Defender

DEFENDER

Caroline J. Cherryh

the fifth in the Foreigner sequence

Chapter 1

Firelight went up to the red figures of an ancient frescoed vault, smoke-hazed from the braziers on either side of the black stone tomb. In the dark congregation, watchful eyes now and again caught the firelight and reflected it, gold fire brighter than the sheen of light off opulent brocade.

It was an atevi place—and solemn tribute to a decades-dead aiji. Decades in the past, Valasi might be, but the association he had created had only grown wider at his death. It spanned the continent now. It reached around the world. It shared the heavens with strangers.

An atevi place, an atevi ceremony, an atevi congregation… but one human, one pale, blond, very small and conspicuous human stood in a crowd of towering atevi lords, some of whom had often and fairly recently entertained the idea of killing him. Under the court attire, the frock coat and the lace and the brocades, Bren Cameron wore ten pounds of composite that would stop most bullets, if any of these very adept gentlemen and ladies ventured an assassination without proper Filing of Intent.

The Assassins’ Guild, on the living aiji’s order, would not allow that to happen. The tall atevi on either side of him, Banichi and Jago, in the black and silver of that Guild—they knew the odds, they knew all the agreements and contracts currently in force—knew the likelihood of illegal risks as well. And while assuring him there was no contract Filed, and that no Guild actions but surveillance could be taken for days on any side of this gathering—they still insisted on the armor.

So Bren complied, uncomplaining, with not too many questions, and kept his head generally down, evading any too-direct stare that might draw attention.

Deference, respect, solemnity… in a place where humans least of all belonged.

Tabini-aiji had decreed this honor to his father’s tomb, so the invitation declared, for a memorial and a reminder of the origins of the Western Association—well and good. Humans and atevi alike honored their dead, and they held memorials, particularly at points of change or challenge.

But what was changing? Or where was the challenge?

But predictably enough—they could hardly ignore the call to venerate the aiji’s father—the loyal lords of the western aishidi’tathad come in with no trouble. Those from the south shore and from the farthest eastern reaches of the Association arrived in far more uneasy duty, surely with questions of their own. They had been Valasi’s allies, most of them—and saying so had been unfashionable in the west for decades.

The aiji-dowager, too, had flown in from the east for this solemn event. If she hadn’t, rumors would have flown.

Ilisidi, aiji-dowager, Valasi’s mother.

Tabini’s grandmother.

And the whole world knew that one of the two, Tabini or Ilisidi, had almost certainly assassinated Valasi.

Well, grant she came: no mere opinion of men perturbed her. If one was an atevi lord—and she was among the highest of atevi lords—one rigidly observed the proprieties and courtesies that supported all lords, whatever the circumstances. One consistently did the right thing.

And if one were the human paidhi-aiji, the official translator, the point of contact between two species, one also did the right thing, and came when called, and kept clearly in mind the fact that this was nothuman society. A paltry assassination by no means broke the bonds of an atevi association, no more than it necessarily fractured man’chi—that emotional cement that held all atevi society together. A judicious, well-planned in-house assassination only made the association more comfortable for all the rest—eased, rather than broke, the web of association and common consent—in this case, the family bond on which the stability of the world depended.

A well-chosen assassination might make unity easier, once the dust settled, and a species that did not, biologically speaking, feelfriendship… still felt something warm, and good when its surrounding association settled into harmony.

Were they here to meditate on that fact?

To renew the bond?

A human couldn’t possibly feel it. Wasn’t hard-wired to feel it. Tabini had called him down from the orbiting station for this service, which he’dtaken as a simple excuse covering a desire to have some essential conference, some secret personal meeting which would make thorough sense.

But thus far—there was no meeting. There was going to be a special session of the legislature—and that had made sense, until it was clear he was dismissed, and would not attend. There’d been one intimate audience with Tabini on that first day, in which Tabini had entertained him in his study, a great honor, talked about hunting—one of Tabini’s favorite occupations, which he never actually had time to do—and asked in some detail about the welfare of associates on the space station. They’d had several drinks, become quite cheerful, shared an hour with Lady Damiri, the aiji-consort, and discussed the weather, their son’s education, and the economy, none of which he would have called critical—nor ever discussed with that much brandy in him if he’d thought it would become critical.

Good night, Tabini had said then, good fortune, not forgetting there wasa memorial service involving, oh, the entire continent, and would he kindly sit among the foremost in attendance?

Not quite news to him. He’d known it would take place—hadn’t quite known, before landing, that it was quite so extravagant, televised, or followed with a special session.

So he was on temporary display at the edge of the aiji’s household, wearing that white ribbon in his braid that reminded all parties he was the paidhi, the translator, the neutral, not an appropriate target.

He represented to those present, among other controversial things, the full-tilt acquisition of technology over which Tabini and Valasi had had their fatal falling-out.

So Valasi died under questionable circumstances, and instead of declaring any decent period of mourning and reconsideration, Tabini had immediately opened the floodgates of change: television, trade with Mospheira… railroads. Valasi’s paidhi, a human whose modest advocacy of airplanes, an expanded rail system and limited television broadcasting had scandalized the traditional-minded among the atevi—had quit, retired, and left the job to him.

Tabini had immediately taken—well, with atevi, a likingto him didn’t translate, but certainly Tabini had sensed that he could work with him. Occasionally he had wondered if Tabini had spotted the world’s greatest fool and thought he could get the sun, the moon and the stars from him…

The stars—considering that not so long afterward Phoenixhad shown up in the heavens, the colony ship returned to its lost human colony on someone else’s world.

Things out there, Phoenixreported, hadn’t worked out. Thingshad involved an alien encounter gone very wrong at a space station that never should have been built. And while the paidhi asked himself how he had ever gotten into this, Tabini’s close cooperation with humans spiraled wider and wider.

It took atevi into space, into a near-unified economy with the human enclave on Mospheira. It took two species and three governments to the very edge of union.

And atevi had never forgotten the hazards of swallowing foreign answers to local problems.

Ilisidi entered the tomb, among the last, just behind Lord Tatiseigi of the Atageini, uncle of the aiji-consort. She walked with a cane, went in the company of Cenedi, her chief of security.

And Cajeiriwas with her. Bren noted that—the boy, almost lost in the company of adults, took his place with Ilisidi’s party.

There was a change. The aiji’s heir took his place, not with uncle Tatiseigi, but one place down, still in the front row, with great-grandmother Ilisidi.

Cameras were discreet, but in evidence, and cameramen shifted slightly to get a good view of Ilisidi and the boy. This was going out across the continent: a ceremony of national unity and a memorial in respect for the past, it might be: but it was also a public function in which the alignment of public figures was highly significant.

So the aiji-dowager stood there now before Valasi’s sarcophagus, just visible in the tail of his eye. She was diminutive for an ateva, white-haired with age, leaning on that cane… sharp eyes taking in every nuance of expression and surely conscious of the camera. The boy stood stock still, just visible past Cenedi’s black uniform—Cenedi also being Guild security, oh yes. Guild security was all through the assembly, despite the limited seating.

A war of flowers out there in the corridor: of colors, of position in here—and a sense of progress and opposition in delicate balance, with the Assassins’ Guild to guarantee good behavior.

But far, far better than the alternative.

The aiji’s immediate household filed in. That was Tabini, Lady Damiri, and theirattendant security. Tabini-aiji was in black and red, his house colors. Damiri wore gold and green, the Atageini colors, and carried a lily in her hands, strong contrast to her black skin, amid the glitter of emeralds. They took their places, finishing the first row.

All seats were filled. There was a little murmur of expectation.

Then a bell sounded.

Utter silence descended. A camera changed focus. That was the only sound now, lamplight momentarily gilding an imprudent lens.

That stroke of the bell called for meditation.

Next would come a statement from the head of house—Tabini, in this case. Bren had read the program somewhat before he entered a shadow too deep for humans to read.

And whatever the aiji had to say, the gathered lords would parse it for every detail. It was important—an address that could, if it went wrong, break the union of lords apart. It always could. Any chance word, gone amiss, could break the Association at any time—and in this context, bets were doubled. Tabini had made deals with human authorities, sent atevi to work on the space station, admitting a flood of new technologies. He’d had to, for a whole host of economic and practical reasons that sliced right across the ordinary order of politics, throwing conservatives into alliance with the most liberal of western powers.

He’d had to reach across traditional lines, across ethnical lines—across associational lines.

And so the agreement with humans widened, policy deliberately blind to the causes of the last world war, dancing across the shards of old resentments, skipping over divides of opinion that had once swum with blood.

Most of all, the crisis in the heavens and the need to secure a voice in that resolution had shoved the whole economy into a hellishly scary rush, a fever pitch run that no one at first had thought would last more than a month.

No longer than three years.

Then no longer than six.

As yet there was no slowdown, no cooldown, no pause for breath—and no meeting of the associated lords—until this.

The silence after that bell was so absolute that breathing itself seemed a disturbance… and in that silence, of all things, someone dropped a program, a crack of parchment on stone that set a twitch—if not a killing reflex—into every hair-triggered, Guild-trained nerve in the chamber.

Every Guild member had to skip a heartbeat. Every lord present—had to make a conscious decision not to dive below the benches.

But it was only the next aiji, theirsomeday ruler, diving almost to the edge of the flower-decked sarcophagus to rescue that wayward, unseemly folio.

In his haste it escaped his fingers on his retreat. Twice.

Bren winced.

Three times.

The boy had it. Scrambled back to his place in the standing line.

Cajeiri, Tabini’s and Damiri’s, the hope of the Association, Tatiseigi’s grand-nephew—was the height and weight of the average human teenager—but not, by any means, average, human, or teenaged. Cajeiri tried—God knew he tried, but somehow his feet found obstacles, his hands lost their grip on perfectly ordinary objects, and when Cajeiri would swear to all gods most fortunate that he was standing still, everyone else called it fidgeting.

Now of all times… in front of the whole assembled Association, the lords of the aishidi’tat, this was notime for boys to be boys, or for a child to be—whatever he might be.

Cajeiri was invisible in the first row again. Silence hung all about him. The dignity of the highest houses settled on his young shoulders. Tabini, Tatiseigi—now Ilisidi, in whose care the young unfortunate attended the ceremony—were all in question in that behavior. Fosterage was the rule of the great houses, once a child of rank left the cradle. Tatiseigi, the maternal uncle, had had a go at applying courtly polish, in the rural, rigid politics of the Atageini stronghold in the central west. Now Ilisidi had him: in her district, modernistmeant someone who installed a flush toilet in a thousand-year-old stronghold.

God help the boy.

A second bell. Solemnity recovered. This was the second point, fragile second, unfortunate second: atevi lived by numbers, died by the numbers. Twoof anything presumed there would be a third. There mustbe a third. The very note, echoing in the stone recesses of the place, on this occasion, gathered up the tension in the air and prepared to braid it into a cord… if the third bell, please God, would only ring without unfortunate omen.

Cajeiri held himself absolutely still. Two would ring ominously even in an atevi six-year-old’s brain. Twoalways meant pay attention: another will follow.

Bren had been to Malguri himself. In a way, he wished he could go back there, have another try of his own at a life a human wasn’t regularly admitted even to see. In a certain measure he so envied the boy that chance.

Ilisidi had her hands full. He did know that. The boy, thus far, with the best intentions, had destroyed two historic porcelains, set off a major security alarm, and ridden a startled mechieta across newly-poured cement in Tatiseigi’s formal garden.

Finally, unbearably, with the least shifting of bodies in anticipation, Tabini, head of house, foremost of the Ragi atevi, aiji of the whole aishidi’tat, moved out of the row to the single lighted lamp that sat before the sarcophagus.

Tabini, tall shadow, took a slender straw, took light from one lamp and lit one of two others.

Two lamps lit.

Jago, armed and informed, nudged Bren’s hand with the back of hers. Pay attention. Be on your guard.

Banichi, on his other side, didn’t move.

Every bodyguard in the whole chamber must be thinking the same, prepared for anything. It was in all the machimi, the history-plays: in the feudal age, in Malguri’s age, the time of bright banners and heraldry, assemblies thus invited had been murdered wholesale, slaughtered by hidden archers. Whole tables of diners had fallen ill at once. Ladies had perished in poisoned baths—name the death: someone had delivered it.

Hearts beat, atevi, and in one case, human, with utter trepidation.

Tabini, damn him, knew it. The third bell had not yet rung. And Tabini turned, in that terrible, unprecedented interval.

“ I speak,” Tabini declared, in that resonant, still-young voice, “between the second and the third bell. We live… between the second and the third bell of our associated lives. We live… on the edge of decision and chance. We live… between expectation and fulfillment. Between the second and the third bell of our collective existence, I am Valasi’s son, I am Valasi’s heir… I amValasi’s successor.”

After the hasdrawad and the tashrid, the bicameral legislature, had determined for the second time that Ilisidi would notbe aiji, they had appointed Tabini to head the aishidi’tat.

And the whole assembly, caught between the bells and the lights, heard felicitous, redeeming threes. Every atevi nerve rang as a human could only intellectually comprehend—not feel, gut-deep: felicitous one, then the two strokes of we live. Then I speak, disastrous two—felicitous threeof we live. And now no resolution of the first cahi, the first proposal, at all, but the infelicitous twoof I am. A human brain could short-circuit keeping up with the bracketing structures, but Bren swore he felt it in his own nerves: and he felthis knees go weak when Tabini gave the assembly that third, redemptive I am. The whole audience held its breath, angry as they must be at this tactic. That, in this audience, didn’t matter. They were caught up, snared, and couldn’t move. Daren’tmove. Feltthe aishidi’tatthreatened—and were drawn, unwillingly, to hope that it, and their lives, continued.

“ I speakas your appointed guide into time to come,” Tabini said. And delivered the nextthird stroke, that painfully woundup, merciful third: “ I speakfor the unity of the assembly of us all.

“We do not forget,” Tabini continued, as nerve and flesh all but liquified in relief and bodyguards stood down from red alert. Tabini swept on in possession of all attention. Thank Godno program dropped. Breathing itself was at a minimum. Tabini’s oratory was all fortunate threes now, rapid, hammering into nerves still resounding to two strokes of the bell, still waiting for the resolution of their universe. “We do not break our strong connections with all that Valasi-aiji built. We do not abrogate our traditions. The more knowledge we acquire, the more we rationally comprehend the universe, the more we control our own destiny—”

Sensitive spot: the number-counters who so powerfully ruled the traditional world had long discounted the numbers of the heavens, meaning they had deliberately, scornfully dismissed the work of astronomers, who had failed to foresee the Landing.

But the modern-day Astronomer Emeritus, a genius of his age, brandished numbers that confounded the number-counters—those mathematicians who claimed to guide the less talented to understand the balance of the universe. The newly respectable Astronomer Emeritus was Tabini’s. And with Tabini’s blessing, the Astronomer Emeritus worked to understand the stars and make reliable paths through the heavens. The numbers flowing down from the heavens now ran a starship and promised to connect atevi to a rational universe that also accounted for humans—

To a universe, what was more, that brought them a secondforeign species. That this new species happened to be hostile—well, well, but the soaring optimism of good numbers insisted the difficulties could be overcome, irresistibly so.

Atevi relied on a rational universe.

Humans on the island enclave of Mospheira had faith in miracles.

Humans on the starship over their heads had more faith in a second armed starship and a planetful of allies, in a universe otherwise sparse with life.

But atevi being an independent lot, fiercely so, and hating worse than poison to be handed a fait accompli involving someone else’s numbers, had politely declined to make too strong a point that a human species that had misplaced its own home planet was not infallible. In the main atevi were impressed by what they saw going on in the heavens—what, at least, the dedicated and the suspicious alike, armed with binoculars, could make out as going on in the heavens. It was at least a personal enough contact with the presence up there to make it a national obsession, and binoculars and telescopes enjoyed a vogue at garden parties and secret meetings.

The latter—since a last die-hard cadre of the traditionalists wanted their world back the way Tabini had inherited it, sanstelescopes, sansautographed roof tiles— sansthe frantic push of atevi interests skyward. But the majority even of the conservatives had dropped the traditionalist fight over the very concept of Air Traffic Control: they’d lost that argument, long since, and scrambled to get aerospace industry in their own districts.

Yet did the builders of such facilities properly consider the numbers? They derived them from new-fangled computers, to the contempt of the die-hard traditionalists and the dedicated ‘counters. Dared one trust them?

“The more numbers we gain,” Tabini was saying to the assembled lords, “the more I myself appreciate Valasi’s work. Not,” Tabini added, before certain die-hard conservatives burst a blood vessel, “that I would argue less with my father, but certainly that I would listen more. His time was too soon to know everything: but in his wisdom he laid a foundation for the aishidi’tatthat would assure a strong leadership… and now I know that he saw change coming. Now I know that he prepared for it. Now I know that my father was a wise man.”

Oh, thatwas clever: generational authority was a tenet of the conservatives… while the aiji’s increasing power over their lives as a central authority was a continual sore point. Now Tabini equated one with the other, wound the cord of their own argument around a strong young fist, and yanked.

Count your fingers when dealing with Tabini. His enemies and his allies both said that.

“My father warned me,” Tabini said. “He saw us growing reliant on advances that we would never have the chance to make for ourselves. But becausethese inventions, like all real things, come of true numbers, he saw that they use the natural universe, he saw that they were good, he saw that if we did invent them they would be much the same. He had, however, every intent of shaping what came to us into our own design, he had every intent of maintaining sovereignty—” Another sore point. “ And because it follows from every previous invention— he clearly had every intent of going into space.” The cadence dragged them right into it… and marched on, leaving the fiercest opponents to mull over a very strong point: if not that aim, what aim? “In the new numbers, our economy runs white-hot. We have no hunger, we haveno feuds, we haveno want of employment for the clans. We mine, we build, we distribute, and we have no scarcity anywhere. Thanks to our vantage from orbit we rescue a forest from blight. We warn a village on the coast to put up the storm shutters. We cure diseases we once thought hopeless. In the new numbers we send and speak and travel from one end to the other of every association, without wires or roads that blight the world. In the new numbers, we draw power from the sun’s free light without smoke to obscure the sky.

“Never let us forget what is kabiu, or break the rhythm of the seasons, or of the wild things, or of our own bodies. Let us never forget how to build a fire, light a candle, or use our hands to spin thread. Let no single village forget how to weave cloth, shape a pot, or hunt its own food. If a machine made a pot, it serves for a while. But if hands made it, it is kabiu, and fit to pass to our children. This was the true understanding I learned from Valasi. This is what I now give to my son. This is what he will in his day give to his son. This observance of true value is what keeps kabiu. This is the source of things unseen. This quality, this fitnessremains so long as we have the keen sense of what is real. And in a hundred thousand pots, one is kabiu.

