Inheritor

INHERITOR

Caroline J. Cherryh

Foreigner 03

For Elsie

1

The wind blew from the sea, out of the west, sweeping up to the heights of the balcony and stirring the white tablecloth with a briskness that made the steaming breakfast tea quite welcome. The view past the white-plastered balustrade was blue water, pale sky, and the famous cliffs of Elijiri, from which, the thought had crossed Bren Cameron’s mind, wi’itikün might just possibly launch themselves.

But no, the sea was surely too great a hazard for the small, elegant gliders.

“Eggs,” lord Geigi urged with a wave of his fingers. It was a delicate preparation, a sort of crusted souffle, eggs of a species the cook swore were innocent of toxins for the human guest.

Bren trusted himself to his staff, Tano and Algini having made his sensitivities to certain native spices quite clear to the cook; and having made equally clear, he was sure, the consequence of such an accident to the reputation of lord Geigi, who had a personal stake in not poisoning him. He allowed the servant to pile on a second helping of the very excellent spiced dish. Rare that he found something he liked that he dared eat in quantity—it was a piece of intradepartmental wisdom that the way to survive atevi cuisine was to vary the intake and not allow the occasional trace of an objectionable substance to become three and four traces at the same meal—but Tano and Algini thought this dish should be perfectly safe.

Geigi was pleased, clearly, at his enthusiasm for the cuisine, pleased in the crisp, clean air of a seaside morning, pleased in the presence of an important guest. Geigi’s appetite ran to another, far larger helping of the souffle. Black-skinned, golden-eyed, towering head and shoulders taller than any tall human, besides being gifted with an alkaloid-tolerant metabolism, Geigi, like any ateva of the mainland, viewed food as a central point of hospitality, the consumption of it a mark of confidence and assurance of honesty, understandable in a society in which assassins were an important guild, and a regular recourse in interpersonal and political disputes.

Such, as happened, were Tano and Algini, watching over Bren’s shoulder, standing near this breakfast table on the balcony; such, Bren was very sure, were the pair who hovered on Geigi’s side of the table, near the balustrade. Gesirimu, Tano had said, was the woman’s name, and Casurni, her senior partner—the pair in a dark, fashionable cut of clothes perfectly in character for a lord’s private security. And one assumed Tano knew. One assumed that, among the thousands of members of the Assassins’ Guild, the highest did know each other by reputation and, more importantly, by man’chi—that word something like loyalty, that meant nothing to do with hire, or birth, or anything humans were equipped to understand.

But it wasn’t necessary that humans understand the passions of atevi minds and souls—at least, it never had been necessary that humans understand, so long as all humans in the world—save one—occupied the island of Mospheira, which lay some distance across the haze of the blue and beautiful strait the other side of that balcony.

That was the state of atevi-human affairs under which Bren had begun his tenure in office not so many years ago. Translator, Foreign Affairs Field Officer, he was, in atevi terms, the paidhi-aiji, the onlyhuman permitted by the Treaty of Mospheira to set foot on the mainland.

He, Bren Cameron, descendant of spacefarers stranded for nearly two centuries on the earth of the atevi, was the one human alive who walked and lived among the atevi, and Bren, at twenty-seven, had it as his lifelong business and sacred trust to mediate the differences between atevi and humans.

Until last year that business had been much the same as that of his predecessors. Most of his days had been spent in the atevi capital of Shejidan, rendering the vocabulary of atevi documents into the one permitted human-atevi dictionary for the human University of Mospheira, for use in the training of other paidhün. A years-long program from which the twenty percent who did go all the way through to the degree in Foreign Affairs disappeared into the bowels of the Foreign Office, all but the one scoring next highest marks: the paidhi-successor, the other tenured graduate of the program (and usually not a voice of any importance at all), who waited in the wings for the Field Officer to quit, die in office, or need a two week vacation. As all the others waited, in the order of their scores, as the paidhi’s support staff in the Foreign Office. That was the program. That was one job the paidhi did. Train one successor and write dictionaries.

The other job was to serve as the conduit through which the Mospheiran State Department made a slow transfer of human technology into the atevi economy. The paidhi did have definite importance in that regard. And he served as his government’s eyes and ears in the field. He reported what data he gathered; he took requests from the atevi government and relayed them; he handled customs questions, and the occasional legal tie-up or bureaucratic snag. Based on what information he passed through, the University of Mospheira and the Mospheiran State Department slowly made decisions about what technology to release—debated sometimes for years over the release of a word, let alone, say, microchips. The goal was to keep the technology compatible, to keep, say, the standards such that a grade of wire produced on the continent could be connected inside a toaster built on Mospheira with no thought of difficulty.

He’d never looked for things to change appreciably in his lifetime, not the toaster, not the society and not the level of technology. Steady, economically stable progress: that had been the design for the atevi-human future. Interlocked economies, meshing just like perfectly standardized nuts and bolts.

