Precursor

PRECURSOR

Caroline J. Cherryh

the fourth in the Foreigner sequence

To Kira and Kasi

Chapter 1

The jet that waited these days was passenger-only, carrying no baggage but that which pertained to the paidhi and whatever diplomats happened to be traveling under his seal.

More, since a certain infelicitous crossing three years ago, the plane itself bore the colors, the house seal, and the personal seal of Tabini-aiji, which served as an advisement to any small craft that, anyone else’s personal numbers be damned, the paidhi’s jet had absolute right of way.

Diplomatic status on the island enclave of Mospheira, however, did not mean a luxurious lounge. It didn’t even mean access in the public terminal, where the island traffic came and went and delivered more or less happy families to holiday venues. No, diplomatic passengers embarked from the freight area. Security preferred that defensible seclusion. The State Department arranged a red carpet across the bare concrete, a small concession to appearances on a tight budget.

Bren preferred the seclusion, carpet or no carpet. A mission from Mospheira was already aboard, so security informed him, about five minutes ago… they’d not been waiting long, but they were all the same waiting, now, safe, their baggage aboard.

He carried his own computer, that was all, a machine with information certain agencies would kill for, and set it down to say his good-byes. Seclusion might mean family partings in a dingy, spartan warehouse, but it also meant he could indulge those partings in private: maternal tears, brotherly hugs, on a hasty Independence Day visit that had nothing to do with family obligations, rather four days occupied with official duties, then an overnight stay with his mother that ended one day before the official holiday.

On his way out of the human enclave, arriving by private car and not having to run the gauntlet of news cameras, he’d already changed his island casual knits for the calf-high boots and many-buttoned frock coat of atevi court style. He’d braided his hair unaided into a respectable single, tight plait, precisely—he hoped—between the shoulder blades, with his best effort at including the proper white ribbon of the paidhi’s rank. He had lost one cufflink into the heating duct of his mother’s guest room, or somewhere, this morning; he was relatively sure it was the heating duct, but he hadn’t had time to dismount the grate and retrieve it. His mother had regaled him with an elaborate, home-style mother-cooked breakfast—her substitute for the holiday—and what could he do but sit down and spend the little time he could spend with her?

He’d borrowed a straight pin to hold the cuff, which he now tried to avoid sticking into his brother’s shoulder as they embraced.

It was: “Take care” from his brother. And predictably, from his mother: “You could stay another day or two.”

“I can’t, Mom.”

“I wish you’d arrange another job.” This, straightening his collar. He was thirty years old, and probably the collar needed straightening. “I wish you’d talk to Tabini. At leastget a decent phone line.”

Tabini-aiji was only the leader of the civilized world, the most powerful leader on the planet and probably above it. A decent phone line in his mother’s reckoning meant one that would take calls in Mosphei’ instead of Ragi and let his mother through the atevi security system at any hour, day or night; that would suffice. The fact that there were four diplomats and a situation waiting aboard the plane was not in her diagram of the universe. Next it would be: Get a haircut.

“You have the pager, Mother.” It had been a birthday gift, last visit. “I showed you—”

“It’s not the same. What if I had an attack and couldn’t use the pager? I’m not getting any younger.”

“If you couldn’t use the pager, you couldn’t use the phone. Just talk to the thing. It’s all automatic, state of the art.”

“State of whose art, I’d like to know.”

“It’s Mospheiran. Bought right here on the island.”

“You don’t know where it goes. You don’t know who’s listening. And atevi made it. They make everything.”

“I know who’s listening,” he said, and attempted conciliation with a hug. She was stiff and resisting to his embrace.

“Shots in the night,” she muttered, not without justification. “Paint on my building.” That was years ago, but he couldn’t blame her for blaming him.

His brother moved in—a diversionary tactic. Toby put his hand on their mother’s shoulder, simultaneously offered Bren his right hand in a handshake, and gave him a clear passage to the red carpet.

“See you,” Toby said. “Go.”

It was smooth. It almost worked.

But a wild cry of: “Bren!” came from beyond the security station, and a woman in fluttering white came running across the concrete, in fragile yellow shoes not designed for athletic effort.

Barb—the ex-girlfriend he’d successfully evaded for the last four days, who’d sent him voicemails he’d deleted.

Barb—whom he’d almost married.

She’d not put in a personal appearance during this visit or the last or the one before that, though his mother on all his visits had talked of Barb—Barb did this, Barb did that; Barb did her shopping, ran her errands.

Barb, married, had all but adopted herself into his mother’s apartment, and yet didn’t manage to show up while he was there… not that he’d advertised his visit, or even given his mother advance notice of last night’s visit. Barb had tried to meet him, he was sure. He’d “just missed her” twice, this trip. He didn’t know what the sudden insistence was. He wondered if he should have deleted those voicemails.

And now she’d gotten into this departure area on her husband’s high-clearance security card, he’d damned well bet.

“Barbie,” his mother said lovingly.

“Go,” his brother urged him under his breath. Whatever was going on, Toby knew.

“Security window,” Bren said with a frozen smile. “Have to go. People waiting on the plane. Mum. Toby.—Barb.” He offered his hand. “Nice to see you. Glad you’re seeing to Mother. Kind of you to come.”

“Bren, dammit!” Barb flung herself into a hug. Bren could find no civil choice but to return it, however distantly. “I know” she murmured against his shirt, “I know you’re angry with me.”

“Not angry, Barb.” He did the most deliberately hateful thing he could think of, tipping up her tearful face and kissing her… on the cheek. “I’m glad for you. Glad you’re happy. Stay that way.”

“I’m not happy!” She seized his lapel, flung a hand behind his neck, and kissed him fiercely on the lips. Passive resistance didn’t do enough to resist it… at first: and then he found to his dim distress that he didn’t respond at all. Barb’s kisses were nothing foreign to him—longed-for, for years of his life. Her mouth wanted, tried, to warm his… but nothing happened.

He was disturbed. He turned from anger to feeling sorry for Barb and a little distressed about himself. For old times’ sake he tried to heal her embarrassment by returning the kiss, even passionately, tenderly… as much as he remembered how.

But still nothing happened between them—or, at least, nothing from his side.

Barb drew back with a stricken, troubled gaze. He gazed at her, wondering what she knew, or why his human body didn’t respond to another human being, why warmth didn’t flow, why reactions didn’t react. Pheromones were there; it was the old perfume, the very familiar smell of Barb and all Mospheira, to a nose acclimated to the mainland.

Interest wasn’t there. Couldn’t be resurrected. Too much water under the bridge. Too many “I’m sorrys.”

And for that one frozen moment he stood there staring into the face of the human woman he’d meant to marry just before the fracture… the human woman who, when the going had been rough, had fought his battles and risked her life—then married a quiet, high-clearance tech named Paul, opting to protect herself behind his security shield.

Could he blame her for that?

He didn’t, particularly, in cold blood. But from dismayed at himself, he transited to angry at her. It wasn’t about the marriage; the anger was all for her campaign to get him back, and doing it by attending on his mother, running her errands.

What in helldid Barb think she was doing? was the first subsurface question. Why did she come now? Why did she court his mother, for God’s sake?

And looking into her face as he did, he didn’t truly know. One lonely woman befriending another? One woman who hadn’t been lucky in love, crossing generations to find a kindred soul, as close to love as possible?

In Barb’s paralysis, in that long, stricken stare… he disengaged, and with his face burning, he hugged Toby, hugged his mother, whispered a farewell, grabbed up his computer case, and followed the carpet to the waiting plane, head down, eyes on the carpet underfoot.

“Bren!” Barb shouted after him. Angry. Oh, damn, yes. Now she was angry. His nerves knew that voice, and for both their sakes, he hoped Barb wasangry… angry enough to get on with her life. Angry enough to divorce her new husband, or settle down and live with the choice she’d made three years ago—angry enough just to do something toward a future of her own. Whatever that choice eventually was, it wouldn’t be his choice, not any longer. It wasn’t his mother’s responsibility, either.

They couldn’t take up again where they’d left off. It wasn’t just the fact she’d married. It was the fact that he himself was no longer the Bren Cameron she knew. Then, he’d been a maker of dictionaries and a translator… until his life had exploded and put her in danger she’d been lucky to escape. He couldn’t go back to that safe anonymity now. Couldn’t join his mother’s fantasy, or Barb’s, that that anonymity would ever exist again. There was a reason for this concrete isolation.

And a great deal that was human wasn’t within his power to choose anymore. He’d already lost everyone on the island; he was about to lose his only human companion on the mainland. He wasn’t happy about it, but that was the choice far higher powers made.

He climbed the metal steps to the hatch of the airliner and still didn’t look back, refusing to give Barb a shred of encouragement, even if it meant he didn’t look back for his brother and his mother, either. His mother’s health wasfragile. He had reason to worry about her. Toby had had threats on his life and his family’s lives, because of him. And Barb had been a target … and knew it. Now she wasn’t, and she couldn’t let well enough alone.

His mother and his brother would come to the mainland for visits. Barb, on the other hand, couldn’t get the requisite pass—no matter how powerful her husband’s influence—because the visa depended on the atevi government, not her husband’s security clearance in the human one.

And doubtless she was upset about that, too. Barb wasn’t used to no. She really hated that word. It’s overwas another thing she’d made up her mind not to hear. I regularly sleep with someone elsewas damned sure outside her comprehension. If she knew, and knew that individual wasn’t human, that might figure in her determination.

But he hoped to hell not even his brother knew… certainly not Barb, because the next step was his mother knowing and the third was the whole island continent knowing.

“Mr. Cameron.” A human steward welcomed him aboard and took his formal coat as he shed it.

In that process he scanned the narrow confines of a jet configured for luxury. The passenger shell he’d used in the plane that had previously run this route had always sat as a removable inclusion in the hull just ahead of dried peas and fresh flowers; but this sleek Patinandi Aerospace number, the aiji’s plane, had tapestry for a carpet runner and seat upholstery of ornate atevi needlework. When it wasn’t ferrying the paidhi across the straits, it did transcontinental courtesy service for the aiji’s staff and guests… and the seats and furnishings were all to atevi scale.

Consequently, four Mospheiran diplomats sat like ten-year-old children in large-scale chairs, grouped around what was, relative to the chairs, a low table… sipping Mospheiran alcoholic beverages from atevi-scale glassware.

They’d be oblivious before they landed, if they didn’t watch themselves.

He knew who was who in the group, having been briefed; knew two of the four in the mission prior to this meeting, at least remotely: Ben Feldman was a spare, unathletic young man thinning at the temples, Kate Shugart, a woman with close-cut, dull brown hair drawn back in a clip—she’d trained to have his job, but the job had ceased to exist, and she’d never made the grade. Those two of the four were Shawn Tyers’ people, old hands in the Foreign Office. He trusted Shawn, or he had trusted Shawn—with his life, while he’d been an official working for the Foreign Office.

The other two… however…

He walked to the group, still with the taste of Barb’s lips on his mouth and a large breakfast queasy in his stomach. Shawn hadn’t briefed him about this more than to remind him Mospheira had applied to go to space, and to say that the aiji in Shejidan had cleared their mission most unexpectedly. They’d felt no choice but to go, immediately.

More, Shawn had said, the station in orbit had just called its second and lastrepresentative home, on this impending flight. A decision that would affect his work… profoundly.

And Tabini-aiji had cleared it.

It was one huge, upsetting mess, and Shawn couldn’t brief him fully, not any longer. They served different governments. He could only say the Mospheiran government wasn’t disposed to say no when the aiji approved a chance they’d looked to take, oh, a year to clear…

Mospheirans never had understood how fast the aiji could move when he wanted to.

The question was why the aiji wanted to.

The shuttle was still in testing; the payload for said test had been set and calculated to a fare-thee-well… one had to be atevi to fully comprehend just what manner of disruption such a change posed. Inconvenient, yes, but more to the point profoundly disturbing to a people whose culture revolved around felicitousnumerical associations. Change one kilo of payload, and the entire mission might need to be redesigned.

It was more than Barb’s maneuver that had his stomach in a knot.

He could imagine Lord Brominandi making his speech in the legislature: Let the fool humans risk their necks in a shuttle that had only made four prior flights. Mospheirans suddenly declared they wanted seats, just seats, nothing major in the way of baggage, Shawn had told him, no great additional mass… oh, let the shuttle just carry enough fuel. No great problem. No recalculation at all, oh, no, nothing of the kind.

He was appalled. Infuriated. It was hisshuttle, dammit, and even the possibility of a glitch-up and the loss of the shuttle turned his blood cold. God, the whole program set at incalculable risk. For what?

And Tabini cleared it to fly?

But the humans in orbit had called their interpreters home, first the one on Mospheira, which hadn’t alarmed anyone on the mainland. It was expected, though early.

And they’d thought nothing of it when, on the next turnaround with the only space shuttle in existence, thisturnaround, this last flight… they’d sent down a senior staffer from the station to replace, so he and Tabini had assumed, Yolanda Mercheson as the human-to-human paidhi.

But when Shawn so innocently announced that the station had called home the only other human being on the mainland, the only human being he had regular contact with, to go back to the ship that had sent him down… a fait accompli. No negotiation, no request, no concession to protocols or his plans…

Thathad been cause for alarm.

And had he only found out about that change in plans when the shuttle had landed and deposited said senior staffer unannounced on mainland soil, he might have been able to address those alarms. Instead, he’d been shipped off to Mospheira, delivering that same senior staffer from the station, one Trent Cope, to Shawn’s superiors, and now he had to learn of Jase’s imminent departure from a former colleague who had no idea the bombshell he’d been dropping.

Yolanda recalled to the station. Now Jase leaving without notice…

Now Tabini-aiji cleared a human mission to go into orbit and deal with the situation on the station before Tabini’s own representatives could go aloft?

He was more than appalled. He was furious. And having walked onto the plane with the matter with Barb simmering, an unreasoning fury boiled up in him at the sight of human smiles. The friendly greetings of former junior staffers in the Foreign Office grated on his nerves, and two senior staffers from Science and Commerce whose provenance he more than doubted were just the topping on the affair.

He knew damned well what the thinking on the island was: Mercheson had gone up with what shecould report after her sojourn on the planet, and now the island government grew nervous about what she wouldreport about them… justifiably, counting that certain injudicious fools on Mospheira had started shooting at each other in her witness.

The human government had changed three years ago, dumped out George Barrulin and his cronies, put in Hampton Durant as president… cleaned house, so to speak. Mercheson had fled the island briefly for the atevi-ruled mainland, feeling her life in danger among the human population. When the political dust had settled, then she’d gone back to her job… and as of a month ago was up in orbit spilling all the island’s sins to the Pilots’ Guild.

Which was the reason a shuttle existed: the ship that had brought his ancestors to this planet had left again, lost itself for a couple of centuries and then come back to find the space station mothballed, the labor force become colonists on the planet, and the species that owned the planet more or less in charge, despite the delusions of the island that they were the superior species. The humans on the planet had lost a war, agreed to turn over their technology step by step so as not to disrupt the world economy, and never quite grasped the fact that turning over computer science to the mathematically gifted atevi had let the genie loose. Humans on Mospheira weren’t the most technologically advanced beings on the planet… not any longer.

And that technological transfer, two hundred years of it, was at an end, as regarded Mospheira passing technology to the atevi government in Shejidan. Right now the only humans with anything to teach the atevi were in orbit, the crew of the returning starship… the Pilots’ Guild; and the atevi government had turned its attention in that direction. As a consequence, the paidhi, the human interpreter to the atevi, currently one Bren Cameron, as an officer of the Mospheiran Foreign Office, was out of a job; the paidhiin, Bren Cameron, Yolanda Mercheson and Jase Graham, as officers of the atevi government and the Pilots’ Guild respectively, were the interpreters of the new order of business.

Now the ship, as if oblivious to the highly specialized nature of that post, called back both their experienced paidhiin, sent a new man down who couldn’t keep his meals down, and he… he shared a plane with an unexpected human delegation, on their way to orbit, on hisspace shuttle.

Shawn Tyers, always trustable, had not quite answered why they scrambled to this sudden order from Mospheira, when he’d asked the blunt question. People are nervous, had been Shawn’s answer. Average people are nervous. They called Mercheson back.

One could damned well bet they were nervous.

“Mr. Cameron.” Ben Feldman, his own age, courteously rose out of his chair to welcome him with a handshake. “We’ve met.”

He wanted to choke the life out of all of them. But diplomats didn’t have that luxury. He smiled, instead. “Bren, if you will. Ben, Katherine…”

“Kate.” Kate got up, offered a hand, and the portly gray-haired man rose. “Tom Lund.”

And the gray-haired, long-nosed woman: “Ginny Kroger, Science. Dr. Ginny Kroger. Pleased to meet you.”

VirginiaKroger. Out of Science. He knew that name, put a face with it, one of the old guard. And Tom Lund, from Commerce… that was a department of the government just a little too close to Gaylord Hanks and George Barrulin, whose influence had damned near taken the world to war three years ago. Their brilliant management was whyMospheira was renting seats on an atevi shuttle… that and the fact that a few billion years of geologic time hadn’t put titanium, aluminum, iron, and a dozen other needful substances in reach of the islanders, where the current aiji’s predecessors had settled human colonists.

“You’re certainly a surprise,” Bren said. “What prompted this sudden hurry?”

“The aiji,” Lund said as they sat down. “Cleared the visas, like that. No warning. We’ve learned… we were ready, even if we didn’t expect it.”

“What—pardon my bluntness—” He suffered a moment of desperation, seeing a thoroughly unpleasant situation shaping up in what had been the world’s clear course to the future. “What do you expect to get, up there?”

He,at thirty, was the veteran diplomat. The people he faced, with gray hair in the mix, were utter newcomers to the trade.

No one on Mospheira but him had actually negotiated with a foreign power in two hundred years. The Mospheirans from their origins had not been models of good sense in international relations… and now they were rushing to insert themselves and their lack of expertise between two armed powers which had had a diplomatic contact proceeding fairly well and without incident.

And they were doing it at the very moment that other armed power pulled its diplomats back without explanation.

He kept a pleasant expression on his face, knowing he was rattled by the whole situation. He certainly didn’t intend to blow up the interface, not with people he knew were going to go do their best to double-deal the atevi andthe Pilots’ Guild. He knew it wasn’t the friendliest question, but he asked it. “Is this a test run, or is there something specific you intend to do up there?”

“I beg your pardon,” Lund said in distress.

“Serious and sober question. I’m worried. Isthere a reason for rushing up there?”

He saw the flicker of thoughts through various eyes… their remembrance, doubtless, that though they were talking to a human being, and though they were on a first name basis, he didn’t work for the Foreign Office anymore… they were talking, in effect, to the aiji’s representative. The aiji had just cleared them to go, but the aiji could unclear it.

“It’s your government’s decision,” Ginny Kroger said, leaning forward. “We filed the request. We had word last night it was cleared. On your own advice, we cooperate, Mr. Cameron. I believe that is your advice.”

