Precursor

The average Mospheiran wanted to go on having his job and his beachside vacations, raising his kids, believing that if there was a war in space, it wasn’t a threat to the planet… and that linchpin of Mospheiran faith: if they didn’t contact any aliens, aliens would be more likely to leave them alone.

It was even possible that Mospheirans were right. The question was whether the aliens in question would recognize the difference between Mospheirans and Phoenixcrew, when Phoenixcame here for help. Some bet their lives that the aliens would be wise, and discriminate.

Bren didn’t. Tabini didn’t bet atevi would remain immune from retaliation, either. Nonchalance was a position from which, if wrong, there was very little chance of recovery.

“You know where I stand with Mospheira,” Bren said. “We knoweach other. That’s three years of good faith any other negotiators would have to do over, and—we’ve talked about this before—I’m not sure anybodyis going to understand Mospheirans oratevi who hasn’t met us in our own environment.”

“No more than you’ll understand us without being in ours,” Jase said. “Ramirez comes closest.”

“On the planet, among atevi, Tabini comes closest.”

Jase shook his head. “No. Among atevi, youcome closest. Down to the last, down to the last, I think I hoped there’d be a personal miracle. Selfish hope. It’s a dream, on this planet. You can dream there are no aliens. You can dream you can go on forever, going about your routine, having your pleasant times… that’s what the Mospheirans do, isn’t it?”

“And atevi,” Bren said. “Atevi aren’t immune to it.”

“Living a fantasy is not what they created me to do. What Ramirez didcreate me for… was to make this leap; contact; understand… report. Ramirez was the only one who understood the possibility there wouldbe Mospheirans. He thought the people we’d left behind us might have changed; the other captains didn’t think so.” A second sip, steadier. “He’d planned we’d meet a tamer situation, a safe, functioning station; that we’d present you a present: a star station and a starship to reach it, and we’d build another ship; and another; and weave this grand web that gave us all access.” Jase shook his head. “Which the alien attack demolished. We ran home. Here. And when we found what didexist, then the other captains looked at me with my language study as something other than Ramirez’s personal lunacy.”

He knew this part. He sensed Jase was going somewhere new with it. The other captains? Josefa Sabin was the second shift captain in the twenty-four-hour rotation; then Jules Ogun, and the fourth, different than they’d started with, since that man had died last year, was Pratap Tamun.

“But they don’tsee me as having authority,” Jase said.

“Then join our group. We’ll make damned sure they listen to you.”

Jase shook his head. “That would undermine Ramirez. He’s had confidence in me; I’ll back him. Just… don’t push too hard too early. Give me a day or so to sit down with Ramirez, let us put our heads together. If you’ll trust me, I’ll see if I can level with him and get his agreement.”

It posed a question, not Jase’s honesty, but how much three years of rarified diplomatic atmosphere had prepared Jase to stand on his own feet; and how much internal politics of the Pilots’ Guild would listen to reason.

“ Chei’no Ojindaro. Pogari’s Recall.”

Another machimi play. Jason’s gaze flickered first with an effort to remember, then with complete understanding. “ Hari’i,” he murmured, sliding back into Ragi with no apparent realization of it. By no means.

The return of a long-absent retainer to a corrupt house: a recognition of loyalties, a sorting-out of man’chi… a resultant bloody set of calamities.

“You’re sure,” Bren challenged him.

“I have to try.”

“Don’t tell me have to try. You know you can work with me. The issues here aren’t for guesswork.”

“Tamun,” Jase said. “Ogun’s the chief bastard, but that goes with the job. Tamun is our problem, hardnosed, Sabin’s man, or used to be. Those two have split. Ogun’s not a fool. I canexplain a situation he didn’t anticipate to exist. Pratap Tamun’s the problem.”

Straight out of the Council, Bren recalled Jase saying when he knew Tamun was elevated to the captaincy: the captains tended to be more moderate, the Council more inclined to go for a radical solution. And his appointment to what the Guild called the fourth chair meant that one of the captains tended to more volatile solutions.

“They won’t risk relations with the planet,” Jase said further. “It’s not in their interest. There’s every chance of getting what they want if they ask Tabini and ask politely. As I mean to tell them.—Bren, you’ve never asked me what I’ll say; but you know I’ll advise them to deal with Tabini.”

“This is the question I will ask you: will they listen?”

Jase took a deep breath. “The same us-only streak that runs in the Heritage Party is there. There’s a strong party that thinks aliens out there and aliens here are no different, and the way you feel about Kroger… I feel about Tamun. I think he’d rather deal with the Mospheirans. The whole faction might not even know yet that they’d rather deal with the Mospheirans, but I think there’s a chance the Guild will go through that stage—until they get a strong taste of Mospheiran politics to match their first sight of atevi. That’s going to scare them. No matter they’ve seen them on screen. They’re impressive, leaning over you. But you know and I know the Guild has no real choice. Ultimately, Tabini is their best and only answer.”

“He’s going to be another shock to their concept of the universe.”

“They already had a real shock to their concept of the universe when they lost a space station. They’re scared of aliens. They’re scared as hell of losing this base, and of being double-crossed by aliens they don’t understand. Bren, understand their mindset. If we don’t have this station, we don’t have anything—no population, no fuel, no repairs, no place to stand. That’s death. That’s death for us. That’s their position.”

“You and I both know that, for reasons of state, friends lie. But I’mtelling you, and I want you to tell Ramirez. Tabini’s a master of double-cross, but stress this. He’s also fair. He welds parties together; he’s united the Atageini with his own. He’s gained lord Geigi.”

“He deals with his grandmother,” Jase said with a wry smile. “ There’sthe training course.”

“And he deals with Tatiseigi. This is a powerful, progressive influence that’s tripled the size of the Western Association, gained votes in the hasdrawad and the tashrid, and notconducted a bloodbath of his rivals, which is hell and away better than his predecessors. You tell Ramirez this. In this lifetime, you’re not going to get better than the man who peacefully took the Association to the eastern seaboard and simultaneously took atevi from airplanes to orbit. And who has the resources under rapid, efficient development. There is not going to be a better association for Ramirez, human or atevi.”

He didn’t have to convince Jase. It was Jase’s store of arguments he supplied.

“Ramirez will listen,” Jase said. “Your Mospheiran history about the Guild’s misbehavior might be true: I don’t believe all of the accounts, figuring your ancestors as well as mine had their side of the story. The others will argue.—But here’s the hell of it, Bren, and this I’ve realized slowly over the last three years. A ship’s a small place, compared to a world. What you don’t understand, what you can’tunderstand by experience… you think Mospheira’s small and bound by a small set of habits. Phoenixis smaller. Compared to Mospheira, Phoenixis a four-hundred-year-old teacup, same contents, same set of thoughts, whatever comes and goes on the outside, we’re on the inside. On an island two hundred years? We’ve been spacebound in that teacup for four hundred. We have the archive; we have all the culture of old Earth; but all of us on Phoenixhave in that sense been in one same small conversation for centuries. I’ve been thinking about contrasts, the last few days. And this is the big one. All of us on the ship have the same database. We don’t encourage divergences.”

Curious, he hadalways thought of Phoenixas the outgoing group of humanity, the explorers, the discoverers; and Mospheirans as limited.

But twenty-five hundred individuals, only twenty-five hundred…

“How many areon Phoenix?” he asked, that old, variously answered question between them.

“Fifteen hundred” Jase said, a thunderstroke in a deep silence. The fire crackled, reminiscent of Taiben, of Malguri, old, old places on the earth of the atevi, aboriginal places where fire was the means of heat and livelihood, far, far different than this most modern waystop. ”Fifteen hundred.—Understand, when we built the station, out there, before I was born, there were six thousand; the ship was doubled up, full. When the station went, there had to have been nine or ten thousand people, just there. But we’re the core. We sent out all our population to make the other station; and now there’s just… just fifteen hundred humans alive in space, besides the population of Mospheira… thousands, tens of thousands, six millionand more human beings on the planet, on the island. That’s incomprehensible to us. Precious to us. And whatever you think, nobodywants to jeopardize that resource… an irreplaceable one to us. That Yolanda can go up there and talk about millionsof human beings is so incredible to the Guild you can’t imagine.”

He could. Not adequately, perhaps, but he could.

“But in a certain sense,” Jase said, “when you talk to the Guild, you have to imagine a far, far smaller politics. We differ. We do differ. But we have philosophical differences, personal differences; you can’t even call it politics… certainly no regional differences. Generational differences. Experiential differences. Differences of rank: the engineers think one way; the services think another. We respect the captains; we don’t see the same conclusions; but we have to take orders. We always take orders.”

It was the reprise of a dozen conversations, some of it exactly the same; other bits, and beyond the ship-population bombshell, were new, as if, with his ship-home a reality on the horizon, Jase was recalling details. Details not purposely withheld, only lacking a certain reality in Shejidan.

The same, but different, and Bren listened with all that was in him.

“What are you going to do?” he asked Jase. “You don’t take orders.”

“I’m going to tell them things that aren’t in their database. I’m going to ask Yolanda what she said; I’m going to find her and remind her she can say no. I’m going to tell them they’d better deal with Tabini because they won’t have a concept in their universe how to get an agreement out of the atevi without him. But when my gut knows I’m talking to the captains, I’m going to be scared as hell. All the rest of me is going to want to say, ‘yes, sir’ and do what I’m told.”

“But you won’t do that.”

“I can’t do that anymore.”

“You know we’re armed. That was part of the understanding, that we would have our own security when we set up the atevi quarters on station. That there would be weapons, electronics… bare walls and life support; and we tie our electronics in with theirs, all that agreement.”

Jase drew a deep, long breath. “I’ll be damn surprised if it’s there yet. It’s not an emergency yet; it’s what I said. And the rank and file isn’t going to know what to do with it because it violates a dozen rules. You’ll stare at them, and scare them half to hell. There’ll be aliens among them. You know what kind of scare that is, when we’ve already lost one battle?”

“Not looking them in the eyes?”

Jase hadn’t, when he first came. “They really don’t like that. Try to make your staff understand.”

The consequence of growing up in small corridors, narrow passages, managing some sort of privacy in nose-to-nose confinement. They’d discussed that sort of difference over the last three years.

“I rely on you,” Bren said.

“That scares the hell out of me.”

“We share that feeling,” Bren agreed.

“Time for me to go back. It is time.”

At the root of all their plans, Jason had known he had to go back as soon as the shuttle flew reliably—being too valuable a passenger to send up with the tests. He’d known when Mercheson flew successfully; they’d both known… that he’d get the call, eventually.

“We want you back down here to finish the job, if you want to come.”

“I’ll do what I have to do.”

“So will I,” Bren said. “And I’ll work with you. Tabini will. He considers you in his household. That’s an irreplaceable advantage. When they really want to talk to Tabini, they’d be wise to send you to do it.—Might at least work a fishing trip out of it.”

Joke, but a painful one.

“Safer, this trip,” Jase said. “At least.”

“Flinging yourself at a planet?” It was the way Jason had landed, flung himself at the planet in a three-hundred-year-old capsule with two chutes, the first of which had failed.

“Don’t say that.”

He himself didn’t like all he could imagine, either.

Jase hated flying. He didn’t. But at engine switchover, he’d like to have the whole damn bottle of vodka under his belt.

“I promise,” Bren said. “You want a bed here, tonight? It’s late.”

Jase shook his head. “I’m going to take half a sleeping pill. Try to get some rest. If I don’t wake up for the launch, come and get me.”

“I will.”

“You’re not nervous.”

“God, yes, I’m nervous!” He laughed, proof of it, and didn’t think about the engines. “I plan to enjoy it anyway. Experience of a lifetime.”

“An improvement,” Jase said. “Falling out of space on my second parachute… that was an experience.—Horizons. That was an experience. Riding another living creature… that was an experience. Being onwater higher than the highest building… thatwas an experience. I want that fishing trip, Bren.”

They’d been through a great deal. Even standing upright on a convex planet under a convex sky had been a visual, stomach-heaving nightmare for Jason.

Having a natural wind sweep across the land and ruffle his clothing had frightened him: a phenomenon without known limits. The flash of lightning, the crack of thunder, the fall of rain—how could Jason’s internal logic tell the natural limit of such phenomena?

It hadn’t been cowardice. It had been the outraged reaction of a body that didn’t know what to expect next, that didn’t know by experience where unfamiliar stimuli would stop, but that knew there was danger. He was in for the same himself, he was sure, tomorrow.

“Having no up or down” Bren said, his own catalog of terrors.

“There’s up and down. The station spins.—Didn’t when we docked; but it does now. Low doorways, short steps. It’s the household that’s going to have to watch it, and they never have.”

Atevi, in Mospheiran-sized doorways. And furniture. “Well, an experience. That’s what we’re there to negotiate. Cheers.” He knocked back the rest of the glass. Stupid, he said to himself. It wasn’t wise at all, flying tomorrow, before dawn.

“Cheers.” Jase tossed down his ice-melt, and rose.

Chapter 7

A gleam of silver on a black, imposing figure in the dim inner hall, the gold chatoyance of atevi eyes… very familiar eyes, they were, never failing to observe; his staff had been there. He’d been aware of them. Jase had gotten a summons from outside, and now Jase was under observation, however benign. Someone watched, and that someone was Jago, who waited for him. She bade a polite farewell to Jase and, with Jase out the foyer doors, Narani properly attending, she came back to report as he walked toward his bedchamber, two more of the servants waiting in the hall.

“The staff reports baggage is boarded,” she said.

Bindanda, imposing, roundish shadow, said, “The bath, nandi?”

“Very welcome.” He was tired, mentally tired; he wasn’t going to shake the events of the day by lying down and staring at the ceiling. He knew that Jago would oblige him sexually; he didn’t ask that. She had her own agenda, no knowing what, and he didn’t inquire.

Rather he walked on, down a hallway more comfortable to his soul these days than the geometries of the human-area conversation grouping.

Had it only been this morning he’d left Mospheira, and all that was familiar to him from childhood?

Jago walked behind him, catfooted.

“Mogari reports,” Banichi said, also appearing in the corridor. “Nothing untoward, no messages passed concerning Jase, except expectation of his arrival.” Mogari was the site of the dish, the source of communications from the station.

“Good.” He left all such questions to his security, trusting they could manage it far better than he, and would. “Get some sleep, Banichi-ji. If you can leave it to someone else, do. Tano and Algini, too. This all starts very early in the morning.”

“One does recall so,” Banichi said. Banichi had a new set of systems under his hands in the security station, ones Banichi had helped put together, and he knew Banichi had that for a powerful attraction. “Tano and Algini, however, have gone to meet Jasi-ji in his room.”

“To sleep there?” He was astonished. Did they think someone in the Mospheiran mission might have any designs on Jason’s life?

But they were careful; they were atevi, and they were careful.

“For safety,” Banichi amplified the information, “Replacing two of Tabini’s staff.”

“Where are they sleeping?” he wondered, stupid question.

“Nadi, they will hardly sleep. We will survive lack of sleep.”

“Of course,” he said, as Narani, too, entered the central hall, this inner circle of fortunate encounter. A baji-naji inset was above, below, and several places about. No soft green and blue here: definite, entangling black and white and color that fought like dragons in every design.

“Will you have any late supper, nand’ paidhi?”

“No,” he said. “Thank you, Rani-ji, I can’t manage another bite, and I fear I had at least half a glass too much tonight, with Jase.” His head was light. He’d run from supper to late tea with Tabini, to here, all nonstop.

He turned, saw all the staff together, in various doorways all eyes on him.

He’d been afraid, a moment ago, thinking on the morning. In the moment Jase had left he’d mentally expected he’d be alone, like the Mospheirans; but he wasn’t, he wasn’t ever. They wouldn’t let him be. “Nadiin-ji, thank you, thank you very much for coming.”

“A grand adventure,” Narani said, a man who should be, if he were Mospheiran, raising grandchildren… but here was a model of discretion and experience for a lord’s house. “A great adventure, nand’ paidhi.”

“Your names are written,” he said, bowing his head, and meant it from the heart… meant it, too, for the starry-eyed, enthusiastic young woman, Sabiso, who’d come primarily to attend Jago, for the Atageini who had come, rotund Bindanda, who carried the eastern and old-line houses of the Association into this historic venture.

“Nandi.” There were bows from the staff, deep bows, a moment of intimate courtesy before he went into his bedroom, before Bindanda and Kandana attended him there.

He’d used to think of it as an uncomfortable ritual. Now he took comfort in the habit… carefully unfastened the fine, lace-cuffed shirt and shed it, sat down to have his boots removed, all the items of his clothing from cufflinks to stockings accounted for and whisked away to laundry or whatever the solution might be on this most uncommon of evenings. He didn’t inquire what they’d brought and what they’d left or what they might do with the laundry. If he named a thing they’d left, they’d send clear to the Bu-javid to bring it, and God knew it would turn up.

“Good rest, nand’ paidhi,” Narani said, managing to turn down the bed and to bow, quite elegantly and all at once, as young Kandana, a nephew, hovered with a robe. “And will you bathe?”

“Yes, Nadiin.” He accepted the bathrobe Kandana whisked into place, stepped into slippers… should the paidhi-aiji walk barefoot, even ten meters down the hall? The staff would think him ill-used.

It was a very modern bath… porcelain, far newer than the general age of the fixtures in the Bu-javid, but there was absolutely nothing lacking in the quantity of water in the sunken tub. Bren slid into the soft scent of herbs, slid down to his nose and shut his eyes, while the extra half-glass of vodka seethed through his brain, blocking higher channels.

A shadow entered, a dark presence reflected ghostly on dark tiles: Jago, likewise in her bathrobe.

“Shall I bathe later, nandi?”

So meticulous in slipping in and out of the role of bodyguard. Perhaps they were a scandal. He was never sure. He had no idea how Banichi construed matters, and suffered doubts. He wasn’t sure even how Jago construed matters, except that he wasn’t utterly surprised at her turning up now unasked, after this crisis-ridden day.

“Now is very welcome, Jago-ji.”

Smoothly then she shed the robe, tall and black and beautiful as some sea creature… slid into the water and let it roll over her skin with a deep sigh. In the next moment she submerged and surfaced, hair glistening… still pigtailed: with that propriety alone, she could answer a security call naked as she was born, with never a sign of ruffled dignity: she had done so, on occasion, and so had he, and so had his staff. There was no mystery left, but there was admiration for what was beautiful, there was expectation. One didn’t say lovein dealing with atevi, as one didn’t say friendor any of those human words… but bodies knew that despite differences, there was warmth and welcome and comfort. She might technically be on duty; there was a gun with the bathrobe, he was relatively sure.

But she pursued his welfare here, strong, graceful arms keeping him warm, when all at once he felt the chill of too much air-conditioning above the water surface, and the heat of an atevi body beneath. The water steamed in the refrigerated air, made clouds around them, steamed white on Jago’s bare black shoulder, and on her hair.