Now, just since last year, there was one more human on the mainland, one Jase Graham, born lightyears removed from the earth of the atevi, and certainly not a product of the University’s Field Officer candidate program.

And Jase Graham’s arrival was why he, Bren, was sitting on lord Geigi’s balcony eating a souffle of spiced eggs and relying on two assassins’ professional judgment that there was nothing by design or default harmful in the dish.

The situation and his job had changed radically overnight when the starship had turned up, the same starship that, two hundred years ago, had left his ancestors to fend for themselves among the atevi. The atevi government (which had elevated intrigue to an art form) had consequently suspected the human government of Mospheira (which Bren well knew couldn’t site a new toilet in a public park without political dithering) of double-crossing atevi high, wide, and with considerable cleverness for nearly two hundred years.

It was not the case, of course; there had been no human double-cross of the atevi, though for a time even the paidhi had had to wonder whether his own government really had been more clever than his park-toilet estimate. The humans on Mospheira had had no idea that the ship would return. They had, in fact, believed quite to the contrary.

As it had turned out, the State Department on Mospheira had truly reacted as desperately and as ignorantly as he’d feared. They had tried to contact the ship directly, and in secrecy, to secure its alliance exclusively for Mospheira.

They’d tried, in short, to shut the atevi out of the dealings.

If they’d asked, Bren could have told them they were fools, that you didn’t double-cross the atevi. To be sure, the State Department at first had been unable to secure his advice; but they hadn’t listened to him once he did get through, no—since his advice hadn’t agreed with what their fears and their biases said they should do in responding to the Atevi Threat.

The atevi government had, of course, found them out. Sharp atevi eyes had spotted the new star that attached itself to the abandoned space station in the heavens, and atevi antennae had intercepted the communications between Mospheira and the ship. The atevi had promptly taken action, in which Bren had been inextricably involved, that had placed them in direct communication with the starship.

Mospheira’s maneuvers hadn’t won the sympathy of the starship, which had turned out willing to deal with the atevi and with the human enclave on an equal basis— anyone, the starship maintained, was welcome up in space, but the one thing they wouldn’t agree to was time.

The ship wanted help, manpower to repair the station abandoned two centuries before, and they wanted it immediately, or as immediately as a world without a manned spacecraft could build one. The ship cared nothing about the careful work of centuries not to destabilize the atevi government—which in turn supported the atevi industrial base, which in turn supplied the factories and shops on Mospheira and the humaneconomy.

But with the mutability of self-interest, Mospheira’s attitudes had shifted. Of coursethe State Department supported the atevi government, and of course it was more than willing to work with the atevi to obtain materials the atevi needed to go into space equally with humans, and of course it supported the paidhi, any paidhi the atevi wanted, just so the Treaty stood firm.

Meanwhile the average human citizen was both scared of the ship in the skies, which bid to change a way of life they’d thought would go on forever, and scared of the atevi, who had defeated them once in war and who were alleged in popular understanding to be utterly incomprehensible to humans—this at the same time atevi were supposedly growing more and more like humans, having television and fast food, skiing and soccer—which of course defined everything.

So somehow, without destabilizing the atevi, as they’d been taught all their lives would happen if someone slipped too much tech to atevi too fast, they were going to merge the cultures instantly and have universal peace.

No wonder the population of Mospheira was confused.

As a result, Bren Cameron no longer exclusively served the President on Mospheira who’d allowed that state of confusion to develop. He damn sure no longer exclusively served the higher-ups in the State Department, who’d tried to browbeat the Foreign Office and to use the situation for domestic political leverage.

The Foreign Office within the State Department, well, yes, he was loyal to them—if the commotion his actions had caused had left anyone of hisstaff and hissuperiors in office.

He’d last heard from his old chief Shawn Tyers two months ago. His personal bet was that the President wouldn’t dare jerk Shawn out of office, because without Shawn, the Mospheiran government had nochain on the paidhi. But even the two months since he’d last talked by phone was a long time, and the silence since implied that Shawn had no power to call him as often as he’d like; or, evidently, to send him mail.

And by now (unless Shawn had somehow protected within the system the computer codes Shawn had ingeniously slipped him on his last trip home) the Field Officer’s access codes to the Mospheiran computer net were useless. His access to Shawn himself grew increasingly less assured.

He didn’t know the true distribution of power in Mospheiran governmental offices any longer. He knew who mightbe in charge. And for that reason he wouldn’t link his precious computer to Mospheiran channels right now for all the fish in the briny sea—because without the protection of updated codes and the access they gave, some electronic disease might come flashing back to its vulnerable systems from people who really didn’t want his computer to hold the records it did.

A situation that half a year ago had had the Foreign Secretary hiding computer codes in a cast on the paidhi’s arm didn’t inspire the paidhi to confidence in the State Department even at that time, and his government having since then reacted in internal partisan panic and having done things and issued statements which, unmediated, could have blown the fragile peace apart, he didn’t think the situation had improved.

