Precursor

“Kroger doesn’t like you.”

“It’s her job to suspect the worst of me. Someoneneeds to question what I do. Too damned many people take my figures without checking them.”

Ramirez gave a slow, quiet smile. “Dealing with you over three years, Mr. Cameron, I’ve acquired an understanding of your ability to maneuver, to answer, and to calculate. You came up here prepared to agree; you have agreed. I’ll tell you I’m still astonished.”

“As I’ve dealt with you, I have considered you an ally. A sensible man. So is the President of Mospheira, so is the Secretary of State, and so is Tabini-aiji. The world is fortunate. The human race and the atevi are fortunate. We have reason to believe what you say and take you seriously. After all, the world’s been invaded from space once. Twice and three times would not be an astonishment.“

Ramirez’ brows lifted, then contracted in thought as he examined that concept, and perhaps realized he was the alien invader in question. “All right, Mr. Cameron, we’ll transmit the archive. Your channels will be open to it henceforth, in your quarters. Examine the files as you will. I do caution you that the designs you’re going to be working with are part of that download, however buried in detail. If there’s anyone on the planet you don’t want to have that technology, they will have it.”

That was worth a small, wry laugh. “Furtive construction of a starship?”

“Of weapons you don’t have, perhaps.”

“Mospheira’s manufacturing is good, but no better than the mainland, and falling behind by the hour. We’ve reached parity. Some few might want to misuse the files; but we’ve already come to mutual destruction and declined. We’ve learned to get along, Captain; in some part you’ve watched it happen.”

“Are you planning to go back at shuttle turnaround? Is that our time limit? I’ll tell you, we consider you too valuable to be running up and down in a gravity well in a relatively untested landing craft.”

“I can stay longer, but if you want my office to undertake a major new project, I’d rather be there to deal with my staff. And I intend to come and go. I’m worthless if I’m not where I can settle things. We have a limited time to set the details. If we’re to get workers up here, we have to arrange quarters and intensive, rapid training. We need room for five hundred, by our designs. Can I tour a similar, refitted area?”

“I can arrange that,” Ramirez said. “Whenever you ask, you’ll have a guide.”

“And a point we must agree to in principle. As you wouldn’t house the Mospheirans within totally black walls, you’ll expect certain aesthetic accommodations where atevi reside.”

“Aesthetic accommodations.”

“They are important, Captain. You want workers to work, there will be aesthetic changes, changes in the way the rooms connect…”

“We have no time to spend on aesthetics.”

He was very, very glad to hear that word time, a corroboration of every single point of negotiation over the last three years.

“So there are aliens.”

“Can you still ask that?”

“Damned right I can. And the walls won’t be this particularly objectionable yellow and the doors will be differently arranged… while we build your starship. I must warn you that the time will be a little longer than the three years we’ve already taken on the shuttle.”

“You’ve worked a damned miracle,” Ramirez said. “I need another one.”

“Another point. Potted plants will be very popular on the station, but these have to be removed to some other facility; we can’t have yours going down to the planet, no matter how innocuous the intent. We will observe a quarantine zone.”

“Understood. That becomes your problem.”

“It will be.” He drew a heavy breath. When he engaged with Ramirez, common sense arrangements tended to happen at a breakneck pace, and he wanted a space to consider the details. “I’m very content, gentlemen; the only other request I have is for radio contact with the planet, my schedule, my initiation.” Amid all the rest of the preparations, the designs on a vast, space-spanning scale, anguished small realization dawned on him, that he couldn’t honestly use personal privilege and call Mospheira on the phone. The best he could do was ask his office to mediate, or send off a letter or two he greatly feared wouldn’t pass Mospheiran security unexamined.

“Any communications of that nature,” Ramirez said, “can be patched through to your residential communications center. I’ll give those orders.”

“Thank you, captain.”

“Any other requests, requirements, observations?”

“I’m very glad we have time, gentlemen. We officially believe you. We’ll use that time as efficiently as possible.”

“Very welcome news,” Ogun said, and Ramirez rose; Ogun did, and Bren did, too.

In parting, there were handshakes, far happier faces, even Ogun looking relieved as they made their polite adjournment.

“I’d like contact with Jase. Can he get in touch with me, or how do I contact individuals?”

“Cl is the communications center,” Ramirez said. “They’ll put you through to whatever you need.”

“Very kind, sir, thank you. Captain Ogun. Thank you.”

“Glad to reach agreement,” Ogun said. “Kaplan will guide you back.”

“Good, sir, thank you.” They were offered no further formalities. Bren cast a look at Banichi and Jago, walked toward the door, and Kaplan was outside, waiting, likely all through the meeting.

They’d gotten down to discussing, God save them, potted plants and ecological concerns. They’d agreed to build a second starship.

It was time to talk to the home office.

Chapter 12

"It went well,” Bren said to Banichi and Jago, while Kaplan gave them the guided tour back past the various potted plants. There was some chance Kaplan, twice specifically chosen to guide them, understood whatever words of Ragi existed in the dictionary the mainland had sent aloft, and he hesitated to speak with Banichi and Jago too freely, but then, what he knew would go out over radio with even more likelihood of someone listening… even Yolanda, even Jase, so he simply abandoned pretense. “We’re building them another ship, Nadiin-ji, pending the aiji’s approval; we’re going to run the station for them. And no one’s told the Mospheirans yet, but we’ve freed the library archive they’ve been trying for three years to get out of the ship’s records. It should come through the wall units in the rooms, but it will be on its way to Mogari-nai by tonight and disseminated to the aiji and to the island at the same time.”

“One is amazed,” Banichi said.

“Indeed,” Jago agreed.

“And Jase-paidhi may be part of this agreement,” Bren added, “seeing we need his help with the arrangements we’re making with the captains.”

“A very fine negotiation,” Banichi said. Banichi remained conservative on what he did say, clearly conscious of exactly the same possibility some of the crew knew a handful of words in Ragi.

Spy on one another? They surely would. He would, as far as he could.

And what washe to do about the Mospheirans, and about the President, and the State Department, and a delegation representing, essentially, distressed business interests behind the Department of Science and Technology, which had historically had ties to the National Security Administration, and likewise behind the Department of Commerce… which had ties to some of the richest, most powerful interests on Mospheira?

“Mr. Kaplan.”

Their guide, stopped at a door, looked at him, half through the eyepiece. “Mr. Cameron, sir. I’m not mister. I’m just Kaplan.”

“There used to be a business level on the station. Know anything about that?”

“No, sir. Never heard about it.”

There was an answer. “Interesting,” he said. “So that wasn’t restored.”

“No, sir.”

He thought about that as Kaplan took them back to their own territory, a considerable trek.

He thought and he thought about that.

Narani met him, the servants ready to take his coat in this linear, human-made place. Tano and Algini waited in the doorway of the security station, likewise observing.

“Kaplan,” Bren said, “tomorrow morning, you’ll take me to see the Mospheiran delegation.”

“I have to get clearance, sir.”

“Do that, will you?”

“I’ll ask, sir.”

The doorway shut, sealing off Kaplan.

Bren turned to face his staff. “It went very well,” he said. “We have agreement.”

He made the staff happy. There were respectful bows from Narani’s staff, very quiet happiness from his security.

The first order of business was to detour into his own quarters, write a small message to Tabini, set up his computer, and apply himself to the wall unit communications… a direct test of what Ramirez and Ogun had said.

Not unexpectedly Banichi and Algini turned up very shortly after he’d pushed a button… knowing something, at least, was activated.

Cl, the man had said, and Bren pressed the requisite keys on the panel while his security took mental notes.

Static sputtered. “ Yes, sir,” the answer came back. “This is Phoenixcomm.”

“This is Bren Cameron. Establish a link to Mogari-nai, Bren Cameron to Tabini-aiji, Capt. Ramirez’ clearance.”

“ Verification required,” the answer came back, and Bren waited. And waited, hoping there was no deception, no glitch. He had, for a view, shadowing the light from the overhead fixture, Banichi, Algini, and now Jago. Tano presumably was at the security station. “They’re seeking authorization,” he said, and in the next instant another button lit on the panel,

“You’re cleared with the captain’s compliments, Mr. Cameron. Stand by.”

It was going through. He didn’t expect to talk to Tabini, only to relay his message, and did not intend, in his message, to relay the heart of what was going on. Dropping major news into the court except through personal courier had its sure hazards, in the less stable members of the Association, and they had held suspicions of the Messengers’ Guild, which ran Mogari-nai, where the big dish drew down messages from the heavens. The aiji could be extremely efficient, since the aiji had gathered power enough to pay the bills himself and keep detailed design authorizations out of the hands of the hasdrawad and the tashrid. But damned right there was debate on the issue, that the aiji didn’t submit designs, but presented the bills after the fact… and he asked himself, pending time to think, just how what he dared transmit might hit the mainland if there were a leak.

Emergency reimbursements were Tabini’s primary budgetary tactic of the last several years, when the hasdrawad hadtamely voted the funds to reimburse the household accounts to build two space shuttles—granted one had whispered in the ears of the lords of the Association that the Association was in a race for time and survival.

Thus far the economy had never lurched, not with the industrial shifts, not with the new materials… it had only grown at a frightening rate. And there had been far less debate about the reimbursements than might have been. The Association was seeing benefits from Tabini’s expenditures. In some cases there was a rushto approve the new expenses, because innovation was pouring back into the economy, and thus far the sumptuary laws held. Conspicuous consumption could only be of art, no other luxury goods.

And art, as the law provided, could not be mass-produced. Even with the introduction of fast food, meat, traditionally, philosophically, had to be seasonal. Populations could not intrude onto green space and transport could not involve highways. A hundred and more years of developing mechanisms to assure the smooth fit of technological advances arriving on the mainland had worked this far.

Equilibrium. Prosperity.

Tabini’s enlightenment, shining down from the heavens, where he at the moment stood, hand on switch.

He heard, in a reasonably brief time, the operators at Mogari-nai, bidding Phoenixgo ahead.

And Phoenixrelayed the message.

“This is Bren Cameron reporting to the aiji: Aiji-ma, favorable. We have substantiative agreements. I’ll courier down many specifics when I return, likely on schedule. End transmission. Mogari-nai?”

“Yes, nand’paidhi.”

“Message to the office of the paidhiin, Shejidan: Work is going well; maintain full staff. End transmission. Mogari-nai, Nadiin: you may be getting long files. Have you received any yet?”

“No, nandi.”

A disappointment. “Have I messages?”

“Under seal, nandi. Will you receive now?”

“Send and receive, both.”

A blast of sound followed, rapid, unpleasant, protracted; his computer squealed and squalled back. A second blast came from the speaker, and that was that. The computer storage light went on, went off.

Stored.

“Thank you, Mogari-nai,” Bren said, figuring that burst should trigger alarms in Phoenixcomm, that computers in any security installation would probably be very busy for a bit, that anyone with his ear pressed to a receiver was going to be damned unhappy, and that he would shortly hear a human voice.

“Mr. Cameron, this is Phoenixcomm. Was that intended?”

“Completely,” he said. He was truly vexed about the files. “Thank you. I’m expecting a lengthy download.”

“I’ve heard there’s supposed to be a long ‘un, sir. I’m supposed to set up for it when the terminator’s past the island, to minimize traffic conflict.”

Encouraging. Very encouraging.

“You mean after dark.”

“Local 2400 hours, sir. It’ll have been dark a while there.”

“ Thankyou, Cl. That’s good to hear. Excellent. Can you put me through to the Mospheiran delegation on this station?”

“ Clearance required,” the voice said, and the unit went quiet for a moment. Bren cast a look at his audience, lifted brows, unconcerned by what was fairly routine mail pick-up, these days, and keyed up the mail display. Excited, however. Delighted.

He had a report to write to Tabini, to send by the next call. Now they knew they could do it. And the archive was going. God, the archive was going down. One day up here and they’d collectively worked what three years hadn’t done. What they’d feared was lost was found.

There was only one message from Mospheira, from Toby. It said: Delayed flight, weather at Bretano. Got your message and mom’s; she’s on painkillers. Very upset. I called her doctor; he’s on holiday at Bretano, sending records. Flying back tonight.

So how bad is Mother, Toby?

Toby had written in haste, gotten it through the system… probably hadn’t triggered his mail until he’d gotten home, not expecting a problem: Toby had been on one long flight and somehow had gotten another, back again. It was Independence Day weekend, their mother’s doctor was out of town, but they were getting another doctor? Was their mother having difficulties, or was it more than a scrape she’d suffered on the curb?

What about Barb?he wanted to know—What about Barb?—but there nothing on that score. Toby likely didn’t know the answer, forgot to mention it, or thought he wouldn’t want to know.

He couldn’t distract himself with family problems. At a certain point he had to pretend his family was like any other that didn’t have a son on the mainland, and Toby and their mother had worked out something within their means. He had the aiji’s agenda. He couldn’t think about the island, couldn’t do what Toby could do, wasn’t responsible for it, dammit all to hell.

Calm, he said to himself.

He punched Cl again. “ Phoenixcomm, give me the other delegation, Ms. Ginny Kroger or Mr. Tom Lund.”

“Mr. Cameron, this is Phoenixcomm. Standby.”

It was going through.

“ Hello?” he heard, “ Ginny Kroger.”

“Ginny,” he said cheerfully. “Are you up to a visitor?”

“ Cameron?”Not cheerfully. “ Where are you?”

“At our apartment. I’d like to drop by tomorrow morning. Mind? I have something to discuss.”

“ Can you get here?”Incredulously.

“I can get there, I’m pretty sure. See you at ten.” He punched that off. Phoenixcomm?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll need an escort for the morning, ten o’clock, Ramirez’ orders. Can you send Kaplan?”

Chapter 13

It was a very curious seal-door they reached under Kaplan’s guidance, a gray metal door that looked as if it belonged in a boiler room, very heavy, where the hall was beige and much like the rest of the station; it had an untidy seal around the edges of the frame.

“Temporary seal, sir,” Kaplan said when questioned. “Seals off the area, safety concern, sir.”

Safety concern, hell. Security concern, Bren thought as Kaplan opened it with a keypad.

“They have the Mospheirans safely contained,” he muttered to Banichi and Jago behind them, and smiled at Kaplan as the door opened.

He walked through into a cubbyhole of a hall section, with four open doors facing one another, before the hall ended in a more ordinary security door.

They’d kept the room assignments equivalent, at least, a little diplomatic evenhandedness, Bren said to himself. The numbers involved could set atevi teeth on edge; but the Mospheirans would be quite happy in them, two and two, he supposed, like the fabled ark.

Feldman came out to meet them with a mild gesture toward the farther right hand door. “Mr. Cameron. If you please.”

“Thank you,” Bren said.

“Shall I wait, sir?” Kaplan asked.

“If you would, Kaplan, please.—Would you mind giving this very obliging gentleman a cup of tea, Mr. Feldman?”

“We don’t have any tea, sir,” Feldman said.

“Then, Kaplan, would you walk back to our quarters and ask my chief of staff if he’d provide a generous packet of tea for the Mospheiran delegation?”

Kaplan began to obey that order, then looked taken aback. “He doesn’t understand me, sir.”

“Feldman, go with Kaplan. Translate. For that matter, take Shugart with you. Get some exercise.”

“I don’t know if we—” Feldman began, looked at Kaplan, looked at Lund, who’d just come out the door. “Mr. Lund, he wants me to take Shugart and get a packet of tea from their quarters.”

Bren folded hands behind his back, looked down, looked up, and gave Lund a direct look; translators from the Foreign Office were not need-to-know on the proposals he had to make.

Lund caught the notion that something was up, apparently. “Tea would be welcome,” Lund said. “Go, do that. Both.—Mr. Cameron. Come in.”

Bren walked back with Lund toward that rear room, while Feldman turned out Shugart and explained the mission; and in the remote recess of his hearing as he walked into the room with Kroger, Feldman and Shugart were explaining tea to Mr. Kaplan.

“Mr. Cameron.” Kroger was seated at the table. They had not moved tables for the conference. They still had a bed in this room, but had moved in an additional chair, or had moved one out. There were four floor braces, three with chairs, and Bren found himself moderately curious whether the four ate together and interacted in this room, or whether it was routinely two and two. He rather suspected the latter.

“We’re attempting to secure tea,” Bren said lightly as he slid into the third chair. “Good day, Ms. Kroger. Ginny.”

“You’re up to something, Mr. Cameron.”

Lund swiveled a chair and sat down, the three of them at indecently close range at the little table, if they should lean forward. Bren did exactly that, arms on the table, and watched Kroger lean back.

“I’ve just sent to Mospheira and to the mainland, and I think things are going very well. Talks went very well yesterday, frighteningly well, in fact; and I have a proposal for you.”

“The nature of which, Mr. Cameron, if you please.”

“The nature of which is very commercial. The Pilots’ Guild wants a functioning station. Commerce of an atevi pattern is very dubiously suited to a human ship’s needs; they hardly want artworks or tea services. It does strike me, instead, that if we’re to set up this station to function as it might, according to the historical capacity of large commercial stations—”

“We’re talking about a war, Mr. Cameron, their war with these damned aliens.”

“Eventually. Perhaps even sooner than we wish.”

“We don’t wish, Mr. Cameron. We don’t ever wish!”

“Nor do we. But the commercial potential of this station…”

“We’re talking about invasion and murder and a damnable atevi tendency to settle their disputes by assassinating the opposition!”

He blinked several times, considering that forceful declaration of Kroger’s position. He did not retreat, rather leaned where he was.

And smiled. “Very precisely. War. Stupid, mistaken war. We don’t wantthat sort of thing, either, I assure you. Atevi have absolutely no interest in dockside concessions, entertainment, or other things that one human community can very readily provide another… do you know Mr. Kaplan out there had not a clue what a tea service is?” Jase had come down to the planet relatively ignorant of varieties of food, having experienced very little in the way of fresh produce. “The potential market, fellow humans, the extension of island companies to the station—do you know there’s not a single teashop, no paid entertainment, no payfor anyone on the ship, and no clothes that aren’t simply drawn from ship’s stores?” He had had the picture from Jase, and reckoned that Yolanda had likely explained that matter on the island fairly thoroughly. “Think of these yellow hallways endlessly extended, no commercial zone, no such thing, not even a soft drink dispenser? We could well do with a SunDrink stand.”

“You’re talking nonsense, Mr. Cameron.”

He didn’t let his smile vary. “They want us to build a ship.”

“Build a ship,” Kroger echoed, and blinked.