“We canheal the sick, warn against weather, and supply common pots to every village in the world. But let us teach our children to make what is kabiu, and to recognize what is kabiu, and to value what is kabiu.

“This is the unity of one. This is the aishidi’tat. This is our heritage.”

A bell rang. Tabini lit the third lamp in utter stillness.

The whole universe seemed to start again. A camera changed focus. Feet shifted. Breath came in and out.

Tabini turned, faced the assembly and lifted his arms. “Go. Observe silence for this one day on the matters under debate. Meet with me tomorrow.”

Silence on matters under debate. Tabini had just put allthe burning issues in that category. He’d destined the whole damned basket of snakes for debate tomorrow—when the paidhi, who’d worked on all these issues, had to be at the shuttle site within the hour.

Tabini having put every issue under legislative seal—no one could talk. The doors at the rear opened, admitting the brighter light of the corridor outside, rendering all of them, human and atevi, old and young, easterner and westerner, as shadows.

With the opening of those doors the smell of flowers overwhelmed the slight petroleum scent of atevi bodies. The hush now was overwhelming. The outward movement, beginning at the back, proceeded, and row after row, kept going, participants likely wondering what they dared say—or think.

Dared he stop for a word with Tabini? It seemed chancy to Bren even to turn his head and look toward the aiji’s household. He had a side view of Ilisidi and uncle Tatiseigi waiting in starched silence.

The outward movement reached the next to last row, the outflow proceeding with dispatch. At least there’d been no gunshots outside.

Their own row took its turn and moved out.

Bren followed Jago out, and Banichi followed him, the three of them, felicitous three, a unity differently destined than the crowd outside. The sarcophagus, the arcane secrets of death and the atevi’s dealing with it, was at his back. Light was in the hall. The recessional suddenly felt to him like an escape toward life, toward a wholly different world, fleeing questions of eternity and mortality and Tabini’s motives down here…

Tabini didn’t consult him, didn’t invite him to the most important legislative session in a decade—well and good. There was no call for hurt feelings. He had urgent jobs he hadto do, up in orbit, and Tabini was in regional contentions.

He and his bodyguard went out those guarded doors among the flowers, into the outward flow of the elite and the powerful of the aishidi’tat, everyone on their way to the two lifts. There was talk, now, and there were guarded looks, brooding looks, satisfied looks—one could practically know the province by the expression.

He still didn’t know what he thought. He didn’t know whether what he’d been dragged down here to do had simply evaporated, and Tabini wasn’t talking—or whether his mere appearance in the ceremony was enough to accomplish some purpose, and Tabini wasn’t talking.

He could damned well bet there’d be conferences among allies who had been here. There’d be frantic opinion-seeking among the news services. He desperately wanted to avoid the news people, and they’d be swarming thick in the halls above.

He was due to be off the planet inside an hour now, and that, at the moment, seemed a very good idea.

They reached the lift, waited, in the murmurous silence of the hall. “Did you see the offering from Keishan?” one lord asked another indignantly.

Bren personally had not, nor wished to look, in this hazardous precinct where looks said it all. He had no idea which among the cloyingly perfumed flowers belonged to Keishan, but Keishan’s neighbors clearly did, and were somehow disturbed by the placement, or the size, or the color, or a hundred other declarations someone could find improper.

“This way, Bren-ji.” Banichi rarely pulled court rank to do his job, but they were late, as was, and with an out-thrust arm and a judicious eye, Banichi shunted him ahead of village nobility. Jago quickly blocked the lift door for him, and to Bren’s dismay and relief, gave them the entire lift car to themselves.

Rude, to the lesser lords. Justifiable, but rude. Bren didn’t know what to say—but when Assassins’ Guild security indicated their charge should move, a wise man moved, and heaved a shaken little sigh of deep appreciation in the little time they rode by themselves.

“Is there a problem?” he asked them. But immediately as he said it the door opened onto another wall of flowers on the main floor—flowers, and lenses, and news service reporters who spotted a high source and meant to have it at any cost.

“What does the paidhi’s office have to say, nand’ paidhi?” was the loudest question, along with, “Is there a crisis, nandi?”

“I am apprized of none,” he answered, his only safe answer. “I’m bound back to the station on the scheduled flight.” He was relieved to let his security whisk him along to another bank of lifts.

The door shut.

“No particular difficulty,” Banichi answered the prior question.

The lift rose up, let them out. They walked down a short hall in the restricted residency of the Bu-javid and took yet one more lift, this one securitied and keyed, down again.

Down and down to the rocky core of this hill which was the Bu-javid, the governmental nerve center, the seat of legislative authority, the state venues and the residence of the aiji and the highest lords… and the place of tombs.

“It should be a quiet ride, nadi-ji,” Jago said on the way down.

He very much hoped so.

“Tabini never did tell me why I’m here,” he said.

“It’s a puzzle,” Banichi said. And what puzzled Banichi decidedly puzzled most people. And gave him no better information.

The lift let them out in an echoing vault of concrete and living rock, a large, heavily guarded hall, a mostly vacant walk toward the Bu-javid’s internal freight and passenger train station—huge spaces, cut into the high hill, with guarded accesses for the trains.

Forklifts carried cargo to and fro. Security offices were constantly busy. Everything here was scrutinized—everything examined.

A red-curtained train waited at the siding—theirs, beyond a doubt, one of the short, well-appointed specials that sometimes had tagged them on to a long-range train, sometimes ran them straight to the airport.

It was the latter, this time, and Bren made a quick check of his wristwatch as they walked.

“We’re just a little late,” Banichi said. “No worry, nadi.”

No worry.

“I need a copy of Tabini’s speech, nadiin-ji.”

“As soon as possible,” Jago assured him, and he hoped that would happen before he was in the air. Absolutely no copies had been leaked, not even to intimates and staff, and he remained marginally uncertain whether Tabini, damn him, might have ad-libbed the whole thing. Tabini was capable of it, completely capable, but it was important enough he thought not. He himself wanted a re-read before the tone cooled in his memory, and neither he nor staff could take time now to secure one by ordinary channels.

They approached the red-curtained car—Tabini’s private car, on loan to him… and he recognized the operations car that went next. It was arguably the tightest security on the rails. Banichi quickened his pace, entered the passenger car first to check out the situation there, then came back to signal him and Jago to come inside.

A guard just inside surrendered a computer case, thecomputer, to Banichi, and Bren breathed a sigh of relief as Banichi handed it to him. The man was Tabini’s, known to them. The car next door likely held the rest of that team. All of that was Banichi’s concern. Bren took his precious computer—the computer he’d not expected to have to leave anywhere he wasn’t, and had. He’d rather leave a newborn child on a railway track than have it out of his hands for five minutes—but if he trusted any staff as allied to him, it was logically Tabini’s.

Not that Tabini wouldn’t spy on him—excruciating to contemplate certain of the computer’s files in Tabini’s hands, but at least there would be no hostile use of them.

The red velvet bench seat at the rear of the car, beyond the bar, was his usual spot. He sat down on the bench seat, holding the computer in both arms. He felt violated, telling himself the while there was absolutely no reason to worry about Tabini’s men getting into it, swearing to himself he was going to take off his personal files on the next trip.

The dark red shutters and velvet curtains at his elbow concealed bulletproofing. The body armor chafed under the dress coat and bound like a corset, and he longed to be rid of it… but not yet. Not yet.

“Fruit juice?” Jago asked.

“Yes, Jago-ji.” His throat was dry. He thought he looked ridiculous holding to the computer as he was, and persuaded himself to turn it loose and set it on the seat beside him. He looked at his watch, trying to re-situate himself in the outside schedule, in his senselessly interrupted agenda aloft. There was Geigi, among others. Jase—Captain Jase Graham, who’d so badly wanted to take this trip.

Four minutes behind schedule, not his staff’s fault. It took an unpredictable time to end a speech, move people through narrow halls, to wait for lifts. The shuttle might wait a little for him. It had some leeway. It didn’t like to use it.

The train began to move. Banichi, communications still in hand, had rechecked the situation with the pair who had handled the baggage. “The baggage is already aboard the shuttle,” Banichi said. That wouldn’t delay them. “They’re advised we’re on our way.”

Moving the baggage was a risk. They didn’t like to advertise their movements. With chaos inside the Bu-javid, it was particularly risky.

As for missing the flight—Bren imagined to himself having to return to the Bu-javid, to dodge news questions for days until the next shuttle—that was a political risk he chose not to run. Escape, on schedule, seemed to raise the fewest questions—leaving everyone only with the original question.

Why?

Why bring him down to the planet in the first place, hold a social meeting, a memorial, and dismiss him?

Jago gave him the requested glass of fruit juice, a sweet mixture. He took a sip. She had her own, and sat down beside him, a wall of living warmth and good will in what had been a chill day of vaults and lower level corridors.

Banichi sat down opposite, his large frame disposed on a seat the image of Bren’s… a seat that fit Banichi.

Bren was young Cajeiri’s size, used to finding his feet didn’t reach the ground, used to standing in the shadow of his atevi bodyguards. Either could pick him up and carry him at a run… Jago haddone it, to tell the truth. She and Banichi both could break a human arm entirely by accident. Atevi could jump higher, run faster, and see in what he called total darkness—all advantages to Banichi and Jago in their work.

All assets, on his side, in any dispute—assets that somewhat equalized the disadvantages of a Mospheiran on the atevi side of the strait.

The island of Mospheira, with its human enclave, very likely had gotten the broadcast of the ceremony simultaneously with broadcast on the mainland. The recent treaty said they would. But it didn’t come translated, and Mospheira was incredibly short of talent in the Foreign Office since he’d left and taken the best with him. Kate Shugart and Ben Feldman were both aloft—so likely Mospheira would send the tape up to them and bring it down again before they put it on the air.

That meant the station—and his own staff up there— wouldhave gotten the feed.

And of speeches this was an incredibly difficult one to render, with so much dependent on situation, nuance and context… positional meanings meant headaches for a translator. Whatever they could put out needed footnotes. Whatever they rendered needed someone wholly fluent—

It needed him, when he could get his hands on it, to supply those footnotes, and he hoped the effects of human guesswork didn’t ripple outward too far or generate position statements from human agencies before he had a chance at it. He rarely exercised his old function as a translator any longer—but there were moments when it was critical he personally do it, and this was one.

He still had Shawn Tyers’ private phone number, too, high though Tyers had risen—the presidency of Mospheira, at the moment, and a damned good president at that. He even reported to Shawn now and again, with Tabini’s full knowledge, and Shawn’s gratitude to Tabini for allowing it. Mospheira being the nation he hadserved until, in one of its prior administrations and in a bad moment in its politics, it had tried to kill him, remembering to report to Shawn did serve as a reminder where home had used to be, and it did make his service to Tabini far more comfortable, morally speaking, humanly speaking.

And what would he say this time? What had Tabini, that master of not quite saying what one thought one heard, given for specifics in that terrifying address?

Or was half he’d heard buried in context, which the best translator in the world couldn’t quite fish out for safe human viewing? Threat, in Mospheiran context, could be toxic. Among atevi, it could be reassuring, a demonstration of stabilizing power.

The aishidi’tatbuilt a starship in orbit over their heads. Don’t forget, don’t forget the old ways… that was the end of what Tabini had said.

But there were details… details so damned full of thorns a conscientious translator needed gloves. The atevi nervous system, the atevi body and brain that interpreted the degree of threat and promise in that twos and threes business and he couldn’t guarantee that even Shawn Tyers would understand what it feltlike in that room, the absolute terror, the threats, the resolutions, the business of an atevi association, an aishi, being transacted in face to face encounter and gut-level emotion.

Where did humans have an analog—except a funeral among passionately feuding relatives?

And how to describe what it most feltlike—

What it most feltlike was the moment in a machimi-play when the holder of secrets divulged them, and set the fox among the chickens—so to speak—and sent things into freefall, all points of reference revised, usually with weapons involved.

And what did it mean, now, when conservative Ilisidi happened to be the highest-ranking ateva who had ever gone to space—and her pro-space, pro-foreigner grandson assembled the leaders of the nation to lecture them on anti-foreigner traditional values in herown words, while she was conspicuous in the audience and in new and conspicuous guardianship of the aiji’s butter-fingered heir?

It could mean, on the one hand, trouble—that grandmother Ilisidi, newly custodian of herally Tatiseigi’s grandnephew, simultaneously Tabini’s heir—was being outflanked by a maneuver that far outdid the previous dangerous push-pull maneuvers of that private relationship. If that was the case, it could more than get someone killed… it could remotely mean Tabini was about to shove Lady Damiri out the door.

Or, conversely, that Damiri and Tabini together had decided to push young Cajeiri out the door, effectively to disinherit him—

Was riding a mechieta through a formal garden thatunforgivable an error?

He couldn’t think it of Tabini or Damiri, or of Ilisidi, but even this far along in his association with the atevi, he couldn’t imagine he understood what the familial relationships were, or what atevi felt.

They didn’t feel friendship, among first points. They didn’t know love. They obeyed a different set of emotions. They herded. They flocked. They rushed to a leader in time of distress, and that leader was distinguished primarily by qualities a human regarded with suspicion: an atevi leader led because he hadno higher emotional attachments, and flocked to no one.

A leader took care of his own. A leader preserved those he led. A leader became passionately distressed at a threat to what was his.

But the high leaders, the aijiin, didn’t bring up their own children. They passed them around, fostered them out to high-level relatives and trusted associates to be tutored, taught manners—and to form associations with those same relatives on whom the whole structure depended. Cajeiri had been with his great-uncle Tatiseigi. Now he was with Ilisidi. He might not be with his parents again until he was nearly adult.

The boy would never, perhaps, forget this assembly in the tomb of his grandfather. That speech from his father would brand itself on a boy’s memory. Even given species differences, that was likely true.

But how did a human understand the situation that might logically relegate a child elsewhere? Or even dispose of him? It happened in the machimi, in the hard, brutal feudal age. One didn’thear of it happening in modern times.

And there were some things he had always been a little hesitant to ask even the atevi he trusted with his life. But the questions nagged him.

“Nadiin-ji,” he said, as the rails clicked beneath the wheels, as the car took a turn he well knew, “Mospheiran humans regard their children very highly, protect them at all costs, and Mospheirans generally don’t hand off their children to raise—” He supposed in that understanding his own father was not quite respectable, but he tried to simplify the case. And tried not to insult the people he lived with. “So I remain perplexed about Cajeiri’s situation, to put it very delicately. Is there satisfaction with him? Is he in any way the focus of this ceremony? Why did Tabini ask me here, and why is Cajeiri suddenly with Ilisidi, when I thought he was with Tatiseigi, and has thatanything to do with this event?”

They were mildly amused, and perhaps a little puzzled.

“Regarding the invitation,” Banichi said—Banichi had had thatquestion a dozen times in the last few days, “one still fails to understand the reason. We have kept a careful ear to the Guild, Bren-ji, and no one has given us a clue. Regarding the heir, Tatiseigi has appealedto the dowager to take the boy in charge: the dowager has received Tatiseigi, and the boy packed his bags last night.”

“The dowager’s plane has entered the hangar,” Jago said. “Her crew has taken quarters in the Bu-javid.”

Thatwas interesting: Ilisidi was not, then, returning to Malguri immediately. She was staying in the Bu-javid with the boy in tow, and staying at least long enough to warrant a hangar for her private jet.

“One fears for the porcelains,” Banichi said.

“His own parents would not—forgive me for a distasteful question—harm him?”

“No,” Jago said quickly. “No, nadi-ji.”

What do they feel?was the question he tried to ask, and wondered whether he ought just to blurt it out and trust his long relationship—but Banichi and Jago themselves were father and daughter: he had had a parent-child relationship right in front of him for years, and stillcouldn’t quite decipher what they thought, or felt, except a strong loyalty—no, they existed within the same man’chi, and that was different: they’d served the aiji before they attached to him, still within that man’chi, and that told him nothing about their own ties to each other.

“I remain bewildered,” he said to them.

“So are we all, Bren-ji,” Banichi said. “So are the lords in the Bu-javid. So are the newsservices.”

“That’s at least informative,” he said. “They did broadcast it.”

“To the whole aishidi’tat,” Jago said.

“And the station, I’ll imagine.”

“One believes so,” Banichi said.

“Curious. Troubling, nadiin-ji.”

“Your staff is troubled, too,” Jago said. “But we detected nothing aimed at you, nandi.”

“Rather I’m aimed at someone else, perhaps.”

“Yet we don’t detect that, either,” Banichi said. “And we gather nothing from usual sources. It’s all very curious.”

“What is the relationship of a child to parent?”

He amused them. Jago laughed softly. “It depends on the parent.”

“It depends on the child,” Banichi said.

“ Thischild, nadiin-ji. I know I could never explain either of you.”

“Cajeiri is bright, precocious, and the porcelains are in danger. If one could advise the aiji, best foster him to ourGuild, to teach him where to put his elbows.”

“Everyone has something to teach, is that it?”

“To the aiji’s heir?” Banichi asked. “Very many have something to teach.”

“Yet he has no security to speak of. When no one else draws a breath without security.”

“He has a great deal of security,” Banichi said, “in the man’chi of those in charge of him. He learns to rely on them. And they learn what he will do.”

The train reached another curve. The protected windows obscured everything outside, but he had a vision of where they were, a brief stretch of wild land before the airport.

“Do you suppose this transfer of the boy to Ilisidi’s hands, coupled with my presence, coupled with this honor to Valasi, and her attendance, and mine—all sums up to a declaration of peace in the household? Ilisidi supporting the aiji’s push to space?”

“Her visit to the station did that quite well,” Jago said.

“Yet something might be afoot in the east,” Banichi said. “Or something might be brewing closer to Shejidan.”

Never mind that atevi had no word for friendor love. Enemytranslated closely enough. One who threatens my interestsapplied on both sides of the strait.

What they thought of a human’s prolonged association with the dowager as well as Tabini—Well, atevi had an untranslatable word for a person who bridged a gap and created an association they’d rather see in hell. Troublemakerwas close. And that described him, for sure.

And Tabini made a point of having him down to the planet and then sending him back, dragging him like a lure past certain noses?

Half his primary security wasn’t on the planet—couldn’t therefore watch his computer, and Tabini’s security hadn’t wanted people carrying packets into the mausoleum, a situation Banichi and Jago had not, in fact, been warned of, not until two of Tabini’s staff showed up not only to assist and guard the baggage while the two of them guarded him, but to take charge of the offending object. On the one hand it could be simple indication they were being strict with the lords and didn’t want to make an exception in his case. On the other—his stomach reacted—it could have robbed him of one bodyguard or set a stranger with him, which Banichi and Jago wouldn’t allow, not even for Tabini’s men—or it could all be a ploy to get their hands on the computer. Banichi and Jago were as nervous as he had ever seen them and, when that was presented to them, about as put out as he had ever seen them. One rarely saw them vexed with the authority that ruled them all—but vexed they had been. They’d been a week on the planet, and suddenly and without warning, no, the computer couldn’t go with them into the service, even when they were told the service would run close to shuttle launch?