So with Shawn and every living soul in the Foreign Office who actually knew the atevi seeming not to have power to prevent such folly, the paidhi, Bren Cameron, loyal to the previous regime, but damned sure not to the present one, conceived it as his personal duty to stay in his post on the mainland and notto come home.

The paidhi counted himself lucky to be sitting on this balcony, in that consideration.

The paidhi reflected soberly that humans and atevi alike were extremely lucky that the situation, touchy as it occasionally became, had never quite surpassed the ability of sensible humans and sensible atevi to reason with one another.

The fact was, their two species hadreached a technological level where they had a common ground for understanding. It was possible that the threatened economic and social destabilization was no longer a justifiable fear. The trouble was—it was a deceptively common ground. Or a commonly deceptive ground—again, that interface was the paidhi’s department.

Fortunately, too, the essential interests of both species were not incompatible, meaning that both of them could adapt to space—and it had been the aim of both species and the better-thinking members of both governments to get there some time this century, even before the ship reentered the picture.

But the common ground was treacherous in the extreme. There had already been moments of extreme risk: a particularly nasty moment when he lay senseless in a Mospheiran hospital, when conservative political interests on Mospheira, led by Secretary of State Hampton Durant, had sent in the paidhi-successor to replace him, hoping to make irrevocable changes while their opposition in the government was having a crisis.

And they’d nearly succeeded.

Deana Hanks, dear Deana, daughter of a prominent conservative on Mospheira, had within one week man-a*ged to founder two hundred years of cooperation when she’d used the simple words faster-than-light to lord Geigi of Sarini province.

The same lord Geigi with whom and on whose balcony Bren shared breakfast.

Simple word, FTL. Base-level concept—to human minds. Not so for atevi. Through petty malice or towering folly, Deana had managed in a single phrase to threaten the power structure which governed in this province and the sizeable surrounding territory, which in turn held together the Western Association, the Treaty, and the entire industrialized world—because FTL threatened the very essence of atevi psychology and belief.

The atevi brain, steered by the principal atevi language (a chicken or the egg situation), was everso much more clever than the human brain at handling anything to do with numbers. The atevi language required calculation simply to avoid infelicitous numbers in casual utterance.

Math? Atevi cut their teeth on it. And questions abounded. There could not be paradox in the orderly universe on which atevi philosophy depended.

Fortunately, an atevi astronomer, a despised class of scientists since their failure to predict the human Landing, had been able to find a mathematical logic in the FTL paradox that the philosophical Determinists of the peninsula could accept. Vital reputations had been salvaged, the paidhi-successor had been bounced the hell back across the strait where she could lecture to conservative human heritage groups to her heart’s content and harm no one.

But as a result of Deana’s brief foray onto the continent, and thanks to the publicity that had flown about atevi society on what had otherwise been a quietly academic question, the FTL concept had leapt into atevi popular culture last fall.

He’d had to explain to the atevi populace on national television that the human ship which had come to their world had entered their solar systemand come from another sun, which was what all those stars were they saw in their skies at night, and about which most atevi had never wondered overmuch. Yes, humans had fallen down to earth on the petal sails of legend (there were even primitive photographs) and no, humans were not originally from the moon. But the difference between a solar system and a galaxy and the dilemma of the origin of humans, until now shrouded in secrecy from atevi, was up for question.

Yes, he’d said, there were other suns, and no, such suns weren’t in this solar system, and yes, there were many, many other stars but not all of them had life.

So now the atevi, who had been building a heavy lift rocket launch system, in an undeclared space race with Mospheira, were building an earth-to-orbit spacecraft that would land like an airplane, thanks to the information the ship in the heavens had released to them. That spacecraft under construction was what his entire trip to this province was about.

And he had to admit he was far less worried about the spacecraft and its materials documentation dumping unconsidered tech wholesale into the atevi economy (although a year ago the proposed import of a digital clock had—justifiably—raised storms of concern in the Foreign Office) than he was about the work of the gentle, slightly daft atevi astronomer who’d come up with that mathematical construct that let them translate FTL into atevi understanding.

The elderly astronomer, Grigiji, who might be the most dangerous man to come out of those mountains since the last atevi conqueror, had been the guest of lordly choice throughout the winter social season, feted and dined, wined and elevated to legend among the amateur philosophers and mathematicians who were the hangers-on of any lordly house—Grigiji, the gentle, the kindly professor, had taught any hearer who would listen (and the respect accorded him approached religious fervor in atevi minds) his quietly posed and philosophically wandering views.

Now Grigiji was back in his mountain observatory confusing his graduate students. And the paidhi, who had survived the social shocks of the paidhi-successor’s adventurous offering of faster-than-light, didn’t even want to imaginewhat was going on in atevi universities all over the continent in the last several months, as that faster-than-light concept, along with the mathematics that supported it, hit the lecture halls and the ever fertile minds of those same atevi students, who were neither hangers-on nor amateurish.