“The aiji’s effectively agreed.” It wasso, since the aiji had sent him to make agreements, and he had made them. “However… wherever there are increases in personnel, supply is a problem; franchises for station operation, for, say, SunDrink, Inc., would be a fairly valuable commodity. Atevi happen to like it moderately well. Especially given the difficulties of transporting fresh juice.”

“We’re not empowered to agree to human personnel up here. We’re against it.”

“Atevi, however, are interested in this shipbuilding. In mining. You don’t need to do these things. I believe we’ve tried to make that clear. But these halls filled with workers simply drawing uninspired rations from some ship’s store… atevi simply won’t put up with that sort of thing. Think rather of human industry supplying a vital commercial zone, withall interested companies selling goods and services tailored to crew and, of course, an increasing dockfront presence…”

“They don’t have currency.”

“Oh, but that, that can be solved. Think of Port Freedom carried into orbit, think of stores, shops… Isn’t that what the stations used to be? Isn’t that our historical image of the station?”

“We’ve got a damned alien menace out there!”

“I don’t think it’s arriving next week, or if it is, we’re absolutely hopeless. We’re not going to fold up shop and refuse to develop because we’re anticipating being blown to hell. I’m quite serious in this. Atevi prefer fruit juice to yeast cultures. There’s a thousand or so people in orbit who have never had a cup of tea. I’m told the food is no inspiration at all.”

“Understatement,” Lund said with a small twitch of the shoulders.

“A modern economy is not monofocused. You can see there’s a market for a widening humans-in-orbit population. Everyone who wants to go up, can go, so long as they have a job to do up here.”

“What side are you on, Mr. Cameron?” Ginny Kroger asked.

“The aiji’s. There’s not a single item of the aiji’s business that proposal interferes with. Pizza definitely has a future on the mainland, but atevi generally find the Mospheiran diet quite bland and far too heavy on the sugars. Not to mention their absolute rejection of the meat preservation industry, which they have absolutely no desire to emulate. It would be ethically and morally ruinous to them to try. There’s not going to be any objection whatsoever to Mospheiran companies expanding to in-orbit operations, small now, very small, but increasingly important as the population up here increases, and it will. I’m sure it will.”

“What do you get out of it? What does the aiji get?”

“What do the atevi get? A sizable orbital population of their own which they’llmaintain, in their own ways. We’re not going to crowd one another, not up here, not in this whole wide solar system. We can engineer our unique facilities, each do what we do best, both benefit.”

“And what about these aliens?”

“They haven’t shown up yet. They may never. They may come tomorrow. In the one instance we have no problem worth worrying about. In the other, our whole discussion may be moot, but in the eventuality we have time to do something, I suggest there’s a great deal we can do. First, take possession of our shared orbital space. We know how to do it. Our economies have been interlocked for two hundred years, increasingly so in the last several decades; it was a decision of several administrations to allow what we called independent but interlocked…”

“Not living interlocked.”

“Nor living interlocked here, either, not changing our ways of doing things. Respectingour separate ways. You noticed that rather substantial door out there…”

“You’re proposing to set doorsbetween our two populations.”

“As we reconstruct this station, yes. Two separate authorities; wedo the gross construction, and the mining, which atevi do very well. You do the interior refurbishment and start the cycle of light industry up here which can make the shipments to and from the planet profitable. The atevi economy can support more heavy construction below and provide a certain amount of raw materials supply; but the very part of the economy that serves dense, linear human populations, the food preservation and the mass-production approach to manufacturing… all that is completely alien to the atevi economy and hurtful to their psychology. We proved that in the War. We also proved over the last two hundred years that we can interlock our efforts up here, profitably, sensibly, and get that linear multiplication of population linked into a prosperous economy. I’ve had some very substantive agreements with Guild authorities; they’re willing to make gestures of goodwill on their side… I think there’s every opportunity for us both to make sensible agreements with the Guild.”

“We’re here to study that,” Lund said.

“Tom, agreementsare on the table. I’m here to make firm commitments. And I know my responsibility to the aiji; I know he’ll honor agreements I make with you. I’m proposing them.”

“We’re not empowered to negotiate with the Guild, let alone with you.”

“What’s this, ‘Let alone with me’? We’ve beennegotiating for two hundred years. That’s what I do. That’s what my office is. We collectively, in this room, arethe planet. What’s more, I know the State Department, I know Tyers on a personal basis; you take notes back to him; you talk to the President, personally; you just handthe government a workable agreement and trust they’ll get it through the committees with their recommendation.”

“Mr. Cameron,” Kroger said shortly, “you can omit to tell us our business.”

“Bren,” he said with a fixed smile.

“ Mr. Cameron,—we have instructions fromthe Secretary. We can manage.”

“I’d be damn surprised if he knew I was coming up here, since I didn’t know it, although who knows? He’s very sharp. He might have guessed. Didhe give you instructions regarding cooperation with me?”

“Damn you, Mr. Cameron!—No, he didn’t.”

He smiled his smallest, gentlest smile. “Take it from me that I regard him as a friend… that word, which I don’t use on the mainland.”

“I’m gratified you still recognize it,” Kroger said, not pleasantly.

“I do. Believe me. You’re from Science. Tom, from Commerce. You’re not Tyers’ personal picks. I think youmight be someone the President relies on.” This with a look at Tom Lund, who didn’t immediately deny it. “But you’reout of Science.” A glance directly at Kroger, who sat thin-lipped and furious. Then he cast a deliberate sop to pride and party. “The scientificpoint of view. I don’t expect decisions until there’s proof.”

“Exactly, Mr. Cameron.”

“I respect that, Ms. Kroger. A fair mind-set, sharp judgment, objective examination of the facts. The Mospheiran point of view… you’re nota friend of Shawn Tyers; not of the President, either—and a damned good thing,” he added, as Kroger opened her mouth. It was not what she expected. “I think it’s very well if multiple points of view on the island have their independent fact gathering. But I also know that a distinguished member of the Department of Science and Technology, with your background isn’t going to be gathering anything butfact, no matter who appointed you, and anyone who thinks to the contrary isn’t going to find damned much political value in you. You’re no one’s fools, I very much think you’re no one’s fools; certainly notGaylord Hanks’ fools, no matter what the source of the university’s grants and funding.”

Kroger’s face actually colored. But she stared eye to eye and leaned forward, herelbows on the table. “Mr. Cameron, you have more gall than any human being I’ve ever encountered. Does that attitude come from the mainland or did you get thatout of the University on some grant?”

“Ms. Kroger, how doyou feel about atevi?”

That brought a slight twitch, a flare of the nostrils, a widening and narrowing of the pupils.

“How do youfeel about them, Mr. Cameron? Damned fond, so I hear.”

If he didn’t react, it was a miracle. But there was no implication she knew more than the rumor mills said.

“Entirely. As I have a naive affection for the human species, one I was born with. I’m not going to destroy my species, and I’m not a fool.”

There was a prolonged staring match—him, and Kroger.

“Ms. Kroger, I wantto deal with your committee. Give me some cooperation.”

“We haven’tthe authority. We weren’t grantedthe authority, Mr. Cameron.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s takenit. Call me Bren. And let’s deal sensibly with the hand we’ve been dealt here. Let’s get this settled. Whether there are aliens out there who give a damn about us one way or the other, we’ve got two halves of the human species in renewed contact, we’ve got the atevi who have their first ticket into space, and at this start of everything all of us have a prospect of control over our own destinies if we don’t hand this over to some damn Mospheiran committee for political wrangling. Paralysis follows.—Ginny Kroger, you knowthat. Represent your view, but for God’s sake, lay it out on the table.“

The steady, angry gaze shattered like a mirror, became an expression of outright fear.

“I’m nobody’sfool, Mr. Cameron.”

“Bren.”

“Mr. Cameron, sir. You have an island-wide reputation for fast and shady dealing.”

“Fast dealing. Never other than honest. I intend to maintain that record.”

“Damn your attitudes, Mr. Cameron!”

“You’re in charge, aren’t you? Mospheiran committees are always committees, but if they’re ever going to work, they tilt. It’s always understood which way they tilt. Tom, here, won’t be listened to, except by the President and the Secretary of State, who’ll hear him. You have legislative backing. I know damned well where, and you won’t be listened to by the other side. But youstill rate yourself independent-minded.”

“I’m Dr. Ginny Kroger, Mr. Cameron, and I damned well amindependent-minded. As you’ll discover!”

“You’re going to fight. Good. About damned time. So do you take my deal?”

“God!”

“It’s a fair deal,” Lund interjected, “if we could rely on it.”

“I’ll assure you the last thing Tabini-aiji wants is the SunDrink concession on this space station. Mospheira and its economy, on the other hand, its whole lifestyle, are set up to use that opportunity and to innovate in its own directions, which is exactly the difference between humans and atevi. You leave our section to us, to the atevi, and you handle trade with the ship, for whatever coin you can get out of them. We’re not going to charge for building the gross structures of the station, or for building the second starship.”

“You can’t do that! We’re not about to—”

“We charge, however, for shuttle space. We charge you not in coin, necessarily, but various things which we hope you’ll supply, and those supplies are the matters I hope to start working out with you at least in gross detail before we even return to the planet. Mospheira understands the way to trade with the aishidi’tat. Mospheira knows we’re a very, very different system. We didn’t go bankrupt building the first shuttle; you won’t lose by paying us for seats and cargo room, especially if you deliver contracts to SunDrink and Harbor Tea. We’ll make sure the Mospheiran economy doesn’t run short of grain or fruit. If we’re waiting for an alien invasion, we might as well be comfortable and progressive about it.”

Lund had leaned forward. Kroger had, too. It was now three heads together. “We’re not talking theory now,” Lund said. “It’s a damn economic miracle you got the shuttle to work at all; I knowwhat went on, on the mainland—”

“Damned scary,” Kroger said, tight-lipped.

Bren shook his head. “Not a bit of it aimed at you. That Tabini is in charge of the mainland right now, with the various subassociations all cooperating, is the atevi response to what turned up orbiting over their heads, and a constructive response: build. Compete. Trade. There are far worse responses possible. He does not see it possible to associate humans with the aishidi’tat. It’s not good for the two species, damned sure not good for the atevi; and Tabini frankly doesn’t want you under his rule. By no means does he want to rule Mospheira. He does want to cooperate with you, viewing you as having notably good ideas, amid your nerve-wracking disadvantages to his species. And that’s the most constructive model of our cooperation you’re going to get on short notice, but that’s the economists’ jobs, which they’ve been doing for two hundred years. I know how it can work.”

“Mr. Cameron,” Kroger said, drawing a large breath.

“Bren.”

“ Bren, damn you. All right. What’s the gist of it? Lay it out. Let’s see this nonsense.”

“Delighted,” Bren said. Remote from them, he heard the seal-door open, heard footsteps in the hall, and heard a small disturbance of voices speaking Ragi.

Then Kaplan, saying, “Just hold right here. Here, you understand? Stop!”

“Stop here,” he heard Feldman say, in unfortunately impolite terms, but he trusted his staff took it in high good humor.

In a moment more Bindanda arrived carrying a tea tray with a small service, as Jago and Banichi took up station in the doorway.

“One assures the paidhi there is no alkaloid in it,” Bindanda said, and graciously bowed.

“Danda-ji, thank you very much.” Bren leaned back as the others of the mission leaned back from the table to allow the tea to be served… not the entire pot, to be sure: Bindanda was a little baffled by the lack of a serving table, but Jago offered her help, holding the tray, so that tea arrived on the table with ceremony.

“Your health,” Bren said, lifting his small, very fragile, very antique cup, which its creator had surely never dreamed would circle the earth. He sipped. Relaxed. “Very much better.”

Chapter 14

It was one round of tea, a reasonable discussion, and a lengthy one, before a lengthy walk back, Banichi and Jago doubtless having learned a great deal of what was going on simply by listening, Bindanda mostly unenlightened, but having had ample chance to exchange pleasantries with Kate and Ben.

Bindanda had left the valuable tea set as a gift to the Mospheirans, properly to serve the tea, of course, and left empty-handed, doubtless confused and baffled by humans, considering the traditional manners of the ancient house that lent him, but mostly looking introspective… and surely to deliver an interesting report when once he found his feet on solid earth.

The meeting had ended much more reasonably than it had begun. They had all achieved civility, and the archive’s release as a goodwill gesture had become, instead of a flashpoint, a positive matter. They were very excited about that prospect… a little resentful that they hadn’t achieved it, but Kroger, the scientist who wanted her hands on that archive, and who now knew it was supposed to be available on the wall panel, was at least smiling and encouraged when they’d parted.

He had omitted to say, however, that the manner of it was not entirely Ramirez’ idea. And he hoped it never came out to the contrary.

Kaplan escorted them back, saw them safely into their section.

And—once the section door was shut, having Kaplan out and his party in with him, safe and secure in the foyer of their own small, comfort-adjusted section—Bren heaved a deep breath, undid buttons and surrendered his coat to Narani.

Supper was cooking… one couldn’t detect it before it was served, in the apartment back at Shejidan. Noble houses took great care not to have that homey, cottagelike state of affairs. But it smelled good; it smelled of home, tables, and comfort, and he was very glad, having had tea for lunch.

But otherwise a profitable day. A very agreeable day.

“Brief Tano and Algini, Nadiin-ji,” he said to Banichi and Jago. And to Narani, who handed the coat to Kandana: “We believe we’ve made progress.” He was cold, even chilled, as he went back into the depth of his room. He considered asking for a light coat, but he was too anxious to know what might have come through, and what might have come of the transmission of the archive… midnight, Cl had said. And he’d collapsed last night; had the meeting this morning…

He set up the computer again, breathing on his fingers between strokes, requested Mogari-nai of Cl, and after some small delay for authorization, got it, downlink, uplink, all in a burst.

A message had arrived from Tabini: it read: One expects further word and commends the paidhi on his achievement. Large files have reached Mogari-nai.

It was short, but went on to give dry notice of committee meeting outcomes, and a general minutes of the hasdrawad’s oversight committee on the second shuttle, a positive report. He was interested, but he set it aside.

Of all things, God help him, an advertisementhad made its way to Mogari-nai. He didn’t delete it. He wanted to know how it had threaded its way into his account.

A message from Toby: I’m in the capital. Delayed again. Rotten weather.

A message from Mogari-nai: We are receiving an immense download of information from the ship which is directed toward the Mospheiran President and to the aiji. Under prior agreements we are retransmitting without question or examination. We are scheduling the information, however, in packets, to allow normal flow of commerce.

That was it. God, that was it. That was the total load, the fabled archive, and Ramirez had kept his word.

At least he hopedto God it was the archive and not some diabolically designed set of files designed to seize control of the communications system. The planet wasn’t as vulnerable to computer attack as the ship or the station; and the mainland far less so than the island. To send anything that massive that was less than honest would not be the action of an authority ever wanting cooperation or productivity from the mainland.

It had to be going through. Disseminated.

“Cl, do I have access now to all those files you transmitted to Mogari-nai?”

“ Mogari-nai?” The rendition of the name as he’d pronounced it was almost unrecognizable. “ Yes, sir, captain’s cleared it to your E10, as of… 0200 hours.”

Last night he’d slept, early, exhausted, completely. He’d found only scattered files this morning, and hadn’t penetrated the communication system. “I’ll need precise instructions, Cl. This isn’t familiar equipment.”

“Easy-do, sir, just punch E10, that’s the E and the 10 and then just S for scan and V for view, M for menu.”

The whole literature of mankind? The missing technical files? The accumulated station records? Design for a starship? Press M for menu?

“I don’t suppose Jase Graham would be available at this hour. He’d be very helpful with this.”

A hesitation. “ Jase Graham isn’t available right now, sir.”

Continuing debrief, several days of it. He was disheartened about that.

But in Ramirez’s place, he’d certainly do the same… wouldn’t allow Jase contact with people whose veracity he was testing. He only hoped Jase was getting sleep and meals in the process. It would have been a perfect cap to the day if he could sit down to a supper with Jase.

But, God, the archives!

“Message for him,” he told Cl. “Same message: say I called; tell him call me; I’d like to see him. No emergency, rather friendly reasons. A little help with this panel.”

“Yes, sir. I can contact the captain, sir, if you need a technician.”

Emphatically not, not with Banichi’s rig across the hall.

“I think I can solve it myself, Cl, thank you.” It wasn’t an unknown principle. M for menu was a good start. “Thank you very much.”

He punched out on the contact, went across the hall to the security post where Banichi and Jago were conversing with

Tano and Algini. “The missing archive. E10, the M key…” His security knew the Mospheiran alphabet, read it with some fluency by now. “Have a look at it, such as you have time to do.”

“Yes,” Tano said with a wondering look. “Yes, nadi.”

He wanted to see it for himself; but he couldn’t distract himself with it, couldn’t slide aside from present business in a meander through human archives, if that was the treasure he had won. He had done what he could. Toby by now must have gotten through; Jase couldn’t reach him. Mercheson if she had authority and access to communications might call him, but he rather thought she was engaged in exactly the same business as Jase: talking to her captains.

The cold by now had gotten to his muscles, a thorough chill as he walked out, back across to his apartment. His teeth were all but chattering as he passed Narani, told him he’d shower before supper.

Kandana and Bindanda showed up before he could do more than shed the shirt. They gathered up boots and clothing, offered a bathrobe to lie about his shoulders for the four-pace walk to the shower… proprieties, proprieties.

He turned sideways to enter, shedding the robe, closed the cabinet door, activated the jets at the temperature he’d last set, and shivered convulsively as cold water in the pipes came out first.

He’d been utterly unprepared except by the life he’d lived.

He’d guessed. He’d estimated. Solo, he’d pulled up his best recollections and his ideas to cover one damned serious, selfish mistake on the plane to the mainland, when he’d antagonized Kroger.

He’d made another mistake over the last several months, not foreseeing what Tabini was up to, not anticipating how Tabini would react when Jase did go up.

And he’d just now promised two parties an elaborate, jury-rigged structure of hopes, all with a manic focus, memorizing details, freezing concepts in his mind, trying to patch his mistakes with the authority he’d been handed…

He’d assumed more and more and more details could be true… and now the whole structure of his plans evaporated, flew apart, deserted him so that for an instant he didn’t know what he’d done or proposed or agreed to, whether it was well-thought or whether Tabini had a lunatic dealing his foreign policy. Millions of lives and two species’ futures were at stake, and for the duration of his arguments with both Ramirez andKroger, God help the world, he’d enjoyedthe dealing. He’d proceeded on an adrenaline rush the same as a downhill race, just coping with what came up moment by moment.