He couldn’t deny that, and he gathered up his self-control, such as still existed. “I don’t deny that.” So it wasTabini-aiji’s doing, more than theirs. The ruler of the major civilization in the world had just reacted to the move the Pilots’ Guild had made, serially recalling theirambassadors for consultation, in effect, and sent up, not his own people, but a complete wild card… a handful of Mospheiran experts, two from the ivory towers of University and State, and two old hands in island intrigue.

God, he said to himself, uneasy at the possibilities, and belted in.

“Then I understand what he’s doing.” he said.

“Do you?” Lund questioned. “That’s ahead of anyone in the State Department.”

“Atevi occasionally grant audacious requests when they’re made… just to observe the outcome, even in serious matters. A roll of the dice, you might say. Watching where they fall.”

He shot a small glance at the two translators, looking for any sign of comprehension, and it troubled him that only one, Feldman, seemed to twig to the suggestion it was a test of human intentions; but maybe Shugart was practicing that other atevi habit: inscrutability.

“You sent a mission request through.” He let the implied accusation enter his voice. “I didn’t get it.”

The reply and confirmation of the mission had almost certainly come out of Mospheira in the Ragi language, translated by some junior functionary, which was against Foreign Office policy, and he knew Sonja Podesta, an old friend, head of the Foreign Office these days, had to have authorized that message… or had it slipped past her.

But past Shawn, her superior in the State Department? Shawn, who had just briefed him?

It was not a pleasant thought that Shawn might deliberately have tried to put one past him, and lied about it face-to-face.

“The transmission missed you, sir.” Lund seemed quite anxious to avert his suspicion. “We had no idea you were already on the way to the island.”

“Indeed it did miss me. How it got cleared without my knowing is another matter.”

“If there’s any irregularity,” Lund said, “it certainly wasn’t intended.”

“On your part, I well believe.”

“At higher level,” Kroger said. “We meticulously respect the agreements. We had no idea the request was going through your office in your absence. We did not expect this.”

It had been intercepted by someone on the mainland with access to his messages, which could only be the atevi Messengers’ Guild, or his own staff—

Or Tabini’s security.

And, routed to Tabini-aiji, the unseasonable, foolhardy request had been granted.

He wished he’d skipped the hearty breakfast. The search of the grate… the missing cufflink was evident, as he sat. The aiji’s representative was not at his best, in any sense. He’d been sandbagged by his former friends in the State Department, by the President of Mospheira, who was supposed to be sane, and now he learned possibly there was a leak in the Messengers’ Guild… an organization which had not been his best friends on the mainland, which had not been loyal to Tabini. Thatcould be a scary problem.

But leaks in that Guild certainly didn’t get their results approved by the aiji, not unless the message had come in such a public fashion that there was no face-saving alternative but to grant the request. He didn’t know what he might be flying into. A government crisis, very likely.

Distrusting the Messengers’ Guild didn’t encourage him to try a phone call.

The hatch had shut some moments ago, unremarked in the exchange. The plane began its taxi out and away from the building. The alcohol-fed cheerfulness was not quite what it had been, and they weren’t even on the runway yet.

“Well,” Bren said, deciding to be mollified, at least for their benefit, “well, I understand. My apologies for my anxiousness. But I can’t stress enough how delicate the situation is. The aiji didn’t get any advance word from the Pilots’ Guild when they recalled Mercheson and now Jase Graham. He may have felt sending you was tit for tat, with them.”

That provoked a little thought among the experienced seniors.

“The atevi have been pushed pretty hard,” Kate Shugart said very quietly, in her junior, mere-translator status. Three of the five people present knew at gut level how wrong it was to shove badly-done messages through the system. “A great deal of change, when just a few years ago we were debating advanced computers.”

… Carefully examining the social fabric in the process, to be sure what they released into atevi hands didn’t end up starting a war or breaking down atevi society. Atevi had invented the railroad for themselves; humans had lately contributed the culturally dangerous concepts of fast food and entertainment on television, trying not to bring on a second atevi-human war.

Now it was rocket science. And a reported contact with some species outside the solar system, technologically advanced and hostile. The Pilots’ Guild had come running home with trouble just over the horizon… and the world had found itself no longer in a space race for orbit and the old, deteriorating station, but in a climb simultaneously for dominance in decision-making and for survival… against a species the Pilots’ Guild had somehow provoked.

Not a pleasant packet of news for the world, that had been, three years ago.

Atevi, who didn’t universally favor technological imports, suddenly had to take command of their own planet or abdicate in favor of the human Mospheirans andthe human Pilots’ Guild, who historically didn’t like each other and who weren’t compatible with atevi.

And in order for atevi to take command, they had to build a ground-to-space vehicle from a design the Pilots’ Guild handed them, and haul their whole economy, their materials science, and all their industry into line with the effort.

It wasn’t humanlypossible. If atevi hadn’t been a continent-spanning civilization and a constitutional monarchy to boot, with rocketry already in progress, they couldn’t possibly have done it… certainly not in his lifetime. Witness the efforts of the Mospheirans, who’d complained about the tax subsidy for their only aircraft manufacturer, and who’d let the company go. Now they were buying their planes from an atevi manufacturer, and had no recourse but to pay for seats on the atevi shuttle to orbit.

He knew what Tabini was charging them, and the citizens hadn’t yet felt the tax bite.

“If the shuttle should fail,” Bren remarked, likewise quietly, as the plane turned onto the runway and gathered speed, “if the shuttle has anysignificant problem, there would be another War of the Landing. Not could. Would. That’s what we constantly risk. Forgive me for the interrogation; I’m supposed to have translated that request, and somehow it catapulted past me. It’s always dangerous in atevi society when things don’t follow routine channels.”

“We’re not in danger now,are we?” This from Ben Feldman, who did understand the risk, as the plane left the ground.

“I have some concern,” Bren said. “I want to be absolutely sure you don’t walk into something. You’re sure that visa really came from Tabini’s office.”

“It came with verification,” Lund said. “You want to see the papers?”

“ Thatwouldn’t tell me,” Bren said. He didn’t intend to reveal any of his doubts of the Messengers’ Guild, or of instabilities he knew of, not to adversarial negotiators. “What specifically are your arrangements? Who’s meeting you?”

“Straight to the space center,” Kroger said, looking worried. “Officials of that center.”

“That’s good. That’s the arrangement as it should be,” Bren said. “Probably it did come from the aiji’s office.” He’d disturbed his seatmates, he saw. He wasn’t in the least sorry to have done it. Nobody in the world as it was—or above it—should be as naive as Mospheirans tended to be about anything outside their own politics. “Which means he wants this to happen. What’s your job up there?”

“We aren’t empowered to tell you,” Kroger said.

“You’re empowered to negotiate.”

“With the station.”

“ With the crew of the ship,” Bren said in a low voice. “ Wewere the station, weren’t we, before the Landing?”

Therewas the old hot button, the privileges of the Guild, the lack of basic rights of the colonists, once in-flight emergency put the crew in total charge of the mission… once a ship went far, far off-course and the crew couldn’t get them to any recognizable navigation point, a long, long time ago. The colonists weren’t supposed to land. They had. The Guild had argued for respect of the natives and no landing, and had wanted to stay in space.

They certainly had. There was no Guild craft that could land and no Guild pilot that could fly in atmosphere. All that was lost.

The Guild right now didn’t want to fly in atmosphere. They wanted the station manned, their ship refurbished. They wanted labor, the same as they’d always wanted.

Mospheirans were fit to be that labor… speaking the same language, having the same biology. Mospheirans, however, were of two minds: those whose ancestors had been high-status techs on the station were inclined to be pro-space; those whose ancestors had done the brute-force mining and died in droves were inclined not to.

What do you want?was a loaded question, regarding any delegation of Mospheirans going to talk to the Pilots’ Guild.

“We’re basically fact-finding,” Lund said.

“Find out what they’re up to?”

Kroger shrugged.

“Not hostile to the aiji’s position,” Bren said. “Fact-finding. The big question is… are the aliens real? Did they really find something out there? I’ve worked with Jase Graham very closely for three years… and I believe him.”

They’d reached altitude. He felt the plane level out.

“And does the aiji hold that attitude?” Lund asked.

“Good question. Because I do, he tends to. He pushed for the space program, over some objection, as you may remember. He’s the one who’s enabled this whole program to work. The Guild up there has to understand… do anythingto jeopardize Tabini’s position and there is no shuttle, no program, no resources, no ticket. Alpha Base, gentleman, ladies. Alpha Base all over again.”

Every paidhi-candidate visited that island site, where the clock stood perpetually at 9:18.

Humans floating down to freedom on their petal sails had settled wholeheartedly into atevi culture and offered their technology, blithely crossed associational lines with no idea in the world of the danger they were in. Humans hadn’t… generally couldn’t… learn the language to any great fluency, and because humans had never twigged to the damage they were doing, because atevi themselves hadn’t comprehended completely what the cost of the gifts was… it all had blown up suddenly, and that clock on the island had stopped, precisely at 9:18, on the morning the illusion had gone up in flames.

After that, the aiji who won had settled the human survivors on Mospheira, and appointed the first of the paidhiin, the rare human who could tiptoe through the language.

“We’ve read your paper,” Ben said earnestly.

Yes, they’d read it, and done what they’d done, and gotten permission from the aiji for this flight, nudging the aiji’s precedence for the shuttle he’d built.

Considering Mospheiran history, why was he not amazed at even the linguists had missed the point?

“Well,” he said, seeing there was nowhere to go with the discussion, “well, you’re on your way, and likely it will work. I just ask… in all frankness… that future conversations with the atevi come by channels.”

“I’ll be frank, too,” Lund said, “relying on your discretion… the Secretary of State insists you can be trusted.”

He gave a nod. “In good will, at least. I doreport to the aiji.”

“We aren’t interested in establishing another human government in orbit. They say they’ve found hostile aliens out there. They need work crews to fuel their ship and bring the station back into operation, and if your aiji is willing to supply those crews, and if some humans want to go up there and do it, fine. But does the aiji understand the fatality rate?”

“The aiji does understand that,” Bren said. “I explained it very thoroughly. And neither human nor atevi workers are going to work without protection.”

“And he takes that position. Absolutely.—Or can we say he cares ?”

That, from a Mospheiran of Lund’s background, was a sensitive, intelligent question. “Yes and no. The short version: atevi reproductive and survival sense are wound together in man’chi. It’s a grouping instinct as solid as the mating urge, not gender specific. If a person isn’t in your man’chi, no, you don’t care. If they’re inside your man’chi, you all have the same goal anyway, give or take the generational quarrels. But that’s the average atevi. An aiji has no man’chi upward, and doesn’t give a damn; but he holds together the man’chi of his entire association. If he wastes that devotion, the association will take offense, pull apart, fragment violently, and kill him. They care. Passionately, at gut level, in emotions we don’t feel, the way they don’t feel ours. The aiji doesn’t throw away lives. Biologically, he’s driven to protect them, they have a drive to protect him, everybody cares. Passionately. There’s no chance he’ll tolerate conditions such as our ancestors tolerated. On the question of workers in orbit, you can depend on a united front. Protection, or no workers. He won’t put up with any Guild notion of high-risk operations that don’t benefit the atevi. Second… he’ll constantly be asking what benefit an action is to his association. As will you, I’m well sure, on Mospheira’s behalf. The aiji has everything the Guild’s come to extract from this planet; you have human understanding of how the Guild thinks. It wouldn’t serve either of us to give away the keys to those resources. The atevi halfway understand Mospheirans, as far as they understand any humans. They knowthey don’t understand the Guild.”

“We can’t speak to each other,” Kroger said. “We and the atevi, we and the Pilots’ Guild. We had you to interpret, and you left… pardon me, but left is the word. Then we had Yolanda Mercheson, and shewas called back. We don’t know what this new man represents. We’re rather well without resources. Our mission is to reestablish that understanding.”

“Certainly I agree with that. If you figure out the Guild… tell me. I’ll be interested.”

That raised a small amusement. Small and short.

“What do you think the Guild wants, sending this new man…”

“Cope. Trent Cope.”

“What’s he like?”

Bren shrugged. “Senior to Graham and Mercheson. Probably higher rank. Sicker than seasick, looking at a horizon. Hard to get to know a man when he’s heaving his guts up and drugged half-sensible.”

“I hope it doesn’t work the other way,” Lund said.

He’d opted to travel with Cope, having shepherded Jase through his initiation to planetary phenomena. He’d not known then that Jase would get a recall order; not a clue of it. He hadn’t emotionally reckoned with that hard hit, which he’d only found out about this morning.

He didn’t want to think of it, just wanted to get back to his own apartment in the capital, where he and Jase could have a day… at least a day before the scheduled launch… to sort out what they did think. He was in an informational blackout, trying to get back to deal with Jase… and Tabini-aiji’s orders packed him in with the Mospheiran delegation who was part and parcel of the same crossed signals.

“The atevi report a little nausea,” he said. It was only atevi pilots who’d been in space, testing the shuttle. Docking. There was a scary operation. “I won’t bias you toward it, I hope.”

“I hope not,” Lund said.

Kroger had fallen silent. Thinking, perhaps. Or keeping her own counsel. The two juniors were very quiet.

Then Kroger asked: “What kind of report do you think Yolanda Mercheson’s given?”

Mercheson had fled to the mainland, lived in his household for half a year of her tenure here; but once the government looked stable on Mospheira, she’d gone back. She’d spent most of her time afterward on Mospheira, alone in the culture, miserably unhappy: he knew that. She didn’t love Jase passionately, but they’d made love; they weren’t working partners, but they were friends of a desperate sort, just the only available recourse for a woman otherwise on the ragged edge of tolerating her exile. Mercheson’s early recall to the ship had seemed a solution, not a problem. What she and Jase had had… he wanted no part of, but understood.

That part wasn’t the Mospheirans’ business.

“A fair report,” he said. “She was homesick for the ship. But she bore no ill will to Mospheira, none at all.”

“But she will have given a report to the Guild,” Lund said.

“Definitely. As Jase will of us.”

“A good report?”

“I think so. I think both of them will. There’s no percentage in creating any rift… any negative report, whatever. They’ve sent Cope down, as I trust we’ll get someone for Jase’s spot on the next flight down.” He wasn’t looking forward to it, not at all. Losing Jase still hit him hard… harder than he’d ever anticipated. It might be why he’d reacted as he had to Barb; it might be why he’d gone into this conversation armed and angry. “I don’t have to say this to the two from the FO; but listen to your two advisors. You speak the Guild’s language; but don’t assume that the words mean the same things after two hundred years’ separation. Most of the differences will be stupid, small things; a few could be really significant.” He glanced at Feldman and Shugart. “They know.”

“We trust they know,” Kroger cautioned.

“I know these two,” Bren said. “They’re good.” The blushes were irrelevant to him. He meant what he said. “We’ve only the length of this flight for me to brief you on what we know about the Guild, as I gather the aiji would intend. Expect the aiji to support the agreement between our associations… and to oppose any independent agreements with the Pilots’ Guild. The aiji won’t undermine you. You work with him, I’ll work with you, and that’s far, far better assurance than you’ll ever have out of the Pilots’ Guild, even if they hand you the keys to the starship. We both know the history, better than the aiji does. We know it in the gut.”

“We do,” Kroger said. “And that’s exactly right. A look-see into the workings of the Guild. Anything you know is welcome.”

“I trust Mercheson’s motives; but given the Guild’s history, yes, I’m cautious. They’ll want speed. We want a minimum of funerals. But we do take seriously the fear that sent them running back here. Jase Graham believes it. I’d stake my life on it being true. And if it is, either a band of angry aliens offended by the Guild’s choice of real estate will come here to press their quarrel, or they won’t. And if we equip that ship to fly again… we equip the Guildto deal with the situation that’s going to affect the whole planet for good or for ill. We on the mainland aren’t sure about the goodpart of it. We want to find out what the Guild knows, bottom line, and then apply our own experience to it, for what good that can do. If we have to fight, and if whatever’s out there is that advanced, we’ve got a problem in dealing with the Guild that’s far beyond Mospheira’s old quarrels with them. A very mutual problem. Neither of our species wants to provide labor for fools, and neither of our species wants to take for granted that a Guild war is our war.”

“We’re in agreement on that,” Lund said.

The mood improved. The steward came by and wondered what they would drink with their brunch.

It was small talk then, on recent history, Jase’s two-parachute landing, the aiji’s relations with the island, the building of a second and third shuttle… the governments were no longer at odds, both of them looking anxiously at the sky.

Atevi mutating everything they’d learned about computers and playing games with mathematics… he didn’t mention that—didn’t understand it, for one thing. The ateva who was working on the most abstruse part of it was likely a genius… a mathematical genius, in a species that did math as naturally as they breathed; damned right he didn’t understand it, but he suspected a truth he couldn’t prove, that atevi had sailed right past the University on Mospheira and maybe past anything in the lost library, the one they’d lost in the War… no way to prove it. But the Astronomer Emeritus scribbled away, and wise atevi heads nodded; his students thought him brilliant, and the occasional number counters and philosophical fanatics who traditionally made aijiin nervous had focused their energies on the Astronomer’s ongoing work, too stunned, apparently, or too outclassed to take their sectarian battles onto hischalkboard.

A lovable, slightly otherworldly fellow… there was the devil in the design, sweetly philosophical, thinking away, building a cosmos theory that didn’t battle the traditional atevi philosophies, just lapped away at the sand beneath them.

The two from the Foreign Office, queried by the steward regarding refills, shot over curiously shy glances, as if they feared to open their mouths even to order drinks: advisors in private, no rank. Bren figured that… terrified of the possibilities, because they were the ones who really knew how dangerous the atevi-human interface was… how explosive and how treacherous.

Lund jovially ordered another martini, Kroger the same. The two translators wanted beers, and Bren asked for vodka and fruit juice.

The steward went about his business.

Lund said, when the man was out of hearing in the general roar of the engines, “How long do you figure this new man will stay down here?”

Cope: deposited on atevi soil some four weeks ago, a man tamely landed via the shuttle instead of flung at the planet the way his predecessors had had to come down… a clerical-looking fellow who’d moved by night and avoided the open sky. They’d learned with Jason. He’d been too sick to go on duty for several weeks… lodged in the space center, since atevi security, sensing irregularity and possibly espionage in his refusal to budge to go to the island, had not let him out of the facility. Jase had gone there for meetings; Cope remained sickened by everything, the smells, the irregularity of lights, the flickering of fluorescent.

And now Cope was on Mospheira, his senses being assaulted by an entire new set of sights and smells. He’d been, when Bren left him, lying on his new bed, not daring to venture far from his new, completely enclosed, apartments. How long would he stay?

“I have no idea,” Bren said. “To judge by Jase’s situation, he may not know, himself. Mostly, he was sick for four weeks. Possibly younger systems adjust better. We don’t know.” Jase had said… watch him. Watch him. “I’d be damned careful of his opinion. I said that to Shawn Tyers when I met with him, and I’ll say it to you, since you’re going into direct contact with the Guild. He’s definitely senior to Mercheson and to Graham. He’s very sharp, possibly malingering, very much on his own agenda, probably intends to check up on everything Mercheson reported when she went back up.”