Considering the excitement the old man had raised, and considering the ability of atevi to take any mathematical model and elaborate on it, the paidhi on certain bad nights lay awake imagining atevi simply, airily declaring at year’s end they’d discovered a physics that didn’t needa launch vehicle ora starship to convey them to the stars, and, oh, by the way, they didn’t truly need humans, either.

The paidhi, who thought he’d had a very adequate mathematics education in his preparation for his office, thank you, had had six very short months to study up on a branch of mathematics outright omittedfrom the Mospheiran university curriculum for security reasons—mathematical concepts now spreading limbs and branches in other areas of atevi academe besides the lately fashionable astronomers.

And all this brain-bending study he did only so he, the paidhi, who was not a mathematical genius, could laboriously translate the documents of atevi who weremathematical geniuses—to humans on the island and on the ship who didn’t half suspect the danger they were in from a species they thought dependent on them.

He hoped at least to keep well enough abreast of matters mathematical so that conceptual translation remained possible between two languages, and two (or counting the ship’s officers, three)governments; he also had to translate between what was formerly two, but definitely now three, sets of scientists and engineers, all of whom were flinging concepts at each other with a rapidity that numbed the sensibilities.

Now humans who had never met atevi face to face—the crew of that ship—were proposing to bring atevi into space and to hand atevi the kind of power that, by what he understood, couldn’t be let loose on a planet.

Only last year the University advisory committee on Mospheira, who did know something of atevi, had maintained that nuclear energy, like digital clocks and the concept of time more finely reportable than atevi numerologists were accustomed to reckon it, was still far too dangerous to put into atevi hands. And humans up there proposed to bring the technology of a stardrive into atevi awareness.

What the humans on that ship still had difficulty getting through their heads was that it hadn’t been just a bad day on which the space age humans who had landed on the planet had legitimately lostthe war they’d fought with the then steam age atevi. Humans had really, militarily lostthe war, so that, indeed, and by the resulting Treaty, Mospheira had been surrendering their technology a step at a time to the atevi of the Western Association—Treaty mandate, not a voluntary choice.

And in all those years, a process mediated by two centuries of paidhün, technological change had been deliberately slowed and managed so that atevi and humans could achieve technological parity without ever again destabilizing atevisociety and starting another ateviwar.

The ship, by the conversations he’d had with its captain, and with Jason Graham, with whom he shared quarters back in the capital, seemed convinced atevi would adapt.

He hoped they were right. He was by no means convinced.

As it was, certain factions within the Western Association of the atevi were viewing with considerable suspicion the flood of knowledge and engineering pouring down on them from the sky, knowledge and space age science that could be turned—very easily—against them, in their regional and historical quarrels with the capital of the Association, situated at Shejidan.

The current aiji, Tabini, the atevi president, whose capital was at Shejidan, was ethnically Ragi, a distinction the ship didn’t understand. Tabini-aiji, whose position was both elective and to some meaningful degree hereditary, was also clever, and bent on taking every bit of power he could get into the atevi central government, for good and foresighted reasons, by Bren’s estimation; but tell that to the provinces whose ancestral rights were being taken away by this increased centralization.

And in that light, damned right the atevi of the Peninsula had a reason to worry about the space program in the hands of the Ragi atevi; most of the atevi of the Peninsula weren’t Ragi—they were Edi, who had been conquered by the Ragi five hundred odd years ago.

While lord Geigi, across the table from him, likewise sipping his tea in a dawn wind, wasn’t even Edi: he was Maschi, which was a complete history unto itself, but he was an Edi lord. And, to add to the puzzle—which neither the ship nor his roommate would understand—until lately, last year, in fact, Geigi had been in a very uncomfortable position, trying to do well economically and legislatively for his district, trying to be a moderate in a region of well-armed hotheads who were almost-but-not-quite his ethnic relatives, while trying not to lose what humans might call his soul in dealings with Tabini, who headed the Ragi atevi, the Western Association, and the civilized world.

Tabini, even before the advent of the ship, had been dealing with Mospheira hand over fist for every piece of human tech he could get his hands on. Now Tabini dealt with the ship instead, wanting whatever technical diagrams and materials information the ship would send down to the great dish at Mogari-nai and into his control. Tabini was hell-bent on new tech, and all it implied about central power and respect for the traditional mathematical philosophies which still constituted the atevi view of the universe.

Geigi had been the one provincial lord who, thanks to his unique position as technologically and mathematically educated, anda Lord of the larger Ragi Association, anda philosophical Determinist (as the peninsular atevi generally were), suddenly had had to find honest answers to the FTL paradox that Deana Hanks had posed.

FTL was a devastating challenge (via a mathematics implied in its new universe-view) to the philosophy by which lord Geigi and all his Edi neighbors lived and conducted their affairs: if something could move faster than light, science, which thought it had understood the universe, was wrong and the peninsular philosophers and all the Edi who had been part of a philosophical rebellion against Absolutist number theory had been made to look like fools.