Large atevi bodies chilled less rapidly than human, absorbed heat and shed it slowly, simply because they werelarger; and tall as she was, she could pick him up and throw him with not an outstanding amount of effort. But that wasn’t in their dealings, which were mutual. The dark blue walls reflected him more than her. She was always warm, and he was chronically cold. Across species lines, across instinctual lines, their first engagement had been a comedy of misplaced knees and elbows; but now they had matters much more smoothly arranged, and had no difficulty in a soap-slippery embrace. Hands wandered, bodies found gentle accommodation under the steaming surface. She enjoyed it; he did. He was recent enough from Mospheira that he was conscious of the alien, and fresh enough from converse with Jase that he still had his human feelings engaged.

And not knowing to this hour whether these interludes with the source of her man’chi were permissible for her or a scandal to her Guild, he still found no personal strength or reason to say no. He found a gentleness in the encounters that never had been with Barb… his weekends with Barb had been more intense, more desperate, less satisfying. He didn’t know which of them had been at fault in that, but he knew that what he and Jago practiced so carefully respected one another in a way he and Barb had never thought about. There was humor; there were pranks; there was never, except accidentally, pain.

He struggled not to let his heart engage. But his heart told him what he and Barb had called a relationship hadn’t been the half of what his heart wanted to feel. He had asked, or tried to ask, whether Banichi and Jago had their own relationship; and Jago had said, in banter, Banichi has his opinions; and Banichi never managed to take him seriously… never quite answering him, either; and it was not a question he could ask Tabini—how do atevi make love.

He was not about to ask the dowager, who—he was sure—would want every salacious detail.

It was sure above all else that Banichi would never betray his partner, that she wouldn’t betray Banichi, not under fire and not in bed.

It was sure between him and Jago that the man’chi involved, the sense of association, flowed upward more than down, and that no human alive understood atevi relationships in the first place—

But the more he involved himself in the atevi world, the more he knew he wasn’t in a pairing. He’d assumed a triangle; and then knew it wasn’t even that, but deep in some atevi design, a baji-naji of their own convoluted creation, and deeper and deeper into feelings he knew he wasn’t wired to feel as atevi felt, not feeling as they did, only as he could.

God help him, he thought at times, but she never asked a thing of him. And they went on as formally and properly in public as they’d always been, always the three of them, she and he and Banichi, and four and five, if one counted Tano and Algini, as it had been from the time Tabini put them together.

He’d been in love in his teens, when he’d gone into the program, with the foreign, the complex, the different.

She certainly was. God, she was… pure self-abandoned trust, and sex, and her exotic, heavily armed version of caring all in the same cocktail.

They rested nestled together till their fingers and toes wrinkled, while the heater kept the water steaming.

They talked about the recent trip to Mospheira…

“Barb came to the airport,” he said.

“Did you approve?” she asked.

“Not in the least,” he said.

They talked about the supper with the dowager.

“Cenedi looked well,” he said.

But she never talked business in their interludes. She had, in whatever form, a better sense of romance than he did, twining a wet lock of his hair about her finger. She’d undone his braid. Her tongue traced the curve of his ear and traveled into it.

A shadow appeared in the doorway, above the steam.

Banichi.

He was appalled. “Jago-ji,” he said; she was aware… surprised, but not astonished.

“Nandi.” Banichi addressed him, incongruously, in the formal mode. “Your mother has called, requesting to be patched through wherever you are. She says it’s an emergency.”

Banichi had been exposed to his mother’s emergencies. He himself certainly had. He was remotely aware of the rest of his body, and simultaneously of the rest of Jago’s body, soft and hard in all the right places, as her arms and her knees unfolded from him.

He probably blushed. He certainly felt warmth.

“I regret the untimely approach,” Banichi said, “but she says she’s calling from the hospital.”

“Oh, damn.” He was on his way out of the water as Banichi procured him his robe.

Jago gathered herself out of the water as he slipped into the robe. He had the presence of mind to glance back at her in regret for the embarrassment, whatever it was, and knew that, in a Situation, Tano and Algini being absent with Jase, Banichi had left the security post rather than send servants into the bath to pull him out.

Bren yanked the sash tight on the robe, on his way out the door. His mother had had her spells before… had had surgery three years ago, one they thought had fixed the problem with her heart as far as age and life choices let anything fix the problem.

At least shewas calling.

God, could anything have happened to Toby or Jill? He had enemies, and some of them had no scruples. He’d cleared Kroger to call the island. Word of the mission could be out, no telling where, and he’d not been in contact with Shawn, to advise him to tighten his mother’s security, that hewas on this mission.

Banichi had reached the security station near the front entry, that place which, with its elaborate electronics, held the phones.

“The ordinary phone, nadi,” Banichi advised him, and Bren turned a swivel chair and settled onto it, picking up the phone that looked like a phone.

Banichi settled into the main post and punched buttons. Bren heard the relays click. “Go ahead,” he heard the atevi operator say in Mosphei’, that deep timbre of voice, and the lighter human voice responding: “Go ahead, now, Ms. Cameron.”

“Mother?”

“Bren?” There was the quavering edge of panic in his mother’s voice, real desperation, and that itself was uncommon: he knew the difference.

“Mother, are you all right? Where’s Toby?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. Bren, you’ve just got to get back here. Tonight.”

“Mother, I’m sorry. I can’t just—”

“You have to get here!”

“Where’s Toby?” Had there been a plane crash? A car wreck? “Where are you?”

The line spat, one of those damnable static events that happened when the atevi network with its intensive security linked up by radio with the Mospheiran network. He clenched the receiver as if he could hang onto the line.

“… at the hospital!”

“In what city, Mother? Where’s Toby? Can you hear me?”

“I’m in the city!” That meant the capital, in ordinary usage. “I’m at the hospital! Can you hear me? Oh, damnthis line!”

Not inthe hospital. “You’re atthe hospital. Where’s Toby, Mother? Where’s my brother?”

“I don’t know. He got on a plane this afternoon. I think he should be home. I think he and Jill may have stopped at Louise’s to pick up the—”

“Mother, why are you at the hospital?”

“Bren, don’t be like that!”

“I’m not shouting, Mother. Just give me the news. Clearly. Coherently. What’s going on?”

“Barb’s in intensive care.”

“Barb.” Of all star-crossed people. Barb?

“Barb and I went shopping after we left the airport, after we put Toby on the plane, you know. We were at the Valley Center, the new closed mall, you know…”

“I know it. Did she fall?” There were escalators. There was new flooring. The place had opened this spring, huge pale building. Tall, open escalators.

“No, we just came out to go to the car, and this busjust came out of nowhere, Bren.”

“Bus. My God.”

“She went right under it, Bren. I fell down and I looked around as the tires came past and she never said a thing, she just… she just went under it, and packages were all over, I’d bought this new sweater…”

His mother was in shock. She was the world’s worst storyteller, but she wasn’t gathering her essential pieces at all.

“Mother, how bad?”

“It’s bad, Bren. She’s lying there with all these tubes in her. She’s messed up inside. She’s really bad. Bren, she wants you to come.”

He was dripping water onto the counter. His feet and hands were like ice in the air-conditioning. With the side of his finger, he smeared a set of water droplets out of existence, thinking of the new counter, the new facility. He was not at home. He was not going to be anywhere close to home, and he was trying to think what to say. He tried to choose some rational statement. “I know you’re with her, Mother.—Were youhurt?” Setting his mother to the first person singular was the fastest way to get his mother off the track of someone else’s woes. He’d practiced that tactic for years of smaller emergencies.

“She needs you, Bren.”

It was bad.

“Are youhurt, Mother?”

“Just my elbow. I scraped my elbow on the curb. Bren, she’s so bad…”

He winced and swore to himself. His hand was shaking. Jago had turned up in her bathrobe, with Banichi in the little security post, support for him. But he didn’t know who was with his mother, tonight, or how bad the damage was. Shawn’s people watched her. They always kept an eye toward her. But they’d damned well let down this time.

“Have they assessed Barb’s damage?”

“Spleen, liver, lung… right leg, left arm… they’re worried about a head injury.”

“God.” On medical matters his mother very well knew what she was talking about. She made a hobby of ailments. “Has anyone called Paul?”

“That useless piece of—”

“Mother, he’s married to her! Call him!” He tried to assemble useful thoughts and quiet his stomach. His mother was acting as gatekeeper, hadn’tcalled Barb’s husband. He hoped the hospital had.

And the time… he wasn’t sure of the time. It was well after dark now, east of Mospheira. If his mother and Barb had gone to the mall directly after leaving Toby at the airport, it couldn’t have been that late when the accident happened, and she’d only now gotten through the phone system?

He was behind a security curtain. God knew how she’d made the entire worldnet and the aijiin and captains understand she had a real emergency, and now she came unglued. She was sobbing on the phone.

“Mother. Mother, you fell down. Has anyone looked at you?”He was honestly, deeply worried. “Are you sure you weren’t hit?”

“Something hit me. I’m not sure.” With the intonation that said it wasn’t important, it didn’t matter to her pain.

“Have the doctors looked at you?”

“They did.” Dismissively. “Bren, Bren, you can get a plane. Tell the aiji. You have to.”

“Have you called Toby?”

“She doesn’t need Toby, dammit! She needs you!”

“ Youneed Toby, Mother. I want you to call him.”

“You listen to me, Bren Cameron! You damned well listen to me! The woman you were going to marry is lying in intensive care in there, and you don’t tell me you don’t care! You don’t tell me you’re carrying on an affair over there and you don’t care. You straighten yourself out and you get back here!”

She did know. She guessed. On one of her visits, somehow someone had slipped… the tightest security in the world, and she knew.

“I can’t. I can’t, Mother.” Barb’s kiss in the hangar, Barb running, whole and healthy, across the concrete, and a bus, for God’s sake… there was a sense of dark, malign comedy about it, a grotesque sense of the impossible, and he didn’t catch half the awful details his mother spilled to him, except that there were fractures, a punctured lung, internal bleeding.

And knowing Barb… knowing Barb who’d been his on-island lover and sometime contact point for relaying dangerous messages from before their breakup… it was entirely possible Barb had shoved his mother for that curb and thatwas how Barb had gotten hit, and thatwas what drove his mother’s grief.

Barb would. Grant all their failure to be a couple, Barb would. “What are her chances?” he asked, dreading to know. “What’s the damage?”

“They’re going to do a bone replacement and a brain scan.” His mother drew a breath and grew calmer in a list of specifics. “She’s conscious. When the ambulance was coming, she said, ‘Tell Bren this really wasn’t a scheme to get him back here.’ And when they were putting her in the ambulance, she said, ‘I need him.’ Bren, she does. She really needs you. I had a feeling you shouldn’t fly back today.”

She hadn’t seen the damned bus coming, but that wouldn’t convince his mother she didn’t have premonitions.

He’d done all he could. The personal phone wouldn’t have helped her at all, once he’d gone through the security curtain that surrounded Tabini’s intentions. Hours of trying to reach him.

And what did he say, after she’d worked a miracle to reach him?

“Mother, I absolutely can’t come.”

“Bren, don’t you tell me that! Bren, you have to come, that’s all there is! You’re so damned important to Tabini, you get him to get you a plane, right now. I want you here!”

He had the receiver against his ear for privacy—thank God. “Mother, I’m involved in something I can’t leave. I can’t tell you. But this is important. I’m sorry. Tell Barb I’m terribly sorry.—Don’t you dare tell her I love her. Don’t you do that, Mother.”

“You listen to me, Bren. You listen. This job is killing you. It’s killing the son I knew. It’s killing any happiness you’re going to have. You don’t decide when you’re sixty that you ought to have gotten married, you don’t wait till the end of your life to regret you didn’t have children…”

“Mother…”

“You listen to me, Bren Cameron! I know what’s going on with you and that atevi woman! It’s not right!”

“Mother, where are you?” He was appalled that she knew, but more appalled to think she might be in a hallway, at a public phone. “Don’t say that out loud. Don’t raise your voice.”

“Are you ashamed? Does it worry you?”

“It worries me when my mother might be saying things in a public corridor. It worries me for her safety if the extremists get themselves stirred up again because some damned rumor gets started—talk like that won’t help Durant, either. Hush! Be still. Listen to me…”

“You really don’t want to hear it, do you? You know Barb always loved you. She married that fool Paul because you broke her heart. You hurt her, Bren, and she was sorry, and oh, no, you were too self-righteous, too damned important with your fancy estate to take her back.”

“I never promised to marry her. I don’t love her, Mother! I’m sorry to say it under these circumstances, but I don’t love her. I never loved her, she didn’t love me; we slept together. That was the end of it. I tried to have something else, and she was the one who wanted something different.”

“You don’t knowwhat she felt! You weren’t here! You were traipsing about the continent acting as if you were some atevi lord! She decided to marry. To marry, respectably, as sensible people do when they want to have normal lives.”

“I don’t have a normal life.”

“She was scared, Bren, she was scared and she was hurt—personally hurt, by the things you’d done. If you asked her to divorce Paul, she’d be there in a moment.”

Dealing with his mother was like running a course under fire… and he feared his mother would tell Barb there was hope of having him back, wreck Barb’s marriage, drive Paul off when Barb needed him, and hurt Barb more than she’d been. Most of all, he couldn’t hold that out to Barb… because he wouldn’t beback and Barb, all she valued and all she wanted to be, her fashion, her nightclub glamour, all the things she loved… didn’t exist on this side of the sea.

“I can’t marry her. End of statement. It’s not a time to debate it.”

“How can you be like this? You’d come home. You’d show up on a weekend, ask Barb to drop all her plans and go running off to some hotel, with the news people all trying to find you, and then you’d be gone, and then the news people wouldfind where you’d been and Barb would have to duck out and lock herself in her apartment for weeks, Bren, sometimes in fear of her life!”

“I know that.” It was true, Barb had played international intrigue as part of the shining, glittering game, until it turned bloody; and now his mother was working herself back into tears. He tried to get his point through while there was still rational thought to hear it. “But I can’t help that. I can’t helpthat, Mother; listen to me! The president’s guard does look out for you. If there are spies at the hospital now, they’re official. They probably are at the hospital right now. I want you to call Shawn Tyers. You know how.”

“Don’t you hang up on me!”

“Mother, you know I love you. That’s the way things are. Call Shawn. Call Paul… I know you don’t want to, but do it! Then go home, get some rest.

“Mother, what was between us is still herbusiness and my business. Give me credit that I know Barb, I know her damned well, and I can’t help her by getting involved in her life and ripping that up a second time.”

“Bren, don’t be like this.”

“I’m sorry as hell for what happened. It makes me sick to think of it. But I can’t fix it, and don’t you dare tell her I love her, don’t you dare tell her there’s any hope of my coming now. There isn’t. You’ll just hurt her. Do you hear me, Mother? Go home! I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

“Promise to call Barb.”

“I will notpromise to call Barb. I’ve got to go now.”

“Bren, call her.”

“Mother, go home. Good night. I love you.”

He hung up. He was aware of Jago in the doorway of the security station, aware of the fact some words were in her understanding and Banichi’s, at least of his side of the conversation.

“Barb’s had an accident,” he said. “A bus hit her. My mother fell down and hurt herself. Barb’s in the hospital. There’s nothing I can do from here.” They didn’t understand love, they didn’t understand the intricate details of failed human relationships, but they knew attachment persisted. Most of all they knew loyalty, and the urge to go to the scene of trouble. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Banichi said solemnly. “The aiji can request action of the President of Mospheira, and Shawn-nandi. Shall we do that?”

Tabini could do so much; and so damned little. “Not for this. Toby’s not home yet. Patch me through to his house, Banichi-ji. I’ll leave a message.”

Banichi pushed buttons. The communications interface was a great deal easier than it had been, with security codes that automatically engaged when the messages crossed the straits. Even at this hour, the Mospheiran system produced an operator, better than in prior days, and the call went on its way to the north coast, where Toby’s answering system cut in.

Bren was in some part relieved. It was easier to unburden the matter to a machine. He was sure their mother had put one of those nerve-jarring Call me’son Toby’s system, and he hoped his message might at least advise Toby what the matter was, if their mother fell out of contact before Toby ran off into the night trying to hire a plane.

“Mother seems fine” he began his message, experienced in years of long-distance crises. “Scrapes and bruises, as I gather. Barb’s in the hospital, Mother’s with her. A pretty bad accident with a bus, and Mother saw it, might have been in front of it. She wants some comfort. Toby, I know you just got home, I hate like hell to drop this on you, but I’m behind a security wall at the moment and I absolutely can’t get back there. I don’t think you need to fly back, just give Mother a call at…” Professional coolness wavered. “I don’t know what hospital.” Their mother was probably one of the few people outside the government who didn’t have forwarding on their calls: security precaution. And she was one of the very few, inside or out, who wasn’t completely aware of all the security arrangements that surrounded them. He couldn’t call her security and ask where she was. He hoped to God they knew and that his mother and Barb hadn’t gotten whisked away out of security’s sight. “She didn’t tell me what hospital.” He covered the microphone. “Banichi-ji. Get the origination on that call from my mother.”

Banichi pushed buttons, wrote on a slip of paper, handed it to him.

“It’s Central City,” he said into the phone. He was relieved. He knew the number by heart. “Look, just give her a call through the hospital system, and if she’s not there, call the apartment. It’s possible Barb pushed Mother out of the way of a bus. She’s really shaken. Barb’s critical. God, I’m sorry, Toby, I’m really sorry. I wish to God I didn’t have to put this on your shoulders.”

Toby, however, wasn’t there to assure him it was all right, or that some disaster hadn’t delayed Toby and his family. There were watchers around Toby, too, all the same. Agents followed the kids to school. It was what the government had to do… what he thanked God they did, because the whole question of atevi/human relations provoked every borderline crazy in existence, on Mospheira and on the mainland. Even someone the random lunatics thought might be connected to him, like his former secretaries, had to have constant protection on the island… it went against Mospheiran law to round up the lunatics until they’d actually done something.

“You take care,” he said, hearing the vast, cold silence. “Thanks, Toby. Hope we get that fishing trip one of these months.”

He hung up.

No, he couldn’t come back. And he couldn’t let out, even on a shielded line, that he was going up to the station, not before launch. The aiji would announce it when the aiji chose.

The paidhi’s personal crises didn’t figure in the plans. He thought he should call Shawn… but if the other delegation had, or should, call the island, there were issues… a lot of issues.

A hand rested lightly on his shoulder, Jago’s, calling him back to rational thought, reminding him he wasn’t, after all, alone.

“Barb just stepped in front of a bus,” he said. He felt distant from that information, as if it were some line in an entirely unpleasant, grotesque joke. But it wasn’t. He didn’t want to think what kind of damage she’d taken, “Possibly she moved to protect my mother. Likely it was my mother’s inattention to traffic. It’s quite heavy, where they were.”

“One only asks,” Banichi said, who, like Jago, had likely understood a great deal of it… more, because they both knew his mother and knew Toby. “Did you not advise your mother to go home and did you not say to Toby call the hospital?”