“Alarming.”

“Since Mercheson didn’t lie, I doubt it’s a problem. That’s what I know. He’ll be looking for resources. He’ll be testing whether the island’s resources exist. Observing the geology from space will tell them some things. Not all. Not whether Mospheirans will work with them, either. Now that there’s a space shuttle and safer access, the ship can risk higher-level personnel down on the planetary surface. And that’s exactly what Cope is.” He had a suspicion the elder members of this group might have friends in the old regime and said it anyway: “The Heritage Party is an embarrassment I hope he doesn’t encounter, but he may try to investigate that, too.”

The drinks arrived, a small break, a welcome small confusion in the sorting-out of orders and napkins.

“To your mission,” Bren proposed then, having shot his small dart at the Heritage Party, the pro-spacers who thought humankind had a natural right to everything in sight. “Here’s to tolerance.”

“To the aiji and his court,” Lund said, “and an alliance of purpose.”

Bren sipped his drink, with, at a slight bump, a glance out the window. Billowing cumulus, slate gray in spots. “Ah, spring over the straits. We’re in for a little chop for an hour.”

“Of course,” Kroger said. “They just served the drinks.”

Old joke, old as mankind, in the general goings-on of Mospheiran air travel, most of it in smaller, slower planes. General relaxation. This was, by default, the longest flight any Mospheiran who wasn’t the paidhi had ever made, except a handful of the paidhi’s friends and family; and those generally came with Toby, on the boat, and to the seaside estate. Mospheiran jet service was limited to the island, not flying so high, nor so long between landings.

“So…” Kroger asked, then, “will we meetatevi when we land?”

The interspecies interface was so meticulously ordered, so bound in regulations, it was a real possibility they would not meet atevi. They weren’t to speak to atevi; that was the law. Atevi… well, atevi would do as they thought they could, and thank God one species of the two adored the law… atevi had a very fuzzy, constantly shifting concept of right and wrong, man’chi-guided and solid as a rock if one knew where man’chi lay.

But written orders and nonspeaking attendants would get them from one place to the other… granted the Messengers’ Guild hadn’t run amok and seized power in the four days he’d been gone, granted Jase was still mediating the paidhi’s office, amid his sudden packing…

God, he was going to miss Jase. He’d be alone… he’d been alone, but he’d gotten used to Jase being there…

“I’m reasonably sure there’ll be an official escort,” Bren said, “Don’t expect them to speak Mosphei’. Don’t correct their pronunciation of your names. They’ll pick what they can pronounce.” Ben and Kate knew how their names would turn out. Atevi would likely adjust Ginny to Gin, in uniformity with her companions, for reasons of felicity… which would take an hour in themselves to explain to the uninitiated in number theory. Fortunately and by chance, none of the names carried particularly funny or infelicitous meanings in Ragi. “Bow. Don’t smile. Don’t expect them to.”

“But you converse,” Ben said quietly, as if saying he could fly.

“Practice,” Bren said with irony. Atevi counted items in sets faster than the eye could blink and either took offense or made linguistic accommodations on the fly. “Long practice.” Not counting hours and hours of math, until he breathed it; not counting becoming so sensitive to atevi expectation that he had analyzed what was wrong with Kroger’s lapel-pin the moment they met, and thought as they entered atevi air space about offering the woman a flower to stick in it… but she was going straight to the space center, and the atevi dealing with strangers expected strangeness: it was all right. “Just use the children’s language. Nothing more. They’ll understand.”

“No turning back now,” Kate said, out of a long silence.

Well, there was. There was a chance of landing and riding the plane back to the island, mission forgotten. But diplomats hated like hell to meet an absolute and public rebuke, or to run in terror.

Lunch arrived, in some haste. The plane met increasing chop, on a direct flight into a security window opened by coastal defenses, and it wouldn’t dare deviate in altitude without a great deal of to-ing and fro-ing on the radio. Possibly they were trying that.

The plane hit a pocket. Bren adjusted his glass of ice melt on his way to his lips, waited, then took a sip.

Human crews.

Human crews flew atevi-made planes; atevi still didn’t often land in or take off from the capital of Mospheira. Mospheiran pilots were fiercely jealous of their few long routes, particularly in this day of space shuttles, nationalistically arguing that atevi pilots had a continent to fly in. These days, too, after doing in the aircraft industry, the legislature protected the handful of highly skilled Mospheiran pilots as a major national defense asset.

The human pilots achedfor a shot at the shuttle. He’d heard that. He’d talked to them, saw the hope they had, but that honor Tabini wouldn’t cede to humans, not yet, and for more than national pride. Tabini’s pilots, experienced in long transcontinental flights, were an asset in the negotiations for atevi rights in space, on the station… to the solar system.

Politics, politics, politics. Everything, even that, was politics, depressing thought… it was the one matter in which he meant to make a change in favor of humans if there came a chance. Atevi had taken to the skies, but the same fluidity that they applied to the law they tended to apply to flight rules… hence the very conspicuous insignia and paint job on the aiji’s plane. The flight crew they had was superb. The backup was, too. When they got down into the ranks of the bush pilots, the prospect was less favorable.

“Comfortable seats,” Tom said. “Over all. Chop’s not too bad.”

“Not bad,” Shugart agreed, about the time the plane hit a pocket.

The talk was like that, serious subjects exhausted. The rhythms and sounds of Mosphei’ hit his ears with idle chatter, good-bad, either-or, black-white, infelicitous two without a mitigating gesture.

Mosphei’ was like that. His mind had been like that, before he acculturated.

Fluent, but not instinctive. The spot-on atevi ability to see numerical sets was more than trained into children: it seemed to him atevi numeric perception might be co-equal with color perception, one of those things that just developed in infancy. It might be emotionally linked to recognition of parents, or safety, if atevi infants developed in any way like humans, and after centuries of sharing a planet without real contact, they just didn’t know. Whatever provoked aggression… maybe sexual response—that might be involved with pattern recognition in atevi. If it was sexual in any sense, it might be why, though children perceived the numbers, they were immune from responsibility, and spoke a number-neutral language. Again… no basis in research. His own observations were the leading edge of what humans did know; and atevi themselves hadn’t a clear notion of their linguistic past, by all he knew… archaeology was the province of hobbyists, not a well-defined science. Linguistics was something practiced by counters. Comparative biology was mostly practiced on the current paidhi, when an atevi physician had to patch him back together… and comparative psychology was what he and his bodyguard did on late winter evenings. He could only imagine what atevi did see, or what disagreeable visceral reaction certain nasty patterns evoked, as atevi had to imagine for themselves that humans somehow saw comfortable felicity and stability in pairs and twos…

Twos in marriage; twos in yes-no; twos in left hand and right hand.

The shuttle had had two hatches when they acquired the design. Atevi had changed very few things in the design they’d been handed, and the mathematicians had gone over it and over it trying to justify two hatches, even come to him in agonized inquiry whether he understood the logic of it… he didn’t. And with trepidations on all sides, there’d been a third hatch, with resultant structural changes. There had to be one exit, or three.

And, God, the other questions they’d come asking… the changes in materials science over the last three years…

He himself—with wise and capable advisors—had had to pass on how much of that technology ought to go sliding off into the general economy. Was it wise to turn industry immediately to ceramics, bypassing much of the development of exotic plastics? What were the economic costs, environmental costs, social costs… costs to tradition and stability, and dared they put a road through to a mine in one subassociation without granting a benefit to another?

Shejidan manufactured certain things. What did it do to the balance of power within the Western Association when Shejidan developed another, and unique, industry?

What did it mean emotionally to the relationship among atevi associations when that shuttle lifted from the runway at Shejidan, heart of the Ragi association, the aishidi’tat?

The decisions were all made, now… an incredible three short years after the shuttle began to take shape and form. Whatever mistakes he had made or avoided, atevi were in space now. The shuttle had made its first flight six months ago, proving the vessel, a disappointment to the aiji’s enemies, vindication for the aiji’s program of technological advancement.

The world hadn’t blown up. There hadn’t been a war. It had been a close call, on that one… but the Heritage Party on Mospheira had been turned back in the elections, the new administration had passed the last election with knowledgeable people still in office, still with public approval. There were still stupid moves, one of the most egregious in recent memory being the message that had launched this half-thought delegation and destined them for space before there was any atevi mission… but he would get to the bottom of it, quickly so, once he landed. He trusted he could smooth over whatever was going on. If it wasTabini’s retaliation against Jase’s recall, he understood it.

If Tabini was mad as hell and if some misdirected request from the Mospheiran State Department had brought this about, Shawn Tyers would owe him for straightening this out. But he rather inclined to the former theory: they want humans… let’s give them humans.

Let them ask again, what they will, and let us see where they temper their demands.

It was, certainly, a way of probing the other side’s intention. It was damned, bullheaded atevi mindset.

And it certainly wasn’t out of line with the way Tabini had dealt with his own species.

To be first at something… wasn’t in and of itself either good or felicitous in the numbers.

He thought about that point, idly conversing with his fellow passengers while the plane crossed the coast, maneuvering through bumpy skies and a rainstorm.

As they descended through the cloud base, he pointed out places of interest in the countryside, a river, a small town, and had an appreciative audience.

They were taking a fairly direct approach, not being routed to the south, as sometimes happened.

And within a shorter time than usual they were over Shejidan.

They’d cut three quarters of an hour off the usual time. By the time the plane was maneuvering for a landing, runnels of rain were tracking back over the windows, roofs occasionally appearing out of the gray.

“We’re awfully low,” Ben announced, peering downward, and then a sharp bank gave them a view down into the hillside residence-circles that, with their connecting walks, served somewhat as neighborhoods and streets.

The leveling of the wings gave them a grand view of the Bu-javid, the hill palace rising above the tiled, rain-grayed roofs of the common neighborhoods… footed with a pink neon glow in the general fading of the light.

“Is that the Bu-javid?” Kate asked.

“Yes,” Bren replied. “That’s the aiji’s residence, centermost.” So was his, but his wasn’t a tourist attraction, not, at least, to Mospheirans.

“Hotels below?” Ben asked, peering down.

The palace was a vast sprawl of a building with interior gardens and pools, skirted, these days, by a proliferation of businesses at the foot of the hill.

“Hotels. Neon lights and hotels.” It wasn’t his favorite change.

“Petitioners to the aiji,” Kroger said.

“That’s right.” Over changes atevi themselves chose, the paidhi had no veto, and Tabini hadn’t stopped it, though conservative atevi complained. Three years had seen a neon growth all through the city. The atevi thought it curious. It looked like downtown in the capital of Mospheira, and it afflicted his soul. “Anyone has the right to see the aiji, if he comes here, and the aiji will see he can come here, if he can’t afford it.”

The plane’s next bank brought a view of other neighborhoods past the window now, tiled roofs in varying shades of red. “There’s your ashiipattern,” he said for Ben and Kate. “See the geometry laid out. The unified walkways. Associations. Apparent to the eye once you know you’re not looking at our kind of boundaries. That’s what the first settlers ran afoul of. Never saw it.”

“Not a straight street in the place.”

“People walk a great deal more.”

“Well, thank God it won’t be for us to figure out.” Ginny’s face, a thin face with a multitude of faint freckles, caught the white light of the window as she looked out on the foreignness of an atevi city. “We’ve got enough problems.”

She hadn’t said a thing in a quarter hour. At this precise moment—maybe it was his imagination—she looked scared as hell.

The plane leveled out.

Stewards wordlessly collected the glasses, and they stayed belted in while the familiar signs glided past the window. They were on final approach to the airport.

“Can we see the shuttle from here?” Kate asked, craning forward.

“Not on this approach,” Bren said, and drew a deep breath, hoping he might find a stable, peaceful city… hoping his security would meet him. Hoping nothing had blown up… besides Jase’s unexpected orders.

He’d gotten far too used to company… psychological weak spot, he told himself. Shouldn’t have done it… shouldn’t have associations he couldn’t keep up. Gotten himself attached to someone he damned well knew would leave.

Unwise, in a man who’d made the professional choices he’d made.

Wheels touched down, squealed on wet pavement. The airport buildings rushed past, went slower.

Slower still.

Chapter 2

The plane braked to an easy turn on a rain-puddled taxiway and rolled toward the security zone while the stewards reunited passengers and coats.

They reached a sedate stop, and there followed the immediate, familiar growl of the ladder-truck.

All four of Bren’s seatmates, putting on their coats, simultaneously developed the same angle of furtive small stares toward the windows, dignified, not wishing to be seen staring as the ladder-truck moved up. But at the approach of the first atevi personnel, the first atevi they would ever have seen in the flesh, they stared. Ben and Kate had spent years studying and translating the language, but they had never seen the species who owned the planet they lived on; Ginny and Tom had no association whatever with atevi but trade and scientific exchange.

Bren himself fully expected the ladder-shaking rush of giants up the aluminum steps to meet the opening hatch. He didn’t stare, rather composed himself to court standards, as the two atevi he hoped would have come to meet him arrived in the hatchway… Banichi and Jago, senior pair of the four who guarded him: black skinned, black-haired, golden-eyed, in the black leather and silver of the Assassins’ Guild, against whose size they all looked like children.

His bodyguard, appointed by Tabini-aiji: his dearest friends, humanly speaking… and not friends: he was their duty, their association, as atevi felt things.

Human friends, even family, might desert you for very valid emotional reasons, even leave you for hire; and when he was on Mospheira, the human ways crept into his bloodstream and gave nesting room for doubts. But this pair, not being insane, wouldn’t leave him except when duty took him overseas, where the law wouldn’t let them go… and the moment they could rejoin him, sure as sunset, here they were.

They found themselves facing strangers, probably no surprise to them, but their polite impassivity gave no clue even to him. In front of dignitaries from Mospheira they stood, armed, solemn—very, very tall.

“Banichi and Jago,” he introduced his bodyguard, then in Ragi, revised the island names to a form the language could accommodate. “Ben Feldman, Kate Shugart, Tom Lund, Ginny Kroger. One believes Tabini-aiji has granted their request to go up on the shuttle.”

“Honored,” Banichi replied in Mosphei’, in a voice that would rattle china. He even gave a nod of the head, signal honor to the paidhi’s guests if they knew enough to recognize the fact.

“Honored,” Ben said. It was his very first chance to speak a word of Ragi to an ateva face-to-face, and the atevi in question disappointingly spoke Mosphei’ to him first. But it was still a life-defining moment for the two linguists. Bren heard the quaver, saw two pairs of eyes wide as saucers, unabashedly staring at what they’d devoted their lives to understand.

Tom and Ginny remained more reserved, staying more to the rear… he knew that reaction, too. One felt smaller than usual. Even the scents atevi brought with them were mildly different. All of a sudden and for the first time, Mospheirans found themselves not in the majority, not giving the orders, not the masters of civilization. It was another life-defining moment, less pleasant than Ben and Kate’s.

“The escort is waiting, sirs,” Banichi said, and Bren translated. “Observe caution on the steps.—Nadi Bren, Jason has gone to the lounge.”

“ Hashe?” He didn’t let it show on his face or in his manner, and he didn’t translate that part. He reined his reaction back hard, though he felt it as a blow to the gut. He’d raced all this distance, left his family early—he’d had to be the one to take the new ship-paidhi to the island when he was ready to go, no question, but dammit! someone could have waited. He’d rushed to get back to have time with Jason… and to no avail, it seemed.

Things suddenly didn’t seem that right on the mainland, despite Banichi’s and Jago’s presence, not with this mission, not with Jase’s.

“The aiji deemed best he welcome the passengers and deal with them. Jasi-ji asks you meet him there.”

“Let’s go there, then, nadi-ji.”

“Is there a problem?” Tom asked him.

“No,” Bren said quickly, adjusting his coat sleeve past the annoyance of the straight pin, relieved it had held, dignity preserved. It had scratched his wrist, minor pain, bringing a spot of blood to the cuff. “Jase Graham’s gone to the space center to welcome you there. The aiji, I’m sure, thought you’d be more at home if he met you.”

“Very thoughtful of him,” Tom said, and at that unthought and rude familiarity, Bren found himself furious, behind a diplomatic mask. Thoughtful.

Thoughtful, hell!Not of him, not of Jase, not of the unusual haste that was manifesting around him.

But having fallen already into the expressionless mode of atevi among strangers, he’d also begun hearing things through a Ragi filter, began to adjust his eyes, so that Banichi and Jago looked ordinary, and it was the humans who looked strange. Such was the order of the majority of the world, except for Jason Graham, and, briefly, Yolanda Mercheson.

And he knew every nuance of his guards’ expressionless expressions, understanding by that immediate advisement that he was being set on his guard, so far as Banichi could go against the aiji’s orders. He didn’t know why, didn’t take anything for urgent information, guard-your-life information, but his bodyguard was just slightly on edge about something.

Welcome home.

“Very thoughtful,” he echoed Tom Lund. “I’m sure the aiji hopes this mission goes well for both the island and the mainland.”

Three times was a charm, didn’t the proverb say?

The fourth launch of a newly-built shuttle, however many missions its exact predecessor had flown in the skies of the earth of humans, still didn’t feel secure, not to him. It didn’t feel that secure to Jason, either, not to anyone who’d sweated through the first, problematic docking. Not to anyone who knew why there’d been an hour-long cabin blackout on the third flight.

Why the rush? he asked himself.

The haste couldn’t feel that secure to the four Mospheirans, either.

Every time he thought about the possibility of a post-launch emergency, with two places in the entire world with a long enough runway, he found his palms sweating. Mercheson had made it safely to orbit. Jase would. He didn’t effectively give a damn about the Mospheirans… and did.

No cargo, well-thought test plans thrown to the winds…

“Shall we escort our guests to the facility, then?” he asked Banichi and Jago.

“As you wish,” was Jago’s answer… elegant, smooth, reasonable, and not a hint in her official bearing that there was ever anything but business between them, or anything in their meeting but well-oiled routine. “The van can accommodate us all,” she said, “nandi.”

With Banichi, then, she led the way down the stairs. The usual van was waiting.

“Watch the steps,” Bren said, starting down after her. All the stairs on the continent were higher steps than standard on Mospheira. He didn’t forget; he didn’t trust them to remember, and turned once and twice, hearing too much haste and suspecting too much sightseeing behind him. Rain slicked the ground. A brisk wind was blowing—tousling the Mospheirans’ hair, disturbing a strand or two of his despite his braid, but never, ever disturbing the precise single plaits that swung between atevi shoulders.

The van rolled forward as his bodyguard reached the tarmac. Banichi and Jago opened the double doors of the van and with the others settled inside, leaped inside themselves with a spring-rocking bound, pulling the doors to after them with a businesslike thump.

The van rolled off on its way, comfortably appointed, windowless, with no access to the drivers, whose identity Bren suspected as two more of his personal guard.