Yet Geigi, tottering on the brink of public embarrassment and a loss of respect that could collapse his financial dealings, had sought the truth face to face, had challenged Bren-paidhi to answer for him the mathematical questions Deana-paidhi had raised.

The support and resources Bren-paidhi had gotten from Tabini himself had enabled him to answer that question, and that answer had undoubtedly saved Geigi’s reputation and probably his life, counting the financial and political chaos that would have erupted in the province.

Bren rather likedthe plump and studious lord, this man who posed courageous questions of his universe because if it killed him, lord Geigi wanted the truth: baji-naji, as atevi put it, turn the world upside down, lord Geigi didn’t want some surface assurance that would let him ignore the universe. No, he wasa scientifically educated man, not because an atevi lord had to be, but because he wanted to embrace the universe, understand it, see it in all its mathematical beauty.

Understand the human side of the universe—maybe Geigi could even approach that.

But lord Geigi would not, on a gut level, understand being liked, his language having no such word and his atevi heart feeling no such emotion. What went on inside Geigi was equally complex, it might produce the same results, but it was not human; and that was the first understanding of all understandings the paidhi had to accept in dealing with atevi.

As a human, he likedlord Geigi; he also respectedGeigi’s courage and good sense, and that latter sentiment Geigi couldunderstand, at least closely enough to say there was congruence enough between their viewpoints for association (a very atevi word) of Geigi’s interests and his—in the way atevi looked at things. Geigi also seemed to respect him, the paidhi, as the one official of Tabini’s predominantly Ragi household ironically most able to understand the tightrope Geigi walked as a Maschi in an Edi district in a Ragi nation. That was another point on which they were associated, that atevi word of such emotionally charged relationship.

Or their mutual numbers added, giving them no cosmic choice but association.

It was a lot likefriendship. The human in the equation might likethe man. But add them up to equal friendship? That wasn’t what Geigi’s atevi nerves were capable of feeling, let alone what Geigi’s atevi brain thought was going on; and that very delicate distinction was true of any atevi, no matter what. Basic law of the Foreign Service: Atevi aren’t friends. Atevi can’t be friends. They don’t like you. They’re not capable of liking you. The wiring isn’t there.

Neverforget it. Neverexpect it. Start building that construct to satisfy yourneeds and you’re dead. Or you’ll bedead. And the peace will be in shambles.

Based on his own experiences, he’d add, if he were, like his own predecessor Wilson-paidhi, talking to a university class in Foreign Studies, Don’t lead them to expect too much of you, either.

He hoped Geigi didn’t attribute Tabini-aiji’s shift of attitude and the grant of manufacturing in this district directly to the paidhi’s doing. That would be a mistake, and dangerous. Tabini’s actions were for Tabini’s reasons, and he never, ever wanted to get between the aiji of Shejidan and any of the lords of the Association. A human had no business whatsoever in the lines of man’chi, of loyalty between lord and lord, and, taking that one element of his predecessor’s advice greatly to heart, he never intended to stand there.

A brown lizard whipped along the balustrade. Itfeared nothing. Djossi flowers were in bloom again with the coming of spring, and the little reptile dived in among the blooms and heart-shaped leaves, on the hunt for something tasty.

Humans came and humans might go. But the land went on, and the sea washed the rocks, and atevi, like Geigi, who knew such rhythms of this world of their birth in blood and bone… were a force to be reckoned with, wherever it regarded this planet.

He was glad, seeing this dawn, that he had opted to guest in lord Geigi’s house. His security had had very serious misgivings about his accepting Geigi’s invitation to stay with him in his ancestral home rather than in the Guild-guaranteed hotel. It was unprecedented that a person of Tabini-aiji’s household (and so the paidhi was accounted, socially speaking) should guest in this house, which until recently had not had the status, the resources, or the security clearance to receive such a visitor from the court at Shejidan.

Well, the considerations once in the way of such a move had changed. And clearance had come from the aiji himself for the paidhi to accept Geigi’s invitation.

One couldn’t say lord Geigi was particularly in the paidhi’s debt for that latter change of heart, either. In that, Tabini had been informed and had decided for his own reasons to change Geigi’s status.

Figure that lord Geigi, too, was risking something in having such an unprecedented guest, since it certainly would be talked about—talked about on the evening news, coast to coast if it was an otherwise quiet day—and would set lord Geigi at some odds with the politics of his Edi neighbors: not seriously so, Bren hoped.

But personally the paidhi, by taking this very sip of tea (out of a kitchenful of herbs lethal to humans), bet his life that Geigi was exactly what he seemed. He had bet it last night and he had slept quite soundly under this roof. Wilson-paidhi would hold that he was in danger of transgressing common sense, and that a paidhi who started having such confidence in his assessments of atevi was headed for serious trouble, but, ah, well, here he was.