He began to shake all over, suddenly doubted everything he knew, everything he’d done. He desperately wanted Jase with him to consult, he desperately wanted to talk to Tabini at this juncture. Most of all he wanted to know what he’d done and what he’d agreed to, because he couldn’t for a second remember a damned thing of how it fit with reality.

He slipped down to the bottom of the shower, tucked up while the water finished its cycle. Long after the hiss of the jets had cut off and long after he’d informed his body, he wasn’t truly cold, intermittent tremors rolled through his limbs like waves of the earthly sea.

Who am I to decide?

Most of all, what have I become, to likethis? To gamble with the whole world’s future?

Tabini. Tabini. Tabini, who’s the only power fitto rule the world.

His own species calls him ruthless.

What do they call me?

I can’t let anyside dominate the other, for its own sake; but, God, God, God! where in hellhave I appointed myself to impose conditions on the world, the ship, the station?

“Bren-ji?” he heard Jago say, through the door, and, sitting there, trying to control the shivers, he wondered how long his servants and his staff had fretted before one of them appointed herself to say something.

But the next step was his staff dismantling the door; and that would never do, never in the world do, at all.

Who was he to do what he’d done? He was the man in the middle, that was who he was, the one officer two nations had appointed to stand between them. He was appointed to do exactly what he’d done. He’d reacted strongly when Kroger, who didn’t know what she was doing, had challenged him in his own territory, and he’d jerked her about in hopes of her realizing there were dangers. He hoped it had done some good.

More, Ramirez had leaped to agree with him… and it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been talking for three years, as if they didn’t know what, essentially, they faced in the way of costs and necessities. Jase knew, he knew, Ramirez knew, and Shawn Tyers and the President of Mospheira knew that the station had to operate and the present situation had to keep some sort of balance, or the world went to hell and took Phoenixand two or three species with it, granted these far-space aliens had a future at stake, too.

He’d spoken for the balance.

He’d stolen some of what the Mospheirans wanted, control over the station. He’d given the Mospheirans what Tabini could have gotten for himself but which would have proved a poison pill: control over businesson the station, as the humans in question expected to exchange goods and services. They’d sell hot dogs in any season, and atevi would shudder and look the other way as they’d learned to do, contenting themselves with ship building and station building.

He’d committed the atevi economy to another long push, but the social structure hadn’t taken damage from the last one, in building the shuttles… the provinces had thrived, in fact. The complaint of certain associations had been not enough public projects to go around.

The station and the ship was the answerto what followed the explosion of the economy in the shuttle project. In a far lower-consumption society than Mospheira's, what did he dobesides go to neon light and fast food like Mospheira’s north shore, in order to keep the atevi economy moving at its breakneck, profitable pace?

Easy. He built a starship.

He gaveit to the Pilots’ Guild, true; but if you took any vehicle and compressed it to a cube… you had a lot of scrap worth so much the kilo. It was the labor and the shaping that had value; most of all, it was the learning that had value. They paid the raw materials and the labor and gained the knowledge and the technical skill with no R&D, sure designs, incremental learning of new theory…

Damned right someone had to keep a tight lid on the economy; damned right it was time to sit down and hammer out answers until a handful of translators, diplomats, an economist, a ship’s captain, and a damned angry woman from the Science Department all agreed they could keep the station running, get the needful things done, and assure that things in their respective cultures didn’t blow up.

It was as he’d said. Goodthat Kroger was still to some degree mad at him and good he was as suspicious as he was of her. Angry, she wouldn’t fall worshiping at his feet or take his seniority or his solutions without question. He no longer thought she was entirely Gaylord Hanks’ minion, but she had that mind-set. Aliens and the devil were nearly congruent in her thinking, at least foundationally, he suspected. Fear was implicit in her attitudes, and those might be from the cradle. But a scientific career overlay whatever she’d absorbed from earlier influences. The woman had a mind, and a keen one.

Win her and she was an asset. More, she was someone who could talk to the most radical self-interests on the island, from the inside, trusted. Toss Lund into that equation: Tom Lund had influence in Commerce, and could be invaluable in moving business interests.

Tabini, meanwhile, put the brakes on volatile atevi interests on the mainland and dragged the lords, resisting, into an interdependent age and a boiling-hot economy. Mospheira and even some atevi might curse Tabini for a tyrant; but Tabini, alone of leaders, had a clear concept of how to steer this creaking, shuddering arrangement past the shoals of unmitigated self-interest on either side of the straits; and the Durant-Tyers combination on the island could move Mt. Adams, if it had to declare an emergency. It still had political punch. It just couldn’t use it prematurely, on a non-issue.

And God, this was going to be a big issue—full cooperation with the atevi and the Pilots’ Guild that trampled cherished party dogmas on both sides of the divide.

“Bren-ji!” A thump.

“Yes, nadi!” He hastily levered himself up to his feet, in case Jago should break down the outer door and leave them to explain the wreckage. Banged his head. “Perfectly fine, nadi. Thinking! One does that in baths…”

“Dinner will be ready,” Jago said, undeterred, still suspicious. “Will you wish a delay, Bren-nadi?”

“No,” he said. “No, no such thing. I’ll be right out.” He had banged his head on an unfamiliar water-nozzle, checked his hand for blood in the running water, and found to the negative.

He left the shower stark naked, put the robe on for respect to the servants’ prim propriety—and respect, too, for the imposition Jago didn’t make on his time or his mind with sexual demands. She was simply concerned, was simply there… he was profoundly grateful for that, still prone to shivers, but had them under control.

It was still exhaustion, he decided. He needed sleep. He’d slept last night; he thought he could sleep this time. He wondered about asking Jago into bed, just for the warmth, just for the company.

A damned too-small bed.

“Ordinarily, alone, you take less time,” she remarked, “Bren-ji.”

“Sometimes I think,” he said, still thinking of bed, wanting that, after the enervating heat of the water, more than he wanted food right now; that was itself a cue. He’d learned to pace himself. He tried, at least. “Thank you, Jago-ji.”

“There is supper,” she cued him, “of which Narani is quite proud.”

How could he complain? How could he beg off and fall into bed.

It was, he decided, a good day, a very good day. Bindanda came in with Kandana to array him in his more casual attire, still with a light coat, but less collar, less lace to have to keep out of the soup. Together with Jago they walked to the room dedicated as a dining hall, where Narani had indeed worked a wonder, setting out a formal service… even a setting of cloisonné flowers in a jade bowl.

Banichi came in.

“Tano and Algini have chosen supper together in the office, nadi,” Banichi reported. “But Rani will supply them very well, all the same.”

“Sit, please,” Bren said. Banichi and Jago sat, gingerly, in straight-backed flexible red chairs that made them look like adults at a child’s table; but the plastic chairs held, and the first course followed, a truly magnificent one, difficult of preparation.

“Narani-ji, a wondrous accomplishment. Do say so to the staff.”

“Honored, nandi.”

One could not possibly talk business past so grand an offering. And it did put strength in him.

Afterward, afterward, there was a little chance to linger, to declare themselves in a sitting room, while the dishes disappeared, while a very fine liqueur splashed into glasses, clear as crystal. Banichi and Jago sat on the floor, on luggage, against the wall; it was doubtless more comfortable than the red chairs. Bren tried the same, on the other side, and accepted a glass from Kandana, from a small serving tray.

“The health of the aiji,” he said, a custom they had learned to share.

“In this place,” Banichi said, and they all three drank, the merest flavor against the lips.

“One would wish a little consultation on figures,” Bren said. Banichi, who hadn’t known the sun was a star because it hadn’t affected his job in those days, did know every potential factional line in the Western Association, and did know the fine points of industry and supply. “I intend to do some work if I can stay awake. You haven’t found any visual monitoring.”

“None within the rooms,” Banichi said, “but we remain uncertain about the corridor.”

“I have the structural plans,” he said, to Banichi’s thoughtfully astonished glance. “I am a fount of secrets,” Bren said. “I should have purged the contents of the machine before we left; nothing that the ship doesn’t contain, or shouldn’t. Nothing that isn’t duplicated in the archive, or available to them for the asking: I think a search should turn it up. I’ve no trouble with them knowing whatI know, but I’m a little more worried about them knowing thatI know certain things. The very size of the archive buries things; but we hadpart of the archive. I do know the location of the search key in the original archive. It used to be extraneous information. Now… not so.”

“One completely comprehends,” Jago said.

“Have you followed much of what we said today?”

“And the day before. A good deal of it,” Banichi said. “Does the paidhi wish an opinion?”

It was a measure of the relationship of confidence that had grown between them that Banichi did ask him that question, and would give it thoroughly.

“Yes. Very much so.”

“I think the aiji will approve,” Banichi said. “I think he will very much approve.”

“One hopes,” Bren said fervently. Do you think so? welled up from the human heart, but one didn’t ask Banichi obvious questions. “Thirteen more days before the mission goes back down. But we ourselves may go down and up again on the shuttle’s return flight. Can we manage it? I know we have materials tests that need to run. But if we place a permanent presence here, theycan manage those tests much more quickly.”

“Indeed,” Banichi said.

“Shall we leave an establishment here?” Jago asked.

“I hesitate to ask it of staff. They didn’t agree to a protracted stay.”

“They agreed to accompany you, nadi. And if we establish our security in these quarters, I would be reluctant to interrupt it for any reason. This is our center of operations, however we branch out from here.”

“I think so, too,” Bren said.

“Tano and Algini would stay, perhaps Kandana. That would suffice.”

Bindanda’s role as reporting to Lady Damiri’s irascible and very powerful uncle was in fact an asset: to abandon Bindanda up here unable to report… Tatiseigi would immediately suspect it was no accident.

And the old man probably knew that they knew Bindanda was a spy. Between great households there werecourtesies. And some courtesies they could not violate.

While Narani… a possibility as head of a continuing station presence… yet he was an old, old man.

“We should ask Narani,” Bren said. “Do offer him the post, but stress I value him equally going with me. I would trust his experience in either post. How is he faring?”

“Very well,” Jago said. “He worries excessively that you and Jasi-ji were not accorded greater respect. He’s quite indignant the officials haven’t come here to pay their respects. He wonders if he has failed in some particular. One attempts to assure him otherwise.”

There was some humor in the statement. Narani was exceedingly set in his devotion, but it was not an outrageous sentiment, in the atevi mind-set.

“By no means has he failed,” Bren murmured. “These are not atevi. And for the two of you, for Tano and Algini, too, I understand their manners; I give way to them more than I ought, perhaps, but I still believe we will gain what we need.”

“We defer to your judgment.”

“Tell the staff. I would willingly place Narani or Kandana in charge here, with the understanding this area must remain sacrosanct. Jase may come here. Or Yolanda.”

“One wishes Jase were available now,” Jago said.

“They still refuse me contact with him. I intend to see him before we go down.”

“So the paidhi, too, doesn’t trust implicitly.”

“I don’t trust. I find out.”

Banichi gave a wry smile. “We saw two captains,” Banichi said, accurately nailing one of his apprehensions, with all the psychological infelicity that expressed. Never… never in atevi management of a situation would there be fourcaptains in charge over anything, and two, by no means.

“They don’t see the difficulty,” Bren said.

“Yet even on the earth we have dealt with the same two aloft. We never hear from the others. Should we be concerned?”

“Two captains,” Jago added, “two days until a second meeting…”

“It’s natural to them, these twos. They don’t find infelicity in the number. They don’t think it insulting or ominous.”

“They have not sought to discover our opinions, either,” Jago said.

“Baji-naji,” Banichi added in a low voice, which was to say that there wasa duality in the atevi mythos, the dice throw of chance and fortune, that black-and-white duality that governed gamblers, computers, and the reach into space. Twos allowed division. Twowas implicit in the dual presence, and dual absence.

“Baji-naji,” Bren echoed, thinking, in fact, of the old troubles with the Guild. Ramirez on every point was far better than their fears of the Guild… thus far. Ramirez had made negotiation possible, was, indeed, consistently the one they dealt with by radio; a handful of times with Ogun, a few with Sabin, very few words with Tamun.

Ramirez saidthat Guild agreement was a foregone conclusion… and it certainly would be hard to find disadvantage to the ship in having all their requests met, the same way the shuttle had leaped into production, the same way those files were going down.

But Banichi and Jago remained uneasy, in the strangeness of the culture… in the lack of relaxation, and the infelicity of numbers. Could atevi ignore that, psychologically?

And Jago was right. Might they not have thought of that, and tried to amend it? Three years in contact with the world might have taught them something.

Hecouldn’t ignore the duality, for all of those reasons: the Pilots’ Guild was in some senses an autocracy, but it was an autocracy on a twenty-four-hour, four-watch schedule, with fourcaptains who shared absolute power on a time clock; and they’d consistently heard from the two seniormost… on the surface that was good; but in the subsurface, Jago was right, and Banichi was. It did raise questions.

“We’ve agreed for three years,” Bren said. “Most compelling, they have reason to deal with us, the best reason… supposing they’re telling the truth, supposing Jase is telling the truth, which I do believe: they at least haven’t time to start a war here. And they are sending down the very large files. I’ve heard from the Messengers, and they confirm it. The local communications post says I can access the files here, just as Ramirez said.”

“And we shall be building that second ship for them,” Banichi said. “Do we understand that is still agreed?”

“Yes.” There wasn’t a thing yet the atevi hadn’t pried apart and learned, not least of it the mathematics, not least of it computers, which they were taking in their own direction. “I have the commission from the aiji to agree to this, nadihi; I don’t say I’m without misgivings.” One couldn’t say, of all things, half have agreedin the atevi language: it came out an oxymoron, agreement meaning agreement. “We haven’t seen all of the captains; we assume their agreement. Let them teach us how to build a starship. Atevi have something as great to teach them, Nadiin-ji. If they’ve started a war with strangers, then we and the Mospheirans have very important things to teach them. The Mospheiran economy and the mainland economy… both have things to teach them about how to build. We can’t be the same as these ship-humans, but we don’t need to be. We won’t be.” He caught himself using we, as he used it in his thoughts. “Atevi don’t need to be. And atevi won’t be.”

They listened to him very soberly, and remained silent a moment after.

Then Jago said, “So, this starship. Shall we have one, too?”

“If the aiji wills,” he said. That was the answer to all official policy; and he knew what Jago asked: separate command, on the station, was a problem. Establish another aiji and there was a potential rivalry within the aishidi’tat, an unsettling of the balance of power. “But with atevi, every outpost, every separated community must find honest aijiin who can agree with the aiji in Shejidan for good and logical reasons; as we may have to find an honest lord to command a starship. A hundred, two hundred, a thousand years from now, who knows what will be possible for any of us?”

“Perhaps we’ll all be so virtuous there’ll hardly be aijiin, or presidents,” Jago said.

“One doubts it,” Banichi said.

“More than starships, Nadiin-ji, far more than starships is the skill to absorb change, and atevi do excel at that. Atevi managed the resolution of the War. We, Mospheirans and atevi, wrote the Treaty of Mospheira, and the atevi economy every year makes technology transfer an asset, not a detriment. It’s taken two hundred years to refine the economy to do that. Now we absorb an immense rate of change without social upheaval.”

“Without much social upheaval,” Banichi said.

“Give or take what happened three years ago. But to accomplish what atevi and Mospheirans have done, Nadiin-ji, welding together two completely different economies, peacefully, prosperously, that’s no small thing.”

“No,” Banichi said, “nor managed by fools, as delicate as it is.”

The mathematical gift of atevi was prodigious. They hadn’t needed computers at the start of the relationship, and in the last few decades of this two-century partnership, the University and the Foreign Office on Mospheira had stalled… very, very fearful of releasing computers into the information pipeline.

They had done it, truth be told, because atevi knew aboutcomputers and had begun to understand them as more than an aid for humans. As trade proliferated, the economy expanded, the population bloomed, and—second truth—the Mospheiran economy could no longer fine-tune itself fast enough to sustain its more advanced industries once atevi competed with them, unless there was closer contact. Atevi, who made a rug or a vase to stay in the economy for centuries, had discovered a use for fast food and ephemeral gains… as a blunt-force weapon in an economic war and as a useful communal experience in an ethnically diverse province.

Highways had once started wars. Trains were the appropriate answer.

Computers had helped atevi understand how humans perceived the universe. Atevi were reinventing them, hand over fist.

But dared one think of a space station and a starship as the equivalent of a provincial fast food chain, feeding a carefully-modulated interprovincial money flow?

They sipped their liqueur, and he had his misgivings.

The banking system, with its new computers, was set up to do that kind of calculation down to the small exchanges. Coinage as such was one of those imports from the human side of the straits, more token than intrinsically valued.

Coinage was going to be a problem on the space station, getting crew into possession of coinage was another question.

And within the aishidi’tat there were questions. Provinces, however loosely they defined borders, still had borders in terms of economic interest, and that was going to be a touchy problem.

They had to be careful of the ethnic composition of the work force the aiji sent, keeping the provinces and great houses from seeing advantage to their rivals; and keeping the ubiquitous number-counters from seeing calamity in obstinate human dualities. Computers, God knew, had been a controversy in that regard.

He felt a headache at the mere thought of the provincial lords. The hasdrawad. The tashrid. The committees. Mospheira was not alone in its proliferation of committees.

“So,” Banichi said, in this post-supper discussion, “we shall set up, shall we, nadi, as a permanent installation? And then, shall Tano and Algini look to stay?”

Tano and Algini struggled to learn the language. But outside of Banichi and Jago themselves, whom he would not give up, there was no choice, much as he hated the whole idea of leaving atevi unbuffered up here, without him, even for a few weeks.

“Ask them to consider the assignment. We should widen this zone with every shuttle flight. More, the next flight should bring technicians to assist, and staff to support them, and so on. Increasingly more personnel, until they see it possible to turn the matter over to subordinates. We can’t forgo the materials tests, but we do need to establish several other working modules here, on the station.”

“Refurbish those areas immediately adjacent,” Banichi said.

“And areas useful to us… all those things, granted we gain the agreement of all the captains… and the aiji. We get the other shuttles into operation… hire more staff. The dedicated spaceport will have to move on schedule, no matter what. Shejidan can’t spare many more roof tiles.”

Wry smiles from Banichi and Jago. “The Ragi have a fondness for history.”

The Ragi of the capital mailed broken tiles to relatives as valued mementos. He’d signed a few.

“But when their roofs leak, this fall, they may think less of it. We’ve met schedule. We’re up here. We’reup here, unlikely as it still seems. The new runway should be complete as soon as possible, before Shejidan soaks in the winter rains. I have the manager’s word on it.”

“With the tourist center?”