“My mother won’t go home,” Bren said. “Nothing we can do, any of us, from here. I have to trust Shawn will do something. That Toby will.”

There were frowns, confusion on their part as to what the proprieties were. As for him, he could scarcely think.

“Nadi,” Jago said, not nandi— my lord—but the common sir. She wanted him to leave the matter. She wanted to take him out of the security station, away from the questions.

She was right; he rose, but he cast a look at Banichi, who’d be in charge, who wasin charge of whatever came through these communication and surveillance boards, and who took his safety and his family’s safety very seriously.

“It was an accident,” Bren said. “It couldn’t be otherwise. The buses are public. They move quickly, even recklessly. It’s notorious.”

“Sometimes there are accidents” Banichi said.

“Sometimes there are,” he said.

He left the security center then, walked back in the halls, to the bedroom that was his, in a place quiet now. The servants had retreated to their own rooms, likely, hoping for sleep; or still working.

Jago followed him, stood a moment while he stared at the wall.

“Stay,” he roused himself to say.

She shut the door behind her. He slid off the robe and went to bed, and Jago put out the main lights.

She came and eased into bed beside him, around him, not a word said.

I don’t love Barb, he wished to say to her, but there wasn’t a word for love, and it didn’t matter to Jago; from her view, since he insisted Barb was still with his mother, Barb was still within his association, marginalized somewhat, but still there.

But if lovewasn’t in the atevi hard-wiring, sexual jealousy wasn’t, he suspected, quite that remote. He couldn’t trust his own human feelings to interpret hers, further than that, and his thinking wasn’t outstandingly clear; neither was his feeling, his emotion… his heart, whatever one wanted to call it.

Was it that way for Jago, too?

He didn’t relax. Couldn’t.

“Shall I turn on the television?” Jago asked him.

“It might be good,” he said. He didn’t want sleeping pills. Couldn’t bring himself to make love on news like that. They put a machimi on… a part of the culture close to religious, but not, having everything to do with the atevi heart, and nothing at all to do with gods.

In the play before them, he guessed the woman would learn her lord had interests conflicting with her sexual partner’s. The uninitiated human, seeing the drama, might expect quite the opposite as would happen, but atevi had no doubt. One only waited for disaster.

He’d send Toby the funds. He had that. He always had that, and Toby knew it. In his absence from crises he could always contribute money for the airfare.

“We have boarding before dawn,” Jago said against his ear. “Do you think of that, nadi-ji?”

“I do now,” he said, realizing he’d slept, and that his arm was numb, and Jago’s might be. “What time is it?”

“The depth of the night. Rest, nadi.”

He sighed, and Jago, with the remote, without moving him, shut the television off.

Chapter 8

Remarkable as it was to be going up to space, it was only a matter of walking out into the hall that had led them here. That hall led to double doors, and those doors let them into the departure lounge. Jase was there, Tano and Algini; Bren was so used to seeing them he hardly knew the sight was uncommon, except Banichi and his team had exchanged their habitual leather and metal for more form-fitting operational black, mission-black, the sort they’d hitherto worn only in clandestine work, and rarely with him. That was one thing different.

The other, patently, was Lund and Kroger and company, pale-skinned, reflecting in the glass. “Good morning,” Kroger said frostily. “Good morning” Lund echoed, in slightly more friendly fashion.

“Good morning,” he gave them back as if nothing at all had happened.

But what commanded his attention, what utterly seized his attention, beyond that wall of dark windows was a floodlit view of the shuttle, white as winter, long, sleek and elegant.

Shai-shan.

We’re going, his mind chanted over and over, halfway numb and operating on far too little sleep, while the body manufactured a false, expensive strength. We’re going. We’re going.

Attendants of the space center had ushered them here, and now, time ticking away, opened the outer doors of the departure lounge, so smoothly on the edge of his arrival that he was sure he and his party had been on the edge of late.

“Well,” Shugart said with a deep breath, and started off. Bren started walking without half thinking, fell in with Jason… then, willing to make peace, waited for the Mospheirans, not to outpace them.

They walked, far as it was. There’d been consideration of a mobile lounge, but the shuttle itself took precedence, every element of the budget concentrated on that and on its sister ship, still under construction. It sat farther away than any ordinary walk to a waiting airplane, slowly looming larger and larger, deceptive in its graceful shape.

Meanwhile the lingering night chill set into human bones, and uneasy stomachs had a long, long time to contemplate the fact that the engines were different, the wings were mere extensions of the hull. Shai-shandidn’t look human or atevi. She looked alien, out of time and place… a design not state of the art when Phoenixhad launched from the earth of humans, no, but one that might have served that age.

They arrived within the circle painted on the concrete. The embarkation lift sat in down position in front of them, a cargo lift with a grid platform, a railing, a boarding bridge up against the hatch, no more exotic an arrangement than that. They walked aboard, the four Mospheirans, Jase, Bren with his security, and after them Narani and the three other servants, carrying the hand luggage, bags that would have taxed strong humans. There was room on the sizable platform, but only a little.

The lift clanked, jolting them all, and rose up and up to level with the boarding platform that sat mated to the open hatch.

From it, Kroger pushing violently to the lead, they filed past a dismayed atevi steward.

Let her, Bren thought. She passed the steward because he had no orders to lay violent hands on a human guest, and had had no suspicion of the move in time to make himself a wall. He had no doubt Banichi and his team took their cues from his failure to object… and that Kroger hadn’t scored points with the atevi.

She and her team, moving ahead, were under-scale in a cabin sized and configured for atevi… beautifully simple, completely fortunate in its numbers. Bren knew it intimately, and the harmony of the sight soothed away his annoyance at Kroger, showed him how little she did matter to the atevi’s ability to launch this vessel. It might have been one of the mainland’s best passenger jets, simple rows of seats, carrying a hundred atevi at most; the buff-colored panels were insets, not windows; that was one difference. And in every point the craft feltfortunate, and well-designed, and solid, an environment completely carried around the passenger, surrounding and comforting.

Screens occupied the forward bulkhead, high, large, visible from all the seats.

Stewards waited for them, showed Lund and Kroger into the foremost seats, not quarreling with the precedence; Ben and Kate looked troubled by the proceedings, uncertain in the disposition of their small handbags, and sat with their group.

Bren chose his own seat, on the aisle, midway down the row of seats—there were plenty available—and offered Jase his choice.

Jase eased past him and sat down next to the wall, while Banichi and Jago took the pair of seats across the aisle. Tano and Algini took the row just behind them. The servants settled at the rear, in their own society, doubtless commenting very quietly on the unusual man’chi-like manifestation among the humans—had a threat been passed? Had the woman in charge felt attacked? Certainly not by their will.

“Luck to us,” Jason said anxiously, in the last-moment activity of the stewards.

“Baji-naji,” Bren said. That black-and-white symbol was conspicuous on the forward wall, right beneath the monitors: Fortune and Chance, the give and take in the universe that made all the rigid numbers move.

The engines fired, whined, roared into life. The shuttle wasn’t particularly good at maneuvering on the ground. Towed to its berth, it had a straight line to one runway going straight forward as it sat, and as the engines built, it gathered speed away from the space center. The cabin crew, too, presumably had belted in.

The shuttle gathered more and more speed… disconcerting for passengers used to taxiing and maneuvering. They could see nothing; the craft quivered to the thump of tires.

“One hopes the small craft have heard the tower,” Banichi said cheerfully, from the matching aisle seat, over the thunder.

God, Bren thought, and reminded himself all air traffic would be diverted away from Shejidan for the next half hour, sufficient for the shuttle to clear the airport, with the aiji’s planes to enforce it. The shuttle was not as maneuverable as an airliner, in the air, either. One unanticipated fool, and the whole program was in jeopardy; not to mention their lives.

The center screen flicked on, showed a double row of runway lights ahead. A lot of runway yet. The pace still increased. The lack of side windows combined with the black forward view made a center-seat passenger feel like a bullet in a gun.

Not nervous, Bren said to himself, not nervous, not nervous, no, not at all. He locked his sight on those monitors, hyperfocused there to keep his stomach steady, trying to convince his claustrophobia that what he saw was a window. But the aft cameras had come on, retreating perspective of the lights warring with the forward motion. Then a belly camera came into operation, showing a spotlighted forward tire and a blur of dark pavement.

The engines cycled up and up. Thundered. The tires thumped madly. Where’s the end of the runway? Bren thought. Lift! Lift!

The tires suddenly went silent, and the deck slanted up. A hand shoved Bren against the foam of his seat: he felt himself sinking back as the whole craft shook to the engines, found his fingers trying to hold him against that illusion.

Deep breath. He tried to relax, look casual in the moment, but his heart cycled in time with the engines. No easy circling of the city like the aiji’s jet, just a straightforward climb, proverbial bat out of hell.

They climbed and they climbed before the press backward eased.

“Well, it worked again,” Jason said weakly.

“It did,” Bren agreed, convinced himself he dared let go the armrest.

But the tilt of the deck was still extreme; they were still climbing, if under less pressure; and every citizen of Shejidan would have been shaken out of bed, hurried into the open to look up and wonder… the wonder was still new, in Shejidan, and people forgave the handful of falling tiles, and filled out the requests for repair, which they would point to, doubtless, and say to generations to come, see, this crack was in the first days of the space venture: all Shejidan suffered this, and won…

What? The space station? The Foreign Star that had shone in their skies for centuries?

A birthright?

Not every citizen of Shejidan welcomed roof repairs. But the aiji promised a new spaceport, conversion of the space center to an acculturation center, promised work for craftsmen, a great felicity, an ultimate association not with the humans but with the associationsof humans, a method by which they could avert war and ensure the future.

Humans could read the translations of the aiji’s statements and never understand. The aiji had received a deputation from representatives of the Gan, original tenants of Mospheira, heretics, of a sort. A whole bright new world was upon them.

The aft monitor showed a seam of dawn, past the running lights on white edges, the belly camera very little but black. The forward cameras picked up nothing but black. They were on their way.

And of all things, Banichi and Jago turned on their seat lamps and broke out reading material.

Look at the damn monitors! Bren wanted to shout at them. A miracle is happening! Look at the sky, for God’s sake! The people pour into the streets of Shejidan! Are you numb?

They’d taken the technical manuals.

It was very like an airplane. It flew and showed no sign of malfunction. It was proved on several flights before. Should they be other than confident in the pilot and the design the paidhiin had translated?

“Much better than parachutes,” Jase muttered, beside him.

That view persisted. Bren didn’t even consult his memory of technicalities, just watched the monitors, time stretched to a long impossible moment.

The stewards rose, sheer atevi obstinacy, Bren thought, viewing procedures with dismay, procedures he would have disapproved if any ateva had asked him.

“Nadiin,” one of the stewards said, walking up the steep incline of the deck, “fruit juice is provided, should you wish. Please avoid excess. Breakfast will be easier to provide now, rather than during free fall.” The attendant repeated the same message in Mosphei’, not too badly pronounced.

There was laughter from the front.

“Have I spoken badly?” the dismayed crewman asked Bren.

“Not at all,” Bren said. “They hadn’t expected service aboard.” Impossible to explain near-hysteria, and the relief of humor. “They’re in very good spirits, and if they were atevi, they would say thank you.—Ms. Kroger, Mr. Lund? Do you want breakfast, up there?”

Kroger said nothing. Lund leaned from his seat, a face at the high end of the aisle.

“What’s available?” Lund asked.

“He is courteously inquiring,” Bren said, “the nature of the offering, and means no offense.”

“Nand’ paidhi.” The crewman offered a respectful bow, and proceeded forward to take the orders from the Mospheirans with a written list as the other steward came to take their orders. “Nadiin-ji?”

“I’ll have just fruit juice, if you please.”

“ Paiinaifor me,” Jason said. “My last chance for a long time. Juice. Toast.”

“Nandiin,” the crewman said, and walked back the precarious route to the rear.

“You all right?” Jase asked.

“Fine,” Bren said shakily. “Supposed to be like an airliner, isn’t it?” The breakfast call still amazed him. “It’s a bit wilder on the takeoff.”

“No problems.”

Don’t say that, he wanted to say, at his most superstitious; and Banichi and Jago, having ordered a large breakfast, continued their manual-reading, probably because they hadn’t had a chance in all else that had been going on. Tano and Algini were behind them, likewise possessed of an appetite.

The fruit juice arrived, in spillproof containers. Lund thought they might like another juice on the way to orbit, and the cabin crew stayed busy.

Bren confined himself to one glass of juice. Jase ate with good appetite.

No further calls from the island. That thought flashed through his mind as it hadn’t since waking, since sleepwalking through dressing and last-moment details.

He supposed Toby had dealt with matters.

He supposed their mother had finally gotten home, and that none of his family had any idea the shuttle creating a sonic boom over the straits carried a Cameron back into space.

Back to a space station he’d dreamed of seeing… dreamed of seeing, like the surface of the moon; a station where all Mospheirans’ political dreads were born, for its history, up there with the starship that was the ark in their ancestral stories, the beginning of all human life on the world.

At a certain point the engines grew quiet; and quieter. Ginny Kroger’s laugh carried farther than she intended, doubtless so, but he was glad to hear it. Fear might have been a part of Kroger’s anger, something Kroger herself might not have known; and now they were past the worst danger… technically the worst. That was what the reports tried to assure them.

The crew collected the plastic trays and cups, passed to the rear. Bren looked at his watch, knowing the flight profiles, knowing them as having crossed his desk, knowing them as having sweated through the launches.

Now he was where minutiae counted, degrees of the schedule that had seemed long on the ground, but that seemed both too short and too long, up here.

“Stand by for changeover,” came from the cockpit, and the cabin crew translated to Mosphei’: “Sirs, now the engines will switch over. Secure all objects immediately. There will be a moment of free fall. Place all loose objects securely in confinement, however small. They may fly back and strike a fellow passenger.”

Oh, God, Bren thought. This was the point he dreaded. This was the point where they shut down the engines he knew worked, and the others were supposed to start.

The cabin crew went aft.

The sky in the forward monitor had almost brightened to color, but now quite suddenly a hole opened in it… not night, but the threshold of space.

There was a moment of uncanny silence. A stomach-dropping moment of no-thrust. We’re falling, apprehensions cried.

Suddenly the shuttle stood on its tail. That, at least, was the illusion. The whole world reoriented. There was a yelp from forward, cries from the servant staff in the back seats.

And a muffled yelp from the paidhi-aiji, Bren realized to his embarrassment.

Yet upwas the direction of the central monitor, and that was black. Belly-cam showed nothing. Aft-cams showed the running-lights.

Banichi and Jago, damn them, hadn’t done more than calmly comply with the safety instruction.

“This is what it shoulddo,” Jason said.

“I’m glad,” Bren said. “I’m so very glad.” He wished he hadn’t drunk that acidic juice, he was not mentally prepared for this, and somewhere in his memory was a confused datum of how long this acceleration should last. It had been numbers. Now it was life and death, and he truly didn’t want it to fall one second short of that, not in the least.

Slowly the sensation of being on one’s back eased.

And suddenly there was no downand no noise at all but the fans and the general static noise of the systems. We’re falling, the brain screamed again, growing weary of panic. Bren glanced to the left too fast: the inner ear didn’t accommodate the change, not at all.

“God,” he murmured, sternly admonished his gut, and turned his head far more slowly, looking about him to see whether items did, as advertised, float. His arms did.

Beyond Banichi, Jago experimented with a pen from her pocket. She seemed quite fascinated when it rebounded off the seat in front of her. Bren stared at that miracle, too, fighting his stomach.

Banichi seemed a little less entranced with the phenomenon, rather grim-faced: Bren took moral comfort in that. Atevi were not immune to disorientation: the first crew had proved that biological fact… the same crew, in fact, that was flying the shuttle at the moment.

“We’re back,” Jason said softly. “ I’mback.”

“Are we doing all right?” Bren asked.

“Completely,” Jase said.

So Jase’s stomach understood what was going on; and if that was so, damned, then, if he’d miss the trip he’d dreamed of seeing… the engines had fired, they were in free fall, and doggedly, seeking something to prove it, he searched up a small wad of paper from the bottom of his pocket, the paper Banichi had handed him with the hospital phone number.

He let it go, floated it in personal incredulity, a miracle. It shouldn’t do that.

Or was gravity the miracle? Wasn’t it wonderful that the world stuck together, and accreted things to it?

No, he didn’t want to think about accretion.

The view in the monitors now was all black. He’d thought he’d see the stars. There was one. Maybe two.

And all the rules changed.

It was a lengthy universal experiment, this traveling in zero-G… even Lund and Kroger tried it, if only partially out of their seats; Ben and Kate held carefully to handholds, careful of transgressing that unspoken territorial limit in the cabin, but skylarked there like youngsters on holiday.

Even Banichi, which was the more remarkable, unbelted, and then the others did, but in his security Bren saw a purpose beyond curiosity… Banichi’s experiments were of measured force, push here, bounce there, back again; and Jago and Tano and Algini did much the same.

A pen sailed by on intercept, lost by a rueful translator forward, and Tano plucked it from space.

Narani was delighted, the servants likewise, laughing with the stewards.

Bren regarded them in slow revolution, wondering at what his mind knew, that they were all hurtling at very high speed.

“The station,” Jase said, then, catching his sleeve, directing his attention toward the screens, where a gleam showed against all that blackness, where hull-shine dominated the camera. Banichi and Jago, then Tano and Algini, ceased their activity and focused their attention on that point of light, and after that the four of his security drifted together to talk, a conversation obscured in the thousand nattering systems that kept the shuttle from utter silence.

The cabin crew moved through again, this time horizontally, assessing the state of the passengers, returning Kate’s pen. Later, over the general address, the steward admonished all of them: “Be cautious of releasing hard objects, Nadiin, which might lodge in secret and become missiles during accelerations.”

It occurred to Bren that he wouldn’t want to contest with Banichi’s mass in any free-fall encounter. And he didn’t want to receive Kate’s pen on the return, either.

At a downward tug from Jason on his jacket, he secured a hold on the seat and drew himself back in… just before the senior steward said, in Mosphei’, “Please be seated for the duration.” The stewards had practiced that. “For your safety.”

The Mospheirans did listen. Buckles clicked, instant obedience.

Bren fastened his own. Jason had reacted to the effect of leaves and sunlight on the planet in utter panic. He measured the fear of vacuum, the fear of movement, against other fears he’d suffered, fears of drawn guns, fears of falling off mountains. This was visceral, a war against lifelong experience, the laws of nature overset… as far as his body was concerned. But his senses weren’t skewed, nothing except that tendency to look about in panic. Too many surfaces, he decided: all of a sudden too much change. He calmed himself. Thought of lily ponds on the mainland. A formal garden.

“We shall be braking, Nadiin.”

He wished they’d been able to have windows. He did wish that. The monitors weren’t straight-line forward. The cameras had moved to track the station; he began to figure that out. Of course. They were gimbaled, to track anything outside they needed to. The crew was giving them a view. It was giving him extreme disorientation.