So here they were, having gotten through it, headed back to orbit with no more explanation than before, but at least back into his own security, back into the safety of a closed world, where such surprises wouldn’t come up. Much as he missed the world, much as he pined for blue sky and the heave of the deep sea under him, much as he missed the people he couldn’t take with him—he knew the world up there was safe. He ranhis own section of the world up there, and he knew what was going on in it.

Down here he’d had to take the computer back, not knowing what might have been done in two hours. And he wasn’twholly sure Algini, the best computer wizard on his staff, had the expertise or resources to find out quickly—not compared to the resources Tabini-aiji could draw on.

The tracks clicked at a rate now that told him the engineer had clearance all the way, and that they were doubtless inconveniencing trains all over the system. They were late. But they were going to get him off the planet. If they were rushing like this, they were going to make it.

The train took a hard right turn, the last. Jago got up and restored the juice glass to the rack, untroubled by the motion of the car.

They had made the airport spur with that turn, not destined for the public terminal, but to the far end of the airport, which handled diplomatic cargo, spacebound cargo, and occasionally explosives, curious juxtaposition.

They braked. “Plenty of time,” Banichi said.

Another exposure to daylight and the chance of assassins. Bren personally gathered up his computer, but willingly entrusted it to Jago’s offered hand. The body armor chafed. He tugged at it, straightened his cuffs and saw to his pockets—ready for a dash once the train stopped.

“The packages made it into baggage?” He even hesitated to ask, amid more serious difficulties his staff had had to track.

“Early this morning, nadi-ji. No worry.”

The video games for staff had made it, then, likewise Bindanda’s request for two particular spices. And the treats… those were his idea. He wished he’d been able to think of something appropriate for Jase—something that wouldn’t touch on Jase’s longing to be down here and cause more frustration than it cured.

The car’s doors opened on a daylight he had last seen from his apartment windows before the ceremony. The view beside the car was a vast tract of concrete, a clouded sky—blue-green foliage walled off by a high fence. A van was waiting for the train, but it would not be Tano and Algini backing Banichi and Jago up this time—no: two more of Tabini’s own, stationed there to swear to the van’s integrity.

He made the small jump down—a small atevi-scale jump that jolted his knees—to the siding. Jago brought all the hand-baggage, a trifle to her strength, and escorted him briskly to the waiting van—holding back just that small bit that let Banichi double-check that the driver and the guard were indeed Tabini’s agents. Members of the Assassins’ Guild knew one another socially, so to speak—shot at one another, under contract, that being their job, but exchanged pleasant words at other times.

Clearly everything did check. Banichi signaled them, and they boarded.

They weregoing to make it. Bren believed it now, heaved a long sigh as he hit the seat and the door shut. The van moved. Chain-link fence and blue-green scrub gave way to a wide panorama.

Then the shuttle came in view, on the runway.

Sleek and white: Shai-shan, oldest of the fleet, the first shuttle built and the one whose crew they knew best.

Fear of flying be damned, Bren thought—it was far safer than where he had just been. It was safer than the whole planet had become—in terms of schemes and plots, and those, in atevi society, were never without consequence.

They halted right at the bottom of the cargo lift… cargo lifts still serving for personnel, a minor economy in a program otherwise making progress hand over fist. They were in time. They exited the van in haste, walked up onto the platform.

One could hold a transcontinental airliner half an hour or so, but the calculations were made for Shai-shan: she rode favorable numbers, and her ground crew didn’t like to revise them. Stewards at the open hatch door above waved at them anxiously.

A wind was blowing cold as, with a bang and a jolt of the hydraulics, they rose up and up to the open hatch. Banichi spoke to someone on his pocket com, confirming their arrival.

They’d made it.

Chapter 2

Air inside was immediately warmer. “Have I time to shed the coat?” Bren asked, and the steward said there was at least that, yes, nadi.

Bren immediately peeled off the coat, with Jago’s help—slipped out of the heavy vest and let the stewards, who were well accustomed to such precautions, stow coat and vest discreetly in baggage.

Hand-baggage went, too. All but the computer. Jago had that, and kept it.

In the democracy of the space effort—and a single, rear-boarded aisle—they passed alongside atevi station workers bound for their jobs in orbit—most back from leave, a few first-timers. Bren knew no few names, and a few rose, bowing under the cramped overhead. “Thank you, nadiin,” Bren said. “Thank you.” He found himself exhausted, after very little exertion for days—very little exertion, and a great deal of tension. He wanted his seat, which was always up in the front, where the steward was waiting. He made what haste he could.

“Nandi.” The steward’s position marked his proposed seat, not quite the first row, this time, but close.

The forward steward he knew very well—having shared with this crew and the shuttle team the effort that consumed their lives and energies. These were zealots, enthusiasts for the program. He was intheir association; they were inhis. Boarding, he was alreadyhome.

But there were, among atevi—not too unexpectedly—a handful of human passengers, too, in the middle batch of seats. They were going up, workers who’d flown over from the island to catch the shuttle up to their jobs.

And his own seat, forward, turned out to have a human companion—a surprise, and a very pleasant one. He likedGinny Kroger, and had by no means expected her on this flight.

Not his age, not his field, no longer his country… unless one counted the station itself, which for purposes of allegiances, he did. Virginia Kroger was gray-haired, thin, a woman with a fierce sobriety, a mouth that gave nothing away until she absolutely astonished a novice with a grin. No fashion-plate: she wore a thick gray, ugly as sin cardigan and doubtless had an equally unstylish parka in storage: Ginny always complained of the chill on flights, and was usually prepared: count on it.

“Gin.” He saw now that rank and courtesy had handed him this seatmate, and probably Banichi and Jago had foreknown that before they boarded. “Nadiin-ji,” he said to Jago and Banichi.

They took his meaning—certainly had no need to protect him from Gin, and no need to spend the flight pretending not to understand a word of Mosphei’, either.

“No difficulty,” Banichi said. The two of them had their reading and their amusements, and the hand-baggage that contained them.

It was his first chance to talk with Ginny in half a year. The moment they reached the station, duty would take them to two different zones. And her presence on station was very rare. “How’s the island?” he asked, settling in beside her.

“Wet,” Ginny said. Of course. It was spring. Rain was a given. “How’s the mainland?”

“Wet. Security-heavy. The aiji’s holding a family ceremony— thatwas the must-see that brought me down to here, it turns out.” He bet that Gin had had a briefing from the Department of State as well as her own wing, Science, and knew he was here, but without an understanding, he couldn’t give her a reason. “But I suppose I agree with the call: I did need to be here.” Grand negligence. Let Shawn be as puzzled as he was… until he learned something.

The hatch had already shut. The passenger comfort systems had come up. Now Shai-shan’sengines roared to life.

“Welcome aboard,” the copilot said over the intercom, and began the rollout litany, the set of instructions, the list of horrors that a nervous flier hardly liked to listen to, but needed to, no matter how experienced: what to do if the takeoff roll aborted, what to do if they had to evacuate… all the scenarios in which a passenger had any choice.

Mostly there was no choice: there were few runways long enough to accommodate Shai-shanif something went wrong.

“No time for drinks, nand’ paidhi,” the attendant said, pausing by his row. “I’m very sorry.”

“I’ll have a fruit juice and vodka when we get up.” Launch usually had him a mass of nerves, and he liked to have a vodka beforehand to calm down, but he discovered he had no need for that, today. Sitting in his own seat was a victory. “Made it in time,” he said to Ginny, and heaved a sigh, telling himself it was, after all, true, and he was safe. “That’s all I ask.”

“We did hold count a little,” Ginny asked, looking at her watch. “But we’re rolling on schedule.”

“We hurried. The fortunate hours.” A Mospheiran might take a shuttle launch countdown as overriding everything else, but the exigencies of a shuttle launch had nothing against the atevi sense of timing and fortunate numbers, and Ginny did understand that. There were times things were done, as there were days and hours when nothing began. A memorial service and a shuttle flight weren’t remotely in each other’s consideration—except that neither would take place at an infelicitous moment.

Shai-shanmoved out, and made a ponderous slow correction onto her runway—she was not agile on the pavement.

Above the entry to the cockpit, the bulkhead had the black and white baji-najiemblem, that tribute to Chance and Fortune, the devil in the otherwise fortunate numbers. Below it was a screen that showed them the runway.

It trued up in the view.

“Baji-naji,” Gin said, meaning, in human terms here goes nothing.

And in atevi— here goes everything.

The engines roared and the acceleration pushed them back. The thumping of the wheels grew thunderous, and abruptly stopped as the screen showed them blue sky.

A split-screen showed the gear retracting safely below, and the ground and all the city falling away under them.

Well, another few roof tiles would fall in Shejidan. The planners had thought they could cease using the public airport once the new dedicated spaceport went into operation, but this one, the oldrunway—crazy as it sounded to call it that, as if anything was oldin this frantic, less-than-a decade push toward space—still was in use, if only for Shai-shan, Shai-shanwas Shejidan’sshuttle. The citizens of Shejidan, even after so much inconvenience, prized their broken roof-tiles, gathered them up when they fell, patched their roofs and took pride in their personal sacrifices for the greatness of their city.

Their shuttle. Theirstation was up there, too, available for anyone with average eyesight, if that person went aside from city lights, as atevi loved to do. Just ask them whose it was.

Theirstarship, too, was assembling in parts and pieces up there. It seemed mad to say, sometimes, but by agreement it was theirstarship when, a decade ago, rail transport had been a matter of fierce debate.

The wider universe, the universe humans had opened to them, had caught on with a vengeance in atevi popular culture. A passion for the stars and the new discoveries burgeoned in the very capital of the atevi world. Shejidan was mad for space.

And maybe, thinking of that, it was a good thing Tabini had held that remembrance of things traditional. Remember the old ways, before all that was atevi changed, shifted—abruptly.

They’d already had several dangerous moments in atevi-human relations. For a second time, atevi had become fascinated with humans and humans had become equally fascinated with atevi. Once before this, they had worked together, lived together. Humans had failed to grasp what was emotionally critical to atevi, and vice versa, and the whole system had fractured, catastrophically, with enormous loss of life—which was why humans were living on an island as far out of reach of atevi as they could manage at the time. The social disaster they called the War of the Landing had started on a critical handful of mistaken assumptions—because humans and atevi had gotten along just too well at first meeting, loved, associated, and nearly ruined each other.

Maybe remembering a little history was a very good thing, as fast as things were moving.

Or maybe Tabini just wanted his son to see the human paidhi, if not meet him.

Maybe Tabini had wanted the boy to understand the history behind the aishidi’tat, and to appreciate the official, paternal, national, even space-faring approval behind the hard, uncivilized lessons Ilisidi was about to teach him. It was too easy for a highborn youngster to think the whole world was what he saw around him.

Shai-shanreached her stage one altitude. Wings reconfigured themselves. Hydraulics whined. And Shai-shankept going.

No word for friend among atevi, no word for love… no word for man’chi among humans, no word for aishi, either.

But maybe both species were wise enough now in dealing with one another.

Maybe this generation figured out how to treat the changes that ran amok through everything they touched.

Maybe kids like Cajeiri would figure out how to deal with situations that shoved biologically different instincts up against one another in what had been, once before this, a dangerous, dangerous intimacy.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Ginny said to him.

And what was he thinking? That atevi were clearly feeling stressed? That the aiji, who ordinarily backed every change proposed to him, held a ceremony in tribute to the old ways?

“The ceremony,” he said. “Just before I took off. Whole reason for the trip down, it seems. Pace of change. Atevi want to catch their balance. Remember the traditional things.”

“Maybe Mospheirashould have a ceremony like that.”

Ginny surprised him with that sentiment. She wasn’t the philosophical sort.

“Why so?”

“Kids,” Ginny said. “ Kids. This generation thinks it’s all a given.”

“My generation?”

Ginny gave one of those rare laughs. “There’s kids tall as I am who were bornduring your tenure, paidhi-aiji. You’ve been too busy way too long. There are kids just about to vote who think there’ve alwaysbeen jobs in space, who think the War of the Landing is a dull chapter in a big book.”

“That’s scary.”

“Oh, damn right it’s scary.”

Appalling thought. Six years since he’d been on Mospheira. The better part of a decade. And she was right. A ten-year-old kid who didn’t care that much about history so easily became a twenty-year-old who didn’t think it was important, either.

“That’s incredible,” he said.

“Kids think there’ll always be a new invention every week. That there’s a magic fix for every problem.”

“That’s good and bad,” he said. “Bad, if they think someone else is always going to solve it. I’m sorry—I plan to retire someday and leave the mess to them. I expect them to do their homework.”

“Oh, but you haven’t been there. We Mospheirans—we do love our holidays. We love our leisure time. We’re too damn convinced it’s all going to work, so if we choose as a nation not to have aeronautics, it doesn’t matter. We need a new swimming center in Jackson. If we choose not to develop our own security, it doesn’t matter. The threat from space, that’s always been there. Just ask any sixteen-year-old.”

“Damn scary.”

Shai-shanroared on, climbing, still climbing, headed for that queasy moment when, far above the earth, perilously riding her momentum and betting their lives in the process—she would shut down one set of engines, switch on another, and transit to space.

“And damn labor,” Ginny said. “And damn unions. Theydon’t think the crisis is that urgent either. The aliens out there aren’t coming tomorrow. They might never come. What does the average factory worker care, except they want their televisions, their beach-front homes, their boats and their retirement plans?”

Atevi and humans were reaching a kind of engine-switchover, too: that was what Tabini’s ceremony said. That was what Mospheirans weren’tcommemorating. Having gone as far as they could on the old arrangement of separatism, atevi were working directly with humans again, this time in orbit, where it made no sense to build two segregated space stations. On mutually uncommon ground, isolated from everything familiar and historically contested, they tried to adapt.

And that meant the carefully channeled interface was flung wide open, everyone exposed to the same stresses that had brought them to war before. Now with more lethal weapons, more power at their disposal—but with strangers supposedly looming on the horizon, strangers with a grudge, a grievance, or pure native aggression: no one was sure, least of all the human crew of Phoenix, who had seen their handiwork—they waited desperately to be invaded, and their children lost faith that the invaders would come.

The cultural differences, the biological differences that had led atevi to attack the early settlers were continually with them… now known and laughed at, on both sides, but those differences still tweaked live nerves in moments of frustration.

A worker, human or atevi, who couldn’t overcome his own biologically-generated anger and laugh at a situation, had to ship out—he got a quit-bonus for his honesty, but all the same, he had to ship out.

And thus far, years into the project, they’d only had to ship out—what, fourteen, fifteen, out of hundreds? Not too bad a record… thus far. The two species had changed their cultures to fit—somewhat.

They’d developed a stationside culture of interspecies jokes, that was one thing—some bawdy and some stupid. Mospheiran experts had wanted to silence them, but atevi had let them run, and the ship humans had contributed the framework and Mospheirans took to it. A human team and an atevi team had a contest, one such joke began…

There was a whole series of those, that usefully illustrated species differences, cultural differences, and made two species laugh. That was the good news. No one had gotten mad. That was the other good news.

We have to get alonghad become the common sentiment between humans and atevi aloft, at least.

Aloft, and being over sixteen, they still believed in the invaders.

They just tended to forget about them, for long, long stretches in which the company contests or the prospect of a machimi play took precedence.

The flight, bumpy for a while, smoothed out. The vodka and fruit juice arrived. Bren sipped it and drew a long, long breath. The screen showed nothing but darkening blue ahead of them.

Chapter 3

The vodka was down to icemelt, they were on their way in deep vacuum, and take-off nerves were quieter. Banichi and Jago, in the seats opposite, were reading manuals.

With Ginny, there was at least a wealth of small talk—island gossip, some of it hilarious, some of it union spats, political maneuvers that only elevated Bren’s blood pressure and tempted him to have a second vodka.

But he didn’t have to go to the island and deal with the problems, these days, and given the rare opportunity of a trip to earth, he didn’t go there, not even with family to consider. He left island politics to Ginny and Shawn and all the brave souls who had no cultural choice.

And it didn’t damned well matter to the space effort if the island politicked about the shuttle port, and took forever getting its own shuttle off the ground. Four atevi shuttles were flying—well, count Baushi, which was simply a lift engine for heavy modules: a freighter, a simple freighter, that carried passengers in a small afterthought of a module… a lot like the aircraft arrangement that had once, in simpler days, squeezed the paidhi into the regular island flight, ahead of dried fruit and pottery.

He supposed if he had missed the flight, he might possibly have caught a ride on Baushiin a few days. He tended to discount it as a passenger option, but it was. Using both spaceports, servicing two shuttles at once, one on the early and one on the late phase of mission prep while a third underwent systems-checks and cargo loading, they had a flight newly landed or about to go nearly once a week, with rare exceptions, and if Mospheira ever got it completed, Mospheira was building a runway out beyond Jackson limits to improve their narrow choice of weather.

That runway construction was a major victory for the pro-spacers like Ginny Kroger. Jackson Aerospace, moreover, was finally breaking ground for its new cargo-launch facility on Crescent Island, to the south of Mospheira.

And that, Ginny opined, meant it was really going to happen. Businesses were moving onto Crescent—not only aerospace suppliers, but companies like SunDrink and Peterson’s, intending to feed and clothe the workers. Jackson Aerospace was starting up in place of defunct Mospheiran Air… still buying its necessary aircraft from atevi Patinandi Aerospace and concentrating its own manufacturing in narrow but profitable niches—

“But over all,” Ginny said, “good news. Ifthe aiji in Shejidan gives them formal permission.”

Permission to expand out of their enclave and Crescent Island, that they had. There were other proposals for humans moving onto air-reached islands no atevi interest was ready to claim. For political reasons going back to the War of the Landing, that was a major, major concession that hadn’t happened yet.

“I favor it,” Bren said earnestly. “I think it will pass. I don’t, honestly, know whether it’s going to pass this year—” More difficult, if the legislative session in the offing now blew up. Or faster, if it didn’t. “It’s still on the table. It could move soon, if things go as well as possible.”

Better news from Ginny, the Heritage Party was still fragmenting, its idealists taking off to space and its hidebound bigots still scheming and planning a human takeover, but now a national joke, with less and less real power in their hands. In recent memory, the Heritage Party had won the Mospheiran Presidency. Now they struggled to maintain membership.