“With the tourist center.” He lifted his small glass to atevi determination. Two small industrial towns near the new spaceport—a runway accessible by rail-link and a short flight from the airport space center—had turned out on various holidays to assist the crews driving spikes, to establish a second link with their quaint local steam locomotive, which would run back and forth, half an hour’s round trip to the modern spaceport. The towns anticipated genteel atevi tourists, and prosperity, and perhaps warehouses of goods and a modern rail-link to the national system… all in the concept of what a tourist facility meant. They had not yet grasped what was taking shape at their very doorstep, were contemplating a name change to Jaitonai-shi, Flower-about-to-open.

Could one look about this cramped, small quarters, austere as the harbor town that might become Jaitonai-shi, and see, as they sat on the floor on their baggage, a place of dreams?

“I think of the folk of Jaitonai-shi,” he said. “How very strange the world may become.”

“It’s already done so,” Jago said.

He massaged his eyes, which stung with the dry air of the station, and asked himself, given the labor of townsfolk who turned out with hoes and shovels to link supply to the new spaceport, how he could think of going to bed in the next hour.

He could take notes. He needed to take notes.

“Nadiin-ji, most of all… most of all, I believe what I’ve done is the best thing to do. An enormous effort.” He gazed across into sober, golden eyes, the two of them his absolutely trusted allies, advisors, protectors. “But over all… one that I still fear to report to the aiji-dowager. Do you think she will at all understand?”

There was no fiercer proponent of the old ways than the aiji-dowager, no more ardent defender of the land, the earth, and its sanctity. And he brought down a proposal for a change that would sweep atevi right off the planet and into an unknown, dangerous future.

But he saw no choice.

“The aiji himself supports what you do,” Banichi said to him in that deep, quiet voice. “I have it on the best authority.—Change is the paidhi’s business, is it not?”

“It remains my business,” Bren agreed, feeling still that change rushed through his fingers, almost out of control, marginally within his grasp.

“Even before the Foreign Star rose,” Jago said, “the world changed.”

There had been changes even before the station appeared in the world’s skies… changes wrought by steam engines, wood fires.

An association of noble houses hellbent on larger and larger associations of interests…

The ruler of the largest association on the planet remained hellbent on his ancestors’ course, insisting the paidhi make sense of it all.

“Change there was,” he agreed, “before there were paidhiin.” He drew comfort from these two who, blood and bone, did understand things.

And he finished his drink, and sighed. “I’ll work tonight. I have the meeting tomorrow. I’ll prepare my case; we may have a very quick return trip, so it’s best I go tomorrow with my proposals in some sort of order. Will you read them and check my proposals for common sense and provincial mistakes?”

“One expects to do so,” Banichi said, and finished his drink.

Bren sat on his bed, made computer notes, nothing quite in Ragi, nothing quite in Mosphei’, a great deal simply in code-labeled graphs that bounced numbers off each other in complex interrelation. He didn’t let himself think about the archive, which might be done by now, which was surely available. Most urgently there was tomorrow’s meeting to prepare for, careful consideration of what specifics he could propose and what he had to insist upon… all the traps, all the considerations on the planet that might blow up into interprovincial matters, or stress between Mospheira and the mainland. Banichi read what he did, discussed it behind the closed door of their small security post with Tano and Algini.

And, minor point of excitement and relief, larger mattresses arrived, simple cushions, very thin, but exceedingly welcome and curiously new, exactly like the mattresses of the bed, a sealed rectangle of foam in a bright blue plastic skin. New, Bren thought, as if the ship had manufactured them; and by what little he knew of the ship’s resources, that was possible, granted the raw materials.

So they had gained another point of their requests. There were beds for the night that did not involve stuffed baggage, that were tailored for his staff, and his security passed the stack in, examining them behind the door for any sign of electronic output or potential for it.

It was encouraging that when, unable to resist temptation, he keyed in the E10 material and hopscotched around the content of the archive, it was accessible as promised. He found unguessed gems, a fabulous treasure of micro-imaged books, an encyclopedia he had never seen, languages he could by no means read, but which some isolated families on Mospheira might even recognize. Certain households had maintained knowledge and recorded it, recreating some things that Mospheira had lost, and scholars would have entire careers comparing the two… granted the world survived the next several difficult centuries and developed the leisure.

He scanned that material until the headache he attributed to the thin, dry air had reached an acute level, and bed began to seem a very good notion.

But before he did, he made one more call to Cl, and to Mogari, and executed another send and receive.

A message from Tabini took priority on his list: We congratulate you and your staff on a successful flight. We have received your prior message and await word of your progress. With it came more files that needed examination, but they had the common prefixes of committee reports.

From his own office, in the Bu-javid, his head of the clerical staff: Toby Cameron has called us three times and we have attempted obfuscation and delays. What shall we say?

There was, in effect, nothing to say. Until he received clear word that the populace knew where he was and there was no problem with revealing that fact, there was nothing at all he could answer, but an enigmatic: I am answering Toby Cameron’s messages myself. Thank you for reporting them. You may ignore any future ones that do not evidence an emergency, but relay them all to me for my action.

And an even more enigmatic message to his brother.

Toby, I’m receiving you at a considerable delay. I’m off on assignment and I can’t reach you directly.

Understatement. He erased his signature and added:

Please write. I’m very worried for Mother and for you. How is Barb? Don’t forget Shawn. He could rely on Shawn Tyers, personally.

His response didn’t help Barb. Toby’s letter didn’t answer how she was and he had no idea why Toby didn’t tell him that one simple piece of information: maybe because Toby thought he didn’t want to involve himself with Barb’s worries, or because he’d asked Toby to handle their mother’s worries and Barb was one of them… God knew. The potential reasons were legion. The headache reached a lancing crescendo, riding just behind afflicted sinuses.

Humidity. When atevi had the station in their hands, humidity had to be higher than it was. Temperature was bearable, but the air was incredibly sterile.

Why in bloody helldidn’t Toby put simple facts in a letter?

Is she alive, Toby? Is she doing any better? For God’s sake, Toby…

He made what he foreknew would be another no-information attempt, through Cl… wanting some sort of consolation before he attempted sleep: Toby, I’m sorry, but I need a specific answer, no matter what it is. Do you have any information on Barb?… with all its attachments and addressing.

Don’t give her any encouragement about our relationship. That’s over. We do care about each other. I care how she’s doing. I don’t know how you can convey that.

Hell, don’t tell her. Just tell me how she is so I know how much I have to worry. Don’t you pay for those plane tickets. I will.

“Cl, I have another send. Please transmit.”

“Yes, sir. Done.”

“Is Jase Graham reachable yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Yolanda Mercheson.”

“No, sir, they’re both on duty.”

“Relay the following message to both: Call when you can.”

Debriefing, still, doubtless both called in, both going over a recording of everything he’d said to Ramirez and possibly all he’d said to the Mospheirans… no linguistic barrier stood between the Guild and the Mospheirans.

And not mentioning the chance the Mospheirans had wanted a second conference with the Guild, after the agreement he’d asked of them, untidy as dual agreements might become… there was never a thing done on Mospheira but that someone wanted another study… would they do differently up here?

The headache was splitting. He searched into a drawer, where personal belongings had miraculously appeared, located a headache medication, and took it with the remnant of a cup of tea.

After that he called Bindanda and Kandana and went to bed, arranged with every comfort, with every indication from his hosts that things were on schedule. Banichi reported no fault with anything he had read. I see no flaw, Banichi said. One might mention there must be an administrative Guild establishment on the station.

By that Banichi meant his own Guild, which attended all civilization; and in the security post they had established, he supposed they had made a start on that. Their section might well become the core of it. And when the Pilots’ Guild knew that, there might be arguments.

There might well be arguments. But he would not bring it up tomorrow.

He listened to his staff coming and going in the hall, beyond the open doorway, on some business one thread of his thoughts found both mysterious and ordinary.

He was very sure his security was on watch, completely in control of their small section of the station, while he listened to the slight sound of conversation in the hall, a little louder than the fans and the movement of air. Banichi’s Guild washere, watchful and protective. Certain things the Pilots’ Guild didn’t need to know until Banichi’s Guild office was a fait accompli and the Assassins were there to keep atevi mannerly and sensible. Banichi was right. Atevi respected their own institutions, and that had to be part of the plan. The Assassins’ Guild, in fact, was one of the only neutral institutions on the mainland, and engaging them early in the negotiations, getting them to establish that presence on the station… that was a very good idea. It would reassure the provinces that no one’s office was getting the advantage, and it was an obvious first, not technical but essential, silent, but needful he make an official approach to the Guild leadership. Banichi was very right to say so. He could begin that, immediately as he reached the planet.

But that was tomorrow. Days from now. Best approachthat Guild, because as in every operation atevi undertook, it had someone involved. In this case it had four of the best, and probably Bindanda… if Bindanda wasn’t a Messenger, which was also possible. It was a Guild almost as secretive.

He couldn’t get to sleep on questions within his reach. He preferred to think about the archive until the possibilities overwhelmed even Toby’s difficulties and Barb’s, and when his mind grew foggier and foggier, he played red-and-blue economic graphs in his head all the way to sleep, simultaneously hoping the spaceport was another few feet of runway toward completion.

He waked confused in the morning, couldn’t find the edge of the bed for a moment, or where the walls were… but there was the comforting smell of breakfast and the same stir in the hallways.

He sat up, heaved himself out of bed, and wandered to the computer and the communications setup, where he keyed up communications and called Cl, the same as he’d done last before going to bed.

“Any answers to my messages?” he asked Cl aloud. “Any word from Graham?”

“No, sir, I don’t have any messages.” It was a new man.

“Link to Mogari-nai,” he said, and the new man on shift wanted to get clearance.

“Confirm it,” he sighed, brusque before morning tea. It had been so convenient to have Cl cooperating yesterday. “Do it on a priority. This is Ramirez’ orders. We were doing it all yesterday.”

“ I have to check, sir,” the answer came back, on the suspicious edge of surliness, but cautious in tone all the same, and a moment later, far more officially: “ Yes, sir. I’m putting you through.”

Bren let go a pent breath. The computer and the wall unit squealed and spat at one another, an affliction to the nerves.

“ Sir,” Cl protested.

“That also is cleared, Cl. It’s the ordinary. Also I want a confirmation that my messages are getting to Jase Graham’s quarters. Can you assure me of that?”

“ Yes, sir. Just a moment, sir.” Again a surly tone: it seemed one of those unfortunate voices that had to make whoever heard it bristle. And the man was, of course, in charge of communications. “ I’m putting the message through myself, sir.”

Bren made not a sound, and pulled his temper back from the brink.

And the answer came back: “ Jase Graham isn’t in his quarters. System says he’s on call, backed up personal messages.”

“Yolanda Mercheson.” The man was informative. Bren liked him better of a sudden. “Can you reach her?”

“Just a moment, sir… No, sir. She’s got messages, too. She’s in conference.”

“I’m expecting a call through from Captain Ramirez, or his office.”

“Let me check, sir.”

A lengthy wait.

“I don’t find anything, sir.”

Well, he said to himself, keenly disappointed, the date had been soft. Maybe the two days included this day. If there was an inherent imprecision in the language, it was counting the day one was on… or not counting it. And Ramirez had been deliberate in not being more deliberate. The man wanted room.

“Cl. Thank you.”

“Yessir.”

Bren heaved a third sigh, went off to dress, settled to work after breakfast, and waited, continually expecting a call.

At mid-afternoon he put through a call via Cl: “This is Bren Cameron. Could you confirm the meeting we have arranged with Ramirez’ office?”

“ I don’t have it on schedule,” the answer came back from what turned out to be not Ramirez’ aide, but an aide to whatever captain was on duty.

Push too hard, too fast could blow things.

“I expect a call,” he said, “and a firm time.”

He expected a call back from someone. It didn’t come.

Before supper he did a send and receive via Cl, and discovered more committee reports.

But there was, too, a message from Toby: Barb is recovering from surgery. Mother wanted to be there.

He was appalled at his brother. Is that all, Toby? Is that it? What’s going on, here?

Toby was angry at him. Angry, and picking a damned bad time for it. That had to be the answer. He couldn’t think of any other.

After breakfast, the servants moved about very quietly, with downcast looks: the word was clearly out, a small indiscretion of the staff, that there was to have been a meeting of very great import; and one had not materialized.

Bren attempted to lighten the mood. He felt the failure, if it was a failure, on his own shoulders. By now he suspected Ramirez of placing far too much confidence in the agreement of brother captains. He suspected Ramirez had tried some sort of maneuver that had failed, and that was all right. Ultimately it had to succeed, since there was no other sane course for Phoenixto take. He refused to be glum about it, but the silence wore on his nerves.

“I haven’t heard anything, either,” was Kroger’s response, frankly delivered via the intercom. She might be relieved to know, at least, that he wasn’t meeting in secret with the Guild Council. “The download’s complete,” Kroger told him. “We’ve been in communication with Mospheira. It’s hit with quite a commotion.”

“I’m very happy,” he said.

“It’s one thing we’ve done,” Kroger said. “One benefit from this.”

At least they weren’t working at cross purposes. He wasn’t sure about Ramirez and his brother captains.

He tried to convey the Mospheiran indecision about days-one-was-on versus days-ahead to Banichi and Jago, after supper, and succeeded in astonishing them, though they had made a close study of humans and their ways.

“I know,” he said. “I find it alarming, too. I find it disturbing that there’s not at least an advance notice about the precise time of the meeting. But the fact is though we said two days, we didn’t set one. I suppose I should have made sure of a date; but our calendars aren’t congruent. And it was a signal not to push him.”

Jago and Banichi alike had worn their most formal looks all through the day, all through dinner. Now they asked their questions.

“Is Jasi-ji safe?” Jago asked first.

“I think that he is.”

“Is Ramirez attempting something we should know about?” Banichi asked.

“I wish I knew.”

“Does not this great ship work by numbers, and precise numbers?”

“One would think so. But humans work by less precise ones.” He could not keep his security ignorant of his worries, but he had no idea how to give their innate sense of precision a real appreciation of what was going on with the ever-lengthening two days, except to say, “This is a game. It’s a game as humans mean it, the sort one plays with one’s enemies, not yet to fight, but not to agree, either.”

That enlightened them. There were looks of complete comprehension.

And in fact, atevi were quite good at such games: Bindanda’s presence was such a move, which must not be challenged.

“One does see,” Jago said, seeming much more relaxed.

“I find it exceedingly annoying. It’s a signal to me to back off. I perceived that when he chose to be that vague; I took it for something that might shift, and shift it has. But I will not let this situation go much further.”

“And then?” Banichi asked.

“Our greatest risk is my annoyance and his, at this moment; and the aiji’s, if I don’t bring him back to the table before I leave, which seems what this game is about. I don’t think the captains want to get to specifics yet, they want as much as they can get, they think a little more time might solve their problems, and among us… Nadiin-ji, I think the trouble is that some of them want agreement with the Mospheirans and the Mospheirans aren’t interested. I think that’s quite upset certain officers of this Guild.”

“To what extent, nadi?”

“To the extent that they’re running this operation like a committee. I think Ogun joined Ramirez and the two moved too fast for the other captains’ liking. What weighs on my thoughts most is that if I’ve made a grievous error and offended them by dealing with Ramirez and Ogun, then it’s my doing for pressing it too fast, and I have to take the entire responsibility for it.”

“Would they agree with Kroger in some secret matter?”

“I can’t conceive of what it would be since, in plain fact, Kroger can’t give them what they want, and if Kroger claims she can pull something out of nothing, that doesn’t bode well for their understanding. I think they know damned well she has nothing substantive to offer. As for confidences I’ve shared with her, I don’t worry about her telling the ship-humans all we’ve said. That can’t affect what the captains think.”

“Would it not affect Mospheira?” Jago asked.

“Oh, very much so. It’s more to Mospheira’s advantage to keep the details hidden from their own more radical elements—to which I still think Kroger may have some ties in the first place, but if there’s one way to create political furor on Mospheira, it’s to suggest mass emigration and coerced labor. It’s just not going to happen.”

“The captains can’t insist.”

“No.” A thought occurred to him as it had occurred earlier in the day. “If she’s gotten anxious, if she’s simply asked Ramirez for a delay or posed some kind of problem, there’ll be annoyances and expressions of annoyance, and I’ll be damned mad; but that’s nothing to the difficulties we’ve sorted out on the planet over the last two hundred years. We’ll sort this out. We will get our agreement and take it home with us.”

“One worries,” Jago said.

“The signs that worry me are that my calls to Jase aren’t going through; my calls to Yolanda, none successful; I haven’t even been able to get through to Kroger at will. The young gentleman in charge of communications doesn’t have authorization to connect us, but more to the point, hasn’t gotten it, and that means he hasn’t gotten it or hasn’t asked for it.”

“Blockage at a low level?” Banichi asked ominously.

“I certainly hope not. This may be the action of subordinates instructed to cover for Ramirez. It may be the action of subordinates set as obstacles by someone opposing Ramirez.

I’m not going to take any action. I am going to advise them how provocative this is.“ Not least of all, meeting times among atevi held numeric keys to fortunate or unfortunate numbers.

“They should not do the like with the paidhi-aiji,” Jago said.

“We’ve had persistent difficulties. Three years of difficulties on this point,” he said in some exasperation. Ramirez had persistently failed download appointments when they had dealt with him via Mogari-nai. He’d excused the behavior and allowed Ramirez to get away with it; he’d told Tabini it wasn’t unknown among humans. He’d wanted to get the agreements that were otherwise in jeopardy. Now Ramirez was doing it again, in an environment where safety might be at risk; that would not do.

He went back to the console after he and his security went to their separate quarters, and sent a message to Ramirez, who—not surprisingly—proved unavailable.

“That’s fine” he said to Cl. “Record a message. Captain Ramirez, contact me at earliest, at whatever hour. Thank you, Cl.”

There was no call in the night. There was no call at all.

Before dressing in the morning, Bren punched in Cl. “Get me Ramirez.”

“Sir, I can’t do that.”

“I want Ramirez, Cl, and I want him now. I’ve waited all night. I’m not in a good mood.”

“Just a minute, sir.” A several moment delay: Bren sat down and turned on his computer, set up files, shivering in the cold air, before tea, before breakfast.

“Mr. Cameron? What may I do for you, sir?”

Different voice. Female.

He rose. Faced the wall unit. “Where’s Cl ?”

“This is Sabin. What’s the problem, Mr. Cameron?”

“Captain.” He adopted a quiet, reasonable tone. “Thank you. You and I haven’t had a chance to talk. Have you a moment today?”