The van was armored: it was never a particularly quick acceleration. It heaved on bumps like a boat on rough water, while humans sat on seats out of human scale, sharing close, jostled space with a species who owned the planet by birthright. The humans stared at close quarters. In dim conditions, atevi eyes reflected gold under bounced light. Jago’s gleamed from her seat in the dark corner. Bren didn’t look to see the Mospheirans’ reaction to that, only thought to himself that Jago damned well knew the effect on humans, knew it spooked him, knew it would spook the Mospheirans, and didn’t take precautions against it.

Jago was mad, damned mad, at something.

Banichi added his stare to the chatoyant glare, and then looked away, not a word said at the moment.

Then, in Ragi, looking at Ben, “Pleasant flight?”

“Yes, sir,” Ben said quietly, in Mosphei’.

Banichi was pushing it and knew exactly which ones of the humans were translators.

Beyond that, it was silence: Banichi prodded, Jago smoldered in silence, and Bren wondered in increasing desperation what could have gone wrong so quickly… besides Tabini’s bloody-minded obstinacy and the Guild’s picking a fight neither Jase nor he could win. Possibly both of them had understood Tom Lund’s unfortunate, offhanded remark.

Ample opportunity for trouble. It was with them. It had gone to the space center with Jase.

The van, having made the long crossing of the security zone of the airport, bounced sluggishly and went down a steep ramp.

Somewhere behind them, massive hydraulics operated… the security doors, inside the space center at the northwest end of the airport, the new wing. Bren recognized the route, had absolutely no question they were on it, finally in it, and safe, at least in that regard.

The van leveled out, pulling to a halt with a low-tech complaint of over-burdened brakes. A thump sounded at the side of the van, someone hitting the doors, and a warning horn sounded outside.

Banichi and Jago left their seats, opened the doors in response to the signal from outside, and let them out into the dimly lighted concrete tunnel of the center. The white-and-black baji-naji emblem was conspicuous on the metal doors that faced them.

It was the emblem of Fortune and Chance, those governors of all cast lots, appropriate symbol for the shuttle as it was historically appropriate for the halls of government.

Nothing about the opening vista offended the eye. The columns that supported the roof were felicitously grouped. Atevi would be comfortable with all that met them, though the guests were doubtless oblivious to that felicity, even the two from the FO. It was concrete, black and white and gray, full of shadows and echoes… but it opened onto a table with a black vase, white flowers, a single, rising strand of blooms. It was a statement: felicity, ascent, under a stark white arch.

Banichi led the way up to the platform, stood at attention as an inner security door admitted them all at once to warmer, more decorated hallways.

Now, now it was the human reception area. The lowering of tension was palpable as his human companions met the soft brightness of the lights, the subtle pastels—felicitous colors to atevi, to be sure, soft green and blue, both quiet nature colors: that was what the human heart wanted. He and Jase together had picked out this scheme for the human comfort zone and approved it… he and Jase had planned this, as they’d planned everything about the center. They’d ordered human-scale furniture from Mospheira, and they’d translated the shuttle specs, a mammoth undertaking.

They’d defused the atevi resentments of the two-doored shuttle design, they’d found compromises… they’d ended up with three hatches on the shuttle, and atevi, who’d dug in their heels for decades—fighting every advance Tabini-aiji tried to bring them—had gathered enthusiasm for the most incredible advance of all.

For three years a handful of atevi engineers, he and Jase and to a certain extent, Yolanda Mercheson, with their respective staffs, had shared every breath, lived and breathed the shuttle, the space center, the program.

“Nice,” Lund said of the decor.

Bren took a breath. Let it out slowly. Lund meant a compliment. He and Jase had hopedfor just such ease in humans when they came to these rooms. Cope hadn’t even said that much when he’d come down four weeks ago, yet Cope had lived those four weeks almost exclusively in these rooms because he’d had motion sickness onlywhen he’d left this facility… had had it all the way across the strait at night on the plane, had had it in his new residence on Mospheira, probably would have it in his new offices, give or take the drugs that held it at bay, and despite his suggestions to State to try to limit Cope’s exposure to changing light conditions and contrasts and open horizons.

He’d grown sensitive to such details, thanks to Jase. Irregularities in lighting were an indication of failing systems, to a ship-born human… large spaces were a particular fear, or so Jason had explained to him: a sensible fear of impact.

Make the corridors interrupted with cross-corridors and nooks that could be a refuge in acceleration: the center did that. Zero chance the space center would ever accelerate, but small chance that blue that comforted Lund and his friends was sky, either. It was something to do with hindbrain and childhood security, he supposed, not intellect.

So Lund liked the decor… didn’t apparently notice that there were no steps to make humans labor or to trip up atevi strides. Elevators handled all level changes. Control panels and wall switches sat at intermediate height, a little high for humans, not too low for atevi.

And the flowers on the table, an atevi welcome in this area, were a carefully chosen arrangement—no different than the species familiar to Mospheirans, but felicitous in number and color, given the blue and green: they were spring, and hope.

“Lovely flowers,” Kate was kind enough to say, perhaps making conscious amends for Lund. She and Ben might understand. The others might finally twig to at least that. Mospheirans were remarkably stubborn in their insularity, but the news channels had been full of unbridled analysis of atevi ways in the last three years. In the end, he’d sent his own reaction in an interview, trying to satisfy a burgeoning, fearful curiosity without weakening the strictures that kept the species from unofficial contact. Adventurous types on either side of the straits had tried contact in rowboats, and successful, live venturers, even escorted back by the authorities, were damned dangerous to have expounding in the press and over the airwaves.

How long could they hold two curious species apart, with a narrow body of water separating them?

That, apart from hostile aliens in some other solar system, was one of the worries inherent in the space program… in this launch, in Jason’s recall, and in this mission. Atevi wouldgrow close, again, to humans.

The door to the lounge opened.

And there Jason met them—his dark hair starkly, badly, shockingly cut. In three years Jason had carefully grown the beginnings of a respectable braid, that badge of atevi dignity, and now he’d cut it, along with his ties to the earth… God alone knew in what frame of mind when he’d gotten the orders from above. Jase wore a dark-blue jersey, black trousers, and, God save them both, that frayed fishing jacket Toby had given him three years ago.

“Jason Graham,” he introduced himself to the Mospheirans, as if television hadn’t broadcast his image all over the planet at least twice a week. He didn’t quite look at Bren, not looking him in the eye, at least. “Jase is what I go by.” Duly, Jase shook hands, smiled, did all the right and human things with the newcomers: Bren accomplished the introductions, wanting all the while to ask the essential question, but they were waist-deep in newcomers and unanswered questions.

“Mine’s the first room,” Jason said to the incomers, indicating the first of the twenty rooms in circular arrangement around the common room: no head, no seniormost: King Arthur’s revolutionary arrangement. It set atevi teeth on edge. To atevi eyes, it was social chaos. War. “Plenty of room, this trip. We have space for more.”

All cheerfulness… which certainly hadn’t been Jase’s mood when he’d gotten the order to fly, and was not what he expected from Jase, not with that haircut.

Bren waited, offered polite, required courtesies. Considered the coat, the performance, because performance it surely was… and God alone knew how Jase had gotten out the door past their major domo wearing that; God knew how he’d saved it from the servants.

But the jacket was a map of explorations. There was an abrasion on the elbow, where Jase had tried to fall in the ocean. Jase had begged, pleaded, and demanded his visit to the ocean—for ulterior motives, as it had turned out. But Jase had fallen in love with the sea.

And what did it say, that, going home, Jase chose that ratty, salt-weakened jacket and a shirt he knew had seen three years of wear? What had Jase been thinking, and what must the servants have thought, when Jase took something to his hair.

“Where’s the shuttle?” Tom Lund was forward enough to ask.

Jason didn’t give them the expected, verbal answer. He walked over to the wall and pushed the button that motored the blinds aside.

The gleaming white, bent-nosed bird out on the tarmac seemed about to lift from the ground of its own volition. It looked small… until the eye realized those service vehicles that attended it were trucks.

“God.” Ben was the only one with a voice. “My God.”

And Kate: “It’s big.”

When ten men set their hands to a rope and pulled in unison, amazing amounts of weight slid.

When an entire civilization worked in concert to accomplish materials and training for a tested design, three years produced—this shining, beautiful creature.

“ Shai-shan,” Bren said, standing behind the group, finding a voice. “ Favorable Wind.” He’d seen Shai-shanfrom framework to molds to first flight, and now Jason’s life, Jason’s departure from the world, rode on these same wings. He’d translated every line of her. He’d all but given birth when she lifted off for her maiden flight, a curious emotion for a maker of dictionaries, a parser of words and meanings.

“Marvelous, marvelous thing,” Kate managed to say, and the group stayed and stared.

Jason had a sense of the dramatic, and of diversion. Bren caught Jason’s eye once for all as the group, Kate last, with a lingering glance at the shuttle, began to disperse, subdued, to make their choice of accommodations.

For a moment Jase gazed back at it, too, then looked at him with a subtle shift of the eyes that indicated the dining recess.

He went, Jason went. Banichi and Jago walked as far as the arch and stopped.

There would not be intrusion.

“So they want you up there,” was Bren’s opener.

“The aiji’s order,” Jason said with a brittle edge. “Packed in an hour. Hurry and wait.”

“I’m sure I’ll learn why” Bren said faintly.

“I’m sure Iwill,” Jase said.

“Damn it.”

“Damn it,” Jase said. That much was Mosphei’, and then, in Ragi: “Sit a moment. The tea’s not bad.”

“Shouldn’t be,” Bren said. “We ordered it.”

So the parting they’d both dreaded came down to a cup of tea from a dispenser, and all Bren could hope for was a quiet, guarded conversation in the dining section. The Mospheirans wandered about. Banichi and Jago were forbidding gatekeepers, not moving a muscle.

“Wish I had answers for you,” Bren said. “I wish I had anyanswers. You don’t know?”

“Just… word came: get up there; and word came from the aiji. Go. Not a choice in the world. I suppose the aiji wanted me here to look over our guests, make sure they didn’t steal the silverware.”

Atevi joke.

“I don’t know,” Bren said. “I swear I don’t know. Didn’t know. Didn’t have any more warning than you did.”

“I believe you.”

There were signs they used for truth, I swearwas one of them. They never lied when they said that to each other, though lying was part of their separate jobs… or had been, and might be again.

“Might still be a weather delay,” Bren said.

“What about the Mospheirans? Did the Guild want them, too?”

“Hell if I know,” Bren said. “Not a clue. They asked to go. Tabini said go now.”

They looked at one another. No sum of the parts made total sense.

“I’ve still not a clue,” Jason said.

“Unless they’re going to spite the Guild,” Bren said, and warmed chilled fingers around a plastic cup. “Tabini might do that.”

“Going to miss you.”

“Get back down here if you can.”

“I’ll try,” Jase said. “Get up there, if you can.”

“I’ll try that, too” Bren said. “If I can find out anything and get a message back to you, when I get to the Bu-javid, I will.”

“Do we everget word?” Jason asked, rhetorical question. He looked badly used, with the uneven haircut, wisps sticking out at angles. God knew what reason… maybe just a fit of anger at an unreasonable order. Jason wasn’t immune to fits of temper.

Neither of them were that.

“Look, tell them that second shuttle won’t make schedule if you’re not down here,” Bren said. “It’s not entirely a lie.”

“I know,” Jason said. “Damn all Ican do. Maybe… maybethere’s a way back. I can’t guarantee it.”

“Ramirez?”

That was the senior captain in the Guild, Jase’s sometime guardian, sometime chief grievance. Ramirez had his good moments and his bad ones.

“I imagine it is. Him, I can talk to.”

“Talk and get back here.”

“I want to.”

“You’re going to have to grow that damn braid again.”

Jase gave a rueful laugh, shook his head, and for the better part of an hour they drank tea and reminisced, mostly about Toby and his boat… nothing about Barb, not a word about Barb, just… “How’s your mother? How’s Toby and all?”

“Oh, fine,” he said.

Remarkable how little now they found to say to each other, when before this they’d had all the time and talked and talked about details, plans, intentions—time shortened on them, three years to recall, no time ahead of them, just a little rehearsing of the schedule for the two shuttles under construction.

“I’ll write tonight,” Bren said, damned well knowing the barriers of administrations, governments, and just plain available space in the message flow up from the big dish that was most of their communications.

Jason was quiet then, subdued, next to distraught. “Tell Tano and Algini I’ll miss them,” the word was. “Tell the secretaries, all the staff.” It achieved a sense of utter desperation. “Banichi. Jago.” He cast a look at them.

“Nadi-ji,” Banichi said.

“I’ll miss you.”

“We also regret this,” Banichi said.

A silence fell. And grew deeper and more desperate.

“I’ve got to get back” Bren said. ”I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I’ll come late tonight, if I can. Maybe spend a little more time.“ The launch was in the early hours. “As much as I can.”

“I’d be glad if you could.”

So there was nothing to do but finish the tea, get up from the chairs, and face one another. Bren offered an embrace. It was the Mospheiran thing to do. Jason met it awkwardly, hugged him fiercely; ship-folk were isolate, not prone to touch one another. Bren gathered a grip on the worn jacket and clapped Jase on the shoulder, feeling a burning tightness in his throat.

“Take care,” Jason said. “Take care, Bren.”

“I’ll do my best.” Bren let him go, turned in the futile attempt to find something to do with his hands, and walked away.

Banichi and Jago went with him, saying not a word as they followed him out of the residency and down the outside, gray hall.

He’d known for three years that, once the shuttle truly flew, he’d be alone again. He’d planned to be alone in his life.

And what was this… alone?He had Banichi and Jago, whom he loved… a human could say love, and they could be devoted in atevi fashion.

He had Tabini-arji’s high regard, he lived in splendid quarters, held an extravagant seaside estate where his mother and his brother and his brother’s family arrived for family visits… visits no other paidhi had ever been granted—

Not to mention the hundreds of staff and servants and acquaintances… and the relationship, of sorts, he had with Jago, for good or for ill. He was not, whatever else, alone.

Yet losing Jason left him feeling used up, bruised to the soul.

In that light he knew he ought to open his mouth and talk, talk about something, anything, in the absence of a word from his companions. It wasn’t their job to guess that the human in their midst wanted— needed—to be talked to. He was the translator, the cultural interpreter. He should initiate a word, something to give them a cue how to deal with him in this situation they’d never met.

But he didn’t find one.

They escorted him in silence down to the security zone, into that area of grim gray concrete where the van had let them out. The next link would not be by van, but by rail, up to the Bu-javid, the palace on the hill, the center of Shejidan. He walked with them past the spot where the van no longer stood, in the echoing hollow of the place. They entered through a black security door, and saw, not unexpectedly, their associates Algini and Tano, holding place near the rail-access to this closely guarded facility.

“Paidhi-ji,” Algini said, seeing him, and that was the first word he’d heard since he’d left Jason above.

“A good trip?” Tano asked him, as if that should be some consolation for what he was sure Tano knew.

“Very fine,” he said politely. Tano was a good man, a very good man. In the paraphrase of Lund’s question, Tano cared.

But this wasn’t fine, his trip hadn’t been fine, Jase wasn’t fine… and on the island his family wasn’t fine. He hadn’t thought that, in this suddenly harried trip, but it hadn’t been fine at all. His mother had wanted him to stay. Toby’s youngsters were going through growing pains and grandmotherly spoiling, and were wretched company, grating on his nerves for the single day he’d been with them… he wasn’t used to human children.

Where had he lost that sense of connection?

And what had he traded it for?

What was he losing, back there with Jase? The one human being on whom he’d focused all his remnant of humanity, in a desperate attempt to put together official policy for the aiji, trying to understand the ship-humans’ mind-set?

He boarded the train, rode in absentminded silence, recalling a dozen and one trips over the years, the first launch… spiraling back in time, the first trip to Malguri, the return… going out to Taiben, once and twice, all jumbled together, Jase and before-Jase. Down to Geigi’s estate, for one reason and another… those were the good times. Fishing.

What in hellwas Tabini thinking?

“Do you know anything about this?” he asked his bodyguard, when they were alone, rocking along the rails.

Tabini’s rail car—he’d used it more often than Tabini had, this specially secured compartment, armored against all eventualities.

“No, nadi-ji,” Banichi said. “We, like you, wonder.”

He leaned back on the comfortable velvet bench seat, red velvet, red carpet, a fresh bouquet in the vase on the counter, blooms of the season, the first in the lowlands. They shed a thick, sweet perfume.

A wake might have been more cheerful.

“I need to meet with the aiji,” Bren said quietly.

“One will forward that request,” Jago said.

“The dowager is in residence,” Banichi added.

A new alarm began to go off, deep in his gut.

“Did she come to see Jason?” Bren asked. “What in hell’s going on?”

“She invited him to tea” Jago said, “and they discussed the weather.”

Well, it wasn’t entirely unreasonable; she did come to Shejidan for visits. It was probably coincidence; she’d arrived, and heard he was leaving.

“He’ll have no weather where he’s going,” Bren said, trying to settle himself to the possibility. “He’ll have to get as used to being without it as he did being with it.”

“He will,” Jago agreed.

“So it was one of those conversations?” The aiji-dowager, whom he’d thought safely and remotely at Malguri, was staunchly, provocatively conservative, a promoter of causes, a keen wit.

A good heart.

And a talk on the weather with Ilisidi, Tabini’s grandmother. Lords of the Western Association would give a great deal for a social conversation with her.

But did she do anything… anything… by chance?

“Did she know he was leaving?” he asked his security. It was a three-hour flight from Malguri, for an arthritic woman who didn’t like long sitting. He was prepared to be touched by that effort, if she’d heard and made the trip only for Jason.

“One has no idea,” Jago said, “nandi.”

My lord?Nandi? So formal? What signal was that?

Jason had said not a word about his visit with the dowager. But she was, though silently, a head of a potentially restive association, within the information flow. Tabini would have sent the dowager word of a favored associate’s departure… or else. If Ilisidicouldn’t press Tabini to resist this sudden request from the station, his own chances dimmed.

Jase hadn’t mentioned the meeting… but what could he say? He and Jason hadn’t talked much about the court, had talked instead about the first things they’d done, the things out in the countryside, then sounding each other out a last time, getting their positions on issues fine-tuned, for those who might ask.

It was their job to do that.

But that Ilisidi came to bid Jason farewell meant far, far more than a social discussion… nothing Ilisidi did could go without notice. By meeting with Jason alone, she had declared not only her past association with Jason-paidhi, but a current, live, and potent one.

She had just announced that, in a meeting sure to make the news.

She’d just announced it to her grandson, the aiji. She had an interest in Jason, in his people, in the space program and in the business the ship-humans had with atevi… she, the ecological conservative, the arbiter of taste and society.

He’d been walking about stunned since he’d gotten the news; now he began to wake up.

Much as he relied on the dowager’s goodwill, it was never, ever to be taken for granted. If one lived among atevi, one asked oneself questions, like: was there any enemy or associate Ilisidi wished to slap in the face by making such a trip? He could think of several enemies.