“Nand’ paidhi.” The steward brought sandwiches—a human notion long popular on the mainland—and melon, an atevi institution. “Nandi.” The latter to Ginny Kroger, with the same offering.

“Thank you,” she said, without Bren’s having to interpose a special courtesy to cover for her. She’d learned—so much. “Very fine, very fine and much appreciated.”

“Indeed,” Bren said on his own behalf. “I do favor these. Well-chosen.”

The steward was pleased.

So there was harmony in the heavens. Talk with Ginny drifted off to their former partner Tom Lund, who had been downworld and office-bound for the last two months on the Jackson heavy-lift project.

“Tom has a real gift for persuading the corporations out of their funds,” Ginny said. “He’s frustrated, but they’re moving.”

“They’re making money.”

“Everyone’s making money,” Ginny said—then added the ultimate islander objection to travel anywhere: “You can make money on the island, too, and still be home for supper.”

“You can make far moremoney running Crescent operations.” The otherMospheiran passion: finance, and the beacon of a new colonial effort.

“Try getting low-level personnel who want to live out there. That’s the thing. They’ve poured foundations. Getting the houses, getting the facilities—it’s all chasing its own tail. Mospheirans won’t go until there’s advanced plumbing and phone service.”

“Atevi would do it. Willbuild it, if Mospheirans want to sit in front of their televisions and watch it all pass.”

“Mospheira knows that. The legislature knows it. But it’s the old story: the heads of corporations don’t trust the very ones that are willing to go out there and take charge. The psychological profile of any administrator who’ll leave Mospheira worries the corporations immensely.”

“Micromanaging from remote-control,” he said. “Bad enough from one end of the island to the other. On Crescent, it’ll be a disaster, mark my words.”

“I think Crescent operations can get possibly toilet paper right now without a corporate requisition, but maybe not.”

“SunDrink’s smarter than Jackson Aerospace. They just move.”

“Oh, but now Harbor Foods wants to buy SunDrink.”

“ Good God.”

“Exactly.”

A SunDrink concession on the station had become a wildly popular and successful venture, patronized by Mospheirans and atevi who had a thirst for their traditional fruit drinks—wildly popular, too, among ship-folk who had never tasted non-synthetic food in their lives.

But Harbor wouldn’t trust the zealots who’d sell their souls for a ticket to work on-station… oh, no, no one who wanted to be up there could be trusted. More pointedly, they wouldn’t trust workers to make a decision, a guaranteed collision course for labor and upper-tier management.

Well, Shawn would know it was in the offing. Shawn would see the collision of interests coming. Strikes were a sacred institution on Mospheira. So was corporate pigheadedness.

Ah, well, it wasn’t the paidhi’s job any more. The paidhi-aiji, who’d used to mediate trade between the island and the mainland, rescuing fishing boats caught in border disputes, couldn’t prevent Mospheiran companies making bad decisions these days.

“Anyone mediating?”

“Oh, Tom’s on it. Bet he is.”

Tom Lund, however, who’d ridden out the stationside fracas that attended the Tamun coup… Tom knew. Tom was a Commerce man, and had the power, moreover, to seize Harbor executives by the lapels and get their attention.

“I’ll say one thing: there’s not going to be a station strike in SunDrink. I’ll support an atevi industry up there in competition if Harbor starts playing tough games with Sun on the station. There’ll be no strikes. No strikes anywhere humans are in cooperative agreements with atevi. It’s this lovely agreement we have: atevi workers don’t hire the Assassins’ Guild to settle with management and human workers don’t strike.”

“Watch Tom declare Sun a Critical Industry…”

“Where they are, damn right it’s critical, if atevi are in the interface. When did this piece of silliness with Harbor blow up?”

“Hit the rumor mill this week.”

“Oh, good. I’m out of touch for a few days and the next War of the Landing is in the works.” He didn’t want another emergency. “I’ve got to call Tom.”

“I’m sure Tom’s ahead of it.” Ginny’s eyes held a curious smugness at the moment. “So am I.”

“How’s that?”

Definite cat-and-canary expression. “Didn’t I say? We’re shipping, with special inspection to be sure there’s no quality issue.”

Labor fuss, another strike, this most recent one stopping work on the quality checks—but it seemed Ginny’s handful of robots had finally, after a dozen delays, gotten through.

“Who bent?”

Ginny grinned. The spare, seamed face transformed from long-faced researcher to elf when she did that. “Management. They give labor what they want, wesign a contract for sixteen more units andget our independent inspector on their line, and it’s all settled. The robots are here.”

“In cargo? Right now? Under our feet?”

“Damned right. Not only that—the deal-maker—they’ve taken an open-ended contract, with minor options. We’ve gotour robots, Mr. Cameron.”

It was suddenly a very good flight. The path ahead stretched broad and straight—robots to be delivered, fuel and materials to be mined, and the effort—delayed by politics with the senior captain, by politics with island conservatives and unions, by politics with the mainland traditionalists and the ever-to-be-damned ‘counters—stayed on schedule.

“I owe you dinner,” he said. “Ma’am. I owe you—”

“The best vat-culture ersatz meatloaf on the station.”

He wrinkled his nose. Laughed, suddenly in high spirits.

They talked about the island, about mutual acquaintances, island politics.

“And,” Ginny said, suddenly, Ginny who never forgot anything.

“And?”

Ginny reached down for a strap and pulled up her personal kit, from which she extracted a plastic sandwich bag full of mangled green leaves and crushed stems.

“And this is… ?”

“Sandra Johnson said just give it to you and you’d know.”

Sandra Johnson. Sandra Johnson. Good God, it had been years. Dark years, terrible times.

Green leaves, stems… plant cuttings in a sealed container.

Sandra named her plants. He couldn’t remember the names. But for some crazed reason, out of the blue, so to speak, she’d sent him a special remembrance. Two kids and a house in the country, but she still thought of him, and sent him mangled greenery to brighten up his living quarters.

“Old flame?” Gin asked. Not a streak of jealousy, no, there never was that between them.

“Secretary. Lifesaver.” Sandra never had become famous the way certain of the participants in the initial fracas had become household words in two cultures. But none of them would be where they were without her. Some of them wouldn’t be alive without her. “Literally a lifesaver.—Where did you run into her?”

“Oh, she used to work in Science. She dropped by the office, enlisted my help to get the plants through customs. The Head of Botany cleared them, personally, said they’re bug-free.”

He saw the packet had the Science Department seal, official as could be, and he wasn’t about to open it until customs.

So a spider-plant and a whatever-it-was emigrated back to their origins, to meet their distant cousins growing outside the captains’ offices.

“Well, thanks.” He put the packet away in his own kit. “Really, thanks. Old friends. Pleasant surprise.”

“No trouble. Well, it wastrouble, but Botany owed me one and I owed Sandra one.”

The steward picked up the sandwich wrappings and trays before they floated. Meanwhile the worker crew behind them let a pen sail too far forward. Banichi captured it and sailed it back. It was the usual games, new workers, zero-g jokes.

And in the long flight after, he and Ginny eventually ran out of gossip, retrieved their computers—Ginny from under the seat and himself from Jago’s keeping—and spread out their own in-flight offices. Ginny had work to keep her occupied, a screenful of numbers.

He had his own. He’d downloaded a considerable mail file, to add to the paper mail that his staff had culled for him physically to take with him—a heavy parcel of it traveling in baggage, paper that, recycled, fed the station’s growing need.

He still got the schoolchildren’s questions. Might the paidhi send a card from space for an honored schoolteacher? Did the Paidhi think that the aliens would come before the ship was built?

He had his answer in file for that one, for parents and children. There was every reason to go on as usual. The hostile aliens had destroyed the station that Phoenixleft out among the stars, along with all its records and maps. Phoenix, returning, had taken one quiet look at the destruction and left without a whisper to go find their long-abandoned population—here, at the atevi planet. It was good odds the aliens had no notion where Phoenixcame from.

Until—so the captains and the president and the aiji in Shejidan admitted to each other in secret councils—the aliens began to listen very intently to the nearby stars, and look for evidence of planets in their vicinity that might be the origin of that ruined outpost.

There were reasons humans and atevi separately reckoned it unlikely there’d be an immediate attack: two species had a better chance of predicting the behavior of a third.

But after all their reasons for confidence, and in spite of what they told worried children—they dared not bet the world on it.

One atevi class had written him to ask, simply: Will we grow up?

That question haunted his nights. The paidhi damned well planned to see that they did, as far as it was in his hands.

While SunDrink and Harbor played financial games.

Lodged in the back of his mind, too, distracting him from rational estimates and international concerns—was the fact that he was one more time upward bound, on a shuttle flight as irretrievable as a bullet from a gun, and for the second time in a year, he hadn’t called his family while he was on the planet.

No was a hell of a lot easier from orbit than from a few hundred miles away. I can’t visit the islandwas more palatable than I physically can, but won’t.

But what could he do? He’d told his brother—he’d tried to tell his mother that he didn’t want to go onto the island for exactlysuch reasons as the SunDrink/Harbor business. He didn’t want another phone call from his mother saying some damned extremist of one stamp or the other had vandalized her apartment building, because his picture had been on the news. He didn’t want his face in the news reports reminding every random lunatic in remote points of Mospheira that the object of a lot of local resentment had a vulnerable human family in their reach.

So he didn’t come. He lied. He dodged.

But this time the news was bound to let them know he could have come. He hadn’t anticipated the television broadcast… and that, this time, was going to be hard.

He switched over to solitaire, pretending to work rather than think. Ginny was doing useful work. The paidhi, who lived by mathematics and pattern arrangements, couldn’t win a single game for the next two hours, not a one.

Chapter 4

The stewards reunited coats and small bags with their owners during the last half-hour of approach.

There was the usual advisement: “The dock will be cold, nadiin.”

Understatement. Bren went aft, accepted his knee-length formal coat, bullet-proof vest and all, and wrestled it on in that slow-motion effort which was the only successful tactic in free-fall. Floating fabric had to be maneuvered just so, and lace cuffs had to be extracted from the sleeves and allowed to float.

He also had to get back forward and belt himself back into his seat without wrinkling the coat-tails. Ginny Kroger, herself in that battered parka, gave a helpful tug on the coat-tail and smoothed it behind him as he drifted down.

“Not the most sensible dress for freefall,” Bren muttered. “Didn’t have time to change.” On principle, he never changed half-and-half, no mixing, for instance, of a more practical casual crew jacket with the formal court trousers; and no mixing of Mospheiran clothing with atevi, either. When he was in court dress he was nand’ Bren, paidhi-aiji. When he was in island mufti and speaking Mosphei’, as he did aboard station from time to time, guesting with Mospheiran station officials, then and only then he was Bren Cameron. Never the two should confuse his often-drifting brain.

On this flight, to and from, he had been stiffly, doggedly nand’ paidhi, and he dressed to exit that way, in the rib-hugging coat… apt to freeze half through on the dock, but socially very proper.

He searched his small carry-on for his gloves. In vain.

The stewards made their final pass, gathering up loose items and advising passengers to put away every item that could break free or drift free.

The forward screen meanwhile showed them the station—then Phoenixherself, a huge, dust-stained wall of white. Tenders moved like dustmotes about her: robots. Ginny’s robots: she watched them with proprietary interest, and pointed out to him one of the oldest models.

“A-4. We’re upgrading the memory, refitting the grappling arm for the newer version. The frame won’t go out of use.”

Far, far different scene in Bren’s memory, than the desolation at his first approach.

The stewards meanwhile addressed a novice worker who hadn’t a clue that loose itemapplied to a pen in an unzippered pocket.

The imminent-maneuvering warning sounded, routine approach toward the docking mast. The forward screen showed them one of the unused sectors of the station, now, an unlovely, impact-pocked stretch of metal. It was nevertheless a sound section, if it was 21, which Bren was convinced it was—he could just make out the 2 and maybe the 1—but it was a battered and long-neglected section of the station, all the same, due refurbishment in the next scheduled expansion of habitable space on the frame.

They fixed what they could as fast as they could, and before it broke, pressed ahead on program. The concentration of effort lately was to get residential and systems operations sections repaired, assuring residences where the influx of workers could find accommodation. Every area opened meant more workers could come up from the planet, and that increased the speed at which they could work, but it also exponentially increased the need for services—

And that need got more companies involved, with their help and their own concomitant problems. Like Sun and Harbor, one of which was going to win, and the other, not. Development had been a snowball rolling downhill ever since the first shuttle flew. Now they were at work on the construction cradle that orbited independently—well, cradlewas premature, and orbitedwas a little optimistic. But it wouldbe a shipyard cradle: orbiting in a linked mass, herded by robot tenders and occasionally by human intervention in their few runabouts, they had pieces… modules, whole prefab cabins of the starship they were going to build, all mixed with pieces of the shipyard that was going to build it.

There was a lot of that, everywhere. If they had room, and it was built, they lifted it to orbit. They wasted not an iota of cargo space. They had elements of the exotic engines up here. None of them had a frame in which to function yet, let alone a hull to which they could attach, and they were not yet stable where they rode, but there they were, herded by robots. It looked a lot like the atevi-Mospheiran-Phoenix cooperation itself.

But with all the problems, he had to say both it and the threeway cooperative worked. Atevi operators ran robots designed by Mospheiran robotics experts—by Ginny Kroger, among others—using atevi-designed computer systems newly linked to Phoenixsensors and remotely monitored by crew. The plans for supercomputers necessary to run the starship were already undergoing analysis in atevi labs—God only knew what atevi would do with the supercomputers, or what politics that would turn up. Atevi dreamedmath and patterns, and hadn’t had human-designed computers and software in their hands for a week before someone was saying there were obvious advantages and obvious possibilities, and someone else was saying there was an obvious infelicity in this and that code.

Change, change, and change. But they built on a pre-tried design they’d drawn out of the newly-recovered archives. They’d had no need to invent their way to space. In fact some held that the act of invention shifted all-important numbers that had already proved fortunate, a scary, foolish and unnecessary modification—

That, they could have settled. But it wasn’t only atevi number theorists who threw monkey wrenches into what might have been a smoothly-running production line. The whole station refit and the shipyard assembly could have run a damned lot faster if Phoenixcommand hadn’t suddenly taken it in their heads that the ship refueling, which hadn’t been done since Phoenixhad arrived back in the system, had to be a priority.

He’draised objections to that with senior captain Ramirez, pitched his only fit of privilege, but in the labyrinthine ways of stationside politics, he’d lost. And fueling had proceeded, monopolizing robotics resources, taking up precious station construction budget when the mining operation, as one could anticipate, developed bugs.

But it was good to know sooner rather than later. They’d worked the bugs out of their plans and their equipment.

And now that was a refueled starship out there… which might be smart. Maybe it was. He supposed it let everyone sleep sounder at night. It made the crew happy, knowing that they weren’t sitting inert at dock while the station drew down power for no few of its systems. And could anyone blame them, when a Mospheiran union wanting a second annual vacation in the contract delayed critical components, or when an atevi launch manager delayed a shuttle five days to gain felicitous numbers for an engine?

Politics, politics, politics. Everyone won a little. Everyone made sacrifices and gained benefits from the collective effort. Mospheirans compromised their dearly-held comforts to come up here, and had the benefits of advanced human medicine, not to mention the whole library of human achievement—the fabled human archive that the ship had sent down to the island. Atevi meanwhile shoved the throttle wide on their economy and risked destabilizing the most stable government the world had ever known, but theydrew down numbers from the heavens, too, mathematical certainties that could unify their number-loving culture in ways humans could only imagine, a delight that all but made toes curl.

So if Phoenixcrew ate vat-cultures and endured the worst jobs and slept aboard the ship to afford better accommodations to their world-born labor force, then they wanted something tangible for that sacrifice, too. And what logically did they want? We deserve to have our priorities addressed, too, had been the general cry from the ship-folk. They wanted to know that their ship, their whole world—and the defense of the whole solar system if anything went disastrously wrong in their estimation of the situation—wasn’t sitting dead at dock.

In that sense, the shunting of resources to that operation was a reasonable act.

But, God, Phoenixhad an appetite: they’d spent as much resource on Phoenix, which they sincerely hoped would stay motionless at dock, as they’d spent on the station with a population now in the tens of thousands. Three whole damned yearsof high-priority labor, fueling that ship, with just enough left over for the station, while certain things fell apart from sheer lack of exterior maintenance and manpower. Ginny’s new robots would help bring the station restoration back to speed, but they’d slowed the whole program to accommodate Ramirez’s insistence on refueling.

The aiji had accommodated Ramirez. So had the President of Mospheira. That was the plain fact. Mospheirans and atevi alike owed Stani Ramirez for his level-headedness against bad decisions in his own command structure—they owed him for his clear vision and his continual smoothing of the way ahead. And they wanted to strengthen his hand in the Captains’ Council, one supposed.

So, well, hell, if the ship-fueling kept Ramirez happy, Ramirez kept the ship-folk steady at their work.

And it was done, that was the best news. Done, as of this month. Complete. Finished. And nowthey got the robots they’d tried to get up here before last winter.

“ Nadiin,” the shuttle co-pilot said on the intercom, “ take hold. Prepare for contact.” He repeated it in Mosphei’, for their one Mospheiran passenger, though by now Gin knew that warning in her sleep.

They’d fixed the balky docking grapple, among the very first station repairs they’d ever made, and now the docking procedure was routine. First Phoenix, then the station became a white wall in the cameras. The image on the screen came down to the crossbars of the docking guide, and, sure enough, bless that grapple repair, they went in with a grace and smooth authority that brought cheers from the passengers.

Thump and massive click. Engaged. Safe.

Home again, strange as it was to say. Well and truly home.

“ Prepare to disembark,” the co-pilot informed them. “ Thank you, nadiin. Please follow the rope guides and don’t let go for any reason. We can retrieve you, but it’s a large, cold space, and very embarrassing to be searched after.”

Laughter, from the workers who were on their first trip.

“My best to the team,” Bren said to Ginny Kroger as he unbelted, knowing they would part ways at the lift—Ginny to the human quarter, himself to the atevi. He drifted. They continued null-G at dock: the mast had no rotation, and they simply loosed the restraints, gathered their small amount of hand-luggage and floated up out of their seats on the slightest of muscle movements.

“My best to yours,” Kroger said as the world turned topsyturvy. In that sideways orientation they met Banichi and Jago face to face: “Good day to you,” she said in passable Ragi—and had a courteous answer, at least as far as security spoke to outsiders while on duty.

“Nandi.” Banichi had taken the bulkier baggage from under the seats, and moved with the precision of practice in zero-G. Banichi took the lead while Jago glided hindmost, casually sweeping Kroger into their protective field for no other reason than that Kroger was in their way, harmless, and attached to their company. The workers squeezed aside, waiting to let an atevi lord go first, and only then drifted free of their seats, subdued and decorous in the presence of aijiin.