“Not this watch, Mr. Cameron.”

“Captain Sabin, most reasonably, and I’ve stated this during three years of negotiations: if agreements with atevi are not completed at the fortunate hourand on time, all agreements are subject to change, in however small detail. Moving appointments can’t be the condition of discussions with the aiji.”

“This is our deck, Mr. Cameron. You do things our way.”

“No, Captain, quite respectfully. If you want this deck repaired and in running order, atevi ways matter. If today is inconvenient, can we set a firm time? Afternoon, 1300 hours, day after this?”

“I’ll see you at 1400.”

“Delighted. Meanwhile, another matter. Could you arrange for me to phone Jase Graham?”

“Mr. Graham is a member of this crew, under our authority. He has no duties to you or to your offices. Two days; your schedule. You have your meeting, with me. Are we agreed, now?”

“Two days, and I will continually hold out for Jase Graham, Captain.”

“Then you’ll wait in hell.”

“I doubt your ability to create hell and obtain what you want from Tabini-aiji. Wewill likely survive your alien invasion.”

“Don’t rely on it.”

“There’s no need to argue, Captain. Let’s save it for the meeting.”

He heard a lengthy silence on the communications system. Then a restrained: “ Two days, and persistently no, to your request for Graham. He’s not your citizen.”

“We will have it on the table, Captain. Thank you.” He punched out on Sabin at that point, likely not what Sabin was accustomed to having happen, but he wasn’t going to allow agreement to dissipate in further discussion.

He wasn’t at all satisfied with the situation he’d set up.

He dressed, still in a glum mood, only involving Bindanda’s help toward the end of the process. Breakfast waited.

But having settled his nerves from the adrenaline rush of one negotiation, he decided to observe routine and get his messages, never sure at what time ship command would lose patience and close off his access simply to demonstrate they couldclose it off.

He punched in Cl, dealt pleasantly with the communications officer, and did a send-receive, picked up his messages, and sent the ones he’d written, all without incident.

From the mainland, head of the list, he found a veritable flood of personal notes from members of the legislature. He skimmed the likelier of them, found them much as expected, locally focused, various lords asking about their various interests, all felicitating him on surviving the perilous flight up in the shuttle, all interested in profit for their districts, their businesses, their concerns.

The word of his presence up here was out, then, likely with the download of the archive: news of the whole mission would break. He couldadvise Toby where he was; he couldbreak the news to his family that he couldn’t come back to the island this week or next, no matter the need.

From Toby, however, there was also a brief word: Toby, knowing the facts of his whereabouts, now, had written first.

I’ve heard where you are; it’s all over the news… now I know there’s a reason you left as fast as you did.

I talked to Barb’s husband. He seems a nice fellow, quiet. Barb’s undergoing more surgery, showing some awareness of surroundings now. Excuse the word flow. I’m writing this with no sleep. Jill’s talking about a separation. I don’t know why now, but I do know. My running up here isn’t making it easier right now, we talked about it on the plane; she told me make a choice and I don’t want to lose my kids, so as soon as I can I’m going back north and staying there. I can’t do this anymore. Mother won’t listen to me, says Barb is a daughter to her, and that’s her choice.

Most of all I’m not going to lose my wife and my kids. I’m going to get a car, take mother home, and if she gets back to the hospital, she’ll do it after I’m back at the airport, and after that it’s not my problem. I’m sorry as hell, Bren, but if you can’t do this any longer, I can’t, either. My wife and my kids are as important to me as your job is to you, and much as I love you and much as I love mum, I’ve got a life to live.

He read that twice, hearing Toby’s voice, knowing how much it had cost Toby to write it. He sat down and wrote back.

I have no blame to cast. I’ve felt deeply guilty for what I’ve asked. I’ve asked of you and mum both to turn caring for me off and on like a light switch, all to support me when I tried to stand in both worlds. Now I’m wholly on the mainland, and have to be. I can’t change the job, I can’t change myself, and we both know we can’t change our mother’s desire to have us both back… which I think hurts worse because one of us is permanently out of reach and involved in things that upset her. But generations can’t absorb one another. Time we both stopped worrying, and that’s not easy, but no one can ask more than you’ve already done. Tell mum I love her, tell her truthfully where I am, tell her there’s no way in hell I can get there, and that Barb and I don’t have a future.

Barb knew it before I did. Barb did the best thing when she married Paul. It made me mad as hell when I found out, but she was always smart about things like that, and she knew better than I did what our association had gotten to be, and what she needed, and that I was killing her by degrees. Her job was always placating me, it wasn’t a healthy relationship, and she went on faithfully trying to do that after she married, I think because she and I do love one another in a caring sort of way. She couldn’t be happy if I wasn’t happy, and she saw how upset I was about the marriage… when I was the one who’d told her our life was always going to be occasional weekends. The simplest truth is the one we couldn’t work around: that she’d be miserable where I am and I’d be miserable where she is, and there just can’t ever be a fix for that, because I won’t come back to live on the island and she deserves a man who’s there through the thick and the thin of life, not just arriving on flying visits.

If she and mum have a friendship, I have no right nor wish to upset that. They both need friends, especially now.

But above all else, I owe my brother more than I can ever say. You’ve done more than any human should for the last ten years. Take care of Jill and the kids now, make them your priority. Mum’s tougher than you think. Especially don’t worry for me: people take care of me. You take care of your own family, love Jill, take care of those kids, and take any of my advisements of problems from here on out as simple advisements, not requisitions for miracles. Like Barb, you’ve known what’s good and right, and instead you’ve been trying to satisfy me. I’m reforming. No more demands. I’m sending a copy of this to Mother. All my love, for all our lives. Bren.

And to his mother:

I’m on the space station, Mother. I’m attaching a letter I wrote to Toby. I love you very much, always. Bren.

He contacted Cl and sent both before he had a chance to change his mind, or before the difficulty of relations with the captains cut him off. He tried not to think how his mother would read it, and how much it would hurt.

But one hard letter beat a decade-long collection of niggling apologies that kept his mother hoping he’d change and kept Toby and Barb both trying to change him. That had eaten up years of trying; by now it was a lost cause.

His emotions felt sandpapered, utterly rubbed raw. He’d said good-bye to his mother, his brother, and the one human woman who loved him all in one package, all before breakfast.

He thought he’d done, in the professional case and the private one, exactly what he ought to have done: professionally, physically, for a moment on the line with Sabin he’d reached that state of hyperactivity in which to his own perception he could all but walk through walls, a state he knew was dangerous, since in the real world the walls were real. But the chances he took were part of his moment-to-moment consciousness; his position was something he didn’t need to research; his dealings with their isolate psychology was something he’d laid out in three years of working with Jase and hearing his assessments of the individuals. He wasn’t a fool. He scared himself, but he wasn’t a fool, not in his maneuvers with the captains.

The captains’ anger was real, however, and backed with force which—yes—if they were intelligent, they wouldn’t use.

Many a smart man had been shot by a stupid opponent. Not at all helpful to the opponent, but there the smart man was, dead, all the same.

And the psychological shocks bound to reverberate through his family… those were real, too. And he couldn’t avoid them. He couldn’t get to Mospheira. He wouldn’t be able to in the future. It was only going to get worse.

He went to breakfast, forced a smile for his staff, apologized, and felt not light-headed, but light of body.

He was still in that walk-through-walls state of mind.

The staff that was supposed to support him recognized the fact and went on doing their jobs in wary silence, and Narani went on bowing and doing properly the serving of tea and the presentation of small courses… he tried to restrain the breakfasts, seeing his nerves hardly left his stomach fit for them, but Banichi and Jago came to join him, and their appetites well made up for his.

“I’ve just insulted Sabin and told my mother neither I nor Toby can meet her future requests,” he said to them, “all before breakfast. What I sense around us, Nadiin, is a set of people on this station attempting to contain us, and to contain the Mospheirans, and to contain Jase… to hold, in other words, their accustomed power up here, or at least, to maintain their personal power relative to Ramirez. And by our agreement with Ramirez, none of these things should be happening. We have to push, just gently. I think we should take a small walk, if I can engage Kaplan-nadi.”

“And where should we walk?” Banichi asked him calmly, over miraculously fresh eggs.

“I think I’ll ask Kaplan,” he said. “I think we should survey this place they wish us to restore. I think we should walk everywhere. I began my report last night; this morning I have nothing but questions.”

“Shall we arm?” Banichi asked.

“Yes,” he said, and added, “but only in an ordinary fashion.”

Chapter 15

Kaplan appeared, kitted out as usual, electronics in place, opened the section door himself at the door with a beep on the intercom to announce his presence, and just came inside unasked.

Narani bowed, the servant staff bowed. Bren saw it all as he left his room.

Banichi, the security staff, and Kaplan all stared at one another like wi'itikiin over a morsel. The door to the security center was discreetly shut, good fortune having nothing to do with it, Tano and Algini were not in sight, and Bren didn’t miss the subtle sweep of Kaplan’s head, his electronics doubtless sending to something besides his eyepiece as he looked around.

“To the islanders, sir?” Kaplan asked.

“That, for a start,” Bren said, and went out, sweeping Kaplan along beside him, Banichi and Jago walking rear guard down the faded yellow corridors that looked like something’s gullet.

And he asked a flood of questions along the way, questions partly because he wanted to know, and partly to engage Kaplan: What’s down there?he asked. What’s that way?

“Can’t say, sir.” For the third or fourth time Kaplan said so, this particular denial at what seemed to be a relatively main intersection in the zigzag weave of corridors.

“Well, why don’t we just go there and find out?”

“Can’t take you there, sir. Not on the list.”

“Oh,” Bren said, lifting both brows. “There’s a list.”

At that, facing him and with Banichi and Jago looming over him, Kaplan looked entirely uneasy.

“Can we see this list?” Bren asked him.

“I get it from the exec, sir. I can’t show it to you.”

“Well” Bren said, and cheerfully rattled off in Ragi, “I think we might as well nudge gently and see what will give. Kaplan-nadi’s restricting what we see, but he’s not in charge of that decision himself. He’s getting his orders from higher up.—What would youlike to see, Nadiin?”

“Where does the crew live?” Banichi asked.

“Excellent suggestion,” Bren said, and looked at Kaplan, who did not look confident. “Nadi, where is the crew?”

“Where’s the crew, sir?”

“What do you do when you’re not on duty, Kaplan?”

“We go to rec, sir.”

“Good.” In some measure, despite the ferocious-looking equipment and the eyepiece, Kaplan had the open stare of a just-bloomed flower. “We should see rec, then, Kaplan-nadi. Or is that on the list of things we definitely shouldn’t see?”

“The list goes the other way, sir. It’s things you can see.”

“Well, that’s fine. Let’s go look at all of those, and then when you’re tired, we can go to this recreation place. That’s rec, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll ask about rec, if you like.”

“Why don’t you do that while we tour what we’re supposed to see? Take us to all those places.”

“Yes, sir,” Kaplan murmured, and then talked to his microphone in alphabet and half-words while they walked. “Sir, they’re going to have to ask a captain about rec, and they’re all—”

“In a meeting.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, tell them we just walked off and left you. All of a sudden I’m very interested in rec. I suppose we’ll find it. Are you going to shoot us?”

“Sir, don’t do that.”

“Don’t overreact,” Bren said in Ragi, “and above all don’t kill him. He’s a nice fellow, but I’m going to walk off and leave him, which is going to make him very nervous.”

“Yes,” Jago said, and Bren walked, as Banichi and Jago went to opposite sides of the corridor.

He’d give a great deal to have eyes in the back of his head. He knew, whatever else, that Kaplan wasn’t going to shoot him.

“Sir?” he heard, a distressed, higher-pitched voice out of Kaplan. Then a more gruff: “Sir! Don’t!”

Bren walked a few paces more, down a hall that showed no features, but the flooring of which had ample scuff on its sheen, leading right to an apparent section door.

He heard an uncertain scuffle behind him, and he turned, quickly, lest mayhem result.

Kaplan, going nowhere, had Banichi’s very solid hand about his arm.

“Sir!”

“He’s distressed,” he translated for Banichi. “Let him go, nadi-ji.”

Banichi did release him. Jago had her hand on her bolstered pistol. Kaplan didn’t move, only stood there with eyes flower-wide and worried, and rubbed his arm.

“Kaplan,” Bren said, “you’re a sensible man. Now what can we do to entertain ourselves that won’t involve your list?”

“Let me talk to the duty officer, sir.”

“Good,” he said. “You do that. You tell them if we’re going to repair this station, we have to assess it. Why don’t you show us one of the not-so-good areas?”

“I can’t do that, sir. They’re cold. Locked down.” He gave an upward glance at Banichi and Jago. “Takes suits, and we can’t fit them.”

“We have them. We could go back to the shuttle and get them. Or we could visit your ship. We’re supposed to build one.”

“Build one, sir. Yes, sir. I’ve got to ask about that.” Kaplan had broken out in a sweat.

“Come on, Kaplan. Think. Give us somethingworth our while. We can’t stand here all day.”

“You want to see the rec area, sir, let me ask.—But you can’t go in there with guns, sir.”

“Kaplan, you’re orbiting an atevi planet. There will never be a place an atevi lord’s security goes without guns. And you really don’t want them to, because if you have twoatevi lords up here at any point, without the guns, the lords are going to be nervous and there might not be good behavior. Banichi and Jago are Assassins’ Guild. They have rules. They assure the lords go to the Guild before someone takes a contract out on one of the captains. Think of them as law enforcement. There’s a whole planetful of reasons down there that took thousands of years to develop a peaceful way of dealing with things, and I really wouldn’t advise you to start changing what works. Why don’t we go somewhere interesting?”

“Yes, sir, but I still have to ask.”

“Do,” he said, and looked at a sealed, transparent wall panel with a confusing lot of buttons. “What do these do?”

“Lights and the temperature, sir, mostly, and the power, but don’t open that panel, sir, some of the sections aren’t sealed, sir.”

“Relax,” he said with a benign smile. He began to like Kaplan, heartily so, and repented his deliberate provocations. “Let’s go. Let’s go to rec. You’re a good man, Mr. Kaplan, and a very sensible one.”

“Yes, sir,” Kaplan said, still breathing rapidly. “Just let me ask.”

Kaplan was nothing if not dutiful. Kaplan engaged his microphone and did ask, passionately, in more alphabet and numbers, and nodded furiously to whatever came back. “Yes, sir,” he said finally. “They say it’s all right, you can go to rec.”

“Let’s go, then,” he said. “And do you have a cafeteria? The mess hall? Shall we see that?”

“That’s on the list, sir.” Kaplan sounded greatly relieved.

“Good,” he said. “Banichi, Jago, we’ll walk with Kaplan-nadi. He’s an obliging fellow, not wishing any trouble, I’m sure. He seems a person of good character and great earnestness.”

“Kaplan-nadi,” Banichi said in his deep voice, and with a pleasant expression. “One would like to know what he does transmit to his officers.”

“Banichi wants to know what you see and send,” Bren said. “Such things interest my security.”

“Can’t do that,” Kaplan said, all gruffness now.

“Buy you a drink?” Bren said. “We should talk, since you’re to be my aide.”

“I’m not your aide, sir. And I can’t talk, sir. I’m not supposed to.”

“Aren’t you? Then I may request you. I’ll need someone when I’m on the station. Are you married?”

“Married, sir, no, sir.” Kaplan’s nervousness only increased.

“Where do youlive?”

“238C, sir.”

“That’s a room?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Alone?” Bren asked.

“Two and two, sir, two shifts.”

“In all this great station? You’re doubled up?”

“On the ship we had more room,” Kaplan said. “But they’re working on the ship.”

“Doing what?” Bren asked.

“Hull, mostly.”

“Damage?”

“Just old, sir, lot of ablation. And when she’s in lockdown, it’s not easy to be aboard; you can’t get a lot of places in zero-G, sir. See those handholds? Not much use on a station, but on a ship, that’s how you get by if you have to crawl.”

It gibed with what he knew from Jase. While he kept up a running interrogation on points of corroboration, it was more corridors, more turns, twists, and descents, not a one of them distinguished from the other except by the occasional wall panels. It was an appalling, soul-numbing stretch of unmarked sameness.

They came to a corridor with one open door.

“This is rec, sir,” Kaplan said, and led them to a moderately large room with a zigzag interior wall—a safety consideration, Bren knew by now—and a handful of occupants. The decor consisted of a handful of very faded blue plastic chairs, all swivel-mounted, at green wall-mounted, drop tables. Most astonishing of all there was a decoration, a single nonutilitarian blue stripe around the walls. There was, besides the stripe, a bulletin board, and a handful of magnetically posted notices.

Crewmen, doubtless forewarned, rose solemnly to their feet as they came in.

“Gentlemen, ladies.” Bren walked past Kaplan, walked around the walls, keeping a careful eye to the reaction of the crew to Banichi and Jago… fear, curiosity, all at the same moment. The crewmen wanted to stare and were trying not to. “Good day to you,” Bren said, drawing nervous, darting stares to himself. “I’m Bren Cameron, emissary from the aiji at Shejidan. This is Banichi and his partner Jago, chief of my house security, no other names. Think of them as police. Glad to meet you all, gentlemen, ladies.”

“Yes, sir,” some said. Those terms had fallen out of use. He was an anachronism in their midst, or he was their future.

“Seems we have an agreement,” he said, curious how far news traveled among the crew. “We’re going to be building here. Mospheira’s going to provide you all the comforts of the planet, up here, according to what we’ve settled on, everything from fruit juice and hot dogs to seat cushions. Jase Graham. You know the name?”

They did, though there wasn’t a clear word in what they answered. It was Kaplan’s wide stare replicated, one and the other, men and women.

And he’d bet the place had been cleared of anyone not on a List, too.

“Jase is a friend of mine. Friend. You may have heard—or you may hear—you can’t say that with the atevi: that they don’t quite work that way. That’s true. But it doesn’t mean you can’t get along with them and that they aren’t very good people. You have to figure out associationswith them. For instance, if you get along with me, you know you can get along with my security, my staff, my associates, and everyone I get along with. There’s no such thing as one ateva. It’s really pretty easy if you ask the atevi what they think of the other ateva you plan to be nice to. Glad to meet you all. My security is glad to meet you, no one’s going to shoot anyone. Don’t mind that they don’t smile. It’s not polite to smile until you know each other. Kaplan.”

“Sir!”

“Introductions, if you please.”