On the other hand, where didhe invest emotionally? His treatment of the paidhi-successor and his refusal to knuckle under to the head of the State Department meant, effectively, that he couldn’t go home. Meant he would have no more chances to sit by the sea on the other side of this strait. Meant he would have no more breakfasts on his brother’s front porch—and this place, this moment, this associationin an alien government was what he’d traded it all for, in some very real sense: the chance to sit here, in the position he occupied with an alien lord. He had a mother, a brother, an estranged father, and his brother’s family all over there in that haze that obscured the strait, and there was a chance he’d never see his mother again, considering the troubling reports he’d gotten on her health this winter. He was bitter about that penalty his government made him and her pay; he was angry, and he asked himself at odd and very dangerous moments like this one, if it wasn’t psychologically or professionally acceptable for him to build careful little fences around certain atevi in his mind and, one-sidedly, thinkabout liking them, what in hellwas he going to do?

He had a human roommate. He had Jase Graham. There was that.

He could likeJase Graham. That was permitted, psychologically, politically, in every way approved by the State Department; that was permissible.

But he didn’t dare quite turn loose of his suspicion of a man from a human culture centuries divorced from his own, a man who didn’t, on his side, offer deep confidences to him. Geigi had flung his lifeinto Bren’s hands when he welcomed him and the aiji’s Guild members under his roof with every evidence of delight. They’d spent the previous evening and this morning discussing sea shells, architecture, and Geigi’s marriage prospects. Jase, who had lived under the same roof, shared dinners and spent the majority of the last six months with him, had trouble talking about his home or his family or his ship’s whereabouts over the last couple of centuries.

And that seemed a significant reticence.

It takes timeto travel between stars, Jase had said. And, We did our jobs, that’s all.

But where wereyou? he’d asked Jase, and Jase had taken a piece of paper and tried to draw him a diagram of the ship’s location for some significant period of time relative to a star he couldn’t identify, but he’d made no sense of it. Then they’d gotten a bottle of shibei and tried to talk personally, but Jase said, I don’t know, to all questions of how that star where Jase said they’d been sitting for years related to where they were now.

And to, What’s out there? Jase had said to him, It’s just stars. It’s just stars, that’s all.

Well, maybe it wasn’t what a human who’d dreamed of seeing the space station, who’d dedicated his teen-aged years, his romantic hopes and his adult life to the hope of advancing the planet just to the edge of space, wanted to hear from a man who’d been born to it.

Maybe it had turned things just the least bit sour in the relationship that Jase, after all the excitement with which he’d welcomed him to the world, hadn’t had wonders to tell him. He didn’t know why he felt put off by Jase Graham.

But he hadn’t been happy since the world changed and since he’d shared his world with an unhappy, often scared young man. He knew that.

He didn’t like to think about that fact on this pleasant morning when his mind had been intermittently, though they were talked dry by now, trying to manage the intricacies of conversation with an atevi lord he admired but didn’t know all that intimately.

He most of all didn’t like to think about the fact that, while he was on this side of the strait coaching Jase in a language that wasn’t easy to learn, his own mother was suffering phone calls in the middle of the night from crackpots who hated him, crackpots the government over there couldn’t seem to catch.

He didn’t like to think about the fact that his almost-fiancee (whom he wasn’t totally sure he loved, the way he wasn’t totally sure nowadays he likedanything in the world without checking his subconscious) had gotten tired of waiting and tired of his absences. So she said. His belief now was that she’d grown scared of similar midnight phone calls.

But whatever the reason, she’d married a man she didn’t in the least love; and there went another tie he’d once had to Mospheira.

Barb was safe now, off his conscience, and married to Paul Saarinson, who was well-placed in the government. He was sure she didn’t get threatening phone calls nowadays.

His brother, Toby, on the other hand, had no such refuge. His brother had suffered phone threats against his family until his kids were afraid to walk to school in their quiet, tiny town on the north shore of the island, a mostly rural place where behavior like that didn’t happen and people hadn’t been in the habit of locking their doors.

He didn’t like to think about the fact that if he did go home for a visit and to try to defuse the political situation via consultation with the State Department and the President, he might find himself arrested right at the airport.

Oh, he didn’t think the Mospheiran government could hold him, for one thing because the aiji in She-jidan would threaten global war to get him back, and for another because Tabini-aiji definitely would not accept Deana Hanks as his replacement. He reckoned either one was a sufficiently powerful incentive for the government of Mospheira to behave itself on that surface level, and had toyed with the idea of a few hours’ visit to try to straighten matters out.

Over all, however, he wasn’t willing to bet his life or world peace on his own government’s common sense the way he bet it right now on Geigi’s cook’s choice of teas.

Trust that he was safe on this exposed balcony, drinking this tea maybe seventy miles from an atevi resort area overlooked by radar installations looking for illicit human airplanes? Yes. Crazy as the world had become, he did trust that he was safe here. An ateva who’d conspired against him and then changed his mind had changed his mind not because of the law (which allowed assassination as an alternative to lawsuits) but because it was no longer in Geigi’s interests to do him harm.

