air traffic and assigning landing sequence smacked rather of associational preference, a bad word on
this
side of the strait.
    And
faster-than-light
?
    God help him. They trusted him with a computer with defense codes in its layered programs and restricted him from comprehensive dictionaries.
    Meanwhile atevi, miffed at
their
inability to gain a dictionary of human language (though atevi had compiled one, he was dead certain) didn't allow comprehensive atevi dictionaries into the paidhi's hands on this side of the strait. And he'd bet his unused paychecks that there were atevi who could marginally understand Mosphei'. Banichi came equipped with a little understanding of Mosphei', which surfaced just now and again; Jago had a very little; Tabini very frequently surprised him with a word he'd picked up.
    More and more interest from atevi in learning Mosphei' in recent decades, when it became clear that computers, read
human number theory
, were all bound up in that language, and, oh, damn, yes, even conservative atevi were interested in knowing the human numbers that described the universe. They were avid and eager learners of anything numerical — passionate in rejection of certain human ideas, even ones that patently worked, where they contravened some elegant and elaborate universal number theory; and suddenly, in the last ten years, atevi were presenting elegant solutions to classic problems that the computer people and the mathematicians were still trying to work into their own theory — and spy out further elaborations thereof.
    The servants, the security that kept the paidhi safe, doubtless spied on his library and kept it pure of atevi reference.
    Damnable situation. A war of dictionaries. A duel of conceptual linguistic ignorance — when the only thing that had brought the real war to a halt was a farseeing aiji in Shejidan and a scholar on the human side who had, in fact, reached the concept of "treaty" as equivalent to atevi "association" and thereby stopped the bloodshed and the destruction — the dictionary again, victorious.
    Meanwhile Hanks stayed, in danger of an assassination that was apt to fracture die Treaty. And Tabini through, he was sure, no wish of his own, had the Association legislatures in session, not only the hasdrawad and tashrid, but the provincial legislatures, in districts whose lords were ready to make a grab for power at any moment Tabini remotely looked like stumbling.
    Damned right Tabini needed him to do something fast; Tabini, damn his conniving heart, needed a miracle, ideally a piece of drama pulled off right in front of the joint legislatures — the whole atevi world was waiting for official answers from the Bu-javid, from the aiji and from the