The inner hatch meanwhile opened. A gust of cold air came in, biting cold. Gloves were definitely in order, but Bren hadn’t found his—and now he recalled where his were, not in the carry-on at all, but in his casual jacket. And thatwas deep in diplomatic baggage down in the hold. The onworld household staff had not been apprized of the fact he would go directly to the spaceport from the ceremony.

Station personnel, meanwhile, met them as they disembarked, cold-suited, masked, stationed there to be sure they used the lines and that no one went drifting out a hundred meters to the far recesses of the docking mast.

Cold—yes. It was cold, a cold so bitter it hit the roots of the teeth on the first breath. Bren used his coat-tail on the safety-line, having no wish to lose skin; and Jago, seeing his predicament, simply took hold of his arm and drew him along. It broke no few regulations—but he arrived at the end of the safety line without frostbitten fingers.

The personnel lift that faced them was nominally sheltered, but it had been waiting a few minutes—it was bitter cold as they entered it. Atevi workers would have certainly understood if the aijiin had taken the lift first and all to themselves, leaving them to wait it out in the cold, but on his standing order Banichi held the lift door open once they reached it, packing the workers in as they never would do in the security-conscious Bu-javid—workers withtheir cumbersome luggage, to the confusion and embarrassment of the protocol-sensitive novices. On the planet, common folk had no wish to mingle too closely with aijiin, who sometimes drew bullets. Up here, there were no bullets to fear—but there was the consideration of frozen fingers and power-conservation.

“A different world up here, nadiin,” Bren said to all and sundry. “Here we do differently. Pack in. Pack in close. Customs will meet you downstairs.”

They all made it in, pressed body to body. Banichi pushed the button and the lift banged into motion, bringing the floor up under their feet.

Baggage settled. The air warmed with the body-heat of a packed elevator—the other reason for packing it close—and Bren, with his hands beneath his arms, drew breaths of air that no longer quite burned his lungs.

Atevi spring court dress was not adequate for this transit, even with the vest. Ginny was far more comfortable in the tatty parka, and had the hood up. Rime was on the metal as the car stopped at the station main deck and let them out into customs—a set of tables and low-level x-ray and sniffer apparatus easily rolled in to meet the flight—in what was otherwise an ordinary station corridor.

“Let the paidhiin out!” the cry was within the lift, and workers pressed back in an effort to give him and Ginny the scant courtesy they could manage. Those nearest the door had to get out first, all the same, and simply bowed as they walked out through customs—a privilege of rank they didn’t decline.

There they parted, having their own separate welcoming parties waiting. For him, Tano and Algini were both there, welcome sight—tall, black figures in black-and-silver uniform. Kate Shugart, from Ginny Kroger’s staff, had come to welcome her. The hellos were warm enough, and reciprocal between staffs, but: the cold above had set into travelers’ bones, and the desire for a warm drink and home overwhelmed any inclination to linger for social pleasantries.

Bren and Banichi and Jago walked along with Tano and Algini—rare that those two simultaneously left the security station, but it wasn’t likely to develop a crisis in half an unattended hour, if things were going as usual.

“And how are things?” he asked Tano. “Any calls?”

“Oh, very well here. No calls. Jase Graham will be your guest tonight at dinner, nadi-ji, unless you object. Bindanda is doing his utmost.”

Bindanda, that loan from Tatiseigi, was a very creditable chef, besides having done double duty as security and anything else that came to hand. Narani, his head of staff, would have made the judgement call accepting Jase as a guest tonight, but that was no problem. His staff had standing orders that Jase might be his guest whether he was absent, present, or en route.

Besides, Jase had so wanted to go down on this trip, having found a rare quiet moment that he could take leave of his regular duties. It hadn’t happened. Ramirez had called at the last moment, senior captain, and there it was: no trip.

“I trust there are no crises. Nothing behindthis invitation.”

“Not that we know,” Tano said—which covered a very extensive information-gathering apparatus. “The priorities committee met on schedule. Lord Geigi sent word to our staff that there were no surprises on the agenda.”

“Very good. I have to see him, tomorrow if I can. There’s progress on the robots—they’re here, in fact.”

“ Yes, paidhi-ji.” Not only Tano, but Banichi and Jago were listening, absorbing, putting pieces together, the most competent staff any man could ask for. They knew instantly what it all meant. They swept up every crumb of detail he gave them and would bend heaven and earth to make things work on schedule.

“One trusts the broadcast of the memorial made it up here.”

“Yes,” Algini said.

“Curious, was it not?”

“Indeed,” Tano said.

“Do we have any theory what it meant?”

“None, on the surface,” Banichi said.

“What it meant,” Jago said, “likely defines itself in meetings yet to come. Curious, indeed, nandi.”

But not their meetings. Not their risk. He’d been of use, perhaps, only as a symbol of the space effort. Tabini surely knew about the robots his shuttle was shipping up off his continent

… and thatwas something Tabini would announce, a triumph of persistence, if nothing else, a new phase in the construction.

Clearly space would be a topic in the upcoming session, and Tabini showed his cards—so to speak.

Home again, home in every sense, where he had his own information-gathering apparatus. He had considerable power onworld. It was nothing to the resources he had here, in what had become his office, his residence, his steel-and-plastics world.

Home, and setting to work with a whole new set of parameters, given Ginny’s surprise. Home, where Geigi, who was nominally in charge of the atevi side of the station, was far less enigmatic, and where things ran more or less predictably. He drew a deep breath, worked chilled fingers, walked a corridor he knew to a lift he knew and rode it in close company with his own staff.

There was a subtle anxious mindset that took over when he was on the planet, in the constant knowledge that at any moment, at any slight miscalculation, he could meet a bullet and end all the work he did or hoped to do—and with it, hope for lives that he had no right to risk. Visits down there, under any level of security at all, had gotten to be a calculated risk. Up here there was more and more to be done, and down there the pace of change pushed the planet’s less stable residents to greater and greater agitation. There was simply no replacement for him, and he had to admit he had no right, no personal right to take stupid chances with his life. That meant downhill skiing was right out, along with bad-weather flying or boating, and he hadn’t been on a mechieta’s tall back in four years. Not that he didn’t miss those things, dream of those things—but at least—at least, up here, things ran, and he could stop anticipating disasters.

The curving corridor apparently ended in a door like all the other doors, but Algini keyed open the security lock, let them through into a whole self-contained world. It was the door of the Little Bu-javid, as atevi called it. Lord Geigi’s residence was at the start of this new corridor, the paidhi-aiji’s at the end, and two unoccupied apartments in the middle, ready for any atevi lord who found it necessary to be here on short notice: Ilisidi had been the first inspiration, and the Astronomer Emeritus had visited as recently as half a year ago.

It was atevi decor from the first moment they passed the door, a muted color here and there, a great deal of white or near-white. The hall-end had the baji-naji conspicuous, next Bren’s own doors.

Baji-naji. Chaos and overthrow: appropriate enough emblems not only for the space program but for the paidhi-aiji’s household and this whole section: they all found more than a little humor in the notion.

But the baji-naji had a table beneath it, a wooden table with a single river-rounded stone: chaos underlain with, comparatively speaking, the most stable thing in the universe, their own precious world, the place that sent them.

His major domo Narani had done that understated exterior arrangement for the hall. Atevi visitors had greatly admired it. A photograph of it had reached the news services, as a result, and Narani, his modest major domo, from a small rural estate, with a peasant-bred practicality to his designs, had accidentally created a widely copied fashion throughout atevi society, an entire artistic movement in Shejidan that found approval on both sides of the conservative-liberal battle. His back-to-basics traditionalism that harked back to country modes and primitive expressions—so the practitioners of kabiu’teradeclared. Narani might have had a whole new career on the planet, a respected master—if he were willing to leave here, which Narani was not.

In point of fact, Bren thought, he simply likedNarani’s arrangement. In stabilizing the chaos around the place, it did satisfy the heart—God knew what wonderful things it did to atevi sensibilities—and to him, yes, both the baji-naji and the stone were very apt, very reassuring.

Home for certain. The door opened. There were bows, there were pleasant, familiar faces… Narani was, of course, foremost, an older gentleman, kindly and very much in charge. There was Bindanda, a roundish fellow of great creative talent—not only in the kitchen. A handful of staff who chanced to be near, men and women who came simply to fill out the number and make a good showing in the hall.

“Nand’ paidhi,” Narani said. “There will be dinner with nand’ Jase tonight. One hopes this is acceptable news.”

“Very acceptable, Rani-ji.” He shed the coat into Narani’s hands, and the bulletproof vest with it. The temperature was perfect, the place was perfect. Here his staff would steer him into the right clothes and the right place at the right time and he utterly could stop thinking about schedules and protocol crises. Once he would have called it lazy. With the pace of decisions his job had become, he called it necessary.

“When my baggage arrives, unpack it. Packets. All labeled. I’ve bought gifts for all the staff.—Danda-ji, your spices should arrive. And yes, the video games. I’ll deal with my messages tomorrow if there are none urgent.—Is there, however, anything pending from Lord Geigi?”

“Oh, indeed,” Narani said, and signaled a younger servant, who presented the message-bowl for visual inspection: it contained a good number of small scrolls, one of which was Geigi’s message-case: he knew that one very well. He picked that one out and read it on the spot.

“Geigi advises me he wants a meeting tomorrow. Noon would be excellent, if it suits him. Anything my staff arranges with his staff will do very well.”

There were a handful of less formal cases: atevi disputes or atevi advisements. The messages were from departments, two, by appearance, even from common workers: certain mediations with humans might properly come directly to the paidhi-aiji, a right guaranteed by centuries-old law.

And a handful of human language printouts. His staff had rolled them into the traditional form—and he feared one of those mightbe a letter from his relatives, who any hour now might hear via the news services he had been in Shejidan and hadn’tcalled—he’d catch hell for that, when his mother knew.

And at the bottom, an accident of shape, not priority, rested a couple of flat, sealed disks that were with equal certainty from various station departments—data he’d requested.

Besides those, still more letters would come flowing into the mail system from the planet, following the memorial service. He could forecast that as he could forecast a storm from the smell in the air. From down there, adding to the mail he’d brought up with him, would come letters ranging from the thoughtful, well-dispositioned observations of lords he did deal with on legitimate business, to less useful suggestions from the amateur but well-meaning, and so on down to the truly unbalanced, be they harmless or otherwise—rather more of those than the real proportion, actually. He had a very large staff on the planet whose job was to filter the mail—but they did pass through the choicest crackpot letters. Such missives, however amusing, gave him a useful sense of the fringe element—and the things sane atevi might actually feel, but would not express or admit. The fears of shuttles puncturing the atmosphere and letting all the air out had diminished significantly, for instance: those were easy. The alien threat was not, and now second-class machimi had a whole new subject matter: alien invasions which came down on sails of flame, destroying cities, frightening children into nightmares. There was an ongoing machimi involving an atevi starship crew fighting off aliens that remarkably looked like other atevi dressed like humans.

He truly didn’t approve of those, but that failed to stop them.

Well, but he was glad to have matters underway with Geigi… and could scarcely wait to inform Geigi about the robots, which really was Ginny’s triumph to reveal first, to Ramirez and the ship council… but Geigi was more his territory, and discreet with the other two camps.

So he could be sure Geigi’s business wasn’t the robots. The urgency was more likely Geigi’s precious fish tanks—not the decorative ones in Geigi’s office, rather the big ones that were meant to feed the space-based population. That was the project Geigi was determined to build as soon as they could spare the labor and machinery from the refueling effort. After three years, priorities were being reset, and he just bet that Geigi was intent on getting his own project to the top of the heap—especially hoping he’d come back from the planet with some new sense of the aiji’s next priorities.

He wasn’t averse to Geigi’s program. In fact he was in favor of it. But he wondered, on his way to the bedroom, whether he could get a reciprocal concession out of Geigi. They were close associates, but that never meant one couldn’t look for advantage in a situation. It was simply the way negotiations happened in court.

A younger manservant appeared in the hallway to inform him, a formality, that his bath was waiting… never mind the shower was always available: it was the form, the welcome home. He went in, shed the clothes into the manservant’s waiting hands, stepped into the shower and vigorously scrubbed away the residue of candle-smoke and incense that had come with him from the memorial.

Simply shutting his eyes reconstructed that vault, and the world, and the mourners all eyeing one another up and down the rows like predator and prey.

Poor Cajeiri. His first public ceremonial, and he’d embarrassed the house, and his present and past guardians.

But the diplomatic relations of the aiji with the East weren’t his problem. The East-West problem all belonged to Tabini and Ilisidi now, and there was no one in the world—literally—better at handling those stresses and strains on the social fabric. The aishidi’tat stood firm. Tabini ran it; he intended it to survive, and its welfare, however habituated the thought, was just not the paidhi’s problem any longer.

Neither was the heir to the aishidi’tat the paidhi’s concern.

He neededto sift through the mail. He needed to solve the pressing problems up here in the heavens.

Not least among them the matter of a fish tank and the prioritization of Ginny’s new robots.

He let the water course over him and laid his strategy for a visit to Geigi.

And for a phone call down to the planet, to give a hello to Toby, who’d want a reasonable answer as to whyhis brother hadn’t phoned when he was in easy range of a visit. That had to be a very, very carefully given excuse.

He felt guilty about that choice. He really did. But the schedule hadbeen rushed. He was tired from the trip as it was. Sandwiching a flying trip to the island into his other business…

Honestly, no, that wasn’t it. Toby’s letters were full of troubles he couldn’t solve and his phone calls were harder still. No, I can’tgrew thinner and thinner as the years passed, particularly when he was in range, and pleasewas so implicit in every conversation he had with Toby. Please come down here, please don’t be out of touch, please tell me what to do with Mother.

Hell if he knew. There wasn’ta good answer, not outside of their mother deciding to do something different than she’d done for the last forty years. Mospheirans didn’t change easily. Their mother didn’t change, period.

Most of all, hardest for him to deal with Toby’s queries on his marital crises: What do I do about Jill? How do I keep her?

Say no to Motherwas the only answer he knew. Don’t try to stand in where I know damn well neither of us should be. Get out of there. Don’t go when Mother calls.

You think after all these years I’m going to have a better answer? Me, the unmarried one?

He scrubbed his face and his hair, hard, not even wanting to think about that next communication with Toby. He couldn’t play part-time marriage counselor, or psychologist, not atop everything else. He had—

God, he had Sandra Johnson’s plants in his baggage. And uninvited as they were, she’d gone to a great deal of trouble to give him that gift. He didn’t want to account for their accidental demise in the letter he was bound to get.

He put his head out of the shower and spied Bindanda.

“Danda-ji, there are some plant slips with my carry-on baggage. Would you kindly find out how to pot them?”

In an orbiting apartment with no pots, no soil and no fertilizer. But his staff necessarily specialized in miracles, and he could do Bindanda the greatest possible favor not to drip on the floor when he made the request.

“Yes, nadi-ji.”

Toby, on the other hand… Toby’s problem… wasn’t something Bindanda could make go away.

Well, he had to call Toby. He had to. He’d probably better call his mother.

He’d do it tomorrow.

The shower beeped: even the paidhi had a water-limit… one he’d insisted on having, and there it was, a one-minute warning, just time enough to get the soap off in decent order.

He rinsed, cut the water off and stepped out. The junior servant was right at hand to help him into his warmed, soft robe and equally warmed slippers.

After that, he sat on a bench, had his hair dried and braided in formal order, and afterward got up and dressed for dinner, not in the full court attire, this time, but atevi-style, all the same, for a dinner at home, among intimates: the lace-cuffed shirt, close-fitting trousers, a white ribbon for his braid. When he asked himself, he didn’t know why he didn’t call for human-style clothing for a dinner with Jase: certainly it would have been appropriate, maybe more appropriate, and in most regards more comfortable. But somewhere in the hindbrain he was still on the world.

“Nandi.” Bindanda brought him a small envelope—no question it was human, no question it was Mospheiran, at first sight. It had a little residue of dirt. From the plants, it seemed.

A letter from Sandra Johnson. With photos of Sandra and smiling near-teens. Good God, he thought. Who are these kids?

Dear Bren, I was repotting today and thought of you. I checked and these plant slips aren’t contraband where you are.

The picture? This is my oldest, Brent, and this is Jay.

Was she married? Had she told him she was married?

I’m working in Brentano now, for a law firm, well, you probably know, Meacham, Brown & Wilson. John and I are happy here. But when I thought about you up there in all that plain plastic, I couldn’t just toss the cuttings. I hope they’re no trouble and if they are, throw them out. I told Brent and Jay I once visited the aiji in Shejidan and that I know you, and I’m not sure they believe me, but I don’t forget those days. I think of you fondly and thank you for all you’ve done up there.

Sincerely,

Sandra Johnson

John who, for God’s sake?

But she was certainly due a letter, and he opened the computer that had magically arrived in his room, and wrote an answer.

Dear Sandra, absolutely I’ll treasure them. Growing things are pretty scarce aboard.

I’m so glad for you. Fine-looking kids. Congratulations.

Bren.

Due two letters, in fact:

Dear Brent and Jay, believe your mother. She saved the whole world, once, and the aiji himself still owes her a personal favor.

Sincerely,

Bren Cameron

Paidhi-aiji

Just occasionally there were entirely delicious satisfactions to the job. And he did treasure… what were the plants’ names? Hell, he couldn’t remember. Seymor and Fredricka, he decided—granted they lived.

Tough specimens. Survivors. Coming home to the realm of their ancestors.

That letter, however, had led him to think about his mail queue, and he connected.

A letter from the tax authority on Mospheira. He needed to file a paper, the same paper he filed every year. No, they couldn’t possibly accept his secretary’s signature. It regarded the immense amount of pay he’d accumulated and not spent, and which he used to pay his mother’s bills and buy birthday presents for Toby’s kids.

A letter from a charity wanted an endorsement, Society for Beachside Preservation, something of the sort. He wasn’t sure how thathad gotten through Mogari-nai and C1. He wasn’t out of sympathy for the cause. It sounded like something Toby might favor. But he doubted Toby had sent it.

The letter from the State Department turned out to regard his personal identification card, which had expired. He could bring the requisite cash and his expired card to any courthouse he could reach.

Well, thatwas a fair hike.

And a letter—God, a short note from Barb.

He hadn’t heard from Barb at all for two years, not since her divorce. She’d said then she was getting her life together—adjusting to life as it was—life, as, dammit, she’d chosen it to be. She’d said she didn’t expect an answer, and gratefully enough he hadn’t sent one—

But he heard aboutBarb often enough. Barb and his mother got along, consoled each other—they had a frightening lot in common and every time he thought of it, he told himself his instincts had been right. Run like hell. The Bren Cameron that Barb and his mother both hoped would exist didn’t exist, couldn’t exist, not since he’d taken on the job—and thank God he hadn’t run back after Barb’s accident, hadn’t gotten involved in her life again. He’d only have provided the chance to let Barb lock on and mess up the rest of her life.