“Yes, sir,” Kaplan said, and proceeded solemnly to reel off every name, every job, and rank: there were Johnsons and Pittses and Alugis, there was a Shumann and a Kalmoda and a Holloway, a Lewis, and a Kanchatkan, names he’d never heard. They were techs and maintenance, all young but one, who was a master machinist. “Glad to meet you,” Bren said, and went around shaking hands, doggedly determined to put a face and a name to what had been faceless for two hundred years and three more in orbit about the planet. “My security won’t shake hands. Our culture is foreign to them. They find you a fortunate number, they compliment you on that fact; they find you a comfortable gathering. I believe your library has a file on protocols when talking to atevi: I know I transmitted that file a couple of years ago, and hope it’s gotten around.”

No, it hadn’t. He could tell by the looks. And he was far from surprised.

“Well, I hope you’ll take a look at it on a fairly urgent basis, since there will be atevi working here. And don’t take humans from the planet completely for granted, either. From your viewpoint, they’re quite different, and words don’t mean quite the same; I was born on the island, myself, and I can say you don’t at all sound like Mospheirans. What doyou do for entertainment, here?”

“Games, sir.” That from a more senior crewman. “Entertainment files.”

“Dice,” another said.

Jase had said entertainment was sparse and opportunities were few. Jase had been vastly disturbed by rapid input, flickering shadows, any environmental phenomenon that seemed out of control: Jase standing on a deck on the ocean under a stormy sky was far, far beyond the bounds of his upbringing… an act of courage he only comprehended on seeing this recreational sterility. “Jase enjoyed his planet stay, gathered up some new games. I know he sent some footage up.”

It hadn’t made it to the general crew. There were blank glances, not a word.

“Definitely, we have to talk about the import situation,” he said, with a picture he really, truly liked less and less. “I’m sure the Mospheirans will offer quite a few things you might like.” Give or take the whole concept of trade, which he wasn’t sure they really understood on a personal level. “You’ll have a lot of things to get used to, among them the very fact of meeting people who aren’t under your captains’ orders, who speak your language and mean something totally different. Who don’t mind surfaces bouncing around under them and lights flashing and who are rather entertained by the feeling.” The looks were somewhat appalled. “We, on the other hand, will be largely involved in construction: improving the station, providing fuel, materials, that sort of thing. And we understand you found a problem out in far space. We’re used to dealing with strangers. We hope to deal with your difficulty and solve it.”

That struck a chord, finally. That was something they understood… and didn’t believe.

“Yes, sir,” came from another one, whose name was Lewis. Bren hadn’t forgotten, didn’t intend to forget a single name.

“Have you talked to Jase since he’s been back?” he asked.

“No, sir,” one said, and there were various shakes of the head.

“Interesting,” he said, and had a very uneasy feeling about this place, about the crew, about the whole situation. “But you do know him.”

“Yes, sir.” They seemed to take turns talking. Or they were all wired, like Kaplan, getting their answers from elsewhere.

“Kaplan,” Bren said.

“Sir!”

“Why don’t we take a walk to the Mospheiran delegation, and then over to the mess hall?”

“They’re in the same section, sir.”

“Well, good,” he said. “Why don’t we do that?”

“Yes, sir,” Kaplan said.

“Would any of you like to walk along?”

“We have to get back to duty,” one said.

“I’m sure you do. Well, good day to you all. Hope to see more of you.” Bren smiled and made his withdrawal, saying, in Ragi, still smiling, “Jase was wildly extroverted when he arrived, compared to these people.”

“They seem very afraid,” Jago remarked.

“They seem afraid,” he repeated, following Kaplan. “They were likely put here for us to see. They haven’t seen Jase, and they haven’t seen any of the files we’ve transmitted up, the ones about atevi.”

“One certainly asks why,” Banichi said.

“One certainly does ask,” Bren said. “Kaplan, what are these people scared of?”

“The aliens, sir.”

“Banichi and Jago aren’t aliens. You and I are. That below is their planet.”

“Yes, sir.” Kaplan didn’t look reassured. Nor was he reassured, regarding the ship.

“Ever been in a fight?”? Bren asked.

“Sir?”

“Ever had to fight, really fight, hand to hand?”

“No, sir,” Kaplan said.

“Has anyone on this ship ever been in a fight?”

“I don’t think so, sir, well, a few scrambles between us, but not outside, sir.”

This from a man overburdened with direction-finding, recording, and defensive equipment, a man who looked like a walking spy post.

“Bren.”

“Sir?”

“Bren’s the name. You can call me Bren. For formal use it’s Bren-nandi, but Mr. Cameron is my island name. Is Kaplan what you go by?” Last names were stitched on every uniform, and it was all uniforms, completely identical. Textures had frightened Jase. Differences had frightened Jase. He saw now that everything on the station was one color, the uniforms were all alike: the haircuts were generally but not universally alike… one size fit everyone and one had to train one’s eye to look at subtler differences, which probably were quite clear to someone who knew the body language of every individual aboard. He supposed that Kaplan could recognize an individual from behind and at a distance down the oddly-curving corridors, and that he himself was relatively handicapped in not knowing. The difference he posed must certainly be a shock; the Mospheirans no less so; and what they thought of the atevi was likely like a man looking at a new species: the ability to integrate patterns and recognize individuals utterly overwhelmed by a flood of input, not knowing what was a significant difference.

Three years to build a shuttle?

Three years to bring Jason, who was trying, into synch with atevi ways?

It wasn’t the engineering that most challenged them in building here. It was the psychology of individuals on the ground who for various reasons didn’t want to comprehend, the pathology of individuals having trouble enough inside their own system of recognitions; the pathology of a human society up here walled in and sensitized to a narrow range of subtle sensations, subtle signals.

He’d been uneasy regarding Jase. In Jase’s continued, defended absence, he was growing alarmed, pressing harder. He knew the hostility in his own mind toward these people who were behaving in a hostile way, and dare he think he was part of the difficulty?

It was a long walk through unmarked territory. More and more unmarked, unnumbered territory before they reached the Mospheirans, before sentries admitted them, unquestioned, at least, on Kaplan’s presence, if nothing else. They walked into the small district, drew a curious response from Lund and from Feldman, who walked out from separate rooms.

“Come have a drink,” Bren said. “The cafeteria’s buying.”

Lund and Feldman stared at him. Kroger and Shugart showed up, equally suspicious.

“Our hosts are hostile in manner,” Bren said cheerfully in Ragi, a simple utterance, given the basic vocabulary of the translators, and Feldman and Shugart betrayed a quickly-subdued uneasiness.

“A good idea,” Feldman said with some presence of mind. “We should go.”

“Go, hell,” Kroger said. “What are you up to?”

“Listen to him, Nadiin,” Jago said, and by now Kaplan was looking at one and the other of them.

“Kaplan,” Bren said, laying a presumptive, hail-good-fellow hand on Kaplan’s wired shoulder, “Kaplan, my friend, is there a bar to be had?”

“There is,” Kaplan said.

“Is it on the List?”

“Yes, sir,” Kaplan said.

“Well, let’s all go there and have a drink.” He tightened his grip as Kaplan began to protest. “Oh, don’t be a stick. Come along. Be welcome. Show us this bar.”

“Sir, I can’t drink on duty.”

“I’m afraid for what the stuff is made of,” Bren said, ignoring Kaplan’s reluctance, and pressed to turn him about. “But I’ve gone long enough without a drink.”

“Sounds good,” Lund said, but Kroger was frowning.

“Feldman, you stay” Kroger said. “All right, Cameron. I hope you have a reason.”

“A perfect reason. Kaplan, is there any chance you can liberate Jase to join us?”

“I don’t think so, sir. He’s with the captains.”

“Well, come along, come along. Feldman, my regrets.”

“Yes, sir,” Ben said confusedly.

At least Kroger hadn’t robbed the bar party of both translators. And she’d left security behind.

They set off back past the sentries. Another walk, a short one, and there was, indeed, a small bar, the most ordinary thing in the world to the Mospheirans, one he himself hadn’t thought of untilhe’d walked in among his own species, and one of the most astonishing places in the world for Banichi and Jago, surely. It was dim, it smelled faintly of alcohol, a television was playing an old movie on the wall unit, and every eye turned toward them.

“This is a place,” Bren said in Ragi, “where humans meet to consume alcohol, talk, and play games. Hostilities are discouraged despite the loosening of rules, or because of them. It substitutes for the sitting room. Here you may sit and talk while drinking. Talk with the young paidhi while I talk with Lund and Kroger, find out what she knows, advise her honestly of our concerns, advise her how to communicate this discreetly to her superiors. It is permissible and encouraged to lean on the counter where drinks are served while one talks.”

“One will try,” Banichi said.

“Shugart,” Bren said, “go practice your translation with them, using no names.”

“No names.” The word was difficult in Ragi.

“Lund,” Bren said, flinging an arm about the delegate from Commerce. “What will you have? More to the point, what have they got, Kaplan? Vodka, more than likely.”

“There’s vodka,” Kaplan said. “There’s vodka and there’s flavored vodka.”

“I’m not surprised,” Bren said. “Is there anything you can’tmake into vodka?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Kaplan said. The eyepiece glowed in the dim lighting. Unhappily, so did atevi eyes, as gold as Kaplan’s eyepiece was red. The phenomenon drew nervous stares around the room… from the single bartender, the five gathered at a table. The stares tried not to be obvious, and weren’t wholly friendly.

“Anyone here know Jase Graham?” Bren asked aloud. If there was anyone who didn’t, they didn’t say so, but neither did the others leap up to say they did. “Friend of mine. Missing onboard.”

“He’s in the captains’ debriefing, sir,” Kaplan said under his breath.

“I know you say that. Here. Sit down.”

“I can’t…”

“Can’t sit? You look perfectly capable to me.”

“Yes, sir,” Kaplan said, “but I can’t drink.”

“You can have a soft drink; I’ll assume there’s something of the sort here.”

“Yes, sir,” Kaplan said. They sat. The bartender came over as if he were approaching hostile lunatics. “Fizzwater,” Kaplan said.

“What flavors does the vodka come in?”

“There’s lemon and there’s pepper.”

“I think I’d play it safe,” Kroger said, “and ask for plain. With ice.”

“Sounds like good advice,” Bren said. “Plain.” Lemon was a flavor; historically it had been a fruit, but there was no such aboard Phoenix;and peppers, while some grew on Mospheira, were mostly native. It was a matter of curiosity, but not when one courted information, not new flavors.

The drink orders went in. Banichi and Jago talked in Ragi with the wide-eyed young translator. The drinks arrived, indifferently served, and their guard had a fizzwater while they knocked down untrustworthy vodka.

“Kaplan’s been touring us about,” he said in his thickest Mosphei’ accent. “We’d really wanted to do this with Jase, who can’t be found. I did get a call through to the mainland and sent one off to Mospheira; Tabini-aiji is quite pleased; I hope the President will be.”

“We’ve put in a call,” Kroger admitted, continually looking at her glass and her fingers, as if there were high counsel there. “We’re going to work up some figures. We’ve been at it, actually.”

“So have I,” Bren said, and they proceeded to talk detailed business while Kaplan sipped his fizzwater and the vodka worked on their nervous systems. Kroger relaxed a degree; Lund grew positively cheerful; whether either took the warning about Jase’s disappearance Bren remained uncertain, but he hoped Banichi and Jago were getting past the language barrier. He heard nervous laughter from Shugart, saw her duck her head in utter embarrassment, and saw Banichi and Jago both laughing, which was encouraging.

The whole bar relaxed, with that. The conversation between Banichi and Jago and Kate Shugart began to involve the bartender, evidently regarding the television. First the bartender changed the channel and punched buttons and then while business talk proceeded at their table, Banichi and Jago investigated the buttons, while Shugart translated and investigated the buttons herself.

And after two drinks, numbers exchanged, opinions exchanged in some quiet amity, and definitely more relaxed than he had been, Bren called an end to the visit. “Well,” he said, “better go get back to quarters, see if there’s a hangover in this stuff.”

“Doesn’t seem too bad,” Lund said, who’d had three.

“Best we go, though,” Kroger agreed.

“But we should give an official hello,” Bren said. Perhaps it was the vodka, but his motives were sheer public relations, since things were going so well at the bar. He went over to the other table and had Kaplan introduce him and introduce the others, including Banichi and Jago, who never yet had spoken a word of Mosphei’, and who met the five crewmen with uncharacteristic smiles.

“Very glad to meet you,” Bren said, and went through the most of the routine a second time with the bartender, whose name was Jeff, and who, yes, had shown them the workings of the entertainment system.

“Can they see in the dark?” Jeff wanted to know, further, on what Bren estimated was the chatoyance of atevi eyes.

“A little better than we can at twilight,” he said, knowing as a human how people who saw in the dark played off human fears… and then remembering this Jeff would have no visceral concept of twilight. Dusk and dawn were no better. “Like in here,” he amended that. “Not sure about the color range, well as we know each other; don’t think it’s ever been tested scientifically. But it’s not that much different.”

“Huh,” Jeff said thoughtfully, and Bren gave the polite formulas and gathered his party out the door into the corridor, Lund tending to stray a bit. They were cheerful, the lot of them, even Kroger looking flushed.

“Well, probably time we got back to our various sections,” Bren said. “Why don’t you drop by tomorrow? We can give you something a little aside from the cafeteria fare. I have to let my staff know in advance, but no great difficulty to set a few extra places.”

“I don’t know,” Kroger said.

“Anything but the food up here,” Lund said, and then cast a look at Kaplan. “With apologies.”

“Everything my staff brought accommodates human taste,” Bren said. “Kaplan, can you bring them for supper tomorrow, say, oh, local eighteen hundred? You’re welcome, yourself. Plan to eat with us.”

“I can’t, sir, not on duty.”

“Your duty is a bother.”

“Yes, sir,” Kaplan said. “But I have to do it.”

“All the same. You can have a cup of tea and a wafer or two. The universe won’t end.”

“Eighteen hundred,” Kroger said.

“Granted we survive the hangover,” Bren said. “Lead on, Kaplan. Show us the way.”

Chapter 16

“One does apologize, Nadiin-ji, for curious behavior,” Bren said when they met the staff, he and Banichi and Jago with Tano and Algini as interested bystanders from the security room door.

“It was a curious place,” Banichi said.

“Indeed,” Jago agreed. “But we were able to advise Kate-ji of the situation.”

“I heard laughter.”

“She said she was an endangered fish and again, that we were three amorous old men.”

Bren had to smile, though the vodka had not improved the dry-air headache. He’d tried inhaling water that morning, tried a headache remedy during their stay in the bar, and still felt far too dry, which the vodka he’d consumed had not improved. “Relations with Kroger and Lund are definitely better, though I don’t think we’re communicating much better than you are with Kate Shugart. There’s far too much apprehension around us all, far too much fear of strangers. I don’t know whether the crew is more worried about you or about the Mospheirans. I think they’re beginning to understand they’re not the same as themselves.”

“These humans will not have met even other humans at all,” Jago said. “Jasi-ji was afraid, the first time he saw how large Shejidan is.”

“Jase was afraid of very many things, but he improved quickly,” Tano said from the side. “Is there word of his welfare, Nadiin-ji?”

“Not to our satisfaction,” Bren said. “Always they say he’s with the captains. They claim he has no further relationship with the aiji’s court: they wish to assert command over him, and I’m not willing to have that state of affairs. Nor will the aiji. What did Kate say, Nadiin?”

“That Kroger-nadi was very angry at first,” Banichi said, “and that she’s still angry over the archive, but reconciled, one thinks, and glad to have an agreement which may turn out to her credit. Kate says that all of them are communicating in confidence they’re being observed. One doubts they have that great a skill at it, judging what I’ve heard, but they are attempting to be discreet in their most sensitive policy discussions.”

“The translators believe they’re privy to those?”

“Yes, but with only small occasion to contribute. Kate stated they all like the notion of atevi mining and building; they believe they can interest commercial enterprises in venturing here, but they’re worried about losing all economic initiative in manufacturing to the mainland.”

“The translator was doing very well, then.”

“She makes egregious mistakes,” Jago said, “but goodwill and courtesy are evident in her manner. She is cautious of offense.”

“Despite naming us noble thieves,” Banichi added.

“Forgive her.”

His security was amused. The words for assassin and thief were similar, for the antique word noble and guild even closer. “Perhaps we are noble thieves. Perhaps we might steal our associate from them when we go. Perhaps we will steal all manufacturing.”

“I intend the one. Not the other. Medicines. Electronics. Refining. Food production in orbit. We can stake out interlocked domains. The principles are well-defined, nothing we have to invent.”

“They have not yet opened their defenses,” Banichi said, “and do not trust. One must ask,” Banichi said, “nandi, how far one should go with them, or with Kaplan-nadi either in confidence or in allowing untoward movement.”

Serious question. A very serious question. “Defer to me in this. If I strike anyone, then observe no restraint. But I rather like Kaplan.”

Likewas for salads; it was an old joke with them, but they understood it well enough for one of those transitory attachments humans formed, one subject to whimsy and change by the hour… when for atevi such changes were emotional, associational, life-rending earthquakes.

They might know, at least, how he read the situation. He added, “I rather likeLund and Feldman, too; Shugart is, well, Shugart’s fine. Even Kroger improves with acquaintance. She and I had a bad start, on the flight to the mainland. I rather think she’s Heritage in associations, but too smart for Heritage, too smart to bow to its leaders, too educated in her field, too innately sensible to swallow what they say. I think she’s seen now how things canwork between our species and she’s not going to give the hardliners in her party a report they’ll greatly favor. For political purposes, theywant to regard us as enemies, they want allthe station, and I don’t think she’ll accommodate them. I think she’s honest. I think she sees the Heritage Party as a means to half of what she wants, better than those who’d rather not think about space at all, but I think if she sees a way to get Mospheirans up here without being directly under Guild authority, I think that satisfies most of what she wants.”

“Kroger is aiji in that group,” Jago mused, “one suspects. An aiji indeed, then.”

“I’m still not sure what Lund’s authority is. Possibly he has the same inclinations to leadership. Possibly he’s even Heritage himself and quite canny at it—his department is rife with that party; but he seems far more skilled at getting along with other humans. Kroger is leader, in terms of having her way, and not owing man’chi to those who think they’re her leaders. She has thorns, doesn’t like what’s foreign, but she also has a brain; and I think—I hope—she’s used it in the last several days. I’m coming to respect Kroger, however reluctantly. I hope that lasts.”

“One also hopes it does,” Banichi said.

“Supper tomorrow evening; a meeting next afternoon with Sabin; one hopes we make contact with Jase. Not a bad day’s work.”

“Shall Tano and Algini attend you at supper this evening?” Banichi asked.