He could even think of the dowager’s grandson, Tabini-aiji, who had advanced Jason’s trip to the space center by a full day, damned well knowing he was coming back with the expectation of a decent farewell… and why had Tabini sent him out there as he had?

Protective of Jason?

A reproof of the dowager for that invitation… disquiet, apprehension of what the dowager might have said or asked?

Why had the Mospheirans gotten their request faster than they’d wanted or expected?

He had to get his wits in order, or endanger the whole damned Western Association, not to mention himself and his bodyguard.

Wake up, paidhi-ji; that was very likely the thought in his bodyguards’ minds, too. They were all but telegraphing signals at him. Realize there might be danger. Defend us. Use your wits.

There was some advantage in having Jason debriefing early, having a man they knew for certain was well-disposed to atevi go up there to counter any negatives Mercheson might have given in her report. Atevi didn’t know Mercheson nearly as well, and didn’t have that much confidence in her, not as they had in Jase-paidhi.

No atevi mission above the technical level had yet reached the station. Pilots and technicians had gone, in the shuttle tests. Those were canny, intelligent individuals under strict instruction how to react and what to do; but no one below could know how those contacts might have gone, off the set script. Tabini wasn’t comfortable with Mercheson’s recall; Tabini knew all the unpleasant history of the Pilots’ Guild, being a student of history other than his own.

That was a hellish load of responsibility under which he served. The Mospheiran government trusted him. The delegates from Mospheira had made gestures toward trusting him. Tabini trusted him. Jason trusted him and wanted to stay down here. He was overburdened with trust and vastly undersupplied with information.

“One does wonder what she wants,” he said mildly, a question utterly without offense to ask in the context of his own bodyguard. He invited response.

“One does wonder,” Banichi said, denying he knew anything worth saying, and Jago, with the equivalent of a shrug:

“She does regard him as within her influence.”

Regarded Jase as an associate, in other words… one who couldn’t be taken from her without dealing with her in some fashion: that was true; it was why Tabini would have called her with that information, probably personally, though the dowager disdained telephones.

“Interesting,” he murmured to Jago’s remark, and noted that Banichi didn’t in the least disagree with his partner’s assessment. Thatrang alarm bells. Jago, the junior in that set, speculated beyond Banichi’s answer: not ordinary in a sober moment. He could conclude both of them thought so, then, but had no solid knowledge of Ilisidi’s motives, and therefore Jago, juniormost, advanced what they could say… once they nudged him into question, dropping their small bombshell of information between them: She’s here, and, She’s involved.

“So what else is going on?” he asked his security. “Who cleared the visas for the Mospheirans?”

“They are cleared,” was all Banichi could say. It was, then, all Banichi knew.

“The Atageini matter is resolved,” Jago said.

“The staff has sent the requisite letters,” Banichi informed him. “The contract is canceled.”

That was a relief. The lord of the Atageini had complained of encroachments on associated territory… the minor squabbles were the bread and butter of court intrigue, rarely accidental, usually a maneuver for position. The land was in contention, and likely the subassociation resident on the land had set up the conflict; assassinations had seemed likely.

And a niece of the head of the subassociation was seeking a union with a neighbor lad who wasn’t within her association. Social convention strained at the seams, interpersonally speaking, and that was how associations widened… if uncle Tatiseigi of the Atageini gave his approval, which at last report would be a cold day in a human hell. Tatiseigi, Tabini’s uncle-in-law, was as hidebound as any lord on the mainland, and what hadn’t been true three hundred years ago was, in Tatiseigi’s book, suspect. They had thatboiling on the border. It was suddenly quieter, for no good reason. Tatiseigihad changed his mind, then. Ilisidi, a distant associate, was back in court.

Go to the island for four days and the landscape rearranged itself.

“Damiri-daja favors the union,” Banichi said, meaning Tabini’s wife. “Nand’ Tatiseigi does not.”

“And Ilisidi?”

“She has had no known contact. But one asks.”

Things shifted and shuddered: the structure of the associations changed constantly, but the overall outlines remained the same; and Tabini and his wife’s uncle carried on a moderate, courteous warfare, within social limits. Men had died over it; but it looked as if violence was avoidable this time, only an old man asserting his power to be disagreeable and old-fashioned… and the aiji-dowager possibly bringing her foot down. He remained disturbed on that account. Tabini had been under siege in his own house. Jason was out from under the roof, unreachable.

The space center began to look like a refuge from the storm. Hehad to go persuade Tabini that sending Jase as the Pilots’ Guild wanted wasn’t a good idea, that perhaps Jase should catch some unanticipated malady, a contagion… the ship-folk had worried, at least, about contagion. But he didn’t know, now, what the repositioning of atevi meant, combined with the moves of the two human governments.

He was still thinking as the train climbed the steep of a very familiar hill. The windows might be curtained in red velvet and sealed in bullet-proofing, but Bren had no need to see out when they entered the distinctive region of echoes and the more level pitch just after the hill.

They were coming to the station. Algini and Tano rose from their seats, stood poised at the door to secure its safety—routine. It was unlikely there would be any assault, but counting the high position he did hold, and things shifting in the court, there was always a remote chance of those doors opening on a hail of bullets.

The car wheezed against the hydraulic brakes, and the doors opened.

No bullets. Bren rose, shouldered his computer, walked ahead of Jago and behind Banichi as they exited down to the platform in the high concrete tunnel. They were in the bowels of the palace, beneath the hill they had seen from the plane. Palace and gardens were above them.

They were safe now, beyond the reach of all but the most adept assassins… there existed a short list of likely offended parties, but there always was that. His enemies were fewer now. They knew, he knew, the assassins they hired knew that taking him down would create far too disruptive a vacuum. These days a determined few did pursue him, but the most, he was in a position to be sure, pursued him only for policy, and would not be willing to meet the retaliation of the aiji: paper threats. Or less than paper: his bodyguard, empowered by the aiji, informed him there was no valid Contract in the Assassins’ Guild.

In that relative assurance, his mind trying to form arguments for Jase’s immediate usefulness… and the nature of a nonthreatening illness… he entered the lift with Banichi and Jago, Algini and Tano as usual seeing to the baggage, while the three of them rode up to the level on which he had his now-permanent apartment.

It was a historic residence that had lately been the abode of the Maladesi… center of an association which had been, since the debacle of resistance to the space program, utterly absorbed.

Small loss, Tabini said; upstart newcomers, Damiri-daja said, though Bren regretted the passing of anything so incredibly old it antedated Mospheira, and felt a small guilt for his improved fortunes. He didn’t needa lord’s estate… he’d once argued. Now he knew the need of it. It was for his staff. His servants. The convenience of his security.

The Maladesi servants had understandably remained with elements of their historic association, absorbed into other groups. But certain servants had come in from the clerical staff, some had been recommended by Tabini, or through his security. Certain ones had even come from redoubtable Uncle Tatiseigi of the Atageini—a matter of some nervousness, but if the old man offered, one would assault the old man’s sense of taste to assume he would use a festive gift to launch assassins… he would, but not as an invited guest at the birth of a grandson, Tabini’s heir: it was old-fashioned manners, largesse and celebration.

And the apartment had been generally gone over with a finetoothed comb for remaining bugs and security breaches… when a lord of the Association moved, it necessarily occasioned changes far more extensive than changing the locks on an apartment. Interior doors had been moved, screens erected, both to confound assassins and to change the numerology of the patently unfortunate rooms.

The locks, of course, were both changed and upgraded, some to lethal levels… all of that. His staff contained no one that Tabini’s security had not passed… an atevi lord of older standing might have had reason to object to that thorough an infiltration from the aiji’s estate, but he was grateful. Banichi and Jago were from Tabini’s staff, before they had given him their man’chi. Hewas within Tabini’s man’chi. There was no contradiction at all.

Jase was within Tabini’s man’chi, too. That… was an argument.

The head of staff met him at the door, took his coat—Narani was the name of this major domo, an elderly and distinguished gentleman from the mountains. Two grandchildren, three former wives, and three sons were all on staff, not to mention lateral relations of wives and sons, including two current husbands… all staff.

Most remarkably and quite literally the heart of it was the population of a small fishing lodge, simply given to him in a very feudal fashion, along with title to the residence that was the source of the staff. The servants there had grown too numerous, in several centuries of marrying and begetting and birthing, to be confined to the maintenance of a lodge the aiji rarely visited. They were only half Ragi in ethnicity, ignored by Tabini’s father—this was a recommendation—somewhat remotely tied to Lord Geigi, a thoroughly reliable lord of the south coast… and delighting in a lord who actually visited the district, and brought his very family and honored mother to visit, no matter their oddness.

Or as Narani had put it, they had rusted in their former service, little called upon by the aiji, and now luxuriated in a service in the very heart of the court, their historic lodge likewise elevated to unprecedented prominence and wealth. Tourists came to the district to see “the paidhi’s country estate” in hopes of the exotic and outrageous, Bren was sure.

His staff survived his mother’s residencies with remarkable fortitude, not to mention Toby’s children.

Even Tatiseigi’s former servants avowed his service to their liking.

“The mail, nadi.” Narani assisted him with the coat, delivered the garment to a maidservant, and with a nod indicated the small silver bowl on the ornate, ivory-inlaid table by the entry.

Not unexpectedly, messages had accumulated, formally delivered message cylinders of silver, gold, ivory, and the like, each unique, most with some small felicitation or solicitation for the paidhi’s office—these cylinders were from the lordly ranks. The ordinary run of mail, arriving by common post, now had a staff of hundreds in full-time employment: would the paidhi kindly respond to a small association in the hinterlands who suspected the sighting of three meteors was a landing of spacecraft?

Granted.

Would the paidhi tell schoolchildren whether they might write to a school on Mospheira?

They might exchange greetings, no more. They could not let down the barriers that prevented free access… not for lunatics in rowboats; not for innocent schoolchildren.

Those were the kind of things the staff handled, up to certain levels. Messages in the silver bowl were likely to be departmental meetings, committee meetings, and policy conferences. Some might have heard about Jase’s departure. The whole court might know, it being late afternoon.

But why was he not astonished to see the dowager’s message cylinder among the rest? And where was Tabini’s?

“Rani-ji,” he addressed his major domo. “When did the aiji-dowager’s message arrive?”

“Within the last hour, nadi.” Narani had not mentioned Jase. But the house was very sober, very quiet compared to happier homecomings. The servant who had taken his coat went away, head bowed, without a sound, and Narani had not a word to say about the shirt cuff.

They stood in a white circular entry hall, reflected in three massive gilt-framed mirrors, before which sat three gilt-and-silver tables on which sat very massive bouquets… gold seasonal flowers in blue-and-green porcelain vases. The marble floor held, three times repeated, the baji-naji symbol in black-and-white marble; the same design echoed on the ceiling in a great medallion; and one could suppose someone had counted the number of repeating reflections from every angle of the mirrors, to be sure nothing in the entry hall was infelicitous.

So were all the motives, all the implications, and all the politics around and above him… atevi. Tabini-aiji, effective ruler of the world, had not, to his observation, sent a welcoming message to him, and he could not approach the aiji without that invitation. He had to count on Banichi and Jago to get something through to Tabini’s staff… and to send a message to Tabini reporting what was surely an invitation from the dowager, Tabini’s grandmother, was exceedingly indelicate. Among atevi, one trusted a great lord knewwhat was going on. In the Bu-javid, messages flowed like groundwater, invisibly… tastefully.

Perhaps a commiseration in the loss of Jase. That would be reasonable to expect. And there was not, not from Tabini.

He opened Ilisidi’s cylinder. Not a word of Jase. The message indeed asked him to supper, with scarcely enough time to bathe and dress in sufficient formality.

He was not surprised at all.

But wary of this invitation, aware of all the threads that ran under various doorways here and across the continent… oh, yes. He was that.

Chapter 3

The dowager’s apartment was very familiar territory, with a luxurious, red, gold, and black decor, the heraldry of the aiji’s line, armed attendants, glorious, though faded, works of tapestry… a hall full of familiar faces that met the paidhi’s visit. Time and events had forged that cordiality, and it warmed a human heart even while a wary official mind remained on the alert.

Check and mate, as far as getting to Tabini. Bren found himself here, instead, going through social motions. His hair was braided with the appropriate braid of rank. He had on the high-collared coat, quietly, houselessly beige—the fichued shirt, with gold cufflinks… no lack of cufflinks, this side of the straits. A little lace, above pale hands as conspicuous as the fair hair. A little scent, appropriately muted, one of the few that both came from an atevi supplier and blended with a human’s natural scent: so Jago informed him, while Banichi wrinkled his nose and said it was decadently floral.

Narani, at least, had sent him out the door with professional satisfaction. Banichi and Jago had very naturally come with him, and met the senior bodyguards of the dowager’s staff with wary cordiality. They’d saved one another’s necks repeatedly, and had as friendly a relationship as their slightly divergent man’chi allowed.

Tano and Algini had brought Jason there, and avowed they had observed nothing untoward. The curious fact remained that Jason hadn’t mentioned the visit… though human interactions were like that; in the hour they’d had, everything but what was human had fallen out of their minds.

Jason to this hour might be thinking, My God, I forgot to tell him…

But that Tano and Algini had not… thatwas more likely because they deferred to Banichi and Jago, and theyknew there was something afoot that the paidhi needed to figure out for himself. They couldn’t, psychologically couldn’t, fight Tabini. He was on his own in that; but they were worried about the footing he was on, trying to guide his steps as accurately as they could through what was shaping up as a maze of intrigue.

“Nand’ paidhi.” The head of the dowager’s security, Cenedi, met him in the dowager’s entry, accompanied him from the foyer to the hall… and from there on into, thankfully, the dining room, not the cold fresh wind of the balcony, where Ilisidi, accustomed to fresh air and disdainful of assassins, had been known to serve meals.

The dowager waited for him instead in the warm heart of her apartment, a woman slight with age—for her species—leaning on her cane, beside a glittering dinner table centered with crystal, flowers, and candles. There was no grand entry, no keeping him waiting. This was the approach afforded intimates.

“Nand’ dowager,” Bren said with honest fondness.

“Well, well, so formal, are we?”

“ ‘Sidi-ji,” he amended that, but only on indication she welcomed it. “I received your invitation and came immediately as I reached my apartment.”

“Sit, sit, flatterer.” Ilisidi advanced a step toward the table, and her bodyguard whisked her chair into position. She sat; the cane went to the bodyguard’s hand with never an interruption of movement, and Bren sat down in a chair as deftly moved and reset by Cenedi’s partner. “I support your vices. I have imported vodkafrom the island.”

“It’s very good of you,” he said. He was pleased. A measure of the times and the current size of his office. A subordinate must have passed it, so that she could actually surprise him with an import. His job had grown far, far beyond stamping import manifests.

“With appropriate fruit juice?”

“Thank you,” he said, as a glass… with unseasonable ice, decadence in the dowager’s opinion… turned up in a servant’s hand, and settled in place in front of him.

Another servant presented a glass of the dowager’s own preference, one of those alkaloid stimulants that could kill a human, or make him wish it had. “So, so, nand’ paidhi, how fares your mother?”

“Well. Very well. Complaining of my desertion on a holiday.”

“The Independence Day.” Ilisidi showed herself amused, and well-informed. “Independence from us. What a curious holiday, under the circumstances.”

“A historic, a traditional occasion.” The inference belatedly dawned on him, that there was in that human ship overhead another threat to Mospheiran independence. “Equally, Mospheirans secured their independence from the Pilots’ Guild all those centuries ago by flinging themselves onto the planet in parachutes. I assure you… there’s certainly no national urge even yet to rush into the arms of the Guild. Even those who wanted to go back to space have their doubts.”

“When you first landed, atevi thought you’d fallen from the moon. Now the sun’s a star and the morning star a planet. What a strange world we’ve made! Try the relish. It’s from the garden at Malguri. I did inquire of its safety.”

“A fond memory.” He did help himself. Relish and other pickles were exceptions to the rule of propriety, of kabiu: nothing but what grew or was customarily hunted during the season was kabiu. What was preserved as a condition of its recipe and served during a subsequent season was acceptable: such were liquors and other products of time and fermentation, which had no season but readiness. Likewise smoked or pickled meats.

And the dowager would not be wrong about the alkaloid content. If she flatly meant to poison him, she would never, on a point of honor, assure him of its safety beforehand.

The relish was, if peppery, quite good with the egg, that standard of atevi appetizers.

“The sun is a star,” the dowager reprised, serving herself another two eggs and a dollop of relish, “and the Pilots’ Guild so mistrusted by the Mospheirans has now offended another species. So they say.” Old, old news; but in that statement the dowager set the topic of the encounter. She knew about the human mission; she was well-briefed. He formed the hypothesis she’d come across the continent to have supper with Jase; and now with him; and that Tabini couldn’t prevent her three-hour flight or her interference, but might not be pleased with it.

“We don’t know that it was an offense the Guild committed, nand’ dowager. This strange species may have attacked the Guild for its own reasons.”

“Ha. Simply ill-natured, do we believe? Humans launch out from their own star, lose their way, and come here—such is our great good fortune. They fall on our heads. Now they go out looking for their own misplaced planet and manage to offend unidentified neighbors. Given their record, I doubt it was simple bad luck.”

“The Mospheiran government, frankly, shares that opinion. Though logically, one can’t exclude bad luck.”

“They have no sense of felicitous design. Baji-naji.” That was to say, chance and fortune could overset the pattern, however good or bad. “And this frantic exchange of paidhiin? Acceptable to you?”

“I’d like to hold Jason.” They were on diplomatic and personal thin ice. Tabini hadn’t asked yet. ‘Sidi-ji asked, for her own reasons, which she had not divulged. He tried to deflect closer questioning on the exception he was about to advance with Tabini… if he could find a way through Tabini’s door. The dowager might be a resource, or fuel on a fire. “I’ll mourn his departure. I need his help down here.”

“They don’t present us a successor. Just this fellow Cope, who’s made a nuisance of himself. Will they?”

“I don’t know what they intend. One may come down with the next launch.” It was what they’d done with Mercheson.

“They’ll debrief our Jason before they send the next one.”

“I think that’s their intention.”

“Understandable in them. Dare we take that motive for what it seems?—More to the point, do you take it that these ship-folk have interests in accordance with yours? I shall never expect they accord perfectly with ours.”

“My interests don’t diverge far at all from those of the associations, and I don’t know, nand’ dowager, in all truth. Mospheira doesn’t know, either. No one does, not me, not Jase, no one but the officers of the Pilots’ Guild… and possibly even not all of those.”

“Hereditary officers. Lords of their association. Ramirez?”

“As a father to him. A stern father.” It didn’t mean quite what it did to a human, but it meant man’chi.

“This business of being one of Taylor’s Children.”

“Just so.”

The servants took away the egg dish and replaced it with the seasonal meat, a large, fan-spined fish. It sat atop the platter staring at them from a bed of blue-green weed, but its body was a sculpted white pate dotted with small green fruits.