Jase talked to him, small matters, observations: “We brake to overtake,” Jase reminded him. He knew that. Gravity-tied to the planet, they couldn’t catch the station by accelerating: the result would be a higher and higher orbit, missing the equally-bound station. Their path was simply—simply!—to coincide with it and brake slightly, little by little.

That would drop them in the orbital path to line up with the docking stem.

“There we go,” Jase said. Jase knew he was scared.

He’d sweated through this, every docking from the first one; knew this whole docking business was another troubled sequence. He bit his lip and prayed there was no mistake.

“Easy,” Jase said, salt in a wound.

“I’m fine” he said. Jase had used to say that. Jase prudently didn’t remind him.

The image, over a long, long nervous approach, resolved itself from one dot to two connected dots.

Finally into a ring with that second dot against the stem.

Kate pointed to it as the camera suddenly brought it up close, while Jason just said, in a low voice, “ Phoenix.”

Chapter 9

The cameras on close-up, as they glided past, showed a battered surface, not the pristine white Bren had once imagined Phoenixto be. She was sooted, discolored with black and with rust-color, streaked and ablated on the leading edges.

Their ship. The ship. She carried the dust of solar systems, the outpourings of volcanoes on Maudit’s moons, the cosmic dust of wherever Phoenixhad voyaged… and the scars of the first accursed sun where Phoenixhad lost so many lives. Jason’s forefathers. His own.

The whole world had seen the scarred image on the television during the first shuttle flights, and the sight had shocked everyone, moving some even to question whether it was the same ship. Phoenixin all Mospheiran accounts was always portrayed shining white, though every schoolchild also memorized the truth that the earth of the atevi was in a debris-filled, dangerous solar system, that the colonists had rebelled against Phoenix’splans for refueling principally because fatalities were so much a part of mining.

The image of authority. The ark that had carried all their ancestors on two epic journeys, and a third… without the colonists, but with Jase’s fellow crew. Bren felt a chill go over his skin, felt a stir in his heart, an awe he hadn’t entirely expected.

Now the outcome of this last voyage, this run home with hostile observers behind them. The captains had no disposition to die without a struggle, as hard a struggle as their compatriots back in this solar system could make of it, with or without their consent.

Welcome to the space age. Welcome to the universe we’vemade, and the consequences of all we’vedone.

“Stand by, Nadiin, for braking.—Sirs, ladies, prepare your safety belts. Secure all items.”

Bren tugged the belt tight, fastened the shoulder belt as Jason unhurriedly, confidently at home, did the same.

He glanced across the aisle and saw his security belted in, looking as calm as if they sat in their own apartment.

There was no stir from elsewhere. This was the sequence that had fouled on the first flight, nearly ended the mission in a dangerous spacewalk.

“Homecoming,” Jase said.

“Nervous?” he asked Jase.

“As hell,” Jase confessed, and took a deep breath. “I don’t mind traveling in space at all. It’s stopping short of large objects that scares me.”

Bren felt safe enough to retaliate. “Better than skimming the surface of planets, isn’t it?”

The engines cut in. Jase grabbed the armrests. “I hate that, too. I really hate this part.”

Hard braking. Jase was not comforting.

Warnings flashed on the side-view screen in two languages: in general, stay belted, don’t interfere with crew, and don’t interfere with the pilot.

The mechanisms are old, figured in the explanation.

“There’s an understatement,” Jase muttered.

This time, however, the locking mechanism didn’t fail: the grapple bumped, thumped… engaged.

“We have docked,” came the word from the pilot.

There were multiple sighs of relief. A buckle clicked.

“Please stay close to your seats,” the steward said. “We have yet to perform various tasks and assure the connection.”

Bump.

Gentle bump.

Second jolt, second crash of hydraulics engaged. Bren told his heart to slow down.

They were in. Locked.

“Made it,” he said.

“Bren,” Jase said, in one of those I’ve got something to saytones of voice.

“What?”

“You think Tabini’s ever advised them yet we’re not the test cargo?”

“I’m sure he has.—Worried?”

“Now that I’m here, I’m worried.”

Second thoughts were setting in, in a way he didn’t have to entertain, because hedidn’t have any options here. “About them—or us?”

“Just—worried.”

“Survival of the atevi, Jase. Survival of all of us. If you’ve got second thoughts about rejoining your crew…”

“I have no choice.”

“I canclaim you as a charge d’affaires, under Tabini’s wing, and I know he’ll back me on it. You can talk to Ramirez from that protection, inside our quarters, if you think you need it.”

“You don’t have quarters here… you don’t knowyou have.”

“Believe me. We will have.”

“I’m Ramirez’s choice. I have to play this through, Bren.”

“For you?” Bren asked. “Or for them? Or because it’s wise? Second thoughts, I understand. Believe me, I understand: I’ve made my choice. Whatever you want for yourself, this is no time to make gestures. Too many lives are at risk here. What’s the sensible truth, Jase? What do you expect?”

“I need to get to Ramirez. I need to talk to him. We aren’tatevi associations. I remember that from the gut now.”

Naojai-tu?

Association-shift? Rearrangement of man’chi? Damiri’s cynic meeting the relics, in the play?

Humans, on the other hand, made and dissolved ties throughout their lives, even on so limited an island as Mospheira. Jase washuman; the Pilots’ Guild was human. In this whole business, everyone in the game could rearrange loyalties… so could the atevi, but under different, socially catastrophic terms.

“Still friends,” Bren said, meaning it. “No question.”

“Still friends,” Jase said. “But, Bren, I can’t bewho I was down there. They won’t let me be.”

“Will they not?” He was determined to the contrary, determined, in this last-moment doubt, to recall what Jase had thought last week and the week before. “Listen to me. Will you turn against Tabini, or report against him? I don’t think you will; you understand what the truth is down there. I know you won’t ever turn coat for your own sake. I know you.”

“Do you? I don’t know whatI’ll do.”

“I understand that point of view. Been through it. You knowI’ve been through it.”

“I don’t know I can.”

“Get your thinking in order. I know the dislocation you’re facing. But think of Shejidan. It’s real. The people you know are real, and depending on you, the same as I imagine people here are. Personally—I’ll get you back, Jase. Damned if I won’t. Politically, you’ll do as you have to for the short term, but don’t ruin my play and don’t stray too far, not physically, not mentally.”

“I’m not Mospheiran. I can’t explain how different…”

“ Na dei shi’ra ma’anto paidhi, nadi?”… Are you not one of the paidhiin, sir? Am I mistaken?

From a glance at the screens, Jase flung him a sidelong, troubled glance.

“ Na dei-ji?” Bren repeated, with the familiar.

“Aiji-ji, so’sarai ta.”

There was no real translation, only affection, loyalty, a salute. You taught me, my master. I respect that. Implicit was the whole other mindset, that back-and-forth shift that came with any deep shift in language, an earthquake in thought patterns. From panic in Jase’s eyes, he saw a slide toward sanity and familiar ground.

“Shi, paidhi, noka ais-ji?”

Are you reliable, translator-mediator?

Jase heaved a small, desperate breath. “ Shi!” I am.

“ Thinkin Ragi, Jasi-ji. The language changes the way you think. Changes your resources. Your responses. So does your native accent. You’ve been on a long trip. You’re going to remember things here you’d let slip. But stop and think in Ragi, at least twice a day.”

“It’s trying to slip away from me! Words just aren’t there!”

“I’ve been through that, too, every trip to Mospheira. Fight for it.”

“Please give attention to the exit procedures,” the steward said, with the worst timing in the world or above it.

“Jase,” Bren said. “What’s your personal preference? Honestly. You don’t getpersonal preferences. I don’t. But tell me what it is.”

“If I had personal preference,” Jase said with a desperate laugh, “I’d be home.—God! I’m scrambled…”

“I know that,” Bren said. “Think of the sitting room in the Bu-javid. Think of Taiben. Think of the sea.”

“ Sha nauru shina. I’ll contact you,” Jase said desperately, as staff rose and the Mospheirans rose to leave. “Or you demand to see me. They’re going to want me to themselves for a number of days. Ramirez I can deal with.”

“I’ll raise hell till I do get to see you,” Bren said. It might be a close, intense, emotional debriefing, a close questioning no one could look forward to. They would want to bring him back under their authority, even to crack him emotionally to be sure what was inside… Jase had never quite said so, but he had an idea what he was facing. No government could take chances with trust, not with survival at stake.

Likewise he knew what he was promising Jase, on the instant and on his own judgment of a situation. He hadbeen in Jase’s position. And he knew how Jase might both take comfort in someone saying you matter—and at the same time feel politically trapped. In the emotional impact of the ship that was his home, the atevi world was starting to leak right out of his brain, along with all the memories, all the confidence of what he believed.

“At Malguri,” he said while bangs and thumps proceeded aft and Mospheirans drifted free of their seats. “At Malguri,” he said, because Jase knew the story, “I had one of those language transit experiences; I think it helped make me fluent. I’ll tell you honestly I don’t envy you the debriefing. And this I can tell you. Don’t ever let them take timeaway from you. Don’t ever let their reality become yours. I’ll be here as long as possible, and if I have to leave, I’ll apply every means I’ve got to get contact directly with you. I won’t give up. Ever.”

“You can’t afford that.”

“Hell, Tabini won’t forget you. And I won’t. You have power, Jase. I’m handing it to you, right now. Aishi’ji.” Associates. He laid a grip on Jase’s arm. Tightened it. “We don’t lose one another.”

Jase concentrated on him with that wild look he’d had once, contemplating a very deep sea under his feet, and all that heaving water.

“Kindly file out to the rear hatch,” the steward said.

They unbuckled, were able to rise… straight up… taking advantage themselves of zero-G.

His staff had gathered up their carry-on baggage, of which there was a fair quantity.

Tano was with the servants. “One has the manifest, nand paidhi,” Narani said to Tano in his hearing, “so that baggage may find the quarters. How shall I deliver this document?”

This, in a space increasingly complicated by loose passengers, baggage, straps, and elbows.

Something banged. Nothing advised what the various bleeps, beeps, bangs, and thumps were, but he thought it might be the hatch, and in the next moment a wave of cold wind came through the shuttle.

He had to forget Jase then. He cast grim looks at his security, sure that he needed to stay with them, because, being atevi, theywould assuredly stay with him, and he wanted no misunderstandings. The possibility of abrupt, wrong movement all rested with him, with the relative position of him, his guard, and threat. He dared not let overzealous station security create a moment of panic.

“If they do jostle us, Nadiin,” Bren said, drifting up beside Banichi and Jago, “recall they don’t feel man’chi, and may make apparently hostile moves. They are foreigners. Be restrained. Be very restrained. Don’t show weapons.”

“Yes,” Jago said, that disconcerting Ragi agreement to a negative.

The Mospheirans pushed through their midst, evidently intending to be first out. “Let them, Nadiin,” Bren said, by no means inclined to argue with Kroger’s sense of proprieties.

Kate and Ben, more hesitant, drifting free, looked distressed, worried as they passed, clutching drifting luggage.

“Understood,” Bren said to the junior staff. “Go on past. Best if you do go out first. Best if the first thing they see isn’t atevi. Good luck to you.” His servants waited, cramped to the side, while Kroger and her team exited.

“Go,” he said then, and went forward, using the seat backs for propulsion. Jase stayed close, experience and unthought confidence in the environment in the way he gauged distance ahead of him and checked a small movement with unthought precision.

A little of the motion sickness quivered through Bren’s stomach, or indigestible fear. He imitated Jase, using the same technique of small pushes and stops against the seats to avoid bumping into his servants. “Nadiin-ji. Follow Banichi and Jago. Do not make sudden moves, no startling of the humans.”

The air in the ship had turned from mere cold to truly bitter, breath-steaming cold. His hands were numb. Within the air lock, it was worse still; the chill turned any moisture in the air to ice. He met the handline there, took hold, regretting gloves had not been part of the arrangement in their shirtsleeve environment, as he followed Kate’s feet out into the bitter chill of the access.

There a handful of ship worker-personnel, suited against the cold, wearing masks and goggles, likewise clung with gloved hands to the rigged line. The Mospheirans had gone on, a line of bodies the brain kept saying was ascending a rope through water. Perception played tricks, in a stomach-wrenching glance at an environment of metal grids and pipes and insulated walls.

In the same moment the workers saw what was coming: the body language wasn’t as definite in zero-G, but Bren saw it. First: Jase; we know him, glad to see you. Then: That’s a stranger,coupled with, Omigod, they’re large, they’re alien, and there are more of them than us.

Jase reached out a bare hand to one of the anonymous workers and caught a gloved grip. “Luz?”

“Jase.” The word came muffled through the mask. Josefin was the name on the orange protective suit. “Jase!”

“This is Bren Cameron behind me. His staff. Atevi security. And his servants. I hope the message got here.”

“Yes,” Luz said. “Yes. Mr. Cameron.” Bren drifted along with the assistance of the rope. Exposed flesh, face, ears, and fingers—burned and chilled in the dry cold. The inside of his nose felt frosted, his lungs assaulted. He held out his own hand, had it taken, gingerly, in a grip that hurt his cold fingers.

“Thank you for the welcome. My bodyguard and staff, thanks. Glad to be aboard.”

“Yes, sir,” was the answer. Luz Josefin, a woman with dark eyes behind the goggles, seemed paralyzed an instant, then said, “Yes, sir. Hurry. You’ll freeze. Watch your hands. Warm your ears when you get inside.”

“Thanks.” Bren moved along rapidly then, fingers having lost all feeling. Jase was with him. His staff followed. The atevi crew hadn’t exited—wouldn’t yet; they and the pilots, with their separate hatch, would still be at work, checkout and shutdown. Bren concentrated on getting himself and his security to the end of the rope and the doorway he saw ahead before he lost all muscle coordination… and before Kroger might shut the door in their faces.

“Air lock.” Jase shoved him through, using leverage. “Watch those controls. Don’t push any buttons.” He bumped Mospheirans, couldn’t help it, tried not to kick anyone.

“Are enough of us going to fit?” he asked Jase in Mosphei’, and was glad to see another crewman, wearing bright yellow, standing guard over the lift controls.

His staff packed themselves in. There was a directional arrow on the wall, and the attendant hauled at the Mospheirans, saying, “Feet to the floor,” until they had squirmed and rotated into some sort of directional unity, “Feet down,” Jase said. “Watch the luggage, Nadiin, push it to your feet.” The door shut by fits and starts, wedging them and their baggage in, and Bren blew on the fingers of one hand, asking himself how fast frostbite could set in on the one maintaining a hand-grip.

“Never been this way but once,” Jase said. “Should have remembered gloves. Sorry. Sorry about this.”

“Yes,” Bren said with economy, teeth chattering. “Gloves have to go on the list.”

The car moved.

“Hold on,” Jase said. “ Jai! Atira’na. Don’t let go.”

“Hold on!” Jago echoed, amused, as it proved understatement. Bags settled, forcing themselves among atevi feet. Kate’s bag traveled to the floor and thumped.

“We’ll go through the rotational interface,” Jason said in Ragi, and repeated it in his native accent. “Don’t let go the handholds at any time.”

It was a curious sensation, a little like going from flying to mildly falling, resting very lightly on a floor, then weighing more and more. Where does this stop? Bren’s senses wanted to know with panicked urgency.

The Mospheirans had been told no large hand baggage. This was a point the Mospheirans had clearly noticed, and probably resented like hell right now, as his four servants fought desperately to keep theirs organized. Tano and Jago helped, shoving items back in the shifts of stress.

A lift, hell. It didn’t lift, it suddenly moved sideways, like a small plane in a thunderstorm.

It dropped.

Came to a stop. Definitive stop, Bren decided, and relaxed an ice-burned stranglehold on the safety grip.

The door opened on light, warmth, a beige wall and an official welcoming committee, men and women in blue uniforms, all the expected signs of rank… uniforms identical to uniforms in historical paintings, in old photographs, in plays and dramas.

It wasn’t teleconferences anymore. It was living history looking them in the face as they got off the lift, one of those perception shifts: home, for Jase, to him and the Mospheirans, history, like someone dressed up for a play—while the atevi saw this uniformed lot as… what else?… the very emblem of the foreigners who had dropped from the sky.

Bren immediately recognized two of the faces he’d seen previously on a viewing screen: Captain Jules Ogun, third-shift, dark-skinned, white-haired. In real life, he had curiously few wrinkles, as if some sculptor’s hand had created them, then smoothed them out again. He was over eighty years old, and had the body of a younger man.

“Captain Ogun, Lieutenant Delacroix,” Jase said quietly. “The Mospheiran delegation, Mr. Lund, Ms. Kroger; and Bren Cameron, the aiji’s representative.”

Ogun offered a hand, shook Lund’s, and Kroger’s, then Bren’s, a thin-boned, vigorous grip.

“Sir,” Bren said, “a pleasure to meet you.”

Ogun gave him an eye-to-eye stare, not a happy one, not an angry one either. “Mr. Cameron. I take it this mission was the aiji’s sudden notion. And the President’s.”

“We were sent,” Kroger was too quick to say, “on the aiji’s schedule. It was hurry up or lose the seats.”

Coldly, Ogun turned his attention past her to Jase. “Jase. Welcome home.“

“Thank you, sir,” Jase said quietly.

“As for the suddenness of this move,” this with a sweeping glance at Bren and Kroger, “the quarters aren’t prepared. Not a priority, since we’d received no prior word and I don’t hold my crew accountable. I can explain we don’t have the space. I can explain that when we occupy a section of this station we have to secure seals, check the power conduits, turn on power, check the lines, and bring up a section the size of our ship from the extremes of space and vacuum… which we don’t damn well have the personnel to accomplish without risk. Our occupancy is of two sections, plus the core transport, plus the ship. No room. That’s first. Second, I understand there’s cargo you don’t want opened, that you want put under your control. Unacceptable.”

It had been a long flight. If Bren had a wish, it was for facilities—soon, but the aiji’s dignity was life and death. Ridiculous as this standoff got, it was everyone on the planet’s life and death.

He launched into a translation for his staff, occupying attention, making clear that there was a communication problem which no amount of shouting could cure, and hinting that his staff didn’t communicate, which might become a problem to the station.

Then, giving the captain a direct look: “Space under your constrained circumstances, is negotiable, sir. Our cargo is diplomatic baggage, which falls within the previously agreed circumstances, and any interference in it will compromise all negotiations. This has been cleared; it is agreed. We’re prepared to be understanding regarding your degree of preparedness; but not about our necessity for appropriate food.”

The silence stretched on—two, three more heartbeats. “If you can eat it, they can eat what we eat.”

“Your pardon, sir, but their physical requirements involve alkaloid poisons, as I’m sure we’ve made clear; their religious and philosophical requirements insist they have their own diet.”

“Baggage passes our inspection. Your people can stand by.”

“No, sir,” Bren said calmly. “That’s contrary to already negotiated agreements. We state that we’ve brought nothing aboard that’s on your forbidden list, and we’ll make no open fires. The fact you don’t have the facility ready is your side of the agreement; the fact that we have equipment we’re bringing aboard is our side, and failing one of our arrangements, we stand by the other.”