“Certainly.” He had no objections to his staff doing turnabout at the luxury of the formal table and food served at the moment of perfection; more, he counted it a chance to brief the junior pair in more detail, and to give Banichi and Jago a break, or conference time, or time for a lengthy, self-indulgent bath … whatever they might want. They’d gone short of sleep in recent days; and whether something of a personal nature ever went on in that partnership he still had no idea, not a clue.

No jealousy, either. He owed them both his life and his sanity.

“One will dress,” Tano said with a bow of his head, and that matter was settled.

Bren himself went to change shirts… how freshly-pressed shirts appeared on schedule was a miracle of the servants’ quarters, but he took them gratefully as they were offered, a small indulgence of rank, and allowed Narani the smugness of small miracles.

He fastened buttons, turned on the computer, gathered messages, in the interval before dinner.

There was a short one from Toby:

Bren, Jill and the kids are gone. I can’t find them.

His hand hit the wall panel, dented it.

“Nadi?” It was Sabiso’s inoffensive voice, concerned. He collected himself, faced the young woman in formal courtesy.

“A difficulty, Sabiso-ji, a small difficulty.”

Her glance surely took in the damaged panel. She lingered. “Shall I call Jago, nandi?”

“No,” he said mildly. “No, no need.” He wanted to put his fist throughthe wall, but a broken hand wouldn’t help the downward spiral of the situation. He didn’t want to alarm Sabiso. He didn’t want to explain the situation to his security.

He was furious with his brother, didn’t even know why he was brought to the irrational brink.

Not rational. Not at all rational. Not professional, damaging the wall panel. Downright stupid, leaving a trace of his temper. It wasn’t like him. Accumulated stress. Short schedules. The frustration of his position.

He walked over to the vanity counter and tried to calm himself with cold water, the single frustrating handful he could get from the damned spring-loaded tap.

Sabiso still lingered, not about to leave a madman. He could hear her small movements. “You may dismiss worry, Sabiso-ji. Please go about your duties.”

“Yes, nandi.” Confronted, she did leave. He gave it a very short time before he might expect Jago.

Whydid he want to throttle his brother? What in hell was it in a perfectly reasonable message from his brother about his own personal distress that made him dent a wall panel?

Simple answer. Toby had just asked him to leave him the hell alone in one message; and he’d agreed, and sent an irrevocable letter to their mother. And now Toby broke Toby’s own new rules and wanted him to worry… for a damned good reason; he could only imagine Toby’s state of mind.

But, dammit, it was part and parcel of the way his family had always worked: first the ultimatum to leave the situation alone; then two hours later a cry for help he couldn’t possibly ignore, and in most cases couldn’t do a thing about but lose sleep.

He couldn’t do a damn thing in this instance about Jill and the kids. He figured, somewhere in his personal psychological cellar, that the last straw in that marriage might have been his call to Toby to come back to the capital, when things between Jill and Toby were already strained. It was his fault. He’d done it.

And they had to quit the cycle they were in. He couldn’tfix Toby’s problem. He couldn’t go on a search for Jill.

He had to take it just as Toby doing what he himself had reserved the right to do: send an advisory. Toby had that right, too. Toby’s wife and kids were missing… in a world where political lunacy had flung rocks at windows, pegged shots at perfect strangers, and had a security guard from the National Security Administration guarding his brother’s kids from a distance.

Where in hell were the guards when Jill took the kids? That was Shawn’s office, at a primary level. Did Shawn know where Jill was, and would he tell Toby?

Dammit, he was up here releasing the archive files to the planet, the world had just found out there were missions going on up here, and Jill picked a damned hard time to do a disappearing act.

He settled down and wrote exactly that, in a far calmer mode. I’m sorry as hell, Toby. It’s all I can say. Likely she’s at the cottage or she’s gone to her family. I’m sure she’s all right. Tell her I said it was my fault and she should be angry at me…

He deleted the last sentence, one more interference in Toby’s household, in favor of: Contact Shawn. Get answers immediately. Don’t assume. This is a safety issue. Pride is nowhere in this. Protect them.

The message was stark, uncomfortably brief. He knew Toby was absolutely right to have told him, dared not reject the possibility it wasmore than anger on Jill’s part.

He was the one who’d brought his family the necessity of security measures, armed guards, all those things. They’d begun to lean on them. SurelyToby had already been to the security people. And they didn’t have answers?

He couldn’t do anything, except fire a message to Shawn, on restricted channels. Toby’s wife and kids are missing. Need to know where they are.

… and knowing that if that inquiry reached Jill and embarrassed her in a marital spat, it might be the true final straw in her marriage.

He’d done all he could. He couldn’t spare personal worry. He couldn’t afford to think on it. He calmly wrote another message for Mogari-nai, this one to relay to Tabini.

We have spent an interesting day touring the station and meeting with various crewmen. We have not yet located our associate, and have assurances the authorities are asking him close questions. I am concerned at this point but find no alternative. Particulars of my negotiations with all parties did attach to my last message. Please confirm that those files reached you, aiji-ma. I remain convinced of a felicitous outcome but find that certain representations are dubious. I was far too sanguine not of the early progress, but of its scope. Relations with the Mospheiran delegates have become smoother and those with the ship-aijiin more doubtful. Also my brother’s family is missing and I hope you will pursue queries with Shawn-nandi, aiji-ma, discreetly. Personal argument preceded the disappearance, but the unsettled times are a worry.

On the other hand, after some inconvenience we have scheduled a meeting with Sabin-captain, and hope that a session of close questions will allay the concerns of the two less available captains and bring us closer to reasonable agreement. We have repeatedly asserted and I still believe, aiji-ma, that future association with the ship-humans is to the good of all parties including the Mospheirans and the only reasonable course for the protection of all living things. I am more than ever of the opinion that the long experience of Mospheirans and atevi in settling differences between our kinds may prove both confusing and alarming to the ship-humans; but that it also offers a surer defense than any weapon of their devising.

He sent. And hoped to God that Shawn readily had Toby’s answer about where Jill and those kids were.

Supper was, for the first time, a vegetable preserve: such things were kabiu, proper, without going against the prohibition against preserved meat. Tano and Algini shared the table with him, and he mentioned nothing of Toby’s difficulty, there being nothing any of his security could do about it. He’d developed a certain knack over the years, of dismissing things on Mospheira to a remote part of his attention, of shifting utterly into the mainland; and now further than that, into complete concentration on his staff, on the problems of Sabin and Kroger, on the regional labor resources, shuttle flight schedules, and station resources. Tano and Algini in fact had been working the day long on the security of the section they now held, on what went on behind the skin of the walls and the floors and arching ceiling, what possibility there was of being spied on, or of spying.

And at the very moment Tano was about to explain the console, the one in their dining hall leaped to life and let out a loud burst of sound.

“God,” Bren said. Tano and Algini were out of their seats. It was not the only source of the sound, and it ceased quickly, as running steps approached the door.

Jago appeared.

“Apologies,” she said. “We have found the main switch, Nadiin, nandi.”

The servants laughed; Tano and Algini laughed, and Bren subsided shakily and with amusement against the back of his chair.

The screen went dark again.

Supper resumed, in its final course, a light fruit custard.

From down the hall it sounded like water running, or a television.

Ultimately, after the custard, he had to send Tano and Algini to find out the cause, and he answered his own curiosity, taking a cup of tea with him.

By now it sounded like bombs.

He walked into the security station.

On one channel, insects pollinated brilliant flowers, unknown to this earth. They were bees, Bren knew from primer school, bees and apple blossoms. On another screen a line of crowned human women dived into a blue pool. On a third, buildings exploded.

The servant staff gathered behind him at the door, amazed and stunned.

Pink flowers gave way to riders in black and white.

“Mecheiti!” Sabiso said, wrong by a meter or so and half a ton.

“Horses,” Bren said. “Banichi, what have we found?”

“One thinks,” Banichi said, “we have discovered the architecture of this archive. There is an organization to it.”

A varied set of images flowed past. He might have delighted in it, on any other evening. He might have laughed.

But while the staff watched, intrigued by human history, he went across the corridor to his room, to the computer, to check his messages via Cl.

Toby hadwritten back. Call off your panic. Jill’s at her mother’s.

Bren sank into a cold plastic chair.

Not… thanks, Bren.

Not… security knew.

Not… I’m going there now.

Not… it’s going to be all right.

The chill sank inward, and lay there. He didn’t move for a moment.

All right, Toby, did Shawn know, did Tabini send something through?

Did I mess things up, Toby?

I want you safe, dammit. It’s not safe there. This is no time for Jill to be running from her security…

He wrote that: Toby, impress on her this is no time…

And wiped it. Jill had left her home, run out on Toby. This was not a woman thinking clearly about her personal safety. Or she was rejecting it.

The news of atevi presence and hispresence on the station was about to break on the island if it hadn’t done so already, touching off every unstable element, from the mainland to Mospheira, in an ultimate paroxysm of paranoia. He was not persona grata with the Heritage Party, which made a fetish of armed preparation for invasion; his mother and Toby’s accidentally stepped in front of a damn bus. If thataccident had stayed out of the news, it would be a wonder, and that report would taint anything he did, as if there was something sinister and personal in the action. Anythingwas substance for the rumor mills, anythingmight touch off the unstable elements who searched the news daily to substantiate their theories, and the theories were no longer funny. It might be announced on the island at any moment that atevi were going to runthe space station; even if the majority of Mospheirans didn’t wantto live under the Guild again, and didn’t want to run the station, they didn’t want to give it up, either.

And Jill picked this moment to ditch her protection.

He couldn’t write plain-spoken things like, The kids are in danger. The Mospheiran link wasn’t secure enough to be utterly frank; he didn’t know whether their mother was on a bus bound for the hospital, whether she’d called a taxi, or even ditched hersecurity. He knew there was danger, knew there were elements that would unhesitatingly strike at the innocent to wound him, and he’d had his try at gathering his family onto the mainland behind Tabini’s much more extensive security. Thathadn’t worked.

He couldn’t protect them. Not any more than he could have prevented the accident.

He bowed his head against his clenched hands, muscles tightened until joints popped. He wanted…

But he couldn’t intervene with Toby, or Jill, or Barb, or his mother.

He couldn’t beg off from his job or ask why in hell human beings couldn’t use good sense. He’d asked that until he knew there was no plain and simple answer.

And he couldn’t blame his brother for being angry with it all. He was angry, too. He could move things in the heavens, shift Tabini’s Opinion and move the mechanisms of the aishidi’taton personal privilege, but he couldn’t do a damn thing to prevent unintended consequences.

Get to her, he wished his brother. Get to Jill. Get her and those kids back under protection. Don’t hesitate. Don’t quarrel. Just do it.

And for God’s sake, write to me when you’re all safe.

Chapter 17

Aiji-ma, we still wait for any confirmation of agreement from the other captains, notably Sabin, third-ranking, who has set a meeting with me for tomorrow station time, whether with her alone or with others of the captains I still have had no word. I have been unable to contact Jase, whom they continually say is in conference with the captains. Nor have I been able to contact Mercheson, nor has the delegation from the island. I find infelicity in the condition of the halls, and their lack of all numbers and designations. Numbers and colors were erased from such facilities in historical times when occupants wished to prevent intruders from knowing their way about. A local guides us whenever we leave, and he receives a map image, I am sure, through an eyepiece and instructions through a hearing device. Neither device is unknown to the island but their use under this circumstance is somewhat troubling, when a small number of painted signs would indicate the route through what is a very confusing set of hallways.

I have received word directly from my brother. His wife is angry with him and has taken up residence with her household, taking the children with her. I have strong security concerns in this move, but will not allow these to override my good sense in the performance of my duties to you, aiji-ma.

Bren re-read the message, searched for words that might cue any other reader as to subject, decided to send as it was, and set up his computer on the table next the wall console.

He punched in. “Good morning, Cl.”

“Hello, sir.”

“Send and receive.”

“Yes, sir”

The squeal went out and came back.

“Good day, Cl. Thank you.”

“Out, sir.”

Cl didn’t readily know about mornings. Bren had a notion to ask Cl what his name was… at least the one that was there of mornings, or this shift, as the ship and station reckoned time.

And breakfast was waiting for him, but he wanted to see first what he had caught in his net this morning. He ached for a message from Toby, but Toby had his mind on other than sending to him, he was sure, and no news meant Toby had gone on his way and likely reached Jill’s mother’s house last night. If something went wrong, thenhe might hear from Toby.

And there was no message from that quarter, none from the island, none from Mogari-nai.

There was a message from Tabini, a simple one: We have been in contact with the Foreign Office regarding matters of your concern. My devoted wife has transmitted a message through your office to your lady mother by the State Department offering her concern and her wish for the lady’s early recovery.

He was astonished. And grateful.

And hoped to God his mother sent a civil reply.

No, no, Shawn would mediate that. It would be decorous.

He had to thank Lady Damiri. And he very much suspected it was a signal. Tabini was aware of everything, and meant to reassure him.

He was moderately embarrassed to have had Tabini do that… though it was not an outrageous proceeding if it were some notable man of the province or of the court: a matter of courtesy, it was. He didn’t know how his brother might receive any word from Tabini. He didn’t trust his family to behave, was what it boiled down to, and he was vaguely ashamed to realize he held that opinion… justified as it might be.

There were messages from various others, more business of the committee heads to whom he had sent messages, he was quite sure, a few outraged ones, who were put out that a human should be leading an atevi delegation and had no shyness in saying so. The traditionalists had their opinions, and in fact he somewhat agreed with them, but couldn’t speak against the aiji’s decision that had put him here. He left them to Ilisidi, and hoped for the best.

There was a message from students of the Astronomer Emeritus, who were astounded and pleased at his voyage, and who asked what wonders of the stars he could see from his vantage.

What celestial wonders? Human obstinacy and suspicion was not the answer the students wanted. The captains, damn them, had sent down images from other stars but had ungraciously declined to give their coordinates or to tell where they were in the human system of reckoning.

He’d arranged the University to transmit its own stellar catalog and its own system of reference and nomenclature three years ago. And Jase had drawn them a map… a hand-drawn, crude thing, but referencing the charts; so the reticence of the Guild on that topic had passed quietly unnoticed, except in certain close circles.

And the students wanted pictures?

In the press of things strange and hostile up here, he’d utterly forgotten there was an outside, that there was a reality of stars and forces more universal than the captains’ will.

He went off to breakfast, thinking the while what he was going to do about those images, putting them at the head of the mental queue, since there was so damned little he could do today about the rest; and then thinking: damn, of course, the archive. Images had gone down to the planet with that.

Locating them in that universe of data meant having an appropriate key. And he had an idea where to find it, knew what the keys ought to be, in words like navigationand dataand starand map, with which his staff might search the download. Simply comparing the two areas of the Mospheiran maps and the maps in the download… simply! There was a bad joke. But it could be done.

“Thought?” Banichi asked him, and, distracted, he had to laugh and explain he was thinking of dictionaries and starcharts.

“Usefully so?” Banichi asked. Banichi had learned that such things as the stellar nature of the sun had some relevance to his job, quite a basic relevance, as it had turned out, but hardly relevant to the performance of it.

“We’re contained and without sight of the stars,” Bren said. “And the students of the Astronomer Emeritus ask me for pictures and data.”

“Are there windows?” Jago asked.

“I imagine that there are, but not necessarily of the sort you might imagine. Most that this station sees, it sees through electronic eyes, through cameras.”

“Interesting,” Banichi said. One wondered why, and, with Banichi involved, came up with several alarming possibilities.

“Of course,” Bren said, “on the other side of all walls and windows and out where the cameras are is hard vacuum.”

“One does recall so,” Banichi said. “But a view of the exterior might be useful. One would like to know the relationship of pieces.”

“That, I might provide. I can ask Cl. There might be a view available.”

“Interesting,” Jago said, too.

They finished breakfast. And after the accustomed compliments to cook and staff—in this case Bindanda—Bren went to the dining area wall panel and punched in Cl.

“Cl,” he said when he had an acknowledgment. “We’ve been here this long and we haven’t seen the stars. Can you show us a view?”

“Not much to see from the cameras,” Cl said. “ But hull view’s active.”

The screen came live on a glare-lit, ablated surface, and absolute shadow.

“Where is that?” Bren asked, having an idea what Banichi was after, and now Tano and Algini had come in haste, Jago having apparently informed them what was toward.

“ That’s looking back over the hull from forward camera 2,” Cl said.

“Is that the shuttle?” Bren said. There was a reflected glow on a smooth surface, the edge of a wing, perhaps.

“ Should be,” Cl said. “ I can angle for a better view. This isn’t the deep dark, here. There’s planetshine, for one thing, not mentioning the star. You want stars, sir, you should be a little farther out.“

It must be a slow morning in the control center, Bren thought, gratified. It was, in fact, the shuttle.

“ Got to close the show,” Cl said. “ I’ll leave you attached to camera 2 on, say, C45.”

“That’s wonderful,” Bren said. “Delighted, Cl. Thank you.”

“Interesting,” Tano said, much as Banichi had said, as Cl punched out.

“More cooperation than we’ve had, Nadiin,” Bren said. “That man is not cautious with us. Others are. Interesting, indeed.”

His security returned questioning looks. “We had early cooperation,” Bren said, “very wide cooperation, and easy agreement with those who were already agreed. I don’t think it attributable to my powers of negotiation, rather to understandings generally made verbal. Now we have these long delays.”

“Dissent,” Jago said.

“And placatory gestures from the servants,” Banichi said.

It did, however atevi the view might be, seem to describe the situation with Cl.

“It’s not safe to press, however,” Bren said. “No more than in an atevi household. The man is a subordinate.”

He settled to work after that small show, imagining that someone thinking more down a human track would have negotiated that camera view much earlier; that very probably Kroger’s team had asked; and that it was something Cl could grant on request, something to amuse the guests and, like the unmarked hallways, to tell them very little.

They were due to meet with Kroger this evening, supposing that came off on schedule. Certainly Bindanda came to question him diffidently about his selections and his menu: “Excellent,” he said, “and one might have a sweet or two. That will please them.”

“Nandi,” Bindanda said, and went off to their galley stores, with Narani in close supervision.

The household ran without effort; it moved and buzzed about him, rarely disturbed him except to renew his supply of tea, while he sat at the small desk and composed letters and replies to various correspondents.

To Toby:

Write when you can. My love and my apologies to Jill and the kids.

There was no letter today. He wasn’t that surprised in the silence.

To his mother, with ulterior motives, both to hear from her and to hear whatever she might have heard about Toby… ifshe had heard a thing from Toby, which she might not have.