Last he’d heard, she was all right. She’d come out of the accident alive and whole. A rough few years, one hell of a mistake, but she was doing all right these days.

Being on a space station without a convenient way down seemed a safe distance.

Bren,

Your mother’s not doing well. The new medications aren’t what we hoped. I hope you’ll find time to come down as soon as you can.

The bottom dropped out of his stomach… not hard, just a little twinge of guilt. His mother’s health hadn’t been good, but the majority of the crises had involved some scheme to get him to visit. What was the date on the letter?

The day he’d left for the planet, dammit.

And if he had visited—if he had, every damned time his mother would revert to the ordinary list of complaints and the tally of his failures to care enough, visit enough, do enough… no, no, no, he didn’tfeel guilty.

But he went for the message-bowl, then, opened the messages, and found, dammit, one from his brother, not with the usual header that would have tipped off the staff as to its origin and sent it straight to him no matter where he was: no, this one was from Community General, from the hospital nearest their mother’s neighborhood. Toby hadn’t known there was a reason to put an official stamp on it. Toby couldn’t have known he was actually on the planet and in reach, if he’d only put an official stamp on, to alert his staff.

Dammit.

Bren, Toby said,

Mother’s in hospital, her blood pressure again. The apartment manager found her on the stairs and called the ambulance. The doctors aren’t certain…

It went on. Toby’d gone to the capital immediately. There was a second letter with the same origin. Their mother was in the hospital. The medications had taken a toll of her other organs. The doctors were working on the problem.

Toby had dropped everything, ignored all his advice, left Jill to go to the capital to be available.

Well, when hadn’t he felt guilty… for leaving his mother on the island, for leaving Toby to deal with her, when what she wanted was him, the one of her two sons who didn’t come running?

When hadn’t he felt like a scoundrel, ducking possible visits?

Yes, his coming onto the island was a danger to his mother and to Toby and Toby’s family; but they just weren’t damned pleasant visits, either, and if he was honest, that was the real reason… and the source of enough guilt to turn his stomach. Toby, granted, had at least had the good sense early on to go live up on the coast, out of range—but when things had shifted and Toby had turned out to be the only one of them who could be there, Toby would come back—at the worst moments Toby would get on a plane at whatever hour, leave his promises to his wife and his kids hanging while he ran down there to deal with the fact some lunatic had phoned their mother’s apartment and set off her heart condition. They were real troubles, always real troubles, but they had a knack for happening on birthdays and holidays and other times brother Bren couldn’t show up to visit, and the coincidence was more than suspicious.

Did other sons board a plane every time a parent had a medical incident? No. But did they? Toby did, because Bren couldn’t. He toldToby not to go… but Toby went; and once Toby got there, Toby got all the complaints—no thanks for his being there, just the complaints. Where was Bren? When would Bren come? Why couldn’t Bren come? Tell your brother this, tell your brother that…

And ask why. Ask whyToby ran off to try to be a better son to their mother than he could be, and oh, there was a dark spot in that answer. He and Toby weren’t rivals, never had wanted to be, but their mother could look right past Toby without a blip on her radar, and say her sons never cared for her—meaning him, Bren, the one of the two their mother couldn’t possibly have with her.

Was that what was going on again?

Or was this finally the real thing, a real life-and-death crisis?

And even if they’d discussed it, he and Toby, and unmasked what was going on and shone light on the cold facts… the reality of that tactic hurt so much Toby went and did it again, trying for some better outcome, some moment when their mother would just once look at him and say to his face, “Thank you. You’re a good son.”

He picked small details out of the second letter, something about Jill off on business.

The hell. Separate vacations for the last three years, one separation, a new courtship. Now Jill was off on business at the moment and Toby wouldn’t admit to her he’d flown down to the capital. Toby was, in fact, actively concealing where he was, though Jill was due home tomorrow—to an empty house up on the coast. Surprise her with it— God, Toby… what are you thinking?

The kids, at least—hardly kids now—were in school—likely staying with friends at the moment. While Jill—Jill had had all the crises she was willing to take. It wasn’t whathappened. It wasn’t the bouts of illness, which were a real illness. None of those things were the issue. What was the issue was a battle between two women over a son and husband. Jill knew she was always going to lose, and that Toby couldn’t win.

know there are good reasons,

Toby finished his second letter.

If I have to handle things here I will. But I think you’ll feel better if you can get down here.

And who knows? She’s tougher than either of us. She’s beaten the odds before.

You may get a letter from Barb. I know you don’t want to, but read it all the same. I think it’s time to make peace on all fronts.

Time to make peace. That was certainly the truth.

Would he have gone to the island, if he’d gotten that letter before he left the ground?

Would he have thrown all his good reasons to the wind, missed his shuttle flight and caught the next air cargo hop to the island?

He didn’t know. He honestly didn’t know that answer and it was too late now to know the truth.

Turn around and catch the next shuttle flight down, next week?

Maybe. He didn’t want to think about that answer. Not until the shock had settled.

And it would settle, before the chance came.

Meanwhile he owed his brother a letter. But he couldn’t write thatuntil he honestly knew what he was going to do.

Going down there when Tabini was in the midst of maneuvers as critical as any in his reign… risk all that that entailed? It wasn’ta good time for the paidhi-aiji to intrude his human presence into a rush trip onto the continent and on to Mospheira. Even going in at the other spaceport wouldn’t conceal the fact that he had landed—again. A furtive visit was even more apt to attract attention from the news than going down officially at Shejidan.

The more dogged of the conspiracy theorists, atevi and human, wouldn’t believe for a moment that the family emergency existed.

God, he just didn’t see how he was going to get there. He didn’t know if he wanted to get there.

But leave Toby to deal with things solo, one more time… notto be there the one time their mother, who was the world’s best at crying wolf, really was on the brink…

What he most needed to do was to grab Toby by the ears once and for all and say, Go home, brother, you have a right to your own life. But he’d done that and Toby didn’t listen. Toby was so damned smart, but in matters involving their mother, Toby didn’t listen, because somewhere in the tangled depths of family politics, Toby didn’t ever like the answers he got.

A small commotion had reached the foyer. Narani came to the office door.

“Your luggage has arrived, nandi. Crates have been set in the kitchen. Those without labels are in the foyer.”

“Very fine, Rani-ji.” He rose from his desk and let the messages lie—decided against the coat, after all, and walked to the the foyer, where, amid dinner preparations, the smaller luggage sat, large, travel-worn lumps of diplomatic bags about which the servants gathered in shy anticipation.

He personally opened the sealed tie and passed out the bundles and packages. He needed distraction. He enjoyed the gift-giving, like holiday.

Letters. Abundant letters from happy, sensible, long-bonded families, whatever the baroque nature of atevi parentage and fosterage. He gave those into Narani’s care, and Narani ceremoniously handed them to junior servants to sort and distribute, all with fair despatch. There were special treat packets from various homes, small, brightly wrapped presents from relatives… those were the bulk of the bags—besides the requested video games, which regulations did not permit in the general uploads from Mogari-nai, and which therefore had to be freighted up. For Narani, a great-grandfather for the third time, there was a basket about which he had been curious: it was very light. It proved to be simply curls of fragrant bark, and that gift passed from one to the next, with appreciative sighs and second sniffs: smells of the world of their birth.

Then his gifts: he had provided, gathered from the Bu-javid gardens, a middle-sized box containing bits of natural wood and a few curious rocks and sprigs, which the servants prized for their own common quarters, for kabiu. That was his gift to them, which he had personally asked of the gardeners.

For his senior staff, he had another box—a very fine two hundred-year-old bowl of southern work, for Narani and an antique book for Bindanda.

They were far, far more than servants to him.

For Tano and Algini, books. Tano had, besides, gotten a letter from his father. The two had begun to correspond, and did so quite frequently, now that Tano was out of reach.

Banichi and Jago turned up, at the distribution of gifts, both fresh from showers and ready for dinner—they came to present Algini their own gift, a very, very florid shirt, to laughter and applause from the servants, because Algini had a penchant for his old black uniform tees, in his rare moments off-duty. Algini accepted it in good grace, shed his uniform jacket and put on the shirt over the black tee to general laughter.

The door beeped. Algini shed the gift quickly.

“What?” Banichi said. “Not wear it for Jase-ji?”

Algini said not a word, only put on his jacket and looked quite proper before junior staff could open the door.

Chapter 5

Jase turned up in station casuals, never, these days, his atevi finery. Bren was sure it was a political decision that led a Phoenix captain, however unwelcome the captaincy, not to dress as a foreigner to the ship. Jase kept his hair cut, too, and at his least formal, still wore ship-issue, plain blue that had as well be a uniform. He’d been given his captaincy for political reasons, after the juniormost captain Pratap Tamun—there were four captains running Phoenix, by ship’s custom—had led a failed mutiny. The ship had badly needed a reconciling symbol in the wake of that disturbance, and Jase had become that symbol—a captain not tainted by the divisive politics that had led to the mutiny. But beyond the immediate need for a figurehead and over Jase’s protests, circumstances and the senior captain’s insistence had kept him in the post. In self-defense, Jase had thrown himself into the requisite studies, and the requisite manners, and uniform—hell, he probably even knew the set of orders that could activate the ship engines. Please God they could put off that order for decades.

“Hello there,” Bren said as Jase shed his jacket into the servants’ keeping.

“Good trip?” Jase asked him.

“Interesting,” Bren said. “Good, I suppose.” He decided, on the whole, it had been a good trip, no matter what he learned once he got home. No matter what he’d not been able to do while he was there. “The whole business seemed to be a funeral.”

“Funeral.”

“Well, of sorts. Belated. A memorial service for Valasi. Tabini’s putting on a show, called in all the television people. Don’t ask me why. Days there and I still don’t know. I think we got the feed up here. I haven’t asked yet.”

Jase gave him a look as they walked into the dining room. Jase had lived on the planet, knew Tabini, and well knew the rumors Tabini had assassinated his father.

“Curious.”

“Baji-naji,” Bren said. “Everyone who’s anyone was there, and for some reason, Iwas, and it was important that I be there. I’m still trying to figure it out.”

But that was the last word of politics, dinner being the matter at hand, and he would not insult his staff by violating that very basic rule of a noble house. Banichi and Jago joined him and Jase on some more convivial nights, but this being a homecoming, and his security staff having, it seemed, given Narani their regrets, dinner had been construed a shade more formally this evening—it was clear in the careful arrangement of the table, in the number of forks laid out, seven, to be precise.

Jase settled, and paid courteous attention as Narani supervised their juniormost servant setting out the appetizer, a pate of pickle, seafood and nuts that was improbably one of Jase’s favorites. The accompanying crackers were a Mospheiran brand, but kabiu, and plentiful in the station outlets.

“And was Ilisidi there?” Jase asked. It was not quite a political question.

“Oh, yes. I had supper with her. She sends her regards, nadi, most specifically. I gave her yours.” They spoke Ragi. Jase liked to keep up his skills and Bren thought in Ragi, dreamed in Ragi these days—refused to slip into Mospheiran or ship-accent unless he had to: it fuzzed his thought patterns in the work he had to do. “Ah. There is some additional news. The Astronomer Emeritus is coming up two months from now. Heshould keep Geigi entertained.”

“There’s a treat,” Jase said cheerfully. Grigiji was a favorite and intermittent guest—a delightful and curious old man whose greatest joy was the observation station that was supposed to report to them if there was any signal out of the deep… and that incidentally gave Grigiji information on the wide universe. “I’ll arrange something for him.”

From Grigiji and the mathematicians they went on to discuss the weather in Shejidan, the quality of the fishing—but at each new course, offered great appreciation for the dishes. Bindanda had provided his favorites and Jase’s: the effort deserved applause, and one always showed particular reverence for the meat course, under any decent circumstances.

It was another of Jase’s favorites, among items they could import, a meat that Bindanda’s artistry turned from station staple to a very fine presentation.

It was a slow finish, then, a delicate cream dessert—atevi had only a dim compunction about animals kept for milk, though they would not tolerate animals kept for slaughter. But they had gotten the notion of cream cheese from Mospheira, and this was seasonal fresh fruit, one of Bindanda’s specialties, with a nut topping.

How Bindanda had gotten the fruit up here, on the other hand, must involve high crimes and bribery.

“Very fine,” Jase said. “Where did Danda-ji get this?”

“I don’t think we want to know,” Bren said, and called out the chef to compliment him—both of them praised the dessert, which pleased Bindanda exceedingly. But they had not a word from Bindanda on his sources, so they were assuredly not official.

After that they adjourned for conversation on more weighty matters, in the library-cum-study. Bren assumed his favorite chair, propped his feet up, slightly feeling the effects of pressure-change and long travel, and took a brandy. Jase took one, being off-duty.

“Funeral for Valasi,” Jase reprised. “Didn’t he have one already?”

“One isn’t quite sure what the ceremony meant,” Bren said. He suffered a little dislocation, a flashback to the vault, the shadows, the live fire of torches… and tried to think by what handle to grapple with all the questions at once. “I attended and I still don’t know why Tabini wanted me there. The meetings beforehand were all social. I wish you couldhave come. But I’m afraid there wouldn’t have been any fishing—except for information—and there was precious little catch in that commodity, either.”

“What’s your best guess?”

“A patch-up with the conservatives. An overdue patch-up. I don’t know whether Ilisidi’s on the inside or the outside of the plan… but Tabini’s spent a lot of political credit getting what he’s gotten.”

“The economy’s running well.”

“Oh, it is. But prosperity and electric toasters only means the far lunatic fringe loses power… and the legitimate sane conservatives lose power. And the very fact he is succeeding only makes it worse, to the other side’s view. They wanthim to fail. They wantsomething to go wrong. And he’s just gotten stronger.”

“So he offers them a favor anyway?”

“So maybe he knows they’re getting desperate. He certainly made the transfer of Cajeiri into Ilisidi’s care quite public… that may have been the statement he was making. Which was and wasn’t a towering success at the ceremony. Which is one reason I honestly can’t figure it: the boy wasn’t exactly the centerpiece of the event—wasn’t really involved. My meeting with Tabini—well, fine, and social, but I expected more. I bounced from cabinet meeting to cabinet meeting, all courtesy matters and briefings, all the department heads wanting to get up to speed on what’s going on up here. I answered a handful of southern concerns about siting a plant down on the coast—I happen to agree with the ones protesting. They can put the thing inland. They don’t need coastline. It’s a damned eyesore where they want to put it.”

Jase sighed. “I did look forward to the fishing trip.”

“If you’d been there you’d only have gotten caught in this affair. But hang on. You’ll get your ocean. Next spring.”

“Promises.”

“Promises. We’ll try, this time. We’ll try damned hard. I’ll do some extravagant favor for Tabini and see if we can’t get a couple of weeks.”

“Weeks.” Jase looked glum. “I could use a month or two.”

“Something wrong?”

“I broke it off with Yolanda. Again.”

“I’m sorry to hear it.” That relationship had been on-again, off-again. Partners, mostly successfully, on-planet. On-station, decidedly not the case.

“Stupid personal stuff. I swear, I think she’s asking herself how can she tell she’s got authority if she doesn’t wield it? She’s taken up with a computer tech, now, a damned bad choice, but it’s herchoice, and sitting where I do—I don’t care.”

What did a friend say? That that wasn’t quite the truth?

“Quarrel?”

“Sulks and silences. I’m on the captains’ list and she’s not, and I think that’s the crux of it.”

“She doesn’t want the job. You don’t want it. Yet you fight over it.”

“Doesn’t matter what we want. Doesn’t matter what I want. I have the office. Suddenly my advice is a captain’s advice. Whatever I say to her is criticism. If I have an opinion, it just blows up: unfair, pulling rank. So what do I do? We don’t talk any more. We tried being lovers. Didn’t work. Tried being sibs. That doesn’t work. I don’t know what we are, but we can’t live with or without each other. She’s going back on main schedule. She’s seeing her tech. What do I care? But some things you ought to know.”

Jase and Yolanda had been lovers, in the same job, stuck on a planet they couldn’t, at the time, get off of. They were shipmates, never sibs—in the biological sense. But they were, if being planned by the same man could make a kinship, if being born at the same time, for the same purpose could make one.

They were both Taylor’s Children. Conceived out of the genetic material of the heroes from before the Landing. Conceived to beheroes. Conceived to be abovepolitics, if it was possible.

Thus far it hadn’t been possible, even between the two of them.

“I should know,” he echoed Jase. “What should I know?”

“She’d been talking with Paulson, and I asked about what. It’s my job, to ask.”

Paulson. Head of Mospheiran operations.

“And she called Mospheira,” Jase added, “and said it was personal.”

She’d served there. But in the last number of years she hadn’t called Mospheira. Didn’t knowanybody on Mospheira, that he knew of, not in the personal sense. And now he knew.

“Who did she call?”

“Don’t know. I thought I ought to have asked. Maybe it was an old friend. But Paulson isn’t. And all of a sudden I’m the villain. I don’t figure her.”

Yolanda Mercheson, the third paidhi, the one originally destined between the ship and Mospheira—as Jase was the ship-paidhi, translator between the ship and Tabini… and him.

Well, a fractured romance was one thing. But having Yolanda start making phone calls between Paulson and Mospheira, on her own?

He left for a few days and things didgo to hell.

“Can you trace who she called?”

“I might. It’s not my job, now.”

“Does Ramirez know?”

A heavy sigh. “I told him. What he said to her, I don’t know. But she was in a mood. Called me a few names. Hell of it is, I don’t know if it’s a personal matter, and I can’t find out—and if Iask, it’s personal and she’s not talking.” Jase gave a short, unhappy laugh. “You said, never let the job get into my personal life, and vice versa. You were right. It did. It shouldn’t have. Now that I’ve blown the alarm on her, I’m wrong. She’s broken regs for a personal call, she’s in deep trouble and of course now it’s all my fault.”

Yolanda Mercheson was as glum and methodical a young woman as Jase was high-voltage. Small wonder that relationship hadn’t worked, logical as it might have seemed at the time between two people effectively shipwrecked.

“A pickle.”

“As in dinner menu?”

“As in a hashed-up mess.”

“I don’t want this job, Bren. Hell, Ramirez doesn’t even need my vote in council. No one dissents. No one argues. I suggested he move Yolanda into the seat in my place. I guess my report this week didn’t encourage that, did it?”

“And Ramirez said, then?”