The rule was generally to avoid blue foods and mildly suspect the white, but he trusted the dowager, and took a serving without question. A servant set a cruet of herb-flavored vinegar beside his hand, and he applied it.

“Excellent.” A friend of the household could never take for granted the sacrifice of a life, however spiny, or the artistic efforts of a cook preparing the dish. “Truly excellent, nandi. My thanks and my admiration.”

“Duly accepted, paidhi-ji.” Warmly said. “Now. Tell me this tale, not as you told it when we were ignorant of stars and shuttle ships. Tell me the tale as if this time I shall understand destinations. What is this business of Taylor’s Children?”

“Taylor was the pilot, the first pilot. Phoenixset out centuries ago from the earth of humans to a station construction site, going to a star within sight of the earth of humans. But the ship suddenly flew askew, and turned up instead at a deadly dangerous star, out of fuel, or nearly so.”

“Sabotage?”

“It’s given it was an accident of subspace, one of those mathematical questions the Astronomer Emeritus—”

The imperious wave of an elderly black hand. “So. Continue. The birth of the children.”

“Proximity to the star would mean the early death of those who went outside the ship; but they had to acquire fuel. They used the construction craft intended for station construction, craft with little protection. Heroic persons went out, knowing the exposure would surely kill them. Indelicate as it is to say—they left their personal legacy in frozen storage, not out of vanity, but because if they were so lost, they wished to have a community of sufficient variety for a healthy community. They knew they were in trouble. They died in great numbers.”

“And they gathered fuel to move the ship to safety.”

“Even so.”

“Here. And this Taylor-captainguided the ship safely to this harbor before he died.”

“Yes.”

Jason had been her guest yesterday, and he’d wager anything that Jason had told her the same tale in carefully compared detail. He stayed close to the canon.

“So,” Ilisidi said, and had a bite of fish. “All those born of this legacyare named the sons and daughters of Taylor. And they had come to the earth of the atevi. Taylor died. The pilots wished to stay in space and search for home; the ordinary folk instead chose to land and become a problem to us.”

“The Pilots’ Guild respected the rights of atevi not to be bothered or contacted. They wanted to move off to the red star, leaving no station about this planet beyond what they needed for a very small base. But the colonists didn’t agree. They saw a green planet much like their own. Certain ones leaped off on the petal sails and fell into the world.”

“To a welcome, after initial difficulties,” Ilisidi interjected, more expert than he in this phase of atevi history. “We were entranced with change and your technology. We became addicted to these offerings.”

“While the ship left on its search, leaving some persons on the planet, others running the station. But as conditions grew harder on the station, and as the atevi did welcome the Landing, more and more humans came down.”

“Increasing our good fortune,” the dowager interjected wryly.

“So many left the station couldn’t function. They could shut it down and prepare it to wait, in which case it would take less damage, but shutting it down seemed to necessitate leaving. When the ship came back, after elapsed centuries… all the surviving humans were down here, and everything had changed.”

“Yet the ship had had children. They populated the ship with this legacy.”

“They rarely access it. When they do, they treat those children as special, outside the regular lines of descent. They don’t tell whose child they were, so as not to create any sense of preference in their history. They call them all Taylor’s Children.”

“So Jase is a special person, of consequence within their association.”

“A person they’re disposed to view as lacking associations. Not as an aiji lacks them, but born for a specific purpose. Captain Ramirez authorized the birth of a number of them… with ordinary mothers… for the return journey to this earth. They hadn’t known about the aliens yet. They were supposed to prepare themselves to contact the station; that purpose stayed. That’s why Jase studied languages. He said it was a hobby, but he wasn’t quite truthful at the start… not in that, not in a lot of things he later told me. He and the others… there were ten of them… they were purposed for something a lot happier than what Ramirez found when they received a distress call from the second station they’d built out there.”

“Languages,” Ilisidi echoed, and from her deliberate tone, he knew she’d seen the flaw in the reasoning. “To greet their own descendants. Does the human language change so rapidly, then?”

He had no answer to that. He and Jase had discussed the same question, had looked at Jase’s existence in ways Jase had never considered. Jase had said, There are factions aboard ship… and Jase had acknowledged some of those did not gracefully accept the current negotiations with the atevi.

Ramirez had authorized the birth of the children, had had them encouraged into those very skills that would enhance their ability to negotiate… that Ramirez had planned the children to negotiate with the atevi from the start, that Ramirez had had the vision to see beyond human arrogance to welcome aid from any source available… that had been well within Jase’s understanding of his captain-father, and well within the needs of peace aboard ship that Ramirez would keep such a purpose to himself.

But he couldn’t say that to Ilisidi. That was speculation of a nature he hadn’t even factual-basis enough to pass on to Tabini. But that Ilisidi, a veteran of subterfuge, had made the logical leap on her own… that he could well believe.

“So. Well,” Ilisidi, her point made, continued. “With these strangely trained children in tow, they went to this other station which had called and which had suffered great damage in their absence.”

“Exactly so. Ramirez questioned the station-folk there, and determined to come here, fall back to this base, thinking he’d find a large population and a thriving station. The ship was not happy in what it did find.”

Not happy, yes, but that Ramirez had been surprised… that, he and Jase had decided, was highly unlikely.

“One does imagine so.” Ilisidi silently finished a massive portion of the fish, and accepted a dish of spiced vegetables. “These are from the south. I’ve taken quite a fancy to them.”

“A very wonderful presentation.”

“—Does Mospheira continue to distrust the motives of the Pilots’ Guild? Or have they taken alarm at the idea of foreigners chasing the Guild here?”

“Mercheson-paidhi tried to persuade them to cooperate fully. And to trust the Guild’s modern leaders. Especially Ramirez.”

“Did she succeed in this persuasion?”

“Not wholly.” He made up his mind to give Ilisidi a little information, information that might reassure her, and that Tabini wouldn’t mind her knowing. “The delegation that’s going is suspicious. The Guild will have to work to convince them. They didn’t expect to go this early.”

“And now Trent Cope will attempt the same quick reconnaissance?”

“I don’t know if you can call it that.”

“And they take Jase.”

“Just so. If I can’t find a way to persuade Tabini to rescind the order.”

Ilisidi gave a laugh, a very rude laugh. It said her opinion of how likely Tabini was to backtrack.

He tried further. She was an ally, if he could win her. “ ‘Sidi-ji, the Pilots’ Guild would be fools either to offend the aiji or to deal with Mospheirans in any preference. Nature put the resources in Tabini’s hands.”

“Nature,” Ilisidi scoffed.

“So to speak,” he amended that. “But they already know they can’t get a thing from the Mospheirans but workers who speak their language. A considerable resource. What they don’tcomprehend is the danger of having atevi and humans in close contact. We’ve warned them. They still don’t comprehend because it flies in the face of experience. People who live together a long time should grow closer. Not more angry.”

“And the Guild originally was the party to respect atevi rights.”

“Just so. But they’re desperate now. As a human, nand’ dowager, and speaking with all my understanding of the situation, I believe that desperation is real, and that it may drive them to fear atevi less than they ought, or to listen to Mospheirans who may not be well-informed Mospheirans. Above all else, I know Jase knows the truth; it’s valuable they listen to him, but if they get him up there, where he doesn’t have current contact with information, we’re left with Cope, who can’t hold his food down, and whom I don’t find agreeable; and with some other stranger they’re going to drop in our midst, which I don’t favor. There are aliens. There is a danger. There may be small omissions in that truth, but I haven’t lived with Jason for three years without knowing he’s more valuable to us than he gets credit for. If you can intercede with the aiji, do.”

“Jason hasn’t lied to us. On that, everything rests.”

He swallowed a bite that proved just a little large, and took a slow drink to correct it, trying not to let nerves show. They might win. They truly might win. “I have no doubt of him.”

“Do you not?” She rapped the table sharply with her knuckles, shaking the liquid in the glasses and causing ice to shift in the pitcher. “Do you not?”

He had not fortified himself against all her tactics. Some still worked, and this one could shake atevi out of their certainties.

It made him think twice, however, how very, very much relied on Jason’s truth: how much of their information came from Jason; how all their confirmation with the paidhi on the island did agree… but in all of it… in all of it… trust figured prominently.

“Nand’ dowager,” he said calmly, “I have asked myself that question for three years, the same I asked at the beginning. I know I’d entrust my life to him. But the responsibility I bear to the aiji and the association to be sure of the truth… doesn’t allow me to believe anything without question.”

“And this Mercheson-paidhi, whose associations you don’t thoroughly know?”

“Just so.”

“I’d thought a human might have a more exotic answer regarding trust and confirmation.”

“My own mother has associations I don’t thoroughly know, and consequently there are things I won’t tell her. Man’chi doesn’t apply, but gossip in the wrong places is a universal problem.”

Ilisidi laughed, that short, sharp laugh that said someone had, after all, taken a turn she didn’t expect.

“So does my grandsonhave associations of dubious connection,” Ilisidi said, still amused, and utterly serious. “Tatiseigi of the Atageini still rests uneasy.—Paidhi-ji, you never lose your edge.”

“I treasure the dowager’s good opinion.” God, were the gift-servants in his own household informing, however indirectly, the aiji-dowager, as he well knew even Banichi and Jago were informing Tabini? “I hope still to justify it.”

“Is your amorous bodyguard one of those items you don’t mention to your mother?”

He blushed. He knew he did… but Ilisidi had been in on this romantic intrigue from the first night.

“I try not to.”

“Deceiving one’s own mother.” The fruit had disappeared. Ilisidi laid down her utensil and leaned her narrow chin on an aged fist. Golden eyes caught the light, wreathed in wrinkles. “I take it, then, she wouldstill disapprove. On the other hand… is shecelibate? Or would she tell you that?”

His mother? He was shocked to think… no, she wouldn’t tell him. She was completely isolated, completely cut off from relationships outside the family… give or take Barb. She’d separated from his and Toby’s father and never had another man in her life that he knew. By now that was a fairly long record of no outside associations, but frankly, no, he didn’t know what his mother did when he wasn’t in town.

Ilisidi laughed, salacious amusement that was her wicked delight in a still active sexuality… in which he was relatively sure Cenedi figured somehow. He never understood atevi sensibilities in that regard. They had a great reserve outside an association; an unnerving lack of verbal reserve within one—and he suspected he simply didn’t come wired to understand on what grounds she laughed—a fact which he was sure contributed to the joke.

“Your face turns an interesting color,” she said.

“I’m sure it does.” She’d learned the meaning of a blush: and in all the years of their association he hadn’t quite figured out the precise point on which his embarrassment both charmed and amused her. God knew, with ‘Sidi-ji, there were far, far more dangerous relationships. And he always played the game… won her help, sometimes against very heavy odds.

“So,” she said, “are you embarrassed about Jago, before your mother?”

“My mother had far rather I’d married my former lover, who still courts her favor.”

A wry smile touched the dowager’s thin lips, inexplicable for a moment. Then: “Ah. Barb. And does your brother express an opinion?”

“He regards my staff very highly.” Liked them immensely, but there was no atevi word for that. “I rest assured in his loyalty.”

“Ha.” Ilisidi was delighted. “Has he asked particulars?”

He blushed—again, surely to her triumph.

“Only in the most general way, ‘Sidi-ji, and I haven’t answered in any particulars.”

“Such a gallant lover.”

He didn’t know on what grounds or on whose behalf he had just been examined, but he found himself on an unfamiliar shore, high and dry, and took, at last, a political risk.

“I would never lie to you, ‘Sidi-ji. And I do need your help.”

She smiled. Simply smiled. “Welcome home,” she said and, perhaps with a touch of the arthritis that plagued her, winced. “Supper is done. These old bones need a rest. I hate old age.”

She was not going to say a thing about Jase. And there was a time to stop, cease, let a subject rest where the person of higher rank had decided to leave it.

“I should withdraw, then,” he said quietly, “and give you peace. In all high regard for your rest and well-being, nand’ dowager.—But if you will I stay, I shall.”

“Oh, flatterer.” Thin fingers shooed him from the table. “Go. Out.”

“Nand’ dowager,” he said, rose, and excused himself toward the door, attended by the dowager’s servants, by Cenedi as well, who brought him to the foyer where Banichi and Jago waited.

“How is she?” he dared ask Cenedi. The dowager being the age she was, he did worry. He never knew; he never knew whether she would intervene or not.

“As ever,” Cenedi said… no young man himself, but as indefatigable.

“And Jasi-ji?” He never remotely expected Cenedi would betray a confidence, he knew asking had a risk of offense; but pass him a message the dowager herself could not in dignity relay, that Cenedi might do.

“He was here,” Cenedi said, “and now he is outside our security, paidhi-ji. We can’t reach him. We are concerned.”

“So am I,” he said, having no answer. “But not for Jase’s motives.” He passed that word under the table to Ilisidi, who probably would ask Cenedi if he had said anything; and went out, with Banichi and Jago, out into the general hallway, in an area of elegant marble, antique silk carpet, carved tables, and priceless porcelains.

Then he heaved a sigh, finding the vodka had taken the edge off the day; the bruising encounters were at least at distance enough. But if he couldn’t get to Tabini… then he’d go back to the space center, keep a promise… sleep tonight wasn’t likely.

“Bren-ji,” Banichi said to him as they walked, “the aiji has just requested your presence.”

He had his audience. He didn’t know but what Cenedi might have sent word through; he thought Banichi might have asked.

Or it was equally possible Tabini had his own agenda, and waited for the end of this supper—knowing Ilisidi had invited him.

Or there was collusion. That was possible, too.

The aiji called. There was no question he had to accept the invitation.

Chapter 4

Eidi, the major domo of the aiji’s household, admitted them to those historic precincts with minimal fuss, and just as smoothly Banichi and Jago, who knew the territory, knew the staff on a familiar basis, disappeared just past the doorway and went aside to the security station as Bren now knew few others would be permitted to do—Banichi and Jago were from this staff, originally, and maintained their ties.

So, technically, was he from the aiji’s staff, once upon a time, and still technically was on the staff, in respect of feudal loyalty. Any other lord of the Association might have, as he and Ilisidi had discussed, extraneous ties of man’chi, but he did not, and the welcome over the years had varied very little. Eidi provided him a chair in the small side chamber and whisked up a cup of tea, welcome after Ilisidi’s vodka. He sipped that while Eidi went to inform the aiji he had arrived.

A small commotion returned down the length of the foyer. It reached the door, and Bren rose.

Tabini came in still dressed in his court finery, black and red colors of his heraldry, and waved Bren back to his chair. “Well, well, Bren-ji. And how is Grandmother?”

“Very well, as I saw her. Complaining of her age.”

“So. So.” Tabini dropped into a chair. Tabini was a young man: aiji and paidhi-aiji, chief translator, were both young men. In a certain sense, they had come up together, together survived the tides that tried to wash civilization back onto known shores. “A blindingly quick flight from the hinterlands, and she complains of her arthritis.—Sip the tea, be at ease. I’ve no need of any. And how did the trip to the island go?”

Governments and theories of government had fallen; they stood, aiji and paidhi-aiji. On Mospheira, at his back, a very odd coalition of hitherto marginalized minorities with nothingin common but their detestation of the conservatives and their fear of war; while the aiji had gathered his former opponents, the bluest-bloods of the Association, to overcome the wealthy conservatives and get atevi into the space business.

“How fares Mospheira?” Tabini asked.

“As it has been. Always as it has been.” I was startled as hell to learn you’d admitted four humans to the space centerdid occur to him. I was upset as hell you’d moved Jase out, was ahead of that, but he let Tabini get there at his own speed.

“The new paidhi was accepted?”

“There’s no polite choice. They find no affront in Mercheson’s withdrawal, but they’re not happy and they wonder what she’ll say.”

“Since they tried to kill her, probably not a thoroughly positive report.”

“But to recall her… Mospheirans accept this as the Guild’s right over its own representative. I did talk with Shawn Tyers. And talked with the delegates on the plane. They were surprised you granted their visa, aiji-ma.”

“Were they? And the meeting with Jase?”

“We talked at some length.” He kept all expression off his face, out of his voice. “I advise the aiji against sending him.”

“When shall we send him, then?”

A question, a challenge for an answer. “When the second shuttle flies,” he said. “I need Jase.”

“And if I say he goes as Ramirez-aiji requires?”

“Then he will go, aiji-ma. But I’ll wish to go back to the space center. I was surprised, of course. We spent the conversation reminiscing. I fear I came away not having asked things I should have asked. I’m not ready to lose this man…”

“ Whatwould you have asked?”

“Principally, what Jase thinks they’ll ask next. He doesn’t think they’ll let him come down soon. I find this alarming.” It wasn’t no, not yet. He still schemed to advance a plan. “He might take moderately ill. The shuttle cycles in six weeks. That would give us time, aiji-ma.”

“Time.—And Trent Cope? Did he recover?”

“Jase doesn’t favor him. I don’t. Though it’s very difficult for a person to be forthcoming when he knows he’s sedated.”

“Understandable. He has all of Jason’s physical difficulties?”

“Moving at night did prove better.”

“And your household? Well?”

“Very well, aiji-ma.”

“And President Durant?”

God, what was this? A catalog?

“Very well. I introduced Trent-paidhi myself, though Trent-paidhi was mildly indisposed and took immediate leave to a windowless room. The President asked politely regarding your health, aiji-ma, and extended his wishes for you and Lady Damiri.”

There was no reaction to the good wishes. Tabini, even seated, towering in the natural height of adult atevi, was a powerful individual… a hunter on opportunity, besides a student of every curiosity, and of technology. His gold eyes were pale to the point of ill omen, and the predatory look came naturally. There might never have been so progressive and enlightened a ruler as Tabini in all the history of the Western Association. But his direct, continuing stare unnerved his opponents.

“You were surprised by the delegation, paidhi-ji?”

“Utterly. I knew they were training a group to go, as of last year. I knew there was going to be a request as soon as the shuttle officially had a flight schedule. I did report that, aiji-ma, I’m sure I did.”

“You did, nand’ paidhi. I certainly attach no fault to you in this matter of the delegation; on the contrary, I sent directly to Tyers, and suggestedthis mission.”

Without translation? It was impossible. Someone had mediated. Someone knew what was going on. He damned sure didn’t.

No study, no committee, no hesitation. Bang! Stamped, sealed, approved, and the team suddenly had a visa; use it or else.

In the same heartbeat came a footfall at the door, a whisper of fabric, a faint whisper of spice, to nostrils assailed with Mospheiran scents for days. Lady Damiri arrived in the room, and Bren rose in courtesy as Tabini’s wife settled in the graceful chair at Tabini’s elbow.

“We will miss you, paidhi-ji,” Damiri said to him.

Miss? Bren thought in shock, and Tabini looked vexed.

“Love of my life,” Tabini began.

“Oh, you haven’t told him.”

“No, I haven’t told him, daja-ma.—Bren, nadi, there was a reason I sent Jase Graham to the space center in such haste. Your belongings are by now packed.”