Double reason for checking up on her.

I’m doing fine. It’s an interesting place up here.

He struck that beginning. She might take offense at his doing fine in an interesting place; it was somewhat self-centered on his part. He tried again.

I’m just checking to be sure you’re all right. I hope Barb is improving. I want you to take care of yourself, and be assured I’m fine. I hope you’ll keep me posted on everything, and I want you to be sure to get enough rest. I know how you tend to push yourself. I think I inherited it. Do stay to sensible places. You know how certain elements are dangerous when I’m in the news, and I think I am now. I imagine that I am. Know that I love you.

He’d achieved a certain distance in his communication, after sending that other letter, that possibly hurtful letter. He worried about it, worried about it a great deal, and thought now that he’d been too harsh, too self-centered on his own part, to take every move his mother made as self-serving and self-centered. She wasconcerned for him, God knew. She was a mother. She had a son off on a hitherto unreachable space station telling her things were fine while armed security watched over her and everything she did. He’d been desperate; he’d shoved too hard to be free.

What I wrote was honest at the time but one of those things that one starts thinking about; and both your sons love you a great deal. At something over thirty I’ve reached that stage of wanting to be free and to pursue my own course. Kind of late, but there we are. I haven’t taken Toby’s course, home and house and all. And I shoved far too hard when it came to it. Now that I’ve done that I find myself regretting it and wanting to know how you are and to tell you I care. Not to change my mind, but to tell you I care. Both are human, I think.

The I thinkloomed out at him on rereading. In all honesty, it was an I think. He didn’tknow for certain any longer, or hadn’t since his teens, when he’d gone into the University program and begun to separate from the culture he’d been born to.

I don’t know what more I can say, except to take care of yourself in all senses. I wish I had been able to stay longer. We both needed that. But I’m doing a job here, the results of which I think you are able to see now, and which I hope will give those kids of Toby’s a future.

He wrote to the heads of committees.

We are making progress and hope for your patience. While there are agreements in principle, there are many details yet to work out of what I hope will be a good cooperation between our peoples.

He wrote it until he began to see every flaw in the hope.

And he settled down with Jago for a lengthy talk over the southern provinces of the aishidi’tat, their ethnic questions, their material resources and willingness to mobilize, those divisions of loyalty and wealth he knew, but which a human didn’t feelwith the accuracy an ateva felt the divisions, and which a human couldn’t know with the breadth and depth of an ateva’s being immersed in them lifelong while being wired to feel the tides of provincial resentment.

Was a little town building a railroad to a spaceport? Ask what various provinces might do once they saw prosperity within their reach. An ateva might make a pot to continue in the economy for a hundred years, and an ateva might utilize every scrap of a fruit, down to the peelings; but atevi also might have a color television in a house in which electric wiring was strung along the side of a stone floor, under exposed wooden rafters, some of which might have been replaced in the last century.

Atevi made families and ties within man’chi, and passed these houses, and their debts and their projects, from one generation to another, and had both the most informal barter arrangements and the most rigidly traditional activities… give or take what humans sent them.

Atevi when they came to the station might bring families, including aged aunts and grandfathers, which humans in their economy and focus might not understand.

“Will it be like taking service in a household?” he asked Jago. “Or will husbands and wives come?”

“Perhaps both,” Jago said. “As husbands and wives make unions in a household.”

Atevi unions, like human ones, could be ephemeral. “Unions within a household last. They seem obliged to last.”

“Or part amicably,” Jago said. “As one can. Or part for children, and come back again.”

That was so. Lovers within a household might get their children elsewhere, by agreement, so as not to bring children into a household that was otherwise childless.

“I would never forbid children,” he said, half wishing there were.

“But the Bu-javid is a bad place for them,” Jago said truthfully.

They were there to talk about the space station; but he looked at Jago, with whom he shared a bed on occasion, on opportunity, and wondered about children, which were not in the cards for them, certainly, biologically; and not for him, personally… he’d never wanted to leave a family of his own on the other side of the straits.

“Up here there might be children. Or not, as people prefer.”

“There were children,” Jago said, “who rode the petal sails.”

Frightening as it was, certain pods had dropped onto the world with children aboard, all those years ago.

“So there were,” he said. “And so there are on the ship itself.” Jase had told him so.

“Like Jasi-ji,” Jago said.

“And those with two parents,” Bren said. “Jase and I talked about it, how the crew knows who’s allied with whom; but outsiders wouldn’t. And they haven’tconfined their children outside the Bu-javid, so to speak. And politics of personal relationship does exist.”

Jago raised a brow. “One sees where there is no choice.”

“No choice indeed. No other place.”

Jago heaved a deep sigh. “And how shall we map these relationships? How does one perceive them?”

“One simply knows who’s in bed with whom.” He laughed. “It’s a saying, in Mosphei’. It changes their man’chi. Or flings them out of it, when the relationship fractures. And it’s common, Jago-ji; the fractures are common. We have social structures… I’m sure within the ship they exist… to make interaction possible. Feud isn’t allowed.”

A second lift of the brow. “That was not a feud that invaded the mainland? One could have mistaken it, Bren-ji.”

It was worth a wry smile. A shrug. “Politics is ideally separate from bloodline,” he said. “Not historically true, but true nowadays. Humans did have ethnicities, once. And family ties, even smaller. But humans here have had no ethnicities, until the ship came back. Now they don’t know what’s happened to them. Now the Mospheirans may learn to think ateviare the more familiar culture.”

“One doesn’t know what the world would be like without humans,” Jago said somberly. “Different. I don’t think many would like to go without television, without the aishidi’tat.”

“I think humans have gotten rather used to fresh fruit, and the knowledge the aiji will stop any armed conflict. It’s a sense of safety. Since the ship came back, that safety is threatened, at the very moment we seemed to have realized we had it.”

“So for us. Just when we realized humans were valuable, we discover they have inconvenient relatives.”

He laughed; he had to. “Our lives are machimi,” he said. “The relatives come over the hill, and want a share of the hunt.”

“And shall they have it?”

He considered what was at issue. “I think there’s room,” he said, “considering all of space, considering they’ve been industrious on their own. We simply have to add another wing to the house.”

“So,” Jago said. “Up here.”

“Up here,” he said, “where it doesn’t spoil the view.—How will it be for atevi to live here? It’s an important question. My household is the first to be able to judge. And you have tojudge.

I can’t know whether what I’m doing, to gain the atevi their place up here, can be tolerable for you, or whether I have to modify everything to allow atevi to come and go continually. Might atevi be born here, and live here? On what you say, Jago-ji, I set great importance. Can you think of such a thing?”

Jago looked up, at the ceiling, at the lights, around at the room, very solemnly, before she looked at him again. “Atevi who live here will have man’chi to whoever leads them,” she said. “And will they be within the aishidi’tat?I can’t foresee. But when there are children, when there are households, they will not be under the captains, Bren-ji. They will never be under the captains.”

“I don’t think the captains worry about that so much as they worry about having no port at all.” He had to amend that, in all knowledge he had of humans. “To teach the captains that they simply have to deal differently… that’s a frightening task, Jago-ji. It does daunt me.”

“It daunts anyone who thinks of it,” Jago said. “They must be very wise, not so kabiuatevi who come here to deal with the ship-humans.”

Not so kabiu. Not so proper. Not so observant of traditions of food and manners and philosophy.

“Not to be kabiumakes for rapid change,” he said. “Perhaps unwise change.”

Jago thought about that a moment. “The paidhi might see very clearly on that point,” she said. “Perhaps we wouldchange very rapidly here. And there would be problems.”

The thought haunted him. He wrote to Tabini:

I have conversed with my staff regarding the attitudes that this place engenders within atevi at the sight of these corridors and this stark sameness and have discussed with my second security personnel the matter of kabiu, whether it may be an essential safeguard to atevi against too rapid a change of man’chi. I think there may be merit in this view and wish that wise heads consider the matter. I brought no camera. This is an error I intend to remedy on my next visit. It is difficult to describe how foreign this place is to atevi.

Yet the very foreignness may assist to confirm man’chi within the aishidi’tat: and certainly the small touches my staff has added have provided relief to the eyes and heart.

I wish that the aiji might give particular thought to deep questions of man’chi for those generations resident here, considering a residence as foreign as a cave strung with lights combined with the difficulty of maintaining close ties with relatives on the planet. The psychological elements are beyond my judgment, yet I continue in my belief that atevi authority here must be represented. Therefore I do not alter my course, and depend on others’ judgment as to my wisdom in doing so.

Meanwhile I expect the Mospheirans to be our guests at supper, and hope that we may achieve agreement among representatives of the planet in the face of what may still be hard and divisive negotiations.

Kaplan brought the Mospheirans, at the appointed hour… lacking only Shugart, a fact Bren noted as Narani opened the door and admitted them to what was, de facto, the reception hall and their central corridor at once.

Shugart, clearly, was the home guard, the defense against tampering in their absence. Kroger continued to be cautious… as they were cautious. Algini had shut the door to their own guard post and had no intention of opening it at any point the guests might be in a position to see into that room.

Just for symmetry, and not to make too much of an issue of one closed door, Bren had likewise shut the door to his own room, leaving only the dining room and the servants’ quarters doors open, across from one another at the end of the hall.

Kroger, Lund, and Feldman, the latter of whom had no status with the other two, clearly, and who stood somewhat to the rear as the hand-shaking and greeting proceeded.

So did Kaplan, a walking listening post who had to be shut out or otherwise occupied.

And who, like his own security, would have no supper with the rest.

When in Rome, a very old saying went. And this whole station was Rome, and the customs uncertain.

“Kaplan. Would you like something to eat?”

“Duty, sir.”

“Sure?”

Kaplan, behind all the gear, inhaled deeply. The galley fragrances permeated the corridor. The visible eye was wide, nervous, the mouth… a little less resolute.

“Tano, would you see Kaplan-nadi has food?” He changed languages. “Ms. Kroger, Kaplan’s going to have supper with Tano, here. Tano-ji:” Another language switch. “I think we have some of those fruit sweets, don’t we, the ones Jase is fond of? Kaplan might find those a novel taste. Have we enough to spare, nadi?”

“One believes so,” Tano said.

“Ben might have supper with them, perhaps.” Kroger leaped on a chance to shed the translator, who looked somewhat disappointed, doubtless at missing the formal meal.

But if Kroger wanted to talk business at supper, that was the Mospheiran habit: and they might supply Ben quite handily. “Do,” he said. “Ginny. Tom. Come along. Supper’s delicate, doesn’t like waiting.”

“I trust they’ve watched the poisons,” Kroger said.

“Oh, absolutely,” Bren said. “We’ll send along a dinner for Shugart, too. We’ll have one made up.”

“You’re very well supplied,” Lund observed.

“Always,” Bren said. “It’s just the habit. One I like very well.” He escorted his guests into the room, translated the amenities to Narani and the others of his staff, seated himself and them. Banichi and Jago absented themselves, on prior protocols… not that they necessarily took for granted the lordly rank of the Mospheiran delegation, but out of convenience. Kandana deftly whisked away extra settings for Feldman and Shugart, changed bouquets to a felicitous combination for three, and added a dish of candy so deftly the Mospheirans hardly missed a word in the running chatter.

“Have you heard from the captains?”

“Nothing beyond the appointment I have tomorrow,” Bren answered. “With how many at once wasn’t clear. Definitely with Sabin.”

“Mmn,” Kroger said. “And what do you propose to discuss?”

“Anything Sabin wishes to discuss: reconstruction of the station, agreements for the building they want done. I utterly reserve the discussion of business interests on the station for you and your mission.”

Kroger by no means looked unhappy at that.

“Have youhad any message from them?” Bren asked.

“From Ogun, a request to meet, on what business isn’t clear.”

“Interesting. Divide and conquer? I think we should communicate what we learn and agree. More, I think we should coordinatewhat we agree, present a unified package to our governments.”

“No exterior work for our citizens,” Kroger said definitively.

“Franchises,” Lund said. “Coordinated to atevi opening sections up for settlement.”

“Both very agreeable,” Bren said, “and I leave the distribution of the franchises to wiser heads than mine. The exterior work… atevi will undertake with appropriate safeguards.”

Kroger heard him out, leaning back in her chair, eyes narrowed. A pause that lengthened into significance later, she said slowly, deliberately: “Let me tell you a theory, Mr. Cameron.”

“Bren.”

“Bren.” By now, Kroger seemed amused. “Let me give you a word. Robotics.”

“It’s an interesting word.”

“A very industry-heavy word. And the means by which you mightoperate—the only means by which Mospheirans wouldhave worked outside, had I anything to say about it. Robots are the prevailing thought in Science about how to proceed with station repair, but we’ve lacked certain key information. Information that was in those archives, those damnablyhard to obtain archives. I’ve found the records—two days solid, I’ve spent chasing the information down.”

He’d heard the theories, in passing, but had paid little attention. He was listening now.

She leaned forward. “We lost the robots at the first star, such as we had, which was only the handful necessary to gather materials to manufacture the numbers required to construct a station, is the official word. Instead, our ancestors found themselves forced to use that handful in an environment that chewed through metal as fast as it ate human flesh. We arrived here, found an only marginally less hostile environment, and rather than use the resources, we risked lives to obtain or to repair those robots, and to build new ones, we risked more lives.”

“Why?” Bren asked, not quite the first time he had heard the story, but never in this environment, never with the sanction of a senior representative from Science, never coupled with the understanding whyrobots hadn’t been a viable option. It was something ruled out long ago. Wise agencies had said robots failed where heroic human beings succeeded. It was part of the legend of the arrival at the star.

Kroger’s mouth tightened into a hard smile. “Offically? Officially, two things militated against that piece of common sense, first that we didn’t have the resources to build the robots to get the resources, second, that in the Guild’s management of things, getting the resources was an extreme priority.”

“And unofficially?”

“We suspected but could never prove that the Guild wanted to keep the colonist population busy: by maintaining the extreme emphasis on heroism, on risk, they might keep the colonists willing to relocate. The Guild, according to those records, had a two step plan for getting out of this system. The Guild, according to those records, wanted to relocate to Maudit.”

This was new, utterly. Maudit, the place Kroger was saying the Guild had wanted to go, was the next system-site out from the earth of the atevi, a not-quite-planet in a thick asteroid belt.

“The Guild hopedwe’d go on to our target star once we’d just gathered resources here. This spot, in orbit around an inner planet, was safer—or so they believed—for interim measures, but the Guild hopedwe’d simply establish a small base until we had population enough to go out to Maudit’s orbit and operate there, where off-planet metal is hazardously more common. The well-known fact is, we damned near lost the colony, as was. This is a dirty system, Mr. Cameron, in every sense. This planet meets meteor swarms. We didn’t have that tracked; we were strangers to the system; we had no wealth of advance data on that fine a scale. Where we came from, we knew these hazards, but not to this degree, and this degree was lethal to the equipment.”

Lethal. The possibilities he’d begun to imagine took a severe blow.

“Do those mining robots still exist?”

“Hard to say. The big robots, the extrusion molders, survived—the station itself is evidence of that. They seem still to exist—somewhere on this station, according to the records. But the smaller ones, the machines that could safely mine the asteroids…” She shrugged. “The Guild has only opened a fraction of the station up so far. From those records, I believe one or two might still be in storage in Section Five. Most were cannibalized for their metal: in those first days it was the onlynearby metal we could lay hands on.”

“Can we make them work?”

“Mr. Cameron… Bren… ifthey still exist, ifyour atevi can make them run, they may well function, but they won’t work. Hardening. That’s another word I give to you. The lack of it on our initial equipment is why we suffered so much damage: we weren’t prepared for the environment we went into; we damn sure weren’t prepared for this one. The problem with making the miner-bots work, then, launched in a dirty system with minimal information, was getting the resources for spare parts. The problem with making them work nowand with any degree of economic viability is making them less vulnerable. In that archive, we have specifications, however none of them are going to enable a robot ora manned craft to operate safely in this system, let alone efficiently. What I am alsosure of is that we can do better. You want atevi to do it all, Mr. Cameron… Bren. But let me suggest that atevi manufacturing and design linkedto Mospheiran resources for electronics, optics, and robotics, can save a good many lives. We can do better.”

He was a translator, a maker of dictionaries, who had had to learn far more about physics and engineering than he had ever planned to know in the process of performing his job. There were certain topics on which he was naive, and the specifics of items locked up within specialized departments of the Mospheiran establishment contained many such topics.

“I find this very interesting,” he said. He utterly forgave the tone. “Go on.”

“Joint effort, joint development.”

“An atevi-Mospheiran company,” Tom Lund said. “Manufacturing these things.”

“Still interesting” Bren said. He’d envisioned shielding, to protect atevi operators. But shielding meant mass, and it became another worm-swallowing-its-tail situation: fuel to run the miners that gathered the fuel. Removing all that mass from the equation—atevi, shielding and the lifesupport—meant fuel savings, but the same problem held true, as Kroger had pointed out, if robotic equipment ate up all its profits in repairs. If their proposed space industry ever entered diminishing returns, the situation could become again what drove colonists off the station and onto the planet, when Phoenixhad drunk up all the fuel, all the resources, all that the colonists could do, because the captains of that long ago day had believed they could go off and find the earth of humans.

A lot of history had happened since then. The captains that had come back were dealing with a planetary population and an industry base that was capable. Capable not only of the manufacturing the Guild knew it wanted, but of analyzing what went wrong the first time and doing it right the second.

The solar system had proved capable of delivering nasty surprises, he’d known that from the incomplete records. He’d known, when he came to propose the atevi as miners, that those nasty surprises were a problem needing a solution. Howextensive a problem, he’d had to wait for those archived records to determine.

Astronomical observation, the tracking of celestial objects, had been lacking for several centuries among the atevi: astronomy having become a science in disgrace since the astronomers had failed to predict the Foreign Star in their skies. Even with the new revolution in the field, with the Astronomer Emeritus and his work, atevi were stillunaware of cosmic debris that didn’t make annual appearances as falling stars.

The Mospheirans had been even less curious about the lethal environment from which they’d escaped. The region of the solar system where they had to work to supply Phoenixand the station, let alone this new ship the captains wanted, was unmapped except in historical records he hoped were in that download.

He had expected bad news from those records and the initial surveys; but this… this robotics development… was an interesting piece of information from outside his domain.

He began to see much more accurately what they were up against.

He began to see all his proposals as achievable.

Still, she had raised questions… questions that definitely touched on his realm of expertise.

“You’re saying it was a political consideration that killed the robots.”