“Didn’t even look up. Said I was doing just fine: that I understood the atevi. Never mind I don’t have any other qualification and I couldn’t handle ops if the instructions were printed on the console… which they’re not. ‘That’s fine,’ the old man said. ‘You’re doing just fine. Yolanda couldn’t do what you do. Stay put.’ Not damned fair, I say, when the most Iwant out of life is to get on the ocean down there on a boat and just get out of this.”

“That’s not what you want.”

“I don’t know what I want, to tell the truth. I know I never want to handle ops. I don’t want to handle command. I could live off a diet of fish.”

“If we’re really lucky, you won’t ever have to do anything about ops.”

“Or Yolanda.”

“You’re doing fine. Geigi favors you. You give him great confidence, just knowing you’re in office.”

“I’m glad he’s confident. I don’t like what’s going on.”

“Tabini isn’t at all unhappy to have one of the paidhiin sitting as captain up here: that’s an understatement. It gives himconfidence. The whole aishidi’tatis pleased to have you right where you are. We don’t need Yolanda making independent judgments.”

“Damned right we don’t.”

“I’ll talk to her. I’ll keep your name out of it.”

“She’ll know. But at this point, hell if I care. Maybe youcan get yea or nay out of the Old Man.”

“I can. Trust me.” He hadn’t mentioned the thing Jase would most want to know. “ Ginny’sback. We’ve got robots.”

Hopeful quirk of an eyebrow. “Movement on the robots?”

“No. Freed. Liberated. Strike’s settled. The initial load’s just come up.”

“Damn!” It was an entirely cheerful damn.

“In the station’s receiving area, by now. I imagine she’s notifying Ramirez even as we sit here.”

“When did thatclear?”

“Evidently very fast. Didn’t have any idea, either, until I met Gin on the flight. I think she’sescaping from the planet before one of the company execs can ask a return favor.”

“Oh, this is good news.”

“Looks as if everything’s going to move. We’re going to open the next section, first we can. I’ve got the figures, labor and support. Geigi will get his fish tanks.”

“And the Old Man’s going to be in a farbetter mood all around.”

He’d certainly made Jase’s evening. The unlovely little autobots were the backbone of the fueling and refit operation, and Ramirez had requisitioned a crippling number of them into his refueling and mining the last three years. They were finished with that—and now that they were finished, able to divert the robots back to other priorities, finally, the labor dam broke, and they had the autobots’ next generation.

But it wasn’t too late. It meant they could accelerate station operations, and accelerate ship-building: everythingwas going to break loose.

And damned if Yolanda Mercheson was going to conduct some personal business on official channels in the middle of it. Yolanda wasn’t going to be happy with him, either, before all was said and done, not if she’d been carrying on some personal business on Mospheira without going through channels—or if she’d been running some deal for Paulson without telling her fellow paidhiin. There was no legal sanction for the latter, and she wasn’t paidhi to the island any longer. He didn’t know whether to go and talk to her on what was clearly a sore spot. Between them, these days, there almost wasn’t a friendship, but he could at least make his displeasure known. He could talk to Paulson and make Paulson less anxious to go that route, if Paulson was making trouble—and a sad state of affairs if he was, and if he’d gotten Yolanda to do something that proved the final split from Jase.

“I’ll be talking to Geigi after breakfast tomorrow, if I can arrange it,” Bren told Jase. “I’ll promise him his tanks… I assume he gets his tanks. Any reason against it, before I set that promise in motion?”

“You aren’t talking to the decision-making wing of the Captain’s Council. Remember?”

You’re still one of the captains, Bren thought, but there it was: Jase flatly refused to wield the power. At times it was more than inconvenient, but it was Jase’s notion of honor, and there was no getting by it.

They had a second brandy, all the same, and talked about Geigi, Geigi’s boat—the object of Jase’s daydreams of ocean sailing—quiet talk at the end of a long, long week of hurry-up and changed plans, homecoming, and, thank God, arrival of the robots, that solved so many problems.

Bren found his eyelids at half mast, apologized, and Jase excused himself: “You’d better get to bed,” Jase said. The rigors of travel were, curiously, another matter ship-folk had to learn about, and most didn’t quite understand: the notion of packing one’s belongings in a suitcase and rushing breakneck from point to point was something Jase had only experienced on a planet.

“Good of you to come,” Bren said, saw Jase to the door himself, and added, because he meant it, “Very good of you to come. Do it again soon.”

Fact was, he missed Jase. Didn’t know how he would manage if Jase ever moved back in, since the affair with Jago had gone beyond affair, and gotten to be the next thing to married routine. But there were times a human argument, a human conversation massaged areas of his brain that felt far too little exercised… that was what it was, he thought: too little stimulation of the human that was left in him. Not good. Not at all good, for the human organism. He didn’t know, before Ginny on the shuttle today, how long it had been since he’d had a lengthy social conversation with another human being.

Immediately after that, the brandy hit him with full force, persuading him that bed was just about the last objective he could reasonably achieve. Sensibly, he wantedto talk to Banichi and Jago tonight about a number of things, and dutifully, he should have advised his staff and settled down for an all-night debrief. Jago waited for him in the security post, still official and still in uniform, well, down to the tee-shirt, at least—but debriefing wasn’t what she’d been led to expect tonight. Sleepwas reasonably what she thought she had coming, and she, who’d been on outside duty for hours, took precedence over Tano and Algini who’d had only on-site duty, off and on.

He wasn’t in condition to confer with anyone, as it was. The Jase conversation had been the last. Even without the brandy he suspected he would have opted for bed, being just too dog-tired.

But there was more than that business afoot, more than Jase, more than Ramirez, more than Tabini’s dealings with the provinces.

“Is there any word from my brother?”

“No, nadi-ji. Go to bed.”

“Good idea.” Tonight he just wanted to fall over and be unconscious for a few hours. “I’m going to sleep, Jago-ji. Are you coming to bed?”

“Soon,” Jago said, and added, because she knew how curiosity consumed him, drove him, made him crazy: “Banichi likewise says get some sleep.”

At least they didn’t need him. Some things, if they rested in safe hands, he didn’t have to ask. He simply directed himself back to the bedroom, shed his clothes into a servant’s care, all but fell onto the mattress and pulled up the covers. His body temperature was sinking fast.

But he didn’t sleep. He shut his eyes, wondering where Toby was, in what situation, whether there would be a phone call before morning.

After half an hour he got up, went to the computer and keyed in a message. Toby, I got your letter. I’m concerned. Call.

He sent it. It had to pass through the security station out there. His staff would know, and probably be distressed about it. But he didn’t explain. He went back to bed, no easier in his mind.

Jago eventually came to bed, a considerable weight on the other side of the mattress, interrupting an exhausted haze that was not quite restful sleep. He knew she was there, and dropped back off, safe.

Safe. Companioned. All things local in their places.

He couldn’t oversee the others.

Chapter 6

No phone call in the morning. Perhaps, Bren said to himself, amid breakfast, the health crisis was over and Toby was on a flight back to the coast. If Toby could possibly reach a phone, he’d likely call, and if he couldn’t reach a phone, it likely meant he was traveling—which was as good news as a phone call.

In the meantime, morning courtesies included a hike all the way to the Construction Operations office to meet officially with their nextdoor neighbor, Lord Geigi—electric runabouts were available for the trip, but undignified, in Bren’s island-born view of the universe—besides heartily cursed by walkers in the halls. Bren, for his part, preferred walking, for the exercise, if nothing else: he’d watched certain officebound sorts put on the pounds, and fought the tendency.

Besides, in long stretches of hall where Jase swore on his life there were no bugs, he could talk at leisure with his staff, much as he and Banichi would talk in the open country down on the planet.

“So how has the world taken the aiji’s address, by now?”

“In curiosity,” Banichi said. “In great interest. Great interest and an expression of discontent in the East.”

Hardly surprising.

“Any clues why he wanted me?”

Tabini, and the ringing of that bell that held every imagination entranced, entrapped.

“One is not satisfied,” Banichi said. “We’ve reviewed the tape. But we haven’t discovered the absolute answer, Bren-ji. We have not, not in the configuration, the seating, or in anything said during the ceremony. Legislative proceedings are under seal, down in Shejidan. And thatis troubling.”

“Something is very peculiar, nadi-ji.”

They were coming into a more trafficked area now, beyond the limits of any secure conversation. Remarkable sight, atevi and humans in about equal numbers, coming and going on business, atevi and humans in office clothes and workman’s clothes—regulations-wise unable to say more than a handful of words to one another—notably please go, please come, please stop… please call the supervisor immediately, in the most meticulously memorized and numerically neutral courtesy. But by that means the common folk of two species did talk, if only in those approved, memorized phrases for known situations.

They tried to be careful. But at certain points they had to cooperate.

And sometimes it came down to things ludicrous on the surface—at least to one side of the question—but fraught with the most serious emotional reactions.

Fish, for instance, and the urgent reason he had to talk to Geigi about robots and a fish tank.

They reached the construction office, a reception area inside of course tastefully arranged: small scroll-paintings and a reception table, with a bowl for correspondence—and an inexpensive soft drink dispenser for human visitors. Geigi was nothing if not even-handed, though the split in decor made an atevi visitor look twice.

They were expected. The attendant rose and bowed, and immediately opened the door with a key push.

“Nandi.” Security on duty just inside was as easy, as cordial: Tano had called ahead.

And in this easy place, Bren left Banichi at the security station to take his ease with Geigi’s staff, there to have a soft drink, likely, and exchange information.

Meanwhile he went on into the inner chamber, where Geigi, in informal clothing this morning, presided over a desk well-littered with papers, beside a tank humming and bubbling and populated with color and darting movement.

“Bren-ji.” Geigi rose—great courtesy, for a lord in his own territory. He was a jovial man whose whole attitude toward life was experimental—and, for an atevi lord, very spur-of-the-moment. He swept business aside, knocking two storage disks onto the carpet in the process, and personally dragged a chair up to the side of his desk. “Tea—tea, will you, Bren-ji? I swear I could do with a cup. We have this most amazing infuser—” Geigi himself went to a domed creation on the bookcase counter, put a plastic cup beneath, and created a cup of tea.

“Thank you.”

Geigi hastily created another, stirred it with a plastic rod. “Not so fine as that, but hot.”

“Very welcome.” One was appalled. A tea-maker. A Mospheiran tea-maker. In an atevi lord’s office.

“Back from the world and all, and a puzzling trip, I take it.”

“I have no idea why I was called, nandi, I truly don’t.”

“What, pray, is the aiji doing down there?”

“Mystifying us all. I wish I knew. So does everyone.”

“A requiem for Valasi-aiji, and not a whisper of ill intent to the living or the dead.”

“Not a one. And I can’t answer.”

“Can’t.”

“Truly can’t, Geigi-ji. I was down there. I came back none the wiser. But!” It was rude to change subjects on a gentleman, but Geigi was an intimate of long-standing, so intimate he risked his reputation with truly marginal tea. “I had a seatmate on the flight up, nandi. Gin Kroger.”

“Gin-nadi. With news?”

“Oh, with more than news, nand’ director! The robots are with us, and more certainly on their way.”

“A wonder!”

“I talked with Jase last night, filed intent to have someof our windfall diverted to your fish tanks, my closest of associates, and we, you and I, nandi-ji, need to put our heads together, so to speak, and set priorities and requirements and a timetable before someone else gets a bid in.”

“This is marvelous!”

“If the tanks can do as they need, Geigi-ji. If they can provide the needful food.”

“I have every detail.” Geigi leapt up and went to a central cabinet, among the other high, clear-doored shelves and cabinets that graced this very modern office. From it he extracted a stack of much-abused paper, brought it to the desk and spread it out, sketches of a circle containing many little circles.

It was an actual engineering plan, an exploded diagram of what he had last seen as a series of sketches on scrap paper: an aquiculture tank, with triple walls and heaters and solar panels and details he hadn’t seen.

Another trip to the cabinet and Geigi laid something new atop it all: it might be another tank, or a tricky sort of valve—the paidhi had gotten fairly proficient at engineering over the last decade, but this one eluded him.

“This is my own invention,” Geigi informed him. “And mathematically, baji-naji, I can say there are potentially sufficient variables to make the solutions for escape exceed the number of fish. This is an escapable trap.”

“An escapable trap, nandi.”

“It admits fish to an area where they may be caught. It revolves, see?” Geigi went back to a second cabinet and brought a plastic model, a somewhat taped-up and revised plastic model.

One began to get the notion.

Fairness. Mathematics that would prove to have harmonious numbers.

Atevi hunted. And fished. They did notraise animals for slaughter. The ship-folk’s cultural divorcement from the concept of eating living things ran head-on into Mospheira’s love affair with food and meat. The mainland’s code of kabiu, fitness, meant eating no meat outside its appropriate season, and eating with ceremony—respect, even reverence: ship-folk began to take to that concept, though queasily.

But for atevi, reverence didn’t mean processed meat, and it didn’t mean domesticated herds. And that had been a major stumbling block in trying to supply food to the station.

Fairness meant going out to fish for wild fish, not scooping up everything that lived in one whole tank and processing it without individuality.

But this revolving trap, this remote-fisher, offered a statistical chance to the fish to escape.

“Ingenious,” Bren said.

“Fry hatch along the bottom, where this grid—” Geigi pulled a sheet of plans from the middle of the stack, which showed a mesh smaller, one presumed, than the adults. “And a rapid current sweeps the young into the hatchling tanks, to what passes for shallow water. There are three outlets and one inflow. Of outlets, one offers this choice.”

Absolutely ingenious. Roulette, for fish.

Geigi was self-pleased. “ Phoenixengineers, who understand this floating in space, these no-gravity pumps, they do this sort of thing very well. But we can satisfy the objections of the most fastidious. Fish may become resident in this facility, we don’t breed them. They breed themselves. And even from the fishing tank there is an escape back into the breeding tanks.”

Bren examined the plastic model, asked himself why a fish would want to dive through those holes—a question the paidhi had never asked himself in his life.

Some fish, like the species they planned to have in orbit, were kabiuin all seasons, having no migration or well-defined breeding behavior that made them appropriate or inappropriate.

It was notlike the introduction of high fructose sugars, which had addicted the crew and made SunDrink a wild success. To the bewilderment of the Mospheiran companies who had hoped for Phoenixto argue on their side and accept meat products, the human ship-crew did not take readily to meat… but did take to the atevi view of fairness and fitness and season. Fairness made a sort of sense to the ship-folk, while it vaguely disgusted Mospheirans, who preferred not to think of the fish on one’s dinner plate as a personality.

“We can offer the fishing tanks for recreation,” Geigi said. Bren had wondered how long it would take before Geigi offered that notion.

“At first, however, nandi, I fear we’ll do well to have the fish reproduce.”

“We need a game biologist.”

“And the engineers.” It all was, to Mospheiran sensibilities, an insanely grandiose plan. But insane things had been engineered before now, since humans falling in from space had landed in a steam-age culture. One had only to look at the Shejidan spaceport to know what could be done to accommodate atevi sensibilities. Fresh water fish, however, not salt. A sea turned out to be a very fussy, very complex environment to maintain.

And once there were the robots, they had the means to automate operations and increase the supportable station population at the same time. With an unlimited food source, they could envision full-scale operation, a station population adequate to any operation… anyoperation, and a food-source that wouldn’t exclude atevi from orbit: thatwas the center of their plan.

“If we achieve this, nandi,” Bren said, “and quit spending so much of our launch weight on food, we’ll have the labor up here. No question.” In the most logical sense of how to proceed, he supposed he should push for a Mospheiran style fish-farm to start into operation first, to feed enough Mospheirans to make the harder project easy—but getting more Mospheirans than atevi up here was the very last thing they wanted to do. “This keeps everyone happy. I’m quite convinced.”

“Very good,” Geigi said delightedly. “Excellent!”

It was concluded. It was only twice and three times the scale they had intended, but now two thirds of the population were in accordance with the other third, and kabiucould be satisfied for good and all, now that there was a positive abundance of worker robots.

“We have at least a materials estimate,” Geigi said—and stopped, as the door opened and Geigi’s chief of security slipped in with a quietly blank look. Security never intervened in business except on life or death.

“Nandiin,” the man said. “An urgent message for the paidhi.”

For him? And two lords’ security agreed to interrupt a meeting? It was nothing good.

Might it be his call from Mospheira? Some message from Toby?

“Excuse me, nandi.” Bren rose. “I’ll deal with it quickly.”

“Whatever you must do,” Geigi said, rising, the soul of courtesy.

Geigi’s man led the way outside. Banichi was there, to be sure, and Bren’s immediate expectation was that Banichi had received a message, something relayed from Tano.

But Geigi’s man opened the door to the general reception area, where an unlikely individual, in blue fatigues and with a blinking lot of electronics, waited for him.

Kaplan. One of Jase’s aides, considerably out of formal uniform such as he mostly wore nowadays.

“Excuse me,” Kaplan lisped in Ragi, and lapsed into ship-language. “Captain Graham’s sending, sir, Captain Ramirez—he’s had a seizure. They’ve taken him to infirmary.”

“To stationinfirmary.” Ramirez would ordinarily go to sick bay on Phoenix. The station infirmary was closer—for minor things or, conversely, for absolutely urgent care.

“Orders said find you wherever you were, sir. Captain Graham thinks you should come, right now.”

“Absolutely.” He changed to Ragi. “Ramirez has been taken to station hospital, a health crisis, I take it. I’m going at once to pay respects. Tell nand’ Geigi.”

“Yes,” Geigi’s man said, and went to do that immediately.

Which left him with Banichi and Kaplan.

“Kaplan. We’re with you.”

“Yes, sir.” Kaplan led off, out the door.

Ramirez. He’d been subconsciously primed for grievous news to come from the planet, not from here.

But Ramirez… Ramirez had been in dubious health—and he was one of the three keys to the whole atevi-human partnership. The paidhi-aiji could suffer a personal loss and go on doing his job the same day. The paidhi could lose everyone he loved in the world, and the future of three nations would go unshaken.

But Ramirez stumbled, in the midst of all the agreements and programs that relied on that one man… and three worlds shook.

Lord Geigi, no less, overtook them at the lift. That was Ramirez’ importance. Bren acknowledged the presence with a glance as the car arrived, and all of them got in together, bound toward a very small installation on third deck, which had only one virtue—its proximity to Ramirez’ on-station office.

They didn’t speculate aloud, he and Geigi. But it took no telepathy to know they shared the same thought, the same apprehension of disaster.

Chapter 7

Phoenix security was evident in the infirmary corridor, two in fatigues; and armed guards occupied the infirmary foyer as if the place were under siege. It was anxious security, worried security—security whose highest authority was behind those doors, incapable of command.

“Mr. Cameron, you can’t bring them in here.”