“Captain,” Kroger said. “ Our baggageshould not be at issue. We have our clothing, our small personal necessities. Inspect what you like, but this is an official delegation, negotiated as of two years ago; that the aiji in Shejidan hurried it is not our choosing.”

“We won’t be hurried,” Ogun said.

“We’ve heard for three years,” Bren said, “that haste serves all of us. The baggage is not renegotiable; trade agreements depend on our ability to maintain a mission here under our own seal, to feed our people in our own kitchen, and we will not give on that point.”

“From what I can see, you’re human, Mr. Cameron, and you can tell them this, and you can tell the aiji this: we won’t tolerate being pushed!”

“He’s being obdurate,” Bren said in Ragi, and in Mosphei’, “My security officers are armed, tradition on the mainland; they will always be armed. So will the security that attends any atevi representative. That, and the kitchen, will not change, sir. My staff understands as well as yours the hazards of discharging weapons in this environment, and likewise the hazards of interfering with your communications. All this was worked out two years ago, both for us and for Mospheira. Inspection violates those agreements. Your negotiations with the aiji are all tied to those agreements, and we will not give on that point. The contents of diplomatic messages and baggage must be respected, or this shuttle will go back down, and the aiji will consider constructing his own space station and reserving work for himself.”

“The hell he will!”

It was possible to stare down another human being, someone on eye level. And he already knew watching the changes in expression that the captain was not going to throw up two years of agreement on his source of supply; the captain wanted him to back down on the details of the request.

More, he knew this man, at least second-hand and from Jason.

“The hell, yes” Bren said, and in Jase’s accent. ”End report.“

“We can’t admit weapons to the hull. Or biological contaminants.”

“The greater hazard is in ourselves, sir, and frankly we’re more worried about you, since the Mospheirans and the atevi have never had a major disease outbreak interchanged. We don’t carry crop pests, and if we did, we could settle them. Processed flour, sir. Cooking oil. Our galley is self-contained and uses electricity, not open flame, a considerablecultural concession, components we’ve designed to function with station electrical systems on your own advisement, captain, withall due respect. I’m here to talk deal on your supplies, not our baggage.”

“All right, we’ll arrange a stopgap. Settle it for now. Our security will take you to quarters. You can settle in and we’ll discuss the rest.”

“On the baggage,” Bren said, not disposed to move… resistance to discomfort was a requirement of tenacious negotiation; and if this man was difficult, a session in the atevi legislature was hell itself. “If those seals are broken, sir, if there should be an accidental breach, we go down without negotiating, and we may be another two years negotiating another mission.”

There was a long, long silence.

“This will go under discussion during the next twenty-four hours,” Ogun said. “Along with the quarters.” He shifted an eye distastefully over all the staff, and the hand luggage, a waist-high mound of it. Then gave the same look to Kroger and Lund and party.

“Mr. Delacroix. Quarters for the lot.”

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said.

“Jase,” Bren said, aside, with a glance at Jason. “Join us for supper?” Meaning: if you don’t like what you hear, accept. Now.

“Mr. Graham is Phoenixcrew,” the captain said. “He’ll join the captains for supper. Contact them later, Mr. Graham.”

“Yes, sir,” Jase said.

“Meanwhile, Mr. Delacroix.”

“Yes, sir,” Delacroix said, and passed the next order to the human crew that waited. “Mr. Kaplan, Ms. Ramsey. Quarters.”

“Yes, sir, come this way, sir.”

Quarters, then, had been an item understood, probably debated with raised voices ever since Tabini’s advisement they were coming up. Mr. Kaplan and Ms. Ramsey evidently had a completely clear idea where they were going; Bren was no little amused, resolved not to let it affect his judgment… and not to jump quickly to oblige the captain’s maneuvers, no matter the personal discomfort.

Meanwhile Narani and the servants had gathered that they were moving out, and gathered up the baggage. Banichi and his team, likely subtle origin of the signal to Narani, looked to him for orders.

Bren delayed, smiled at Kroger and Lund. “Hope to see you tomorrow,” he said, offering a hand, and went through the entire hand-shaking formality for no other reason than to set his imminent departure as his choice, his schedule.

“Mr. Cameron, sir,” Kaplan urged him, wishing him to go to the left. Kaplan, a young man, wore a kind of headset, and had swung down an eyepiece, appalling-looking creation. It looked like half of eyeglasses; screens, set only a minute degree from the eye, quite transparent to the outside view.

Such eyepieces could be used for targeting. Bren recalled that. Mospheira didn’t have any survivals of that technology, not outside the close confines of the Defense Department.

And on a thought, Bren delayed for another moment, regarding transmissions down to Mogari. “Ginny, give Shawn my regards when you talk to him,” he said.

“The same to the aiji,” Kroger said, with less than atevi-style formality, annoyed as hell, Bren thought.

“See you,” he said to Jase, before he acquiesced to the guidance offered. It was the parting he least wanted, and Jase knew he meant it: See you. It was another of those mutual codes. But for now he obediently led his group after the crewman, down a short hall to an automatic door.

They passed through that and into a hall that, incredibly, curved upward, exactly the reverse of the situation that had turned Jason’s stomach when he’d faced planetary horizons.

Remarkable, Bren thought… and was glad to know his stomach tolerated it. It didn’t feel as bad as it looked. There was just more upward-curving hallway. And a lot of intersections. He’d seen the diagrams of the station; had studied them with interest, when, two years ago, the whole business of diplomatic establishments had come up and they’d talked about what he could do about the doorways, the sanitary facilities, all the modifications that evidently hadn’t been made as agreed.

But, damn, he thought: he had them in his computer, that small machine Jago carried for him. Since he’d gotten this new portable, and since it went in the highest security Mospheira and the mainland could mount, he’d never dumped a file that he feared he might regret. More, he’d loaded everything in that he could possibly lay hands on, everything Shawn lethim have.

Everything they knew of Phoenixdesign was in there; station design was; the architectural modifications, and ten or fifteen card games and any other piece of extraneity he’d used in the last damned year, and he hadn’t even thought about it, except a passing connection of neurons about having it with him, asking himself, under hasty circumstances, if there were atevifiles he could compromise.

But he didn’t keep the sensitive ones in the portable. Those were in the office computer, under guard. He didn’t take them back and forth to the island, only files atevi and the island shared. Thank God, he thought, for that.

His staff was coping with the perspective and the maze they traveled. Keeping his own steps straight seemed to want conscious effort, but at least the nausea didn’t recur. Most of all, he was glad to have played the hand right in the encounter with Ogun… not to have been settled into siege in a rapidly-cooling shuttle cabin while Tabini slugged it out verbally with the Pilots’ Guild, as could have happened if he’d overshot his limits. Atevi, who chilled less readily, could have lasted longer than he could… but it could have been damned dangerous, no credit to Kroger… none to him for antagonizing the woman.

But that he’d win the question with the captain who didn’t want atevi cargo on his station, he had little active doubt. It was not in the ship’s interest to offend Tabini, as it was not in his own interest or Tabini’s to declare war with an orbiting power.

Ultimately, agreements had to work. Ultimately, Kroger, who seemed to get harder to deal with when fear reared its head, had to work with him.

And with luck, he would do what he’d come to do in the same two weeks as the Mospheirans planned to use. He’d get an arrangement with Ramirez and his brother captains, Ogun included, that let him come and go… and that let Jase come and go. He had no right to add that to the bottom line, and couldn’t spend the aiji’s credit to get it; but he was forming an opinion that if Bren Cameron had any personal credit in this affair, he knew where he was going to spend it.

Seeing this place with its wrong-curving corridors, its endless, same-textured, cream-colored corridors, he understood how frightening Jase had found the variability of a planet. He found thismorally frightening. A machine had extruded this corridor, a huge, unvarying machine. The door insets were just that, inset in an extruded-plastics form, not fighting the curvature except for a slanted sill, and every one the same, every door human height, as the corridor overhead was interrupted by absolutely regular translucent light panels.

It was absolutely the antithesis of hand-crafted Malguri. His ancestors had made this place… and he didn’t recognize it. Heart and mind, he didn’t recognize it.

Banichi and Jago walked just behind him, clearing the ceiling by not too much, trusting his leadership without question as they went deeper and deeper into this maze, deeper and deeper into places human authorities knew and he didn’t. Tano and Algini walked behind them, the staff with the hand-baggage two by two behind that. He was aware of the order every time they passed a section door, and there were no few. The escort took them on and on.

And finally right-turned down an intersecting corridor, through a doorway—theirs, Bren hoped, in acute discomfort, only to be disappointed. There was more corridor, another turn, and again a corridor, another door. Kaplan had to be using that eyepiece to navigate, giving no advantage to anybody who wasn’t receiving the information. Scuffs on the flooring gave the only proof of prior traffic.

Security… for the holders of the information. They’d refurbished this area. Put noidentifying marks anywhere on walls or doors or floor.

“Here you are” Kaplan said confidently, at an apparent dead end that might be only another turn in the corridors, and opened a door.

Light came on inside a room with a bed, a desk, several chairs, and a dressing-area.

“Thank you,” Bren said. “And what for the rest of my team?”

“I’ve no instructions, sir. Far as I know, this is what there is.”

“Nine persons won’t fit.”

“I can relay that, sir.”

“And how do we come and go to our meetings? I have to make an appointment with your officers at the earliest. How do I contact them?”

“Someone will come for you.”

“At very minimum we’ll need more beds.”

“I have no orders, sir.”

“You have a request. This is one bed. Obviously there are other beds elsewhere.” He waved a hand, Tabini-esque. “We need more beds.”

“They’re built in, sir. Can’t move them.”

“Then mattresses. Bags with stuffing in them. I don’t care. My people are not going to sleep on the floor or step over one another. We need more rooms. We need mattresses.”

“I don’t know what I can do, sir.”

“You know how to find out, however. That is a communications link you’re wearing; you cantalk to your officers on that communication system, and I insist you do that or accept all the responsibility for not doing it. Tell them mattresses. Or padding of some sort. I want those within two hours. Rooms by tomorrow. I’m sure we’ll work it out. Will you show me the phone?”

“Phone.”

“Communications, sir.”

There was contact, behind both eyes, glassed and unglassed. The young man stepped inside and touched a wall installation, fingers flying over buttons. “This is communications. This is light. This is up heat, this is down. This is the fan setting. There’s an intercom. You just punch in and wait.”

“What about the other rooms neighboring this one? I’m sure you won’t mind if we open them up.”

“There’s personnel assigned there, sir. There’s personnel assigned all over. This is living quarters.”

“Do they have mattresses?”

“Look here, sir, we’re not under your orders!”

“No. They are.” This with a conscious reference to the living wall of atevi waiting around them. “We need the mattresses, we need more room, and we’re going to be persistent. I don’t care what you find, sir, or how long it takes, but this is the team that’s supposed to supply you with yourneeds, I assure you, not ours. I do appreciate the inconvenience and the difficulty involved and I’m sorry it’s fallen on you, but I know, too, that your captain places confidence in your judgment and your resourcefulness, or he wouldn’t have sent us off with you. So what can you do for us?”

Likely suggestions occurred to the man, but he adopted an aggrieved, respectful expression and heaved a sigh. “Sir, I’ll do what I can, sir.”

“I’ll expect success, then. I’m sure of it. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“Yes, sir.”

The guard left, probably saying more on his personal communications than a request for mattresses.

Bren, on the other hand, looked at Banichi, then cast a look at Jago, and then, with the indisputable privilege of rank, ducked inside in desperation, and to the back of the room, to what atevi politely called the accommodation.

In hardly a day and a night he’d antagonized a Mospheiran ambassador, one of the four Phoenixcaptains and an innocent crewman. It was not unpredictable that the aiji’s notion of presenting a fait accompli to the Pilots’ Guild had lodged them sideways in the throat of the station, but he had to reflect, once the adrenaline had somewhat fallen, that he’d had to do it, that Tabini had put him into a position, and he had no choice but make it clear… he couldn’t lie to the Mospheirans.

He couldn’t tell them the entire truth of his intentions either, much as he’d gone out of his way to level with them. He’d told most of the truth to Jase, his one wholehearted ally. But as far as human relations went, he’d had to clear a working space, make it very clear to the Mospheirans they weren’t participant with him in agreements he might make, make it clear to the captains one and all that if bargains weren’t kept, bargains wouldn’t be kept.

It was one policy in the elegant halls of the aiji’s residence.

It was another here, where they settled, the staff on the floor… himself in one chair, Banichi and Jago sitting on the bed, Algini and Tano standing in the corner. The place was too cold for human comfort. Though the fan was on high and the heat coming out of the vents was substantial, it seemed to produce only a fever-chill in the air. The surfaces stole warmth: walls, even the bedding seemed cold through.

“I do regret this discomfort” he said to his servants. ”Nadiin, I am hoping to improve this.“

“They do not, seemingly, adapt well to surprises,” Banichi remarked, and, caught by surprise himself, Bren had to laugh.

“We don’t know” Jago added quietly, ”whether this represents the standard of their own quarters.“

“One certainly hopes not,” Bren said. “More, one doubts it.”

“We can sleep on the floor,” the juniormost servant, Sabiso, said softly. She had banged her head quite painfully on the door of the facility, and had been mortally embarrassed, knocked half unconscious. It had raised a sizable lump on her brow. “We can use our baggage for mattresses, perhaps.”

“I don’t intend so,” Bren said. “I do notintend so. I don’t wish to move in with the shuttle crew, but if we get no better from the captains soon, we may have more words. We won’t tolerate this for two weeks.” Dismissing his servants to that greater comfort did occur to him; but it was not the atevi way of managing things, and it could not be his choice, not without shaming his staff. Tabini would much prefer a standoff.

And ultimately… ultimately, Tabini would have his way.

“We have brought sandwiches,” Narani said cheerfully, “in case of a long flight, and delays, nandi. It is the hour, in Shejidan, by the clock, and nand’ paidhi may have his supper, if he will.”

“Brought supper, Rani-ji!” He’d never even asked the servants what was in the huge, heavy baggage. “Beyond hope. Marvelous.”

Narani was delighted to have surprised him; the servants were entirely pleased and encouraged, and scurried about opening baggage, setting out unbreakable plastic dishes on the desk and the vanity counter.

Another piece of baggage opened up packets of sandwiches. A third produced fruit juice in unbreakable containers besides other black canvas packages, which Tano quietly abstracted and gave to Banichi.

What have you brought?he thought of asking, and thought perhaps he’d face the captains more honestly not knowing. Besides, familiar, homemade food sounded very good at the moment, and he was very glad to accept a plate and juice, in a glass, not the scandal of drinking from a bottle. In no wise would nand’ paidhi have other than a plate, and proper utensils.

“Excellent,” he said. “Excellent, Nadiin.—Sit, sit down, Nadiin-ji. I wish you to sit and share all this with me.”

The offering was meat of the season, pickled eggs and dried fruit, juice, with tea still hot in the flasks. And eat together, and in front of nand’ paidhi and his security? The servants were rarely comfortable with such an arrangement… and he was sorry for his failure as yet to provide them their own place, quarters of their own, their own dining room, their own place for jokes and camaraderie, their domain which Narani should rule.

But they all settled to eat, then, and the sense of ceremony with which they shared their meal made it a quiet, reserved time.

“We’ve become a village,” Jago observed then, recalling the more informal culture of field and farm, and that struck the servants as strangely funny, for reasons a human found difficulty figuring.

“We should have goda,” Tano said, which made them laugh aloud. It was country fare, boiled grain on which one slathered butter or fruit jelly or fish sauce, in season: Bren had had it.

“No fish sauce, Nadiin” said Bindanda, the outsider; all the servants well knew Bren’s distaste for that, and they shyly thought that was very funny, too.

“No fish sauce,” they echoed.

In that laughter came a beep from somewhere in the room, which drew immediate attention from Banichi and his staff.

The servants, lifelong accustomed to the goings-on of assassination-prone lords and their armed security, fell instantly silent.

“ Mr. Cameron,” a voice said from near the door, from the wall unit.

Banichi leaped up, and immediately the rest of the security staff was on their feet.

“I’ll deal with it,” Bren said, and rose and went to the wall console. Green, white, and red buttons were lit.

Green button, he decided, green for go, certainly not what an ateva would have chosen. “Hello?”

“Mr. Cameron, this is the officer of the watch. Your cargo is released, orders of the captains. It’s on its way.”

“Thank you,” Bren said, not entirely surprised, but very glad it would arrive before they wished to sleep. “Please relay our delegation’s satisfaction, captain, and its appreciation. My servants and staff will assist in moving it, at need.”

“No need,” the gruff reply came back. “ We’re sending a cart.”

“And the other problem? The mattresses?”

“Mattresses?”

“ Ithought this was understood.”

“What mattresses, sir?”

“My staff, sir, averaging well above two meters in height and numbering eight, besides myself, cannot rest on the floor, nor do I lodge with my staff, sir, excepting my security. This insults the aiji in Shejidan, it was agreed, and I am still waiting.” With whom it had been agreed he neglected to say. “On the other hand, I’m sure more rooms would solve the problem. Five rooms would be adequate. We are prepared to move.”

There was a lengthy moment of silence. “ Let me ask the captain on shift.”

The captains damned well knew how one had to deal with the aiji of Shejidan. He glanced at his watch, knew by the usual ship’s schedule that it was past Ogun’s watch. “Shall I wait on line? Let me talk to Captain Ramirez.”

“ He’s asleep, sir.” That meant it was either Tamun or Sabin. He strongly hoped for Sabin. “ It may have fallen between watches. Give me a moment on the problem, and I’ll get back to you.”

Bren punched the switch to off. The quarters might be bugged, but they could only detect riot or silence and the occasional drop of a recognizable name. No one aboard spoke Ragi with any fluency. Jase, and to some degree Yolanda, was the ship’s only chance of translating it on the fly. There had been a dictionary sent up; he was sure they would make use of it. But learn Ragi? In years of dealing, there had been no request for that.

“The baggage will arrive,” he told his staff, cheering them. “They’re pursuing the question of additional quarters. The captains go by shifts. Ramirez is asleep, Ogun has left duty, and we wait to see whether Sabin or Tamun happens to be aiji of this ship at the moment.”

The servant staff had risen. They bowed, pleased at the news.

“Let us resume our supper,” Bren said, and everyone settled. He made short work of his own sandwich, fortification for combat.

Within a few minutes the intercom beeped again.

Banichi punched in this time, quick study.

“This is Bren Cameron,” Bren said with the comfort of good food on his stomach.

“This is Captain Sabin. Mr. Cameron, despite the apparent size of the station, we don’t have unlimited facilities. Not all areas are livable. Quite bluntly, sir, we can accommodate the Mospheiran mission; but we’re finding difficulty accommodating your special needs.”