While he was at the dowager’s apartment? In a matter of two hours? “And I’m going… where, aiji-ma?” To Ilisidi’s estate at Malguri, perhaps. Perhaps that was the connection with Ilisidi’s invitation, and this—he was needed somewhere, maybe another insurgency, some further difficulty with the anti-space conservatives. Twice before, he’d found himself moved out to regions of political stress under extreme security and with little notice.

“Do you approve, paidhi-ji, this mission of representatives to the station? Are these acceptable persons?”

“Two translators from the Foreign Office, Feldman and Shugart, belong to Shawn Tyers; or Podesta. She’s department head now. They’re advisors, very junior. I don’t know the other two. One is from Commerce. Anyone from that department is a concern to me. That’s George Barrulin’s old power base.”

“Translators of Ragi,” Tabini mused. “To go to the space station.”

“Awareness of nuance and context makes them valuable observers. I understand why Tyers sends them… I know why they formed the team as they did.” Four. Infelicitous four, he thought. It was not a good number. He’d been functioning with the Mospheiran side of his brain not to see that at the outset.

But Jase was going. Set of five.

“What does Jase fear?” Tabini asked. “He expressed no fears to me.”

“He wouldn’t,” Bren said. “He respects you. He knows he has no recourse. And I stillask, aiji-ma, that you not send him yet. The next flight. Not this one. They’ll understand… they won’t expectyou to grant their request. A human would delay.”

Tabini had a wry expression. “Delay, with these aliens coming.”

“It’s human, aiji-ma. And I need him. They won’t argue. They won’t take offense.”

“In this additional time… what would you gain?”

“Questions. More questions.”

“And three years have not sufficed?”

It was a very good question… one he couldn’t outright answer, except they weren’t either of them ready for this.

“Jase wants to see his ship again; and he knows, in the economy of things, he’s become a valuable advisor to them.”

“As to you.”

“As he is to me,” Bren acknowledged.

“He will go, advise his people, then return.”

“Not likely. They’ve no reason to let him come back.”

“I shall place a personal request for his return.”

“I fear your request won’t get him back, aiji-ma. Not from the Guild.”

“Will Jase remain well-disposed to us? Will he wish, then, what he wishes now?”

“He’ll feel emotional attachment. He’ll fall into old associations.”

“And this mission from the island? Will they find things familiar? Will theyobey the Pilots’ Guild? Or oppose them?”

“I don’t know. There’ll be an emotional context for them. The sites of history have their impact.”

“ Naojai-tu,” Damiri said quietly, “nand’ paidhi.”

“Like that,” Bren said. The machimiplays were the collected wisdom of atevi history, the culture of the Western Association. In Naojai-tu, a cynical woman came face to face with relics she had thought remote and unimportant… and in the impact they had, in the context, she turned on her lover. Indeed, he knew the play, and its conclusion.

Unguessed association, unguessed emotional reaction, unguessed affiliations devastatingly realized.

And when one came down to analyzing the emotional impact of the human team seeing the station their ancestors had come from—or the feelings Jason would have face to face with his relatives again—yes, atevi could indeed comprehend that. Sometimes humans jumped the same direction atevi jumped when startled.

But you didn’t take for granted it was the same reason for the reaction. Or the same outcome. “And what was Jason’s reaction to the mission?” Tabini asked.

“He didn’t meet with them immediately. He had a short time to see me; he chose that. We met, we talked, and I forgot to ask him questions I should have asked. He didn’t ask me, either. On a certain level I think we knew we’d become separate in our man’chi, so to speak. When he goes back—he’ll have no aiji but Ramirez. So we reminisced, and said good-bye.”

Tabini listened soberly.

“That’s very sad,” Damiri-daja said.

“Do you have confidence in the President’s intentions?” Tabini asked. “And Ramirez?”

Not—is the President of Mospheira lying?—which would be one question, but—do you have confidence in him; and in Tyers; and in the senior captain of the ship-humans?

“Aiji-ma, it’s the same story: Mospheirans want to lead their lives and not worry. A leader who makes them worry isn’t popular. Right now, they remember that the Heritage Party nearly took them to war. Now ship-humans make them worry about the chance there are unfriendly aliens out there. They’d rather not think about it. So they won’t. All this mission learns will create a furor at first… then lose attention. All the President does and all the conservatives do about it will be quiet unless there’s a direct, imminent threat. There’s no energy for it, not so soon after the people kicked the conservatives out of office.”

Tabini smiled. It was certainly the short version of the politics of Mospheira, but it compassed very similar emotions on the mainland: Bren knew it did. Neverupset the midsection of the Association, never annoy uncle Tatiseigi… or Lord Geigi.

“One day I should meet the President of Mospheira,” Tabini said, implying there would be no few frustrations in common with Hampton Durant. “So shall we proceed in tasteful silence through these machinations? Or shall we wake two populations from their sleep?”

“Only to tell them both we’ve found a good solution, aiji-ma.”

“Therefore I asked this mission to go with Jase. Time is ours now; perhaps not, if these remote aliens begin to dictate the schedule. Therefore, paidhi-ji, I’m sending you to the station.”

My God, he thought.

And: No. I can’t.

It was the dream of his life, that the space program should have just gotten off the ground with him to witness it. That Shai-shanshould turn out to be his creation… he’d stood on the side of the runway and watched its first flight half a year ago, watched the shuttle become a gleam in the sky, and a dot, and a memory and a hope. When, two weeks later, he had stood on that same runway and watched Shai-shanland as easily as any airliner—God, he’d wept.

But go upthere? That wasn’t for him.

His face, he discovered, didn’t react, hadn’t reacted. Like his predecessor, Wilson, who’d forgotten how to deal with human emotion, he’d stopped reacting.

“Aiji-ma,” he said quietly, accepting that this would happen, “on this flight?”

“On this flight,” Tabini said. And one could not say: but my business, but my possessions, my duties, my staff. One listened. “To remain until you’ve understood them, and then to return to me. You can conduct your other duties by radio, can you not? And your staff is adept enough to carry on without you, at least the commercial aspects. Diplomatic matters with the Pilots’ Guild take precedence until there is an agreement regarding our station.”

Our station. That was Tabini’s position. Humans had built it, Mospheira didn’t want it, didn’t want to lose it, either. Atevi weren’t historically happy about it being there, didn’t want Mospheirans to have it, and Tabini wanted it under his authority.

He hadn’t thoroughly explained that position to Mospheira, but Jase knew.

Get me the sun and the moon, paidhi-ji. Toss in the good will of the Pilots’ Guild for good measure.

Everything was in motion. Everything had been in motion before his plane had set down on the runway. Everything had gotten into motion during his five days isolated and out of touch on Mospheira. Tabini started planning this the day the ship called Yolanda Mercheson home; they called Jason, the day before the shuttle launched, expecting a wrangling argument, and Tabini… simply complied, high and wide.

The ship-humans wanted the program to move faster?

It was about to move faster.

“You must take care,” Damiri-daja said.

“Daja-ma, I will.”

“Safeguard yourself,” Tabini said with unaccustomed fierceness. “Your bodyguard need not return to me if any mishap takes you.”

Then Banichi and Jago were going with him.

But no one would have asked them their opinion, either, and what had been sacrificed in cargo to add three more passengers with baggage… God, the baggage!… he had no idea. Everything… all the scientific packages, all the materials tests…

Where did those stand?

What werethey taking?

What in hell was he supposed to do to make this miracle happen?.

“I’ll work with Jase,” he said to Tabini.

“If they prove intractable, leave.”

“Yes, aiji-ma.”

“I insist on it,” Tabini said, and rose. Damiri-daja rose, and Bren rose.

Together, while he bowed, they left him.

He stood there a moment then, in the middle of the ornate carpet, next to the historic chairs. All the warmth had gone out of him.

He’d built it. He was going to ride it. He was going withJase, who’d just been coopted back under the captains’ authority. If Jase chose to have that happen… and probably he should; probably the captains shouldn’t notice that humans who dealt with atevi tended to grow very strange.

So, well, he said to himself, drew a deep breath and went out, then, not forgetting to pay courteous notice to Eidi, as composed as if he hadn’t just learned he was riding a plane into orbit, to filch change out of the Pilots’ Guild’s pockets.

An agency his compatriots on Mospheira thought of as the devil incarnate.

Had he somehow, somewhere failed to relay that to Tabini?

And Tabini had talked to Shawn?

He walked casually toward the foyer, where he regained his escort.

“Nadiin,” he said simply, taking his leave of Tabini’s security. “Nadiin-ji,” he added, the warmer address to men he knew, and walked outside the heavy doors in his own security’s company.

They, he suspected, had known something was going on from before they picked him up at the airport. They might not have known where he was going, but they’d known they were going with him, and were bound by the aiji’s orders to let him go through this long evening of dinners and conversations—

While his personal belongings were doubtless packed, moved, attended to…

They walked down a hallway resplendent with antiquity and scrutinized by a hundred hidden watchers, electronics, spying devices, all of the panoply of the iron-handed ruler of a world civilization… who didn’t damned much move anywhere without his knowing it.

“Well,” he said to Banichi and Jago, not accusingly, only to assure himself the needful things were done, “not surprised, were you.”

“Nandi,” Jago said quietly. “To be sent up to the station? We were surprised by the destination, not by the fact that we would move.”

“Nand’ Jase doesn’t know.”

He considered that, as they approached the lift. “He’s going to be shocked.” As hell, he thought.

“I think he will be,” Banichi said.

They stood at the lift. He suddenly realized he had no notion which button to push, whether to go to his apartment, or down to the train. “The staff has packed?”

“While you were at supper,” Banichi said.

“Tano and Algini are going,” Jago said, and punched in for the lowest level. It wasthe train. “Likewise Narani, Sabiso, Kandana and Bindanda.”

“Bindanda.” One of Tatiseigi’s. His mind went flying off on a suspicious tangent, involving Ilisidi’s long association with Tatiseigi, Tatiseigi’s occasional opposition to Tabini, and the likelihood more than one element of the Association had been brought in on this before he had.

Bindanda, a quiet, polite spy.

Four security, around a fifth point. Himself. Nine, with the servants. A very fortunate number: ‘counters had devised it, in harmony with the space center and shuttle.

One wondered how those numbers fit in with the station and the Guild.

“Narani’s quite old for this excitement,” he said as the car arrived.

“He avows his health will withstand it. He’s left Tagi in charge of your apartments, moved Edoro into Tagi’s place in your coastal estate, nandi, with your approval.”

The warmth hadn’t yet come back to his hands. He stepped into the lift.

He hadn’t his most comfortable clothing; he had only what he stood in.

He and Jase had made extensive preparations to set up an atevi residency on the station. There were items of baggage. There were pieces of equipment.

“Are we displacing all the cargo?” he asked.

“One believes so,” Banichi said.

He didn’t know what he was going to tell Jase.

Chapter 5

It was back on the train… going the other direction, a passage punctuated by the click of the rails and the whisper of the car’s passage against the wide and narrow portions of the tunnels.

He sat with Banichi and Jago, sure his baggage from the airplane would turn up, at least the needful things. The computer would turn up. He was entirely sure of it.

“Did the dowager know?” he asked, out of a moment of silence.

“I believe she made great haste in arranging a flight” Banichi said. “That’s all we know.”

Bindanda was one of the number. If Tabini had deceived his redoubtable grandmother, that deception would have meant very unhealthy things going on within the Association. Tatiseigi was always an uneasy ally.

“One is honored” he said of the dowager and her dinner. “I’m glad she came.”

Jago lifted a brow. “She has no return flight arranged,” Jago said, “that we know.”

She might well have decided to stay and become a thorn in the side to Tabini, or so Tabini would claim.

Yet it was remarkable how close that apparently divided house could stand, in crisis… no few of the aiji’s enemies had discovered it.

Ilisidi had brought herself and her security, for what was bound to be a period full of speculation among the lords: what would the paidhi learn? What would Tabini agree to? What would be the relation with Mospheira?… that was bound to follow his ascent into space.

God, he didn’t want to think about the flight. He’d survived watching the flights, had nervous fits watching the landing. The switchover in engines was a miracle the technicians swore was flawless, but it always seemed a chancy thing to do, cut off perfectly good engines several miles above the ocean.

A part of him wanted to go to the one atevi physician who monitored his health and ask for total sedation. He wasn’t sure he could do this; he’d been shot at, shot, and chased down mountains; but engine switchover scared hell out of him.

So did facing Jason at the end of this train ride with, Oh, well, you know how Tabini can be. He decided to send me with you. I swear I didn’t know. And by the way, we’re taking the station.

Sorry for the inconvenience, old friend.

He was still in that psychological dislocation that a trip to Mospheira tended to bring him, that sudden trip among people his height, furniture his size, steps his convenient dimensions, language and food he’d grown up with; and now, leaving Jase in the space center, he’d just definitively cleared the air of the island enclave from his lungs, human language from his head, and human expectations from his emotions.

Now, in the obliging silence of his security, he tried to jerk all that back into focus. Banichi and Jago, sitting across from him on the red velvet seats, became two stone-faced giants in the black leather and silver of their profession, black of skin, black of hair, gold of eye…

He knew, the patterns and the battles he understood… he was valuable here, dammit, the world’s leading expert on the atevi-human interface. Someone else could do this part… maybe a year from now.

Jasewas the logical one. Jaseshould be in Tabini’s employ and reckon whether Tabini hadn’t tried to get Jase’s loyalty into his hands?

He knew that answer, suddenly, knew it hadn’t played right from Tabini’s point of view, and Tabini had played the hand he had left.

And what wasthe meeting Jase had had with the dowager? Fond farewell? The dowager had been her grandson’s greatest opposition—on certain causes; but at times she was solidly her grandson’s conduit of policy. Had that been a sounding-out?

And had Jase failed it… or had he never been in the running?

“Well” Bren said with a sigh, “well.” The deep-welling panic about the shuttle flight took its place in a long queue, somewhere behind having to deal with Jase, and that itself was somewhere behind his knowledge that he himself was Tabini’s… and that civilization rested very heavily on his being faithfully Tabini’s… whatever Jase was or became.

It wasn’t the situation he wanted to contemplate. Jase was likely to be mad; if he mismanaged the matter, things could get worse.

“How far in Tabini’s confidence is the dowager in this matter?” he asked his security.

“One has no sure knowledge, nadi” Banichi said. ”We were aware of movements; we did not investigate the aiji’s doings.“

“I understand that,” Bren said. More exotic and more mundane affairs came flooding into his head. “Mospheira very carefully selected four persons, no staff: and I have—what, eight, with baggage? This will disturb Mospheira, I fear, not to mention the delegation; not to mention the station. We should be alert to that.”

“The paidhi-aiji will notmake his own supper,” Banichi said. “These things were agreed.”

Know to an exactitude the limitations of mass and cargo? Banichi’s native gift for mathematics exceeded the norm for his species, considerably. In human terms, he would have been a prodigy.

“How much cargo did we displace?” he asked his staff.

“Sufficient,” Jago answered, “to assure your safety and comfort.”

They had their weapons on them; they always did; and he apprehended that the kitchen likely wasn’t the only thing they were bringing along in cargo.

“They have never advised us our facility is complete,” Bren said.

“Did not this station once shelter three hundred thousand humans? And do we not reckon the crew of the ship to be two thousand five hundred at largest?”

“They have the ship,” Banichi said. “They can live there.”

“We will claim a very fineaccommodation,” Jago said firmly, “for a lord of the Association.”

And the weapons, he wondered?

“Will they be wise,” asked Banichi, “to attack the paidhi-aiji on his first mission?”

“They’re as fond of surprises as Uncle Tatiseigi.”

“The paidhi is a very skilled negotiator,” Banichi said with supreme confidence.

Get control of the station, for God’s sake. He had to argue fast for that one. Mospheirans might not want a thing, but they didn’t want their rivals to have it.

Looking at the microfocus, he’d thought of Cope as the principal problem, and assumed Yolanda’s recall was all the Guild was going to ask for a while. He and Jase had assumed that the Pilot’s Guild would take a long while to digest all that Yolanda could tell them. Consequently, he’d been utterly blindsided by this second request, this notion of having Jase back up there.

So had Tabini. Tabini didn’t like it—but took, not the path of resistance, but the path of equal action in their system of half-formed agreements.

One wanted to know what atevi were culturally set up to expect? The machimi plays held a repertoire of treachery and double-cross. It was the common trick, in the machimi, to try to move some agents about distractingly and achieve a move not suspected, not even by the all-seeing audience.

Mercheson hadn’t resisted going. Shall we send Mercheson-paidhi? Tabini had asked. And he and Jase hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t drawn the line. Nor had Mercheson.

So now the ship captains asked more, and at the last moment. And Tabini reacted.

He couldn’t claim he himself understood the Pilot’s Guild. They were human, but they damned well didn’t feel like Mospheirans… not the old familiar, frustrating debating and delaying of the Mospheiran policy-making apparatus. The ship’s captains were autocrats. In that, they and Tabini understood one another better than the captains were going to understand what the Mospheirans were doing.

Across the barrier of gravity and distance, the maneuvering of subordinates was not easy: one couldn’t, say, as in the machimi plays, ask a major player to tea and serve up daggers.

Now the ship suddenly had Jase, whom they’d asked for, plus a lapful of Mospheirans with their agenda, and worse, an atevi presence at the same time, instead of the test cargo it expected. He could almost see it in historical dress, the blithe guests at the doorway, banners flying: refuse us or accept us. Draw swords or deal.

If it wanted to turn them around and send them back down unreceived, it still had a two-week delay at minimum to service the shuttle. It still faced the fact it couldn’t leave them all on board the shuttle for two weeks unless it meant to murder them all, because life-support wouldn’t last that long… and it couldn’t just shoot them, either, if it ever wanted to deal reasonably and cheaply for earthbound supplies.

Itsaid it desperately needed those supplies, and thus far urged the world into a breakneck development of technology and materials.

The Guild also couldn’t take over the shuttle… couldn’t fly a complex surface-to-orbit craft themselves.

Let the Guild look across their steel battlements and figure all that out.

He drew a quieter breath, gazed at his two companions, at Tano and Algini, too, standing their somewhat more distant station at the end of the rail car, and he thought all these thoughts in a tumbling race while the wheels clicked over the joints of steel rails.

When he’d first arrived in his job as a very young paidhi replacing an old and retiring one, the paidhi’s office had still been trying to convince atevi that an air traffic control system over large communities was a good idea.

Atevi had leaped centuries in a decade, unanimity of effort that was onlypossible because of the Western Association and the power Tabini-aiji could fling into action on a wave of his hand. Mospheira called it autocracy, and that was true on the surface, but only true if one backed far, far away from the workings of the government and the legislature and took a human-tinted view. Atevi had committees.

God, atevi had committees. Lord Brominandi could put a tree to sleep.

But the committees didn’t debate what the aiji paid for out of his own pocket… and every subassociation on the continent had wanted a slice of the budget and a connection to the new materials and industries. The download of designs from the ship archive had become a feeding-frenzy of industrial sponsorship, because there was no question that the world was going to change.