A human enemy on Mospheira, especially a crazy one, was another matter entirely; and the members of his own species who’d started calling his brother and his mother at three in the morning to threaten them because of actions he took on the mainland were liable to do anything.

So if he did have to visit Mospheira before they got a ship into space and made all issues moot, who knew? Certainly there was reason that chief presidential advisor George Barralin and others high in the administration would feel the heat of their under-the-table, bribe-passing supporters if they found him within their reach and had to yield him back not only to the mainland but back to hold the paidhi’s office again, bowing to atevi pressure. They’d done that already, sending him back here straight off the operating table six months ago. But, then, that was no surprise. George and the President were good at bending to pressure. That was why their supporters put them in office.

So, round one, they’d tried firing him. That was what the Deana Hanks affair had been.

Round two, Deana had tried to build her own power base among atevi by (against all carefully considered law and State Department regulation) contacting atevi opposed to Tabini.

Her ignominious return to the island had left George and the President in rather an embarrassing mess, because while they hadto talk to atevi to keep the industrial raw goods flowing, there was no paidhi-successor but Deana who wasn’t either older and rooted to Mospheira, or so junior as to be collegiate. A replacement for him even if completely qualified would be no more acceptable to the atevi than Deana Hanks had been, because hewas the one Tabini insisted on having. And if the atevi bounced their choice back at them again, it just wouldn’t inspire confidence among the Mospheiran electorate that the Mospheiran government was in control of things.

The President of Mospheira, elected with the support of various business interests, including Gaylord Hanks, father of Deana Hanks, got his advice from his advisor George Barrulin and the Secretary of State, Hampton Durant.

The Foreign Office, why, that was a mere bureau within the Department of State. It always hadbeen a mere bureau, run by the Foreign Secretary, presently Shawn Tyers, who couldn’t get a phone call through to his officer in the field.

So his was the only advice that might come to the President from anyone talking to the atevi. And good old George wouldn’t pass it on to the President if it didn’t serve the interests of George.

Well, lord Geigi at least had ceased to think that he ought to be shot. And lord Geigi had far more class than to allude to that old business.

The paidhi, for all his other grief, won a point, occasionally. He had to be content with that.

“If only you had another day here,” lord Geigi remarked on a deep sigh, “one might arrange a day of fishing. The yellowtail are running at this season, or will. Absolutely a thrill, when they begin jumping. I had one land on the deck of the boat. It was a veryexciting moment.”

“One doesn’t doubt so,” Bren said, and laughed. “A grown one?” It was his impression they were a large species.

“The deck crew couldn’t decide whether they wanted the beast in the water or in the locker. He escaped through the rail and probably to this day laughs at us as he swims past. I think he would have been a record. But I wasn’t measuring, nand’ paidhi, I assure you.”

“Oh, you do tempt me.” It had been an eight-day series of cities and plants and labs. He hadn’t rested in Guild-sanctioned hotels anywhere as well as he’d slept last night, not even on the luxury-equipped plane. And possibly Tabini could spare him a day. Possibly, too, it wasn’t a peninsular plot to fling him overboard. Possibly he could convince Tano and Algini that their protection of him during a day’s actual vacation was much easier if he was surrounded by all that wonderful blue water.

But most probably he should fly back to the capital this afternoon, and work on the plane while he did so. He had a towering lot of notes to enter, some export lists to glance over and approve, and a handful of quality control questions which had to be translated for the lab technicians in the last two facilities.

“Yellowtail,” lord Geigi said wickedly, “cooked over the coals. Nothing finer.”

“Lord Geigi, if you go on you will surely corrupt me, and I haveto be back in the capital tomorrow. If I don’t get my work done the stack of paper may reach orbital height before our ship does. I so wish I could accept.”

He took a chance—he hadn’t even realized he’d taken it. It was absolutely against Departmental policy to make a joke with strangers of rank, the language was that chancy even for him. But he did it with his guards and he did it routinely with Tabini, of all people: the aiji of Shejidan, whose displeasure was far more to fear.

Still, a lord in his province, touchy about his dignity, facing a human representative of the aiji of Shejidan, who had status of very indeterminate sort, was worthy of fear, too.

Geigi was amused. Geigi seemed mollified at the turn-down, even seemed pleased at the paidhi’s assumption of intimacy.

So he had done exactly correctly when Geigi had made his rather stunning overture of a local and rustic pleasure to a human guest and a guest of state at that. It was yet one more of those small moments of triumph that the paidhi treasured unto himself, as part of his job—and a part he couldn’t report nowadays, to a State Department convinced he was a fool as well as a turncoat.

And he couldn’t explain to anyone else in the world, not even the man from the ship who shared his quarters, why it pleased him. Except it was the real job he’d signed on to do, and it was occasionally nice to have those little operational checks to prove to himself that yes, the larger civilization-threatening decisions he was taking routinely on himself were possibly founded on a more microscopic-level understanding of the people.