Kaplan was absolutely speechless. Bren swung a stark, forbidding look at the human officer, Jenrette. Ramirez’man, for God’s sake, delivered a prohibition to an atevi lord and his retinue as if they were random tourists.

“Mr. Jenrette, this is lord Geigi and hissecurity.” Bren spotted the personal guard of Captain Sabin and Captain Ogun present further in; and Polano, who was another of Jase’s message-runners. “Captain Graham sent for us.”

Jenrette took a deep breath and made that slight nod of the head that ship personnel had learned to use with atevi authority. “Apologies. Mr. Cameron, the captain… the captain’s in a bad way. The other captains are with him and I can’t let anybodyin right now.”

“We’re here officially, sir, from the aiji’s side. I hope you’ll convey that to appropriate channels. We’re here to help if we can, nothing else.”

“Yes, sir.” Jenrette’s nerves were wound tight, but he let go a pent breath and looked grateful.

“I’m sorry,” Bren said. Jenrette’s whole life was wound up in Ramirez, and Bren sensed in the man’s manner that Jenrette knew they were very near to losing the captain. After all the close calls, this might be the last one, and Jenrette was struggling. “I’m personally sorry, Mr. Jenrette.”

“Thank you, sir.” The last was a breath, heart-felt in expression.

Banichi and Jago, further removed, meanwhile, were in near-silent communication—likely with Tano and Algini, back in their residence. So was Geigi’s security in touch with someone elsewhere.

As for Geigi, his solid, ordinarily cheerful face showed he well understood the heightened tensions… not in human terms, but certainly in practical ones. Lovemight not translate, but man’chicovered the situation. An association about to shatter translated into Ragi understanding very well, and Geigi’s security was understandably on edge, considering their charge here in the midst of humans at a moment of transition. Geigi’smen reasonably thought they were here to shore up order against impending chaos.

“One fears the worst,” Bren translated quietly for Geigi. “Ramirez is alive at the moment, though the outcome seems very much in doubt. I don’t think we have to fear a coup as Tamun tried to effect, not even a dispute of succession. Ramirez-aiji’s chief of security is distressed, and only wishes to prevent intrusion.” This above all else was not only understandable but commendable in a man in Jenrette’s position. “These men all answer to the ship-aijiin. Doctors are with Ramirez. We may expect some sort of initial report on his condition.”

“Understandable in all senses,” Geigi said. “We will attend a decent time, and wait for the report.”

Geigi’s bodyguards meanwhile still looked uneasy. Their senior spoke to Banichi in low, worried tones. Banichi answered something, and there seemed to be some agreement, likewise some quiet communication to separate staff offices.

So they stood. They waited. There was little room in the place. The infirmary staff remained at the desk, looking anxious. A lone human worker came into the infirmary with a badly cut hand, and hesitated in dismay, but one of Ogun’s security directed the man to the desk, and security escorted the worker quickly back into the patient care area. For the rest, quiet prevailed.

“One should set an extra watch on the survivors of Tamun’s men,” Banichi suggested quietly, in the wake of the worker, and it certainly was a worthwhile consideration. Tamun might be dead in the coup of several years past, but there were still a handful of crew under close watch, minor adherents of the Tamun affair who had had amnesty.

Bren hesitated; but critical as the situation might be, he went to Jenrette. “Mr. Jenrette,” he said in a low voice, “my security expresses a concern regarding Tamun’s people. I trust we know where they all are.”

“At every moment,” Jenrette said, and drew a breath and seemed relieved to find something within his capacity to say, yes, that was under control.

So they stood, over a period of minutes after the worker’s passage, and the activity in the infirmary’s central corridor increased in ways that seemed, from Bren’s vantage, to center further up the corridor than the injured worker. Doors opened and closed somewhere in the depths of the place.

Then came a period of ominous quiet, no one speculating, no one saying a word. Jenrette, who had spent years of his life with Ramirez, stood barred from whatever proceeded with his captain, and Bren deeply pitied the man, who struggled valiantly to maintain his calm against evidence that something was wrong.

Then one of the doctors came out into the hall. Two and three others walked behind him, aides, all looking grim and defeated. The doctor spoke to them, then saw the gathering, and came up the hall with a glum expression.

“I’m very sorry. Captain Ramirez is dead.”

There were no expressions, no outburst from the men. “Mr. Franklin is in charge,” Jenrette said calmly, passing command to Ogun’s chief officer. “I’ll be reporting to Captain Graham, now.”

Jase had wanted to resign his office. Instead—Ogun commanded first-shift; Sabin, second: Jase became third, a heartbeat closer to command, in a ship that had just lost a wealth of its experience and knowledge of very critical decisions.

“Ramirez-aiji has just died,” Bren translated for lord Geigi and for his staff, who kept a solemn silence like the rest. “Command has just passed to Ogun-aiji.”

Now the captains emerged from the room down the hall—Ogun, Sabin and Jase Graham. Jules Ogun was a black man, white-haired, square-faced and solid as a basalt pillar; Sabin, a slight woman of grays and dour expression on the best of days, was no different in expression today: they were Ramirez’ two contemporaries, both taking matters in grim-faced calm.

But Jase… Jase, who’d regarded Ramirez as a father, at least as much contemporary father as he had—looked shaken.

Jase… and Yolanda. No one had notified Yolanda Mercheson to be here. And she had lost every bit as much as Jase.

Ogun shook Jenrette’s hand, first, then looked at Bren, and at Geigi.

“Captain Ramirez is dead,” Ogun said. “Seniority rests on me. Captain Ramirez’ policies and orders stand until specifically revised, Mr. Cameron, will you relay that to the allies? We’re on our way to Phoenix, to make the official announcement in about ten minutes. We ask you keep it off the com until then, even for your personal security.”

“Our condolences and respects,” Bren said solemnly. “We understand.—Banichi, the ship-aiji asks no communication until the official announcement.”

“One hears,” Banichi said. It wasn’t to say word hadn’t already passed to his own staff and to Geigi’s, before Ogun had requested otherwise, but transmission had been in Ragi, and not apt to slip those channels. Now Bren ordered silence, a respect to the ship that hosted them, as the captains left, Jase left with them, and the aides attended them out.

The foyer of the infirmary was suddenly only atevi and the paidhi, and the language became wholly Ragi, impenetrable to the infirmary staff.

“They’re going to Phoenix,” Bren explained, “to make the official announcement. We should go back to our own offices now, to answer questions as they come to us, Geigi-ji. Ogun holds Ramirez’ policies and orders in place, at least for the while. I’ll send a courier to Paulson.”

Paulson was acting head of the Mospheiran section, Mospheirans having been utterly without representation and without information in this turn of events.

“A good idea,” Geigi said. “I’ll send, as well, to my domestic staff.”

By courier, that was, which didn’t breach their agreement. They left the premises and took quiet leave of each other.

“Call Jago out to meet us at the lift,” he said. He didn’t construe that as violating the silence. “She’ll see me home. You go to Paulson. I’ll write a note.” He searched his pockets for a notepad, found it, wrote as they waited at the lift, a notification for Paulson. A gentler notification for Yolanda Mercheson. He wasn’t sure Jase would find the moment, caught up as he was in the captains’ council, whisked back to the ship under bewildering circumstances.

By the time you get this you must surely know the sad news, that Captain Ramirez has died. Jase is caught up in official proceedings and incommunicado, as far as I can determine. He was called there, and took it hard. I know he’s still in shock, as I know this message must come as a great shock to you; but I am free to write as I fear he is not, under official order, and express, as I know he would, concern for you.

My staff will welcome you at any time and convey messages or provide a quiet rest as you need. Please accept my sincere condolences.

— Bren

Jago arrived before he was done. He gave her the messages, and their destinations. “No danger,” he said to her. “But requirements of propriety.”

“Yes,” Jago said, and went, quickly.

The messages might or might not beat the official announcement, but they would salve feelings. Especially Yolanda’s. That Jase was under official ordermight at least take the sting out of the likelihood that Yolanda had not been advised, not even in Jase’s mind—he feared so, at least. The look on Jase’s face had said that not much at all was in Jase’s mind at the moment—nothing logical at any rate. And Yolanda wasn’t as close to Ramirez as Jase was. Not that he’d ever observed.

The pace of everything had stopped when Ramirez’ heart beat its last. Now the rate of decision accelerated again, a set of movements that had immediately to be performed and a set of facts that had to be confirmed, abraded feelings patched, nervous allies reassured even if logic and common sense said there would be no immediate changes in policy.

The announcement came over the general address in the corridors as they reached their own apartment foyer, as Narani was accepting his coat. The intercom light near the door began to flash, in case they might not have heard.

“It’s reported,” Bren said to the staff in Ragi. Tano and Algini had come out of the security station. “A call to Tabini-aiji. Use my personal codes. I’ll speak to the aiji himself if I can reach him.”

“Yes, nandi.” Tano and Algini would have heard every breath and whisper in their vicinity for the last hour: they were rarely out of touch with their own internal security, and the same, he knew for a fact, for lord Geigi. And likely two messages were going down to Tabini, and Paulson would immediately call the State Department on Mospheira, at very least.

Then, very quickly, the facts would hit the public news services—no overwhelming shock, because Ramirez was no young man, and his heath had been a serious question for a long time.

But the loss of Ramirez was going to shake everything from the legislatures in Shejidan to the markets in Jackson. Every lunatic who’d been halfway quiet would become agitated and full of speculations. Every paid publicity-seeker who wanted five minutes in front of the cameras was going to jump up waving his arms.

Crisis… under control, but yes. They had to get Tabini and Shawn Tyers fully informed, fast, and get a news release organized ahead of the fact.

He went into the security office to write one, and Tano hastened to open up the board and send as he was directed. Algini was monitoring, listening intently, likely to Jago. Banichi was talking to Narani, outside, likewise passing other details, and count Bindanda into that briefing, too. His security was operating on edge, not alarmed, but their nerves were wound tight, all the same. The passing of a lord was rarely without shock-waves, and somewhere in their atevi nerves was engrained the belief that, species differences aside, some human might at any moment run berserk through the corridors. That it was not that likely to happen in a carefully selected crew was beside the point. If humans failed to do it, some ateva might do it for them, and Geigi surely had his hands full at the moment.

“Lord Geigi has made the official announcement to the staff,” Tano reported, then, from his personal communications. “He’s assured them that the transition is smooth. He’s requested that non-essential staff go to quarters and official staff express appropriate condolences to official channels.”

Get off the streets, that was. So to speak.

Get off the streets and be polite to the humans until whatever might happen had happened, simplest way to deal with the crisis.

Points to Geigi for simplicity: no explanation, just clear instruction.

Mospheirans, on the other hand, were likely to populate the bars—there were several devoted to Mospheiran taste—and speculate. Depend on it, there’d be a dozen conspiracy theories in the Mospheiran section by the end of shift, and they’d build on each other.

Among the crew… the conspiracy that hadattempted to take control of the ship, however, was old business and quiet. Tamun was dead. Jenrette had his allies under watch… under close arrest, it was likely, by now, without explanation, knowing how thoroughly and quickly crew tended to deal with emergencies. Mospheirans might insist on due process and rights, but as Jase put it, rights don’t mean anything when the ship moves. Meaning that acceleration and emergency overruled everything. And if it wasn’t an operational crisis, it was close to one. Their security would already have a heavy hand on matters, and ship crew would not gather in bars or even talk on the job.

“I have sent to Mogari-nai, nandi,” Tano said, seated nearby. “Fifteen messages are in progress to Mospheira… one other is in progress to Shejidan.”

Therewas the difference between the cultures, in a nutshell.

Among atevi those fifteen calls home might indicate fragmentation. Maogishi. Breakdown of order. Among atevi, that rated attention.

“That’s to be expected,” he said. “Department heads and a couple misusing their business clearances. Likely corporate calls, too. No threat of fragmentation. Just informative calls.”

“The halls remain peaceful,” Algini said.

“Best, all the same, if the human work force stays at work—if nothing else, to be near official channels instead of sources in the bars. I hope Paulson uses good sense.”

“It seems so,” Algini murmured, hardly diverting attention from his console. “There is a request for a communications stand-by. Will the paidhi add an address to lord Geigi’s?”

“I hardly need to,” he said. “Lord Geigi will do best.”

“I have the aiji’s line, nandi,” Tano said. “I have Eidi, at least.”

Tabini’s head of staff. “Pass it to me, Tano.—Eidi-nadi?”

“ Nand’ paidhi?”The voice, the rational, known voice from the planet was very welcome, water in a cosmic desert.

“Eidi-ji. I need to speak to the aiji, utmost emergency.”

“ Nand’ paidhi, I regret— the aiji is unreachable even to the utmost emergencies. I can bring the message myself, under my own office, nandi, as fast as I can run.”

God. Was something wrong down there? Or was it simply Geigi’s call, beating his?

“Eidi-ji, Ramirez-aiji is dead, of natural causes. Ogun is ship-aiji now, Sabin second and Jase Graham third. The station and ship are quiet. The transition is peaceful, policies remain in place, but unofficial calls from the Mospheiran district on the station are already going out to the island.”

To the news services, one might as well say, and from there straight to the rumor mill. Of all times C1 had been the choke-point, inconveniencing the free flow of information, it failed them now.

“ I will bring that message, nandi, as fast as I can, understanding its importance. Please remain available.”

“I shall,” he said. “Thank you, Eidi-ji.”

The contact winked out, but that was all right. The message would go as faithfully and as fast as the man nearest Tabini could bring it to him. Eidi understood the importance. He had no doubt on that score.

And now the adrenaline more or less ebbed out of him in disappointment and frustration, knowing he could not speak to Tabini and could not get an immediate resolution out of the situation. Things weren’t going to be simple, not when the changes were this high up the decision-making apparatus.

A week ago, before Tabini’s phone call, the whole world had been running more than smoothly. Now… with Ramirez dead and Tabini pursuing some arcane piece of internal politics with his predecessor and the legislature that he still didn’t understand—and his own family having waited until precisely this week to have a serious crisis… things had gone straight to hell.

In the small nook of his mind he reserved for private business, he did earnestly wish Toby would answer his messages and take at least one crisis off the docket. He thought perhaps if their mother was in hospital Toby might be there, and not in touch… though Toby was usually better than that, and usually checked periodically through the day, if he’d put a call in…

Well, now things were worse on that front. He couldn’t call Toby now, not in the middle of this goings-on. Every call he made to the island was going to be suspect as political in nature. He couldn’t do anythingquietly any longer.

But Toby must surely realize that the moment the news broke. Toby would learn what was going on and then figure out that it was all on him to make contact—that it had to be.

“Nand’ Gin is calling,” Tano said then, a seat removed from him at the console. “She wishes to speak to you, nandi. Will you?”

Ginny Kroger. The unofficialand far more competent human power on the station. “I’ll take it,” Bren said immediately, and picked up an ear-set. “Gin? This is Bren.”

“ Bren, I’m getting disturbing rumors. Are you hearing any?”

“Ramirez has died. Unfortunately that’s no rumor.”

“ Heard that. But that’s not the rumor I’m talking about.”

Did he ask her to spill it, and risk the security of the communication?

But if it was a rumor, it was evidently loose, and a little late for secrecy.

“Something you can say here, Gin?”

“ Talk in the halls. No secrecy here.” Time for a breath. A big one. “ Talk says the lost station’s not destroyed, Bren. That it’s stillcrewed. That the captains knew it all along.”

That couldn’t be true. It couldn’t. His heart stopped a beat.

No.

His deepest instinct said he and Ginny damned sure shouldn’t be discussing this over the intercom, but his conscious brain said that if it was in the halls, it was a little damned late for secrecy and about time someone official spoke to the situation. “First I’ve heard,” he said—understatement. “Gin, at this point that’s just a rumor. Report anything else you hear: talk to Jago, on my staff. She can translate somewhat.” Best if Gin could get to Feldman or Shugart, the official translators, but they were both in Paulson’s office, and probably going berserk at the moment trying to monitor atevi internal communications, granted they weren’t stalled trying to figure the intricacies of Geigi’s message down to Shejidan. “I’ll try to trace the rumor through channels.” He was in the political stream up here. Ginny wasn’t. But Ginny had access to the workers. “You try to trace it through the tunnels.”

“ I will,” Ginny said. “ Keep me informed.”

“Same,” he said to her, and punched out as he swung around in his chair to face an apprehensive staff. “Tano, get Jase on com. Use the beeper.” Jase carried a pocket beeper they had very rarely used… granted Jase had it on him at the moment. If he was in a security lock-down, they might have objected to the atevi beeper. “Send him a code one.”

See me. Emergency.

“Yes,” Tano said, and punched buttons. “Done, nandi.”

“Workers in Gin-nadi’s hearing,” he said then, informing his security staff, who might not have followed all that transaction in Mosphei. “Workers are carrying a rumor that the ship didn’t find the remote station destroyed, as they reported, and that crew remained alive aboard it. That this was something the captains knew.”

“Then the source is reputed to be the captains?” Tano asked.

“It would apparently go that high—if it’s true at all.” Everything they had done here to secure their mutual future depended on the ship’s assurances that the aliens that had attacked and destroyed the remote space station couldn’t possibly have gained information from the ruin—that the destruction there was complete, and that no data on the location of their own station could have gotten to the aliens.

And if that weren’t entirely true—if the conflict out there was still going on—

Banichi appeared in the doorway. “Were workers or crew the source of the rumor?” Banichi, with his earpiece evidently attuned to proceedings in the security station, was completely briefed, and had the salient question.

“I don’t know,” Bren said. “But I want to know. Jago’s out in that section. Is she aware?”

“Now, yes,” Banichi said.

There was an increasingly queasy feeling at the pit of his stomach.

Tabini unavailable, Ramirez dead, the newly-arranged captains off to their private councils, and now rumor cast doubt on all their agreements— allthe ship’s many promises and protestations, all oaths, all reassurances—

This was very, very bad news. And it wouldn’t raise trust, among the Mospheiran workers.

“We’d better get an official answer for this one, fast. Keep trying to get Jase. Contact C1 as well as the beeper—” C1 being Phoenix-com. “Put me through as soon as possible.”

“Yes,” Tano said.

“If it’s only a rumor,” he said to his staff, “it’s still serious. If it isn’t—we’ve been lied to. But we don’t assume that as first choice. It may be more complicated than that.”

Meanwhile Tano pushed buttons and tried to find Jase.

“C1 doesn’t respond,” Tano said—and thatwas more than troublesome. “I believe a recorded message is saying all communications are routed through station central until further notice.”

Not good, not good at all. Bad timing, if nothing else.

“Use the operations emergency channel.”

“The ship is fueled, Bren-ji,” Banichi pointed out.

Phoenix, once all but helpless, was not, at the moment.