“The aiji will not take that into account, captain; nor should he. But we’re willing to make adjustments for your situation, quite understanding your position. We can forgo the modification of doorways and accesses.”

“It’s not doorways and access, Mr. Cameron. I doubt the native government will want to accommodate an unannounced lot of us, either.”

“The aiji has prepared your guest quarters exactly to human specifications, captain, on schedule. Send down a complement on the shuttle, and they will be treated as guests.” It certainly couldn’t be a credible threat of invasion, not unless they wanted to drop their several hundred crew members in capsules, and only atevi goodwill would put a second shuttle within their reach. “We understand your schedule has been subject to pressure. But I must say this situation was not of our making… and we met schedule. The Mospheirans responded with extreme suspicion when you abruptly recalled their translator; when you recalled Jase Graham, the aiji took that as a statement as well, indicating a new phase in our dealings.”

“Mr. Cameron, the aiji is proceeding on assumption.”

“You made the gesture, captain. You alarmed the Mospheirans, the Mospheirans appealed to him for seats; he granted it. He is not human, captain. He responded to your gesture and to the Mospheiran delegates in a thoroughly logical way for an ateva. He sent me up here first to ask why, to be sure the Mospheirans tell you the truth, and to assert his agreements with you and your Council. I find, unfortunately, that the quarters we require aren’t ready. I’m ready to accommodate that, within reason; but for the reason you came to ask our help, we need to arrive at a working relationship. That begins with adequate space.”

“We don’t have space at our disposal.”

“And I believe we’ve already made it clear that atevi representatives don’t come in ones and small sets. They have staff to provide for security that is never absent from them, waking or sleeping, on the planet. This substitutes for weapons. You don’t wanta solitary ateva, sir. If you found one, I assure you he’s crazy and probably dangerous to your lives and property. An ateva with his household, however, is someone who can be dealt with, genially, and the more comfortable he is, the easierhe is to deal with.”

A long silence followed his lengthy rehearsal of matters already settled. Clearly, the woman on the other end of the connection was not speaking without thinking… or consultation… or at very least, getting control of her temper.

“ We have a difficult situation here,” Sabin said. “ Two competing delegations.”

“Not at all competing. If you have an interest in minerals and shuttles and work done up here, talk to us. If you want to talk to the Mospheirans, they will refer your requests back to their government. I, on the other hand, can deal in specifics and have an agreement to train workers up here as soon as I’m convinced quarters are adequate. You can meet with the Mospheirans, but without the aiji, you’ll have no transport for that labor and you’ll mine the asteroids for supply.”

“This is a matter for the Council.”

One saw the origin of the Mospheiran fondness for councils and committees; the third captain was not about to commit the others.

“This is not acceptable accommodation, captain. I’m afraid this doesn’t encourage me to sign a damned thing.”

“All right. We’ll meet. Thirteen hundred hours, tomorrow.”

“Excellent.” He deliberately let the slight accent of long habituation to the atevi language creep into his voice, wondering to what extent Jase was going to spend a sleepless night on the schedule he’d pushed, because he had a notion they’d recorded every word he’d said. The captain was trying to get him to talk, and that they’d talk to Jase… in detail, after sleep if he didn’t push it; with no sleep if he did. Not to mention the captains. Ramirez didn’t seem destined for a peaceful night, nor Ogun and Tamun rest off-duty. “Granted adequate rest for myself and my staff. I insist on expansion of these quarters.”

“This is an orbiting facility, Mr. Cameron. A centuries-old, jury-rigged, malfunctioning orbital facility. We cannot manufacture space on demand. We haven’t the manpower. We understand that’s likely to be Mospheiran. The raw materials and transport have to come up from the mainland, and your atevi are prone to slaughtering humans for no damn good reason. We find that just a little damn worrisome to be accommodating. ”

“Your emissaries have been taken ill on landing, to the point of nausea and incapacity. I believe we’ve understood for three years that atevi would be coming to this station, and I believe we transmitted our specific requirements years ago. I don’t think requesting to use them now that the shuttle is operational is at all beyond reasonable expectation, since in that time, we’ve upgraded our industry, produced one shuttle, have another well along, and have yourquarters operational. That’s the first point. The second: you don’t get transport or supplies if the atevi aren’t happy, you don’t get labor if the Mospheirans aren’t happy; and you’re damn right they don’t live together, and that’s not making your job easy. I, however, am Mospheiran by birth, dolive together with the atevi, very successfully, and I’m willing to tell you all I know about the how and why of it, granted I get any sleep with no mattress and on a cold floor.”

“Members of our crew will be forced into zero-G accommodations by the aiji’s maneuver, Mr. Cameron.”

“Members of my staff, all somewhat over two meters in height, have nowhere to sleep otherwise. One has been injured by a low doorway and the floor is unacceptably cold. Nor will the furniture adequately accommodate them. Thus far, we’re maintaining a sense of humor about this situation. However, it is wearing thin.”

There was a silence. Bren waited, cast a glance at his staff, and the voice on the intercom said quietly: “ We’ll vacate the sector to you, down to the security door. An hour to move our personnel out. Understand that I’m granting this as a stopgap and in extreme displeasure at this maneuver. Don’t expect further modifications until we have labor that meets our needs.”

“As an invention of the instant, more than generous, captain.”

“We’ll meet. Thirteen hundred hours tomorrow, no delays. Our security will bring you to the offices.”

“My security will also attend, captain, as provided for in the agreements. That is not negotiable on the aiji’s part. And we’re still waiting for our baggage.”

“ We have notopened your baggage, Mr. Cameron. I trust you know how fragile this environment is. I trust you’ve briefed your delegation.”

“Completely. Please brief your personnel never to move or stand between me and my security. It’s the same as a drawn weapon. We make adjustments in our procedures; we likewise expect the courtesy returned.”

“ I’ll see you at thirteen hundred, Mr. Cameron.”

In the middle of her off watch, likely. The slight whisper of electronics vanished before Bren could touch the button.

“This device might receive without announcement,” Banichi said, leaning above him for a closer look. “I believe I can prevent that.”

“It might,” Bren said. “But don’t. Yet.” He’d been speaking Mosphei’ to the captain’s responses in a mutated mother tongue, of which some of his staff had some knowledge, but not all. He suspected Banichi might not have utterly penetrated the captain’s accent, or grasped the nuance, any more than Banichi would have an understanding of the green light as go, when atevi would have chosen white.

In such small matters lay the least of the problems they faced.

“Nadiin-ji,” Bren said, looking out at the whole staff, across the small room, “that was one of the captains. She’s given us the whole hall up to the safety door, the baggage is on its way, and she wants me to come to a meeting, probably with several of the captains, at early afternoon tomorrow. She proposes to send security to fetch me tomorrow; she doesn’t sound at all pleased when I say I’ll bring mine with me.”

“Were we to send you alone, nadi-ji,” Banichi said, “Tabini-aiji would have a contract on our heads.”

“I made that clear,” Bren said. “Captain Sabin doesn’t like us having weapons, and wishes discretion. Banichi, you and Jago come with me tomorrow, that is, assuming the baggage arrives and we get the quarters we want. Tano, Algini, you’ll take care of the premises.”

“Nandi.”

Contrary to what he’d said to Sabin, he knew Tabini-aiji had gotten them onto the station by what amounted to sleight-of-hand, one that would have played very well in the hasdrawad’s chambers or the machinations of the associations.

So he had the consequence of that: a very rattled, very angry Pilots’ Guild who’d had a few experiences with Tabini-aiji at a distance, and who’d probably—wisely—begun to count their fingers in every transaction they had with his government.

Courtesy, however, was a cultural fault line that crossed more than atevi-Phoenixrelations. The captains weren’t exactly adept in courteous suggestion, a trait that was bound to rattle the Mospheirans, who for ancestral reasons were already disposed to suspect the Pilots’ Guild leadership of nefarious doings. Conspiracy theories bred on Mospheira, part and parcel of Mospheiran life, and the most prominent had the aliens as a complete lie and the captains bent on conquest of the island, from which they would launch out to conquer the mainland.

Neither the Mospheirans nor the Pilots’ Guild had reasonable expectations of one another. He, however, had had Jase for three years. Assuredly, the Guild hadn’t sent their most senior officer onto the planet in the first place, but he could have had worse advisors…

God, he hoped he was right; it was always seat-of-the-pants navigation on an alien interface, where the paidhiin operated. It was bad enough trying to keep the Mospheirans out and yet not overdo the pushing, either. Now he had to stand nose to nose with a captain of the Guild and tell the Guild he wanted the sun and the moon on a platter. He hoped Jase had reached Ramirez, that Ramirez was inquiring about what Jase knew… and that Jase, perhaps with Yolanda Mercheson listening in, was shaping up a pyramidical negotiation: atevi with Ramirez, if they were lucky, the Mospheirans with Sabin. That left Ogun and Tamun to distribute somewhere, possibly to stand off and analyze and pose their own threats.

The servant staff meanwhile was gathering up belongings, to rearrange their living space after hardly more than a couple of hours aboard the station.

Banichi and Jago, Tano and Algini, were in a close four-way conversation in which the communication panel figured. On the one hand, he was too preoccupied to inquire and yet thought he should find out.

And he had to tell them, too, what he knew of station structure. “This communication center will be much the same in various apartments,” he said to them, “linked to the central control systems of the station. The ship will be linked into that system, with all its equipment. There might be bugs of all sorts, more sensitive and harder to find than anything that Mospheira’s ever heard of, Nadiin, or anything we might have given the aiji. We don’t know what these people have developed in two hundred years, with all they’ve been through.”

“We ourselves have nothing to conceal,” Banichi said, “nandi, and trust our associate will not translate for them.”

“No,” he said: Banichi didn’t use Jase’s name, and for the same reason, he didn’t, himself. “Because they’re humans, Nadiin, it’s very easy for me to assume I do understand them. I resonate to certain things in this culture the way metal resonates to the right pitch… but Jase and I speak different languages with the same words. One’s own ancestral culture is not the easiest thing to ignore; not always the easiest to identify, either, or to tell from instinct.”

“So one understands,” said Banichi, who owed man’chi to a human.

“So one understands,” Bren said somberly. He looked at the servants as he spoke. “We doubt the ship-folk’s security has become fluent in Ragi. They’ve had three years to do it, but use either the most courtly or the most vulgar language. I forgive you any impropriety. We doubt they’ll acquire the skills to deal with either extreme, no matter what they find in a dictionary. I intend to annoy the aijiin of the Guild; too much comradeship will let them make dangerous assumptions, and I have no wish to repeat the mistakes of the Landing. Let them detest me, nadiin, let them think me entirely unreasonable, so long as they assume nothing and presume nothing. That may not make matters entirely comfortable from moment to moment.”

“Shall we fear for our lives?” Bindanda asked.

He at first thought, Ridiculous, then had to take a heartbeat to be honest with what was at stake. “Recall there’s no air beyond the outer wall, and that delicate machinery maintains air and light and heat within. They fear mistakes, and fear them justifiably. Every door will be too low for you, every seat too small; security will take alarmat your height and your manners, which are contrary to their own. Bow often. If a human looks at you with hostile appearance, smile, however you may think it rude, or however you may find it difficult. Smile even to persons of high rank. Smile at me, as well, even in public. Remind yourselves to do it. Even if their intentions are the worst, we have a mission here, in the aiji’s man’chi. I rely on you all for my life.”

“Nandi.” Narani bowed deeply.

“Smile doing so, Rani-ji.” He did so himself, instantly, and provoked anxious laughter from the staff. “Even you, Banichi-ji.”

Banichi turned from his examination of the television, gave him a dour look, a dire smile, and all the staff laughed, including Jago, including Tano and even Algini.

“So,” Bren said with a small ironic expression, “we await the baggage, we await the betterment of our quarters, and we prepare to deal with whatever comes. Nadiin-ji. My machine, please.”

Jago gave him his computer, and with it he settled in the smaller of the chairs and set to work finding files. Yes, the ship records wereavailable. And Jase’s notes, on particulars of every member of the Pilots’ Guild, every acquaintance he had, every officer, every piece of history.

Trust that information?

Yes. He did. He discovered even his scruples were useful to Tabini, that his human nerves remained sensitive to human concepts of betrayal… that served the aiji. The penalty was a live and touchy conscience about what he did, but intellectually, yes, he knew Jason had hedged the truth and then, in later years, amended it, quietly, just changing a detail or two.

Now he did believe the record, as he believed Jason. His file regarded more than a hundred of the crew.

Senior Captain Ramirez was seventy-one as the ship counted time.

Senior captain, a son, a daughter, both privileged into command training: command within the Guild had descended down very narrow lines, all but hereditary unless the offspring failed the academic tests.

A wife of fifty-some years, deceased. Marriage on Mospheira was often transitory, sometimes lacking entirely. Marriage on Phoenixwas lasting, rank-linked, alliances of power that just didn’t break, not without dire consequences.

He’d asked Jase whether to believe Ramirez. Jase had written: Ramirez picked me and Yolanda togo down. In a sense, if I have a father… he is. He signed the papers, at least, that drew the samples out of storage. He wanted us born because it was a new age. He didn’t expect what happened.

Jase had written it in Ragi. They’d been talking late that evening, in the sitting room in the Atageini apartment, inhaling a wind laden with djossiflowers.

He still could all but smell the flowers and the fire when he thought of that conversation… when Jase had repeated in Ragi, “We have no man’chi, except to the ship. And our mothers. We have ordinary mothers. But Ramirez sent me. He’s looked out for me all my life. Encouraged what I studied. I suppose that’s having a father.”

“I couldn’t tell you, either,” he’d said to Jase.

No man’chi, except to the ship.

Jase had pursued the old knowledge for its own sake, because Stani Ramirez had had the notion of returning to the world they’d left behind to set up a trade route, a stellar empire. Things had gone monstrously wrong, then, within Jase’s lifetime.

Jase said… and they had cast everything on believing Jase… the Pilots’ Guild was here to set up a defense of the world. The station they’d left at that other star hadn’t stood a chance.

“I saw the pictures,” Jase had said, that night that Bren had found himself absolutely believing the alien threat. “Only a few of us actually went aboard the station. There was a meeting then, when we’d pulled away. Some of the crew said we ought to try to find the aliens and settle accounts; some said we should just run elsewhere and not risk an enemy tracking us home. But there were all the records on the station. There were the charts. Some thought the station crew might have destroyed them; but most thought they didn’t have the chance. We voted to come here, hoping they’ll wait to digest what they took.”

In due time there came a great deal of thumping and bumping in the hall.

“Shall one investigate?” Jago asked.

“Let them proceed in their own way,” Bren said, much as his security chafed to be of use, and to know what was going on. Moving out, he thought, probably crew quite, quite annoyed with the guests from the planet.

The thumping went on.

Banichi settled to reading, Jago, Tano, and Algini played a game of chance. The servants were similarly engaged, casting dice, darting glances at the door.

In time the light by the door flashed once, twice, and the door opened.

A man in uniform said, “Mr. Cameron?” as if he couldn’t tell which was which. “The area is yours.”

“Thank you,” Bren said, keying a total shutdown.

He rose, walked unhurriedly into the corridor, and surveyed a pile of baggage, three more humans, two with sidearms, and a space of corridor which he gathered had just become an atevi residence. “Very fine, I’m sure. We appreciate your work, Nadiin.”

“Captain’s orders,” the man remarked coldly, and walked off, stiff-backed.

Bren’s nerves twitched, cultural reaction bristled just slightly, but he’d triggered that; he’d done it consciously, and he didn’t answer, just stood and watched as the crew, likely the displaced personnel, stalked out.

Well, well, well, he thought, wary of creating lasting anger; or the assumption atevi could be insulted with impunity.

“Crewman!” he said sharply.

There was a fast look, a wary look.

“One regrets the inconvenience. Those dislodged will receive compensation, if they will make me aware of their names.”

“Johnson, sir.” The jaw was set. “Johnson, Andresson, Pressman, Polano.”

“Three names known on Mospheira,” he said, disobeying his own instructions to his staff, to smile. Possibly they were doing that. “One I don’t know. Interesting. We will import goods once cargo delivery begins; let us know what you think fair return. Jase Graham may recommend certain items.”

The stance was less hostile, though uneasy. The foremost crewman returned a sketch of a salute. “Yes, sir. Where do we turn that in, sir?”

“There will be a desk here. Tomorrow if you wish. It may take a while, but we have a long memory.”

“Yes, sir.” The man wavered into a move backward, and all four left, to talk, perhaps to officers, not unlikely to other lower-ranking crew. Likely bribery and compensation broke a good many rules.

The door shut.

Banichi arrived beside him. “Shall one inspect for bugs?” Banichi asked. “Or leave them?”

“Search. Let the staff unpack. One shouldn’t, however, remove their bugs… or destroy the communications panels. Yet.”

“Yes” Banichi said, satisfied.

The search they would make was technical, beyond his competency. He did trust Banichi wouldn’t short out the station's power systems or ring a fire control alarm.

And there the cargo stood, a mountain of black canvas and white packing crates, the galley, kitchen supplies, Banichi’s own gear, clothing… weapons, if the Guild had kept its word and stayed out of their baggage. Their electronics surely weren’t as sophisticated as the equipment they passed through, but there was, to be sure, the quality of the persons using it. He thought of a shipful of technologically sophisticated spacefarers spying and eluding one another for centuries; and he couldn’t quite imagine how adroit competition could make them, whether worse, or better… but knowing the aiji’s court as he did, Bren rather bet on his own allies.

Chapter 10

The servants would not possibly permit the paidhi to enter the apartment they had chosen for him until they had, of all improbable things, produced from the baggage and arranged three small scroll paintings by the doorway.

Farther, in the main corridor they spread out a mat with auspicious and harmonizing symbols, a unification of one in a hallway otherwise appallingly blank.

It all depended on numbers of items with which they had to deal, which they could not possibly have judged without seeing the place, and Bren had to wonder what other adornments they had brought that rested unused. Narani’s sense of felicitous design was undisputed. His ingenuity was extreme.

More—Bren had tried to ignore the racket, and not to ask—they had shifted furnishings, taken other chairs from tracks, traded between rooms, hung small, portable artworks, and set up a kitchen, all in four hard-working hours that by now had entered the mid of the night down in Shejidan.

“Nadi-ji,” Bren said to his major domo, standing in the central hall to view it, “you’ve worked a wonder.” He walked farther, considered the positioning of a desk in the center of the room they proposed for his, and how, within the outside corridor, and by tools and options they had likely found in security’s kit, they had removed and taped a small table to the corridor wall, managed a vase containing dried grasses with three small stones meticulously arranged, and a dish for message scrolls, should any miraculously appear.

Loose furniture might horrify station authorities. But he was vastly touched.

The chairs within his room numbered three, the bed had a piece of tapestry draped across it catty-angled, and he had to imagine how much better his staff felt. Hefelt the tightness and the devotion in their arrangement… in human terms, felt warmed and comforted in senses that had learned to count flowers and colors of flowers in a vase almost as naturally as atevi brains registered that kind of information. They had made it far warmer, far more welcoming, a brave atevi gesture in a world otherwise steel and plastic.