Tabini had fought the requisite small skirmishes in the process, several of them, right to the brink of war, but never over it.

Take the kitchen? Damned right they would. Take his bodyguard, his servants, his staff—they didn’t go with him to Mospheira, by virtue of the treaty that kept humans and atevi on this world separate and sane. But the station was going to be atevi territory.

The interface was a lot safer than it had been historically; atevi were a damned sight more sophisticated than they had been. Mospheirans likewise.

It was a question of what the Pilots’ Guild had become.

But Tabini hadn’t backed down yet: blood and conniving bone, yes, the atevi lord of lords, the one other atevi regarded as dangerous, simply waited for the moment the Pilots’ Guild blinked.

Conversation stopped, in the group of Mospheirans gathered in chairs about the low table in the lounge. Bren walked the rest of the way in, scanned the room for Jase first of all, and didn’t find him, not there with the Mospheirans, not in the dining nook.

Ginny Kroger got to her feet first, and asked the logical question: “Mr. Cameron. Is there a problem?”

“No, not as such. What I didn’t know this morning was that the aiji’s just formed a mission of his own. Atevi are going. I’ll accompany you up on this flight.”

The body language said they’d been struck, one and all, a second blow to their certainties when they’d been rushed into this mission not on their own schedule; and now they’d been finagled. Conned.

Lund got to his feet, and Feldman and Shugart, less certainly.

“Quite honestly,” Bren said, “this came as a surprise to me. I suppose it shouldn’t have, but here I am. I’ll be lodging next door, this evening, in the atevi facilities, but I did come by to advise you. To advise Jase Graham, who doesn’t know anything about this, either.”

“You’re welcome here,” Lund said, as cheerfully as he might invite a known thief into their midst. But it was graciously done, all the same.

“That’s very kind of you,” Bren said. And at that, Jase did come out of his room, not hopefully. Jase hadn’t seemed to have overheard the details, only the voice, and didn’t look as if he expected miracles, or a reprieve.

“Bren?”

“He’s sent me, too.” He was very conscious of the witnesses. “ I’mgoing.”

“ Areyou?” Jase asked. It was the question of a man who’d known he was in a rapid river, and now heard the cataract. “The aiji’s orders, is it? His idea?”

“Very much so,” Bren said. Jasecould speak of the aiji in the third person remote. Jase had a welcome in the aiji’s apartment, had the familiarity to speak of him, if Lund didn’t. “I think he figures things are moving, since the Guild asked for you. “Go up and deal with them” he said. So—here I am. Me. Banichi and Jago… four of the staff. With the galley.” When he said that, Jase would know everything: it was the full mission, as they’d planned it. “I hadn’t any notion until he called me in this evening, and then it was turn around, get on the train, go.”

Lund had the look of a canny businessman. The junior translators were simply dumbfounded; Kroger, from Science, looked as if she had swallowed something unpleasant. “So what does this mean?” Kroger asked. “Are you cooperating with us, or what?”

“The aiji has his requests to make of the Guild… one of the foremost to be sure there areadequate quarters for us. We will cooperate, if there’s any difficulty in that regard. The other matters…” He let the statement fall, not willing to lie to them. “Our missions are separate. I don’t know how long it will take. I hope for the same turnaround. If not… we’ll hope they find somewhere for all of us. I do regret the surprise.”

“Well,” Lund said. “Well. It is a surprise.”

They had to realize now that their job had just become far more complex, that they weren’t going to get unfettered access to the Guild up there, if they had ever laid elaborate plans in that regard. They couldn’t be pleased with that. Managing their own reencounter with the Pilots’ Guild, when the Pilots’ Guild was simultaneously face to face with atevi for the first time in all history… they’d been sandbagged, in short. As he’d been, as Jase had been… as the Pilots’ Guild was about to be. It was a three-way maneuver, and Tabini had assigned him, flatly, to get ahead of the Mospheirans.

“Well,” Jason said faintly, “good. I’m glad of the company.—Want to sit down? Fruit juice?”

“Madi,” Bren said, deciding to force his way into the company from which Jase had kept himself isolated, in his room. It was an early fruit, green, biting and sour.

Jase went into the dining nook, bent down to take it from the refrigerator… took down a glass.

Bottled juice, poured into a glass: Jase had scandalized the staff, early on in the bottled juice experiment, drinking from a bottle; and not since.

“Glass,” Jase said.

“Glass.” Bren took his drink, settled… trusted Banichi, Jago, and the rest attended the questions of cargo and baggage. And weaponry. God knew what was going into cargo.

God knew what the station would say.

“So,” Tom asked, “what are you going to ask them?”

“A working agreement. A means that doesn’t get Mospheirans oratevi dying in the labor force. The aiji specifically honored his agreement with you in his plans. In his terms, that’s adherence to the agreements. Work with me. I’ll work with you. Fact-finding, I’m very much in favor of.”

“The facts,” Jase said in a faint but carrying voice, “the facts are, there’s a threat out there that may come here.”

“Fact-finding,” Kroger said, annoyed. “We’re not prepared to make agreements.”

“I am,” Bren said.

“Mr. Cameron, this puts us in a difficult position. We need to contact our offices. Tonight.”

“I intend to cooperate fully with your mission,” Bren said, “and hope for the same courtesy. Contact your offices as you like. The phone will go through, I’m sure.”

Lund said, “We’ve left scheduling to the atevi government. Does the ship even know we’re coming?”

“Probably not,” Bren said. “They will.”

“Good God.”

“It’s not the aiji’s style to make it possible for the other side to argue,” Bren said. “We havean agreement amongst ourselves. You don’t want to contract for labor in bad conditions; we don’t; they need us badly. That adds very simply. If we on the world present a reasonable case that gets them what they want in a timely fashion, we get economic benefits and we all get some sort of preparation against whatever threat comes over the cosmic horizon.”

“Until what?” Kroger asked. “Until the aiji decides to surprise uswith another maneuver we aren’t told about?”

“He will do that,” Bren said. “It’s my job to make sure it’s as fair as possible.”

“Mr. Cameron, you’re theirrepresentative.”

If he weren’t Mospheiran he wouldn’t have understood that statement. Jase probably didn’t. And the species-based blindness that produced so obvious an observation ran cold fingers down his back.

“Yes,” he said, “as I’ve made as clear as possible. I hold a rank withinTabini-aiji’s court, I hold my Mospheiran office only because no other paidhi can get a visa, and over that I have no control. Your interpreters can tell you I don’t control the issuance of visas in the aiji’s government. I will negotiate on the aiji’s behalf. I will speak on the aiji’s behalf to Mr. Graham, here, who you might remember speaks for the Guild. That is his function. So we shouldn’t burden him with witnessing too much. On my own, I apologize for the shortness of the notice. For the aiji, I don’t apologize, because it’s perfectly reasonable. Explaining that point is my job. You won’t have to explain it to the Pilots’ Guild. I will. If, on the other hand, you want to request a plane to take you home tonight, I can arrange that.”

There was a lengthy, heated silence.

Anxiety, anxiety, anxiety, on every front. What new technology would arrive to disrupt the economy? How could manufacturers bet on known factors in the economy when something could fall out of space and throw all calculations awry?

At least within their imaginations, fortunes were at risk; their independence as Mospheirans was at risk.

“Ultimately” he said, ”humans don’t rule this planet, but you don’t want to be ruled by the Guild, either. The aiji fully supports your position.“

“Well, now,” Lund said, clearly the peacemaker, while Kroger scowled, the lines of her face set in what now looked like a habit of fury. “We have political stability to consider; we’re not splintering off into a second colony.”

“That’s always a hazard” Bren agreed. ”The aiji would agree.“

“And I say we aren’t here to negotiate,” Kroger said.

“And I am,” Bren said quietly. “I don’t negotiate for Mospheira. But I think the Guild will rather well expect something to result besides fact-finding. I think we’ll exit with some kind of agreement, because I know the aiji’s prepared to move to the next stage.”

“Then let atevi die working for the Guild,” Kroger said.

“I’m sure he’s not prepared to have that happen,” Bren said, “and I’m sure the Guild’s perfectly happy to have the goods they want without loss of life. On the other hand, there canbe profit in this for Mospheira, including the fishing industry, food, and electronics… the usual areas of specialty.”

Electronics was lately in danger, but Mospheirans were still convinced of their superiority.

“Finished goods,” Bren said, to Kroger’s scowl. “That’s what Mospheira has tended to do. We have the lift vehicles; you have specialized manufacturing and you process the kind of foods the station needs far more reliably.” No alkaloid poisons, that was to say; humans were naturally very careful of that sort of thing. “You want the status quo. There’s no reason to see that change. Humans who want to go into space, I’m sure will find a place. Humans who don’t will have their way of life undisturbed, and the aiji’s prepared to guarantee that point.”

Kroger’s face relaxed ever so slightly. “We’ll hear your proposal.”

“I’m making it. A guarantee of stability. Freedom to come and go. Protection for Mospheira against any demands or encroachment.”

“You can’t guarantee that.”

“I know the aiji’s position. I’m very confident of it.”

“He can’t withstand the Guild” Kroger said, and cast an uneasy glance in Jason’s direction, as if for a heartbeat she’d forgotten who and what he was. ”He’s not able to withstand them.“

“He can,” Jase said, and drew all attention, but that was all he said.

“He will,” Bren said, and set down the empty glass. “Jase. Mr. Graham. Will you allow me a brief consultation?”

“I will, ”Jase said.

Bren rose, resisted the habit of a slight bow. “Morning comes before dawn,” he said. “Gentlemen. Ladies.”

“Mr. Cameron” Kroger said. ”Don’t take us for agreeing.“

“No,” Bren said. They didn’t have the power, and he was sure they didn’t, but he had the uneasy suspicion he’d heard Kroger’s opinion, the anthropocentric side of Mospheiran politics. If she wasn’t Heritage, she at least cast that shadow across the proceedings, and he wasn’t so sure Lund even realized it, if he had to guess. He’d have taken Lund for the problem, being out of Commerce, but he began to see compromise in the composition of this mission… Lund thinking he was in charge, but Kroger armed with understandings… he very much feared that was the case: understandings that had nothing to do with Mospheira remaining independent, and everything to do with the last regime’s aims at getting into orbit, getting in power, running human society in a way that had nothing to do with the general will of the Mospheirans as they were and everything to do with old, old agreements with the Guild.

“But I will see you before daylight,” he said, and caught Jase’s eye as he left.

Jase went to the door with him, to the outer hall.

“Very much need to talk with you,” Bren said. “Never mind what they think.”

Chapter 6

A diplomatic, an official action, this first venture into space. To Mospheiran humans, that meant a balanced array of powerful men and women, human interests that could wangle a spot on the team all represented by someone—hence the circle of rooms around a central meeting point—no one more important than the next. Well, give or take the two Shawn Tyers had put in, Bren thought, walking the hall toward his own quarters… gathering up Algini and Tano in the process: trust that his security was never that far from him. They met him, walked with him, overshadowing him, in the black leather and silver of their Guild… good men, both.

And surely Mospheiran dignitaries, given the chance to take more than two translators along, would like to have their secretaries, their whole array of support, including NSA and the appurtenances of Mospheiran dignity.

But those seats on the shuttle were not free of cost, and on the whole, they’d rather be assured that iftheir competition was going, they were going, too.

So they had four seats.

But to atevi, the fortunate gods forbid there should be a laying out of the interregional issues of the Western Association in front of strangers, a diplomatic mission meant the highest representative of the court appropriate to the task, with his supportive community.

And servants were more immediately essential than secretaries, although the four he had could double in that capacity. And security: no atevi lord was ever without security, day or night.

Algini keyed open the door for him into the atevi side of the space center, and Narani met him, closely followed by the others, with deep, respectful, surely anxious bows.

“Nand’ paidhi,” Narani said. “We had orders.”

“One knows, Rani-ji. You’ve done a wonder, I’m very sure. Thank you all.”

Reception foyer, a dining hall, a sitting room, several bedchambers for the lord and his security, who were never far from him. A bath, what atevi genteelly called the accommodation, a cloakroom, a security post, a reading room, a kitchen—all that was minimal.

And when he and Jase had designed the place, in company with atevi architects, the requisite bedchambers and recreational facilities for, they had decided, a minimal four servants, since the servants had to attend the security personnel as well, and assure the security personnel had their minds utterly free to do their duties. Even if for some reason the aiji had sent a tradesman or craftsman… neither craftsfolk nor trades came as isolate individuals. The carpenter would have his apprentices, not to mention family and servants; the plumber would bring his own equipment, his apprentices, and if not servants and security, at very least some remote younger relative of a relative who made tea for the customers… how could one respectably do otherwise and answer obligations to the relatives? If the Mospheirans had a set of independent luxury rooms opening out onto a common room where varying interests could meet, the atevi answer was a single household, inward-turned, a hierarchy with a master or mistress at the top.

“Jase is coming,” he said to Banichi and Jago when he passed the small security station.

“Shall we include Jasi-ji?” Narani asked, following him.

“He won’t stay, I much doubt it,” Bren said. “But he will come. We’ll have vodka, Rani-ji, in the sitting room. Might there be a fire?”

“Immediately, nandi.”

Jase being under other orders, it wasn’t proper, he suspected, to include Jase in his personal arrangements, not for the sake of a few hours. If he undermined Jase’s status as an independent representative of his ship, and if the captains took exception, that could prove a distraction. Only if Jase asked. Then they should, and he’d deal with the difficulties.

He didn’t want a fracture in his understandings with Jase—above all else, he didn’t.

And sure enough, Jase arrived not a minute later, in his jersey and that wretched jacket.

The servants fussed and made despairing motions toward taking the jacket, but Jase complained of chill.

Bren said not a word, only showed him to the sitting room and offered him a chair by a just-lit fire.

Narani himself brought them ice, glasses, a crystal flask of Mospheiran vodka, set it on the side table and poured in that practiced efficiency that never seemed rushed, that seemed to urge the same deliberate slowing of pace on the whole household. Narani served them, received Jase’s quiet thanks, and ebbed silently out the door, shutting it as he went.

“Cheers,” Jase said, in his own dialect, lifted his glass and took a sip.

Bren took a sip of his own, second for the evening; but it was an uncommon evening.

A damned uncommon evening.

“I am sorry, Jase. I was utterly blind to this one; to the last, I didn’t see it.”

“I have no trouble believing it.”

“You didn’t say you’d had supper with Ilisidi.”

A blink. “I did.”

“I know you did. So did I. Whydid she come?”

“I’ve not a clue,” Jase said.

“Do you think she knew what was up?”

“I’m not surprised at anything where she’s concerned. Or Tabini.” Jase added: “I’d like to have stayed. Selfishly speaking. Is this, honestly, not cleared with the Pilots’ Guild?”

“Of course it isn’t. Does Tabini clear any damn thing?”

“No,” Jase said. “Of course he doesn’t.”

“He doesn’t want the Guild to build its entire impression of atevi from you or from Yolanda, either.”

“It wouldn’t be an accurate impression.”

“More accurate than the Mospheiran delegation would give them, I’ll tell you. I don’t trust Ginny Kroger.”

“She’s angry at you,” Jase said.

Bren shook his head. “Angry doesn’t matter with her. I’m afraid she’s a type, and unless she changes her attitude about me, which she came in with, I don’t like the idea of her shaping policy.”

“You have to admit you’ve pushed them.”

“ Iknow that. I don’t think it matters a damn to Kroger’s opinion. She’s set on her own way. Until she believes she’s not on Mospheira, she won’t modify her opinion; and I’m afraid she’s going to discover it after she’s gotten into negotiations.”

Jase didn’t say anything for a moment, then: “How long are you up there?”

“Two weeks. Just until the shuttle goes down.”

“If the shuttle’s on schedule.”

“Fifty-fifty so far.” That was the shuttle’s on-time departure percentage. So far, the shuttle had had no serious mechanical problems, no disaster. “Crossing fingers. I’m not against staying longer. I’d liketo get you back down when I go. If you wantme to do that.”

“I want to be able to go back and forth.—I want them not to blow up when they find out they’ve got unscheduled guests.”

“You think they will.”

“I know they will.” A small laugh, not amused. “They’ll survive it. They’ll be glad, on one level. But I get to explain Banichi to Ramirez.”

“Think the quarters are ready?”

“I damned well doubt they are. Nothing gets prioritized until it’s an emergency. There’s just not enough personnel.”

“We can fix that. If you can get us Ramirez’s seal on this.”

Ramirez: senior captain, the one who’d managed all the atevi contact, the one Jase called something akin to a father, if fatherhood was a signature on an authorization. Of the four captains, it was Ramirez who’d had the vision of a trade empire uniting this station with their outpost at a distant star, and Ramirez who’d had all his plans fall in ashes with the alien attack.

It was Ramirez who’d brought Phoenixhome to the station at this star, hoping for a thriving station, and help.

And the planner in all this grand design for how humanity in this lost end of space should reunite and support the ship, was likewise Ramirez.

“You’re going to be our most valuable resource,” Bren said soberly.

“Don’t count on me for any say.”

“I know. I understand you’re in a difficult position. Andin a certain amount of power, if you’ll use it.”

Jason’s shoulders drew in as if, even with the jacket, he felt a chill. “Symbolic. Ramirez’s project. We were that; we were supposed to inspire the crew… back when this contact was supposed to bring the whole circle together. But as far as power beyond Ramirez’s good opinion, I don’t have it. With Tamur…” That was another of the captains. “I certainly don’t have it.”

“Why did they call you back?”

Jase’s eyes lifted, direct, worried.

“ Whydid they call you back?” Bren repeated the question. “We didn’t expect it. Might Yolanda have said something?”

“She might have, inadvertently. Maybe they just think it’s time.—Maybe it istime.”

“Tabini thinks so.” Bren drew a breath, took the plunge. “Tabini wants the station.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I’m not surprised you’re not surprised. That’s the condition. Mospheira running the station? They can’t site a public park without a chain of committees. If this alien threat materializes, someone’s got to make decisions as fast as the captains do. Mospheira won’t do it. They know one thing: the history that drove them onto the planet. Freedom is down here. The faction that wants to be up there—isn’t the best of Mospheira. In my own biased opinion, the captains can’t deal with them either. There’s too muchhistory in common, too many old issues.”

“Tabini and the captains sharing power?” Jase said, his lips hardly moving. “That’s not easy, either.”

“It has to work.”

Jase and he had talked about the eventuality before, even the complexity of Mospheira’s quest after space, a quest Bren himself had furthered until the anti-atevi Heritage Party had seized the government, diverted the program to their own issue… until criminal elements had applied force to scientists and idealists, scared some, killed some, converted some. It had been a narrow thing three years ago, when reasonable people, greater in number on Mospheira, had pitched the scoundrels out and discovered the game they were up to. Knowledge of a threat outside the atmosphere hadn’t, however, convinced reasonable people they should go back to space when Phoenix, that old bugbear of Mospheiran legend, had just returned asking for laborers and foretelling wars in space.