“Thank you, nand’ paidhi. At what hour will you have breakfast?”

Minds were more comfortable with understandable decor, and bodies were happier with things on schedule.

“Nadi-ji, a small breakfast, on schedule as Shejidan judges it, if you please. I may nap, but wake me.”

They were happy in the praise, and went off to perform their miracles in whatever they had arranged as the official kitchen, likely as well their own quarters, where the servants’ hall would develop its customary jokes and pranks and irreverence, free of the lord’s affairs.

“Much, much better,” Jago said. “But tiny doorways. Poor Sabiso.”

The lump on her head had not gone down.

“Even on Mospheira doors are taller,” Bren remarked, one of those small windows of information which once in his career had been restricted. “We must have compromised, when we built houses together, before the War. Beware of ladders and stairs, Nadiin. Either they saved materials and heating and cooling as best they could when they built this place, or this is actually the scale of the remote ancestors.”

“Never considering felicity,” Algini said quietly. “Does one think so? Perhaps we’ll adjust those numbers, nandi, and this time the station will be fortunate.”

As if the lack of flower vases explained all the calamities that had befallen this station and the other… not that any of the staff attached to Tabini’s court believed the numerology with the fervor of the religious.

“One might say,” Bren replied, “never considering harmony among the residents; and that is infelicitous in the extreme. Let’s hope we can set things in much better order, baji-naji.” Given the workings of chance, the devil in the design.

The message tray set outside was so hopeful, so gently expectant of proper behavior.

And considering that, he truly felt he had a base from which to work, a base from which any otherdelegation from the aiji could work.

He entered his room, sat down at the desk, and opened up his computer.

“The clock says rest,” Jago admonished him.

“One small task,” he said. He looked at his watch and performed a calculation. “It’s a number of hours until my meeting with the captain. The Mospheirans are surely first on the agenda. They don’t get to rest. And theyhave to eat the local food. Jasi-ji didn’t recommend it. I, on the other hand, look forward to a fine breakfast.”

“Nandi,” Jago said, amused, and withdrew.

There was no question of pursuing what they had pursued in the apartment in Shejidan, under Tabini’s roof. Some questions simply were not to be asked, and Jago reverted to grand formality, left, probably to have no more sleep herself. Banichi and Tano and Algini were doing setup within the room they had appropriated, however quietly. The security module, like the very carefully negotiated galley, was meticulously thought out, very portable, piecemeal. Crates and baggage had disappeared in the general transformation. His security was happy.

He ticked down the list of crew, with a mind accustomed to numbers, in a language that utilized calculation in every simple statement… a skill at memorization acquired over years of study and experience in the very dangerous years of Tabini’s court. He reviewed names, everything Jase had told him about persons he might meet, their relationships, their spouses. Monogamy was the rule, occasionally serial. Offspring of high-ranking crew tended to be preferred into slots, but had to be capable of the rigid, computer-mediated training courses. Families had been split in the colonization. There’d been a lot of fatalities before the ship had returned, over a thousand lost with the station, and many still-extant families had lost members… it wasn’t considered polite to talk about the fact. In a society where everyone knew everything, discussions about such things were shorthand, and interpersonal understandings were intense and fraught with assumption. There was no one to tell. People swallowed their grief and just went on. The mere notion of people Jase regarded as essential to his welfare vanishing over a horizon had disturbed him, but more to the point, Jase had taken two years even to mention how it troubled him, or even to figure out why he paced the floor and grew furiously angry in their separations.

Jase had gotten better about it. Jase hadn’t mentioned it in their parting with the world, but it was implicit in Jase’s regret for leaving, his wish to have the freedom to come back… there was not a whole damned lot Mospheiran or easygoing about Jase Graham, and he called himself normal and sane.

He had assembled that kind of data on Jase into a profile that might fit the captains: quick explosions, a tendency to compromise their way through conflicts on the one hand and yet to store up points for future explosions, all grievances carefully inventoried. No one on the ship could get away from anyone else. Resolutions had to happen, sooner or later, and bare hands fights happened, weapons anathema in a family dispute. But the captains enforced absolute order, and isolation was a heavy, dreaded punishment among people who were never, ever, separated from each other.

Jase had volunteered to drop onto a planet among strangers and aliens. Jase had learned to speak a language of the earth of humans, that no one else spoke, because Jase, born of a father dead for centuries, had been destined to bedifferent. He’d been born to make contact with the former colonists, no matter how they’d changed.

Jase… and Yolanda Mercheson.

This… from two of the Phoenixcrew: separate by job, separate by choice, in their own strange way competitive and jealousof their relationship with Ramirez… it was likely foredoomed not to lead to friendship, even if it had led to love-making.

And both of them were different from Mospheirans—how different he hadn’t quite figured until he entered a verbal shoving match with Ogun, and saw the responses that had unnerved him in Jase ticking into action, one after the other.

He took notes for a paper he meant to write, notes in Ragi for a paper in Mosphei’. He’d been a maker of dictionaries, once upon a time, and still could find common ground with scholars like Ben Feldman and Kate Shugart, on Lund and Kroger’s team.

But in the contents of that paper, an explanation of foreign ways, he found himself possibly unique, possibly the only one but Jase who could see in what particulars they were strange to one another… possibly the only one but Jase who could spot the shoals and rocks onto which the Mospheirans might well steer; or the crew of Phoenix, since there was no right or wrong in it. Foremost of Mospheiran hazards, the Human Heritage Party had not the least idea how strange humans could get, on a world, on an island; on a ship, locked in close contact, communicating only on things everyone already knew. They thought “original humans” were their salvation; and there were no longer any “original humans.” Both sides had changed.

His staff came and went in the corridor… easy to know the servants’ soft footsteps and his security’s heavier booted ones. He found himself surrounded by sounds far more homelike, despite the prospect of the encounter tomorrow.

Then, unintended, he thought about the island, the city where he’d been only a day prior, Barb running across the gray, stained concrete of that hangar, dignity thrown to the winds…

Flinched, inside.

A damn bus.

He wondered whether Barb was improving… or wasn’t; wondered what lasting damage there might be. With the faults she did have, if their places were reversed, Barb would have moved heaven, earth, and the national borders at least to communicate with him.

Not to reach him, not to live with him in a world where she didn’t want to be; but at least to call him, to say, “Bren, are you all right?”

Barb didn’t deserve to be hurt. His mother didn’t deserve to be pacing the hall of a hospital all night, scared out of her wits. They fought, they disagreed on everything, and still cared, that was the crazed sum of it all, one he’d begun to accept and one he wasn’t sure Barb yet realized.

He wondered whether his brother Toby had gotten a flight and gotten to their mother, and whether Toby and Jill were doing all right… Jill had happened into a life she’d never contracted for, watched over by security agents, national security haunting her street, following the kids. Toby’s marriage had had its rocky moments, and now Toby’s kids were getting old enough to understand how their freedom was circumscribed by their uncle’s unique job, and how their lives were complicated by a dozen random lunatics who under Mospheiran law couldn’t be arrested.

The whole family was kept balanced on edge, waiting for his visits, as if somehow he kept defining and redefining things, as if he was the one keeping them from living their lives. The fact was, they were bound together, hurt one another: Jill, involved by marriage, didn’t put her foot down hard, and should.

Small hours of the morning. Those kind of thoughts.

He rested the hand with the stylus against his chin, concentrated on the computer screen, buried the files in arcane atevi code which no one on the station would likely crack.

He got up then, called Kandana, undressed, and lay down in a bed Bindanda arrived to turn down for him.

“Sleep soundly, nandi,” Kandana said, and Bindanda echoed him.

“And so must you both,” he said, and shut his eyes, refusing to think of where he was, or what he faced, or what he had to do—beyond take out a title on the station.

The door shut, leaving the room in utter, depth of space, dark. Air whispered briskly through probably ancient duct work.

And in that deprivation of senses he drifted down, waking once or twice, asking himself in panic where he was, and whether he was blind.

“Jago?” he said once.

But realizing, remembering, calming himself after the separate frights, he found it impossible to resist rest, of which he’d had notably less than his body needed.

As deep a sleep, while it lasted, as he’d slept in half a dozen weeks.

The door shot open, and light flared into Bren’s face. He waked in alarm, finding one central reality: Banichi dressed, immaculate, and backed by Narani and two servants. “Time to wake, nadi-ji,” Banichi said.

He collapsed backward into the pillows, telling himself he was in orbit.

Truly in orbit.

Jase wasn’t there. Banichi was.

Jago. Narani. Tano and Algini.

He had a meeting with the captains.

The mind had been very, very far away. He’d been walking on a beach, somewhere in his childhood. He’d heard kids laughing.

“Nadi?” Banichi asked.

Banichi could come through a firelight with his hair un-mussed. Bren did not find himself in that condition. Restarting his heart was one priority. Convincing exhausted limbs to move took second place.

Getting his brain organized was a mandatory third.

“I’m moving,” he said. Banichi, over the years, had learned not to assume until he saw a foot out of the bed; and he put the necessary foot out, into very, very cold air.

“God, I don’t think I want to do this.”

“Shall one wait breakfast?”

“Bath,” he said, gathered himself up with an effort, and went to the small bath, hoping desperately for hot water.

It was instant. He hit the wall, managed to get the water adjusted, told himself it wasn’t the shower he was used to; but soap was there, oiled soap with familiar herbal scents: Narani and the staff had everything in order. And when he came out of the bath, his servants were ready with his robe and his clothes.

He sat down to have his hair dried and braided in its single plait.

“Did you sleep, nandi?” Narani asked.

“Very well. What’s the time until my meeting?”

“Two hours,” Narani said serenely. “One thought you might wish to sleep.”

“One was very correct,” he murmured, having his hair tugged at. He discovered his eyes shut. “Tea,” he said. It arrived in his hand, preface to breakfast.

Narani finished.

He stood up, passed the teacup to Kandana, after which he dressed, taking time to assure the set of his cuffs, and walked out into the hall that now was the heart of the atevi mission.

Servants bowed.

Tano occupied a canvas, atevi-sized chair in the room opposite his, the chosen security station, next to the outside access… with a fair stack of electronics and a massive console.

Where in hell did that come from?he asked himself. He was moderately shocked, and turned to find Banichi waiting for him at what was now the dining room.

Certain things he didn’t want to know. Certain things he might investigate only if the captains asked him. God knew what else might exist, besides the galley that he and Jase had carefully designed to work with station electronics.

Doubtless, that set of equipment found compatible power supplies, too. If it was patched into the room electronics in any unreasonable way, he didn’t want to know it, at least not before his meeting.

Inside the next open door, that which, with two desks secured together, served as their dining hall, places were set for three, himself and Banichi and Jago, two canvas chairs of atevi proportions, and his. Algini was there to draw back his chair for him, and as they three settled, Sabiso brought in a tea service.

He couldn’t bear the curiosity.

“You aren’t doing anything I need to know about,” he said to the two of them, Algini having melted out the door. “Banichi, Jago-ji, surely nothing hazardous.”

“We know what comes and goes,” Banichi said, “and we listen, Bren-ji. Should we not?”

“Listen as you wish,” he said, as Narani arrived with Kandana, who bore a great, wonderful-smelling serving dish, the contents of which he could guess as a favorite of his. “Nadiin, you amaze me.”

Kandana set down the platter, and Narani removed the cover. It was amidi ashi, a delicately shirred egg dish.

“ Eggs, Nadiin?”

Narani was delighted with his success. “We have a few,” Narani said.

Dared he think that all his security wore their operational blacks, not courtly elegance; and that made into the uniforms were devices the function of which he generally knew as location, protection against sharp weapons, and objects for quiet mayhem? There were small needles, and several sharp edges within what otherwise seemed stiffening.

He ate breakfast, not saying a thing more on that matter.

And a little after the final cup of tea, Tano came in to report a human at the outside door, the promised guide.

Chapter 11

It was not the guide of the day before, but it might have been. The eyepiece, the uniform—the quick sweep of a glance around.

“You can’t have that table in a corridor, sir,” was the first comment, and Bren smiled.

“This isn’t a corridor.”

The young man clearly didn’t know what to do with that statement. The door of the security center, fortunately, was discreetly shut. Algini was inside. Tano, Banichi, Jago, and the servant staff stood in the hallway, three of them in operational black, the servants in their usual formal dress, bowing when stared at.

The guide looked at him, clearly disquieted. “Come with me, sir.”

“ Lead,” Bren said, and the guide opened the door. The man wasn’t prepared to have Banichi and Jago come with him, or didn’t like it. He stopped there, looking uncertain, then led on, and Bren followed, with Banichi and Jago last, very clearly wearing sidearms.

There was no conversation, no pleasantry, no curiosity… just a handful of looks at corners, doors, and other excuses to look back, and the young man reported into his communications that he had, “a couple of the aliens coming, too.”

What the answer was to that indiscreet remark Bren didn’t hear. The young man wore an earpiece.

Not the most communicative guide he’d ever had. Bren tried to keep the corridors in mind through the changes, gray and white and beige corridors, endless, same-looking doors, two lift descents, one of which went forward, not down… he’d looked at the map last night, tried to figure where the administrative portion of the station had been, and thought they were in it, but where the captains lodged, whether even on the station, he had no idea.

Three corridors on from the only conversation, they entered more prosperous territory, a place with sound-deadening flooring, spongy, odd-feeling plastic, a bracketed, white-light row of prosperous-looking potted plants, which he didn’t recognize, but they had a fresh, not unpleasant smell. The original colonists didn’t bring many plants; weren’t supposed to, in ecological concerns… though some scoundrels had smuggled down tomatoes and a handful of other seeds from the original station stores; but the ship reasonably had whatever ornamentals had survived. Beside a doorway an airy green-and-white thing sent down an umbrella of runners and little plants. Another, at a turn, had improbable large leaves, unlike anything in the temperate zones of the mainland or Mospheira.

The hallways were no longer blank. Turn right at the green-and-white one, be sure to pass the giant-leafed monster. Jase hadn’t said they had plants aboard… hadn’t known anything on the mainland; but these…

Could they be from the stores on the station?

Or from some completely unknown world?

The doors become more impressive as they walked.

And centermost, at the end… two potted plants and a gold-metal door… clearly they’d reached some place of importance, but he’d learned never to assume that a door led to a room and not another hallway.

But their guide led them to it, pushed a button, opened the door, showed them into a council room with a T-shaped table, four seats at the far side. Ogun was one; Ramirez was the other. Thin hair combed down and cut straight across the brow, hollow cheeks, a mouth that didn’t give a thing to anyone; Ogun’s dark, square face was unsmiling.

But Bren smiled, taking his own advice. He walked in on the even numbers, even balance of seats. No round table here. The captains clearly dominated the arrangement.

“Sir,” he said, “captains.” He walked the length of the table to Ramirez, offered his hand, forcing the reciprocal gesture, and Ramirez rose, the first Mospheiran-style politeness he’d met. “Glad to meet you in person, captain; Captain Ogun, a pleasure.” He extended his hand there, too, and Ogun frowned and rose, taking it.

“Cameron.” Ramirez said, settling, and shifted a glance toward Banichi and Jago, just the least admission of their presence, about which he said not a thing, nor lodged any objection. Ogun sat down.

“Delighted you could find the time,” Bren said. “I trust you’ve spoken with Jase.”

“Extensively,” Ramirez said. “He says you’re here with authority.”

“That’s so.”

“To offer what?”

“What do you want?” Bren asked.

“What we want, Mr. Cameron, is a skilled work crew that we can communicate with.”

“Failing that, a skilled work crew who communicates accurately with their group leader.”

“When do we get the full set of shuttles?”

“I saw number two six days ago. No skin yet, but soon. Fast as it can be done. You want a job done… we have personnel who will be interested in coming here. You came here wanting a base. You didn’t have a way to reach us. We built it. What else?”

Ramirez waved a hand about him. “Make the station work.”

“That can be done.”

“Can you do it?” Ogun asked with a dour, flat stare. “These people of yours have a size handicap, fitting into places.”

“They also have talents, captain, as I’m sure Jase hastold you, which enabled the shuttle out there.”

“Human-designed,” Ogun scoffed.

“More convenient,” Bren said. Ramirez, if he was senior, said nothing, and tempting as it was to come back with wit, Bren restrained it in favor of a calm, respectful demeanor. They were autocrats, no question. This wasthe heart of the Guild. “You wield absolute authority here. The aiji has the same. The aishidi’tat, the Western Association, is a misnomer: the aiji rules the whole of the continent, can manage the industry you need, with minimal difficulty, and will keep his agreements.”

“And push,” Ramirez said, “like hell.”

“He’s an impatient man.”

“ Man,” Ramirez said.

“You arein communication with an alien authority, captain. Man isthe term they use for you and themselves, which is fortunate. Their customs aren’t yours. Their instincts aren’t yours. The first contact of humans with atevi was a success that led to a disaster. If you’d come a century ago, I don’t want to guess what might have happened. No supplies. No help at all from the planet. But very fortunately, now there’s a small association of trained personnel who know how to work with one another, a handful of leaders on the mainland and on the island who understand how to avoid problems, and with a good deal of luck we’ll agree, and make you very happy.”

“Not by throwing schedules to the winds and pressing us!”

There it was, natural consequence of the situation, and it was a case of tiptoeing past it or confronting it, keeping the aiji’s position his own secret, or laying it on the table and playing the pieces where they fell.

He made his choice.

“Being one of that small association of trained personnel,” Bren said, arms on the table, “I would have urged the aiji to proceed differently. Unfortunately, no one on your side asked me or Jase about recalling the paidhiin. That looked like a fast move. It touched off the island, it touched off the atevi, and that was exactly what happened. Jase couldn’t explain why he was recalled. Yolanda Mercheson hadn’t called back with reasons. You may have had good reasons, but I couldn’t tell the aiji I understood, and the aiji decided to find out, by honoring his agreement with the Mospheirans and sending one of their delegations up with his and not announcing the fact beforehand, even to me, since I happened to be on the island and not within secure communication range. That, gentlemen, is a very good example of the communications difficulty we hope to avoid in the future. Fortunately, this misunderstanding didn’t harm anyone. I might have argued with the aiji not to do it; but it was already fairly well in progress. My instincts said not to; I came here on twelve hours’ notice because, frankly, I want to know who I’m dealing with before I advise the aiji what to do.”

There was a small, stone-faced silence.

“Mr. Cameron, you’re pushing us.”

“No, Captain Ramirez, I’m being completely honest. I stand between, admittedly, not a foreign power, but an alien one, and you. The Mospheirans will have promised you the sun on a platter. We in the aishidi’tat know their virtues… and their limits. I, as a one-time representative of the Mospheiran government, know their limits; and I say in all desire to have Mospheira benefit from your protection, that I hope you don’t rely heavily on any offers from the island, because I know who makes them. Fortunately, that’s not relevant. The resources critical to your needs are on the atevi side of the straits, except for a little tin and a little silver, which I’m sure Mospheira will be glad to sell you. That’s my opening position.” He drew a breath, seeing he was already pressing most of the way to the wall. He went the rest of it. “The specifics of my position are actually quite generous, unless you have personnel to spare to run a space station, as I know you don’t. This is the atevi’s star, the atevi’s planet, the atevi’s native solar system; you have a ship that looks to have had hard times, and you want supply. Wethink we can arrange a bargain.”

“You’re insane.”

“No. By all you say about an oncoming threat, we and you don’t have two hundred years to learn one another and fight a mistaken war over trivialities. Ask the Mospheirans what they think of sharing the station. They won’t like the idea at all; but they may not refuse it. Atevi don’t want to share it, either; but they know Jase, they think he’s been telling the truth, and they’re disposed to work with you and with the Mospheirans to gain their own say. It’s a situation they know they have to live with.”

“You mind my conveying this to them?” Ramirez asked, sitting in a similar attitude, arms on the table. Ogun frowned, no different than his other frowns.

“I’d be happier with free access to the Mospheiran delegation, but I don’t think you want us to have that, as much chance as we’ve had to do it beforehand.”

Ramirez cast a glance aside at Ogun.

“What do you want in exchange,” Ogun asked, “to arrange this delivery of goods? What coin are we going to trade in?”

“Ideas, captain. Atevi understand that commerce. Knowledge. The agreement that they’ll run this station.” It wasn’t the end of the agreement; there was the question about whose law was going to prevail, but the first objective was possession of the station. “Tabini-aiji declared the terms he wants; I’ve relayed them. I’ve relayed to him what I know about the kind and amount of supply Phoenixhas used; I think he can do it.”

“Can he build another starship?”

That stopped him cold, for at least a handful of heartbeats. It was the logical extension of the request. It was completely reasonable, in that sense.

“I can relay that request.”

“Can he do it?”

“Yes. I think he can. How many are on the ship? How many does it take?”

“Jase didn’t tell you?” Ramirez asked.

“I ask the senior captain, who probably has figured the size of the request he’s making of the planet: how many does it take?”

“Up here? To man the station and handle the equipment? Five hundred minimum. To build… varies. Several hundred at mining; several hundred at refining; several hundred at fabrication…”

“The old figure, the first figure, was three thousand.”

“Twice that. Twice that.”

“Five shuttle trips to start.”

“Mr. Cameron, this station is holed in a dozen places.”

“That’s not as difficult as not having a station, is it?”

“Why was there a war?” Ogun asked. “The Mospheirans say the atevi are inclined to war.”

Bren shook his head. “The War happened because humans moved in with atevi, allied with the wrong party in a chaotic situation, ignored their boundaries, and didn’t know what they were doing. Atevi didn’t see it coming, either. That’s why we have paidhiin. That’s why only one human after the dust settled was licensed to live on the mainland and mediate trade.”

“You turned on your own leaders.”

“Mospheira still pays me. I’ve objected. They keep putting money in my account, and I just don’t spend it. It’s their position I still somewhat work for them, despite my advisements to the contrary, and the plain fact is that I do mediate. They don’t want a war; the aiji doesn’t. None of us want your war, but if it comes here, we don’t see any chance of ignoring it.”

“Do they understand?” Ogun asked, shifting a glance to Banichi and Jago.

“Perhaps some,” Bren said.

“The solar system, is it? Do you have any concept?”

“I can tell you that if unwary humans thread themselves among the atevi, or ignore atevi presence on the planet, there might be another war. Territorial integrity is an imperative, a biological imperative with atevi. Living with atevi is simple. Living among them is difficult, impossiblefor humans who can’t understand that imperative is gut-level, emotional, life and death. If you work with atevi, the interface will be limited, regulated, and very narrow, exactly as it is on the planet, the same people, the aiji and the President of Mospheira, will control that interface; but the goods you want will arrive and youwill never notice the inconvenience.”

Ramirez gave a strange half laugh and shoved back from the table. “I’ve dealt with you for three years, and you’ve been a pain in the ass.”

“I tell you the truth.”

“Your own security,” Ramirez said, with a look up and at the end of the room. “Banichi and Jago?”

“Nadiin,” Bren said, without quite taking his eyes off Ramirez and Ogun. “The captain inquires whether he knows you.”

“We are the paidhiin’s security,” Banichi said.

“Assassin’s Guild.”

“Yes, Ramirez-nandi.” Banichi was very polite in his salutation.

“He calls you Lord Ramirez,” Bren said, and saw Ramirez take that in with mild embarrassment, in the Pilot’s Guild’s long pretense of democracy. Bren added: “Banichi and his partner aren’t security as your Guild defines it. They also have the aiji’s ear, and rank very high in their Guild.”

“Would they care to sit?”

“It’s not their tradition. But they will report, to those places where they report. You always have to assume their Guild knows what’s going on. It has to. They’re the lawyers.”

“With guns.”

“That custom limits lawsuits,” Bren said.

“And this Guild enforces the aiji’s law?”

“The aiji himself enforces the aiji’s law by hiring certain of this Guild; but likewise his opponents may do the same. But the law theyenforce, the law as the Assassins’ Guild sees right and wrong, has no codification, only tradition: that rule of theirs is the one constant, sir, in the whole flexible network of man’chi.”

“Man’chi: loyalty.”

“Don’t fall into the trap of defining their words in human terms. Man’chi: an ateva’s strong instinct to attach to an authority. As long as man’chi holds the organizational structure steady, there’ll be more smoke than fire in any dispute, and you negotiate with the head of the association. Man’chi transcends generations, settles disputes, brings atevi to talk, not fight. The War of the Landing happened because humans insisted on making associations in one man’chi and turning around and making them in another. We call that peacemaking; to them it was creating war. I can’t emphasize enough how dangerous that is.”

“So we don’t agree with them?”

“Agree with their leader. Not leaders. Leader. What we bring to this association, sir, is more than resources and engineering. There’s an expertise to contacting foreigners and finding out their intentions, one that might well have saved your outlying station. It’s the most important resource we have in this solar system, one you have now, in Jase Graham, in Yolanda Mercheson. There’s also an art to listening to your interpreters and not letting politics or your own needs reinterpret what they’re telling you. The Mospheirans have something you need: companionship, a nation, a place to belong; the atevi have something else you need: mineral resources, industrial resources, mathematics, engineering, a highly efficient organization, but more than all of that: adaptive adjustment to a species you don’t instinctively understand. You could stand on the ancestral plains in front of a lion, sir—I believe we both agree what a lion is—and you’d biologically understand what it might do. I submit to you that you can’t ask the lion, but that you’d more or less recognize a hungry one and one that wasn’t. With the atevi, with any species that didn’t evolve in earth’s ecosystem, all those signals, all those assumptions don’t reliably work. We’ll teach you what we’ve learned on this world. That, gentlemen, in your situation, is the most valuable thing.”

“You think we could talkto a species that blew hell out of our station and that probably got our records.”

“I think that if you’re dealing with a species which might be numerous, sophisticated, and very different, coming from a place we don’t know, the ability to figure them out and to talk, if it’s appropriate, might save us. I don’t say you have to like them. I’m saying you need to know whythey shot at you.”

He left a long silence.

“And your atevi can figure that out.”

“No, sir, though they might, now; I’m saying an atevi-human interface might manage to make smarter moves. As a set, we may figure out what we otherwise couldn’t.”

“Makes no sense,” Ogun said. “Confusion’s confusion.”

“No, sir. You aren’t responsible for understanding the atevi; your gut never will do that. Just learn what you should and shouldn’t do. I happen to likethem, but I can’t translate that word and they don’t understand. They’ve given me their man’chi, passionately so, and I can’t figure that from the gut, either, except it’s a feeling like homeand mine, and I know the quality of these two honorable people. You’re not in familiar territory here. Confusedis a condition of life on the interface, but you canknow when you’re with people you can trust. Trust intersects directly with We’re confused, sir, and I know for people who deal in exactitude on both sides, trust comes hard. But trusting the rightpeople is absolutely essential here, or we take on additional enemies when we might have had allies.”

He watched physiological reactions across the table, body language, two men who’d unconsciously leaned back from him leaned forward; Ogun had just heaved a long, deep, meditative breath—thinking, getting rid of an adrenaline rush that probably urged Ogun to attack him, his ideas, and the whole situation that pinned Phoenixto an agreement the Pilots’ Guild had hoped would be very different.

“Think of the planet,” Bren said softly, “as a very large space station with a two-species cooperation that already works.”

“Yes,” Ramirez said wryly, “but docking with it is hell.”

Bren laughed, and immediately there was less tension in the room, less critical thought, too.

“There’s no need,” Bren said. “We do that. You do the technical operations your crew knows how to do, and you teach where we don’t know. You have our cooperation, and with us, the deal’s done, if you agree. Technicalities have to be worked out with Mospheiran authorities, with your various sections…”

“The Guild itself has to meet,” Ramirez said. “You will have a majority on the Council.”

Bren replayed that, replayed it twice for good measure, asking himself if it was really over, if he’d actually done it. He saw a more relaxed body language on the part of Ramirez and Ogun, consciously projected consideration and solemn thought on his own part, and nodded.

“Then we can proceed to numbers, and matters the aiji will govern. The fact that he will have to assure fair, decent supervision of labor is entirely his problem. The aiji will deal with station repairs, the training, labor management, and his own relations with Mospheira. The aiji proposes the area of the station where you have your headquarters and your offices be under your law and your regulation, the same with your ship, in which he has no interest. He proposes that an area of the station of sufficient size be under Mospheiran law, for their deputies and business interests. And he further proposes that the aishidi’tat will govern the entire rest of the station and its general operations under its own law and customs, build to its own scale, and provide your ship with its reasonable requirements of fuel and supply at no charge.” He said nothing of ownership of the station, of policymaking, of war-making, and command of that effort. That all waited on the growth of atevi presence in space, but he also had a very clear idea that Tabini had not an intention in the world of allowing the Pilots’ Guild to dictate to him, once he owned the establishment that fed Phoenix. If the Guild should study the history of the aishidi’tat, it might learn how Tabini had ended up running the continent and, to a certain extent, Mospheira… in the sense that Mospheira nowadays didn’t work against Tabini. But he hoped they wouldn’t concern themselves with old history, not until or unless it repeated itself. Given the history of the Guild, including bringing them a war, he had every determination to see the whole station under Tabini’s guidance. They could shoot him if not… and various interests had tried.

Ramirez and Ogun listened intently, unmoving, perhaps not unaware that Tabini had steered the situation to this point, and meant to go on steering it… perhaps as disinterested in running this station as Tabini was in running their ship or ruling humans.

“We may have an agreement,” Ramirez said. “You will need to present the case to the Guild in general session, but I think you see very clearly what our interests are.”

“I think our interests are entirely compatible.”

“You have to explain it to Mospheira.”

“I have no difficulty explaining it to Mospheira. Ms. Kroger and I seem to have a problem, possibly of my making, but President Durant and Secretary of State Tyers and I do communicate quite well.”

Ramirez gave a small, short laugh, indicative, perhaps, of chagrin at the rapidity of the negotiation.

“Interesting to meet you in person, Mr. Cameron. Jase is quite emphatic we shouldn’t deal with the Mospheirans. Yolanda, interestingly, just says believe you.”

He hadn’t expected that. He gave a slight, tributary nod of the head. “My compliments to Ms. Mercheson. I’m flattered.”

“Jase says you’re the best asset we have.”

“Jase roomed with me for three years. If he and I, given our starting point, haven’t killed one another, peace is possible between our parts of the human race.”

A slight smile from Ogun. There was an achievement.

“Jase has seen what you wanted him to see,” Ogun said.

“Jase could go anywhere he applied to go. He was rather inundated with the workload that descended on both of us. Your shuttle flies, gentlemen. We, on the other hand, worked a very large staff very long hours.”

“The shuttle is a damn miracle,” Ramirez said. “Another Phoenixis far, far harder. Fabrication in space. Extrusion construction. Simultaneously repairing the station.”

“The population of the continent is a classified matter, but suffice it to say, if that is a national priority, labor is no problem. Leave that matter to the aiji.”

“How many fatalities are you prepared to absorb?” Ogun asked.

“None,” Bren said flatly. “But that’s the aiji’s problem. Accidents are possible. Carelessness won’t be tolerated.”

“And meet the schedule?” Ogun asked. “Three years for a starship?”

“Depends on your design, on materials. Transmit it to Mogari-nai with my order, and translation on the design starts today. Materials inquiry starts on the same schedule. We have a good many of the simple conversions automated in the translation, with crosscheck programs; we’ve gotten quite quick at this. We build the ship, we turn it over to you, werun the station our own way.”

“You don’t understand. It has to be built in orbit.”

“Yes, Captain, I do understand. That’s why we have to make immediate provision to get the other shuttle in operation and to get crew housed reliably and comfortably. We’ll rely on you, I hope, to determine what materials are available most economically in space, with what labor force, and what we have to lift.”

“Are you remotely aware of the cost involved?”

Bren shrugged. “There is no cost so long as the push to do it is even and sustains itself. Materials are materials. You won’t deplete a solar system; you won’t pollute a planet; you won’t push atevi any faster than they choose to work. The critical matter is who’s asking them to work, whether their quarters are adequate… and all I say about the second ship is subject to the aiji’s agreement that it should be undertaken as an emergency matter.—Does your ship work?”

That question startled them.

“She works,” Ramirez said.

“That’s a relief.”

“Fuel,” Ramirez said. “That’s a necessity.”

“Can be done.”

“You talk to the general meeting, Mr. Cameron, and we have a bargain.”

“No problem that I see. We’ll straighten out the details, and I’ll go down again.” He added, as if it were ordinary business, not looking up at the instant. “I could use Jase. He can come and go, but I need him, urgently; he’s the other half of our translation team for technical operations.”

“He said so,” Ramirez said with some humor, and didn’t quite answer his request, but the response sounded encouraging to Bren’s ears.

“When, for this meeting?” Bren asked.

“Two days,” Ramirez said. “Oh-eight-hundred.”

Ramirez said a majority was a given, and wanted two days. Bren didn’t raise an eyebrow, but thought the thought, nonetheless, and gave a small, second shrug as he drew out a common notepad with a pen, and made a note.

“Meanwhile,” Bren said, so doing, “we’d like to feel free to move about.”

“Mr. Cameron,” Ogun said, “there’s hard vacuum on the other side of certain doorways, and we don’t allow our own personnel to wander about.”

“Access to crew areas. Guides, if you like. Integration into your communications.”

“Not until there’s agreement,” Ogun said.

“We need radio contact with our own government. As, I’m sure, Mospheirans will ask the same. Resolution of outstanding points on the agenda the last several years, release of historic records, archived files…”

“Classified,” Ogun said.

Now Bren did lift the eyebrow, and stared straight at the captains. “Centuries-old records, gentlemen?”

“Mospheira wants them. There’s ongoing negotiation on the matter.”

“It’s been ongoing for three years. We see no reason for these files to be withheld. Was there any secret in the original mission? Were we targetedto the white star? Or here? That isone of the conspiracy theories, generally promulgated in small handbills throughout the island… has been, I think, for over a hundred years. Of course, that flies in the face of the competing theory that atevi, having just made the steam engine practical, secretly sent out energy waves to divert our navigation to this world to take us over. The fact is, sirs, there are theories; the more reasonable ones do find credibility, where there’s secrecy with no evident, rational explanation for that secrecy. Werewe targeted to the white star? Isthere some mammoth conspiracy? Haveyou always known where Earth is? Was Taylor’s flight sabotaged?”

“Release the files,” Ramirez said. “The short answer is, Mr. Cameron, there’s no secret. They’ve been retained because negotiations have remained volatile, because we haven’t known how certain historical information would intersect your government’s opinion… the Mospheiran government, or the atevi. There were a couple of murders. Inflammatory history. And a damned lot about old Earth that we weren’t sure how the atevi would receive, and consider, frankly, none of their business to worry about. But no one’s history’s perfect. The main reason’s simply that they’re something Mospheira wants and something the atevi want, and we have them, until we know more about you. But in earnest of the agreement you set forward, I’ll release them. They didn’t exist on the station when we arrived. We theorize you must have lost them, probably in your notorious War of the Landing. We and the station storage now have redundant copies, and between you and us, Mr. Cameron, I’m anxious to see the collected works of our species replicated in a storage deep in a gravity well. We’ve stared extinction in the face, Mr. Cameron, and we wantthose files duplicated. They’ll be available within the hour. When you order transmission, we will transmit, in your name.”

Promoting himas an official contact point, not the Mospheiran delegation. He understood the game, he knew what Ramirez intended, and gave a solemn nod. “I’ll look at the nature of them as soon as I can; but again between us, I’d rather release them outright. Rumors are bound to fly on both sides of the straits, and I’d rather have those records for the theorists to digest right now, rather than let them work over the entire question of the agreement itself before they get them, or doubt that there might be anything in those files that might be associated. The more volatile elements are the very ones most interested in those records… and that have most to lose if those records contradict their universe-view. I say that in some faith they aren’t right and they likely won’t like all they read. But the news on Mospheira, I can tell you, will cover the records much more thoroughly than it will the details of the station agreement. If you want a smoke screen over what we do, yes, release the records. They’ll be an item in some footnote on the news of Shakespeare’s missing plays.”

“You evidence cynicism, Mr. Cameron.”

“Gentlemen, if I wanted to make Kroger a lasting hero on Mospheira, I’d give them to her. As it happens, I don’t want that. She’s not been in the position, and I rather cynically doubt she wants it, or would, if it happened. Mospheira’s hard on its public figures. It’s too small an island, with too many people, and too damned deep a dividing line between factions. I’ll rather ask you to transmit the files to the State Department and to the aiji tonight simultaneously, under your seal, and just let the pieces fall where they may, without politicizing Kroger. As far as I’m concerned, the agreement we reach will stand. The transmission is your way of proving your goodwill in current negotiations. It particularly favors Mospheirans, who value those files extremely; the atevi aren’t all that interested, since they reached technical parity with human culture, and you don’t need to say that the files in any way came from me. I don’t need the credit, but being in orbit, you can take the credit and not have lunatics phoning you in the middle of the night with religious visions.”

“You don’t want Kroger’s name on them.”

“I damned sure don’t want to give them to Kroger.”

“Personal animosity runs that deep.”

“No.” It did, potentially, but he wasn’t that mean-spirited, not against Kroger. But against those who might feel she was their representative, or who might turn her into that, definitely he held grudges, and suspicions. “Give the files to the world, gentlemen. Say it’s your gift. You’ll win good feeling on both sides, and if there shouldbe an informational bomb in those files, you’ll have defused it by being the one to release it, and Kroger and I will be completely safe. From that position, you can argue that you’ve been entirely open. That you’ve withheld them for three years becomes irrelevant. And if the Heritage Party on Mospheira discovers something it doesn’t like, that’s too bad.”