“Well, well,” Geigi said, “the sun waits not even for the aiji, so I suppose it won’t wait for us. We should be on our way.”

That signaled that the breakfast was done. Security and servants moved in about their separate business. As Geigi rose from the table, Bren did, and accepted the formal, many-buttoned coat from the junior security (his own) who had had custody of it. He allowed the young woman to hold it for him to put on, and let her deftly adjust his braid to the outside of the fashionable stiff collar as he did so. He hadn’t realized he’d been chilled through the shirt, but it was the case. Spring had offered the chance to sit on the balcony, had offered sea air and that marvelous view, and he’d said yes in an instant, never thinking that atevi called brisk what humans called bitter.

He bowed, Geigi inclined his head. Everyone was relaxed and polite. He had to visit his room on the way out and gather up his papers, in the custody of yet another junior security agent, also of the Guild. The luggage would make its way separately to the plane and be waiting for him.

But in all maneuvers of this sort, Tano and Algini never took their eyes off him, and insisted on having a car provided by the Assassins’ Guild (oddly enough it was the one way, just as the Guild certified certain hotels, to be absolutely certain a vehicle was safe) to transport him while he was in the province and outside the ordinary security precautions that surrounded the aiji’s household in Shejidan.

It was an official visit designed not just to showcase Patinandi Aerospace, the most important industrial complex in Sarini Province, but to allow the paidhi to talk directly to the engineers at this and at other facilities in recent days. He had allotted the morning to the former aircraft assembly plant, not enough time, but he would exit with a load of paper notes and a wallet full of computer files.

And thatwould go to the staff in Shejidan, the paidhi’s now quite extensive clerical and technical staff. He had to go over his notes for the event, which he should be able to do in the car. Lord Geigi was coming too, but he had his own entourage. Once at the plant, he had a briefing and, he was sure, a similar set of pamphlets and papers would come from the company officials, even including personal requests just to be carriedto the capital and left with the aiji’s staff, a courtesy which official visitors had performed on trips to the capital from ages ago when the mails didn’t come in at all reliably.

The collection of data and the succession of meetings and presentations was down to a foreseeable routine. He had, among the security personnel, one hard-pressed member of his secretarial staff who on receiving the news that he was going with the paidhi on this tour had acted as if he were being offered a government-paid holiday.

Possibly the young man washaving the time of his young life just seeing the interiors of the Guild-approved hotels, usually luxurious, and the views from the Guild-escorted tours, and even just looking out over the land from the windows of the airplane; but the last he’d seen of him, the young man was collating the papers from the last stop on the tour and trying to bring sense out of them, with hisbreakfast a cold roll and a cup of tea in the downstairs of Geigi’s stately home.

He did trust the papers would be in order before the next set was added to the stack: the young man—Surieji was his name—hadn’t let him down yet. And as late as this morning was still cheerful.

2

The structures didn’t look much like a spacecraft yet, either from the ground floor of the immense hangar or from the ladders of the catwalk that ascended to a dizzy height above, in a building with very small windows and spotlights high in the rafters. The structural elements which were the very beginnings of the space-frame were cradled in supports, there, and there, and there. Some elements were forms on which the fuselage would take shape, in composites and ceramics. He saw elements of the wings which he was told were real and ready for their control surfaces. Atevi workers moved among such shapes, dwarfed by the scale.

One could grow dangerously hypnotized by the shifting sizes, and by the heights. A human did grow accustomed to a slightly larger scale of things, living on the mainland and among atevi, whose steps and chairs and door-handles were always a little off a human’s estimation of where steps and chair seats and door handles reasonably ought to be. He was tall, on Mospheira, but he stood about the height of an atevi nine-year-old, and he wisely and constantly minded his step when he clambered about an atevi-designed catwalk, or as he paused for an atevi official to point out the huge autoclave that was a major step in the composite technology.

“Unique to this plant,” the man said proudly, a statement which might as well have been, The only one in the world, although the atevi supervisor might not have been aware that Mospheira’s prototype autoclave had died the death of No Replacement Seals a decade ago.

It was more than the pitch of the steps he watched. He walked cautiously for other reasons, moving through this crowd of black-skinned, golden-eyed gods, expressionless and implacable in manner, all with local and some with national agendas, men and women all distinguished by colors of rank, of post, of heritage and association.

His security disliked this part of the tours. On invitation of the Director he climbed to a catwalk exposed to the view of no less than seven hundred strangers below, any one of whom—or their relatives admitted to the plant for the occasion—could turn out to be a threat to his life. Such would be unregistered and unlicensed operators, of course, of which the Assassins’ Guild and the law took a dim, equally lethal view; but still there was a threat, and he chose to put it at the back of his mind.

One of the lords constantly near him was, of course, lord Geigi, who outranked the lot, and who had already had his chance to do the paidhi harm; but there were lesser lords, and provincial elected representatives, and various secretaries and aides, all of whom had their small window of opportunity for whatever reason, including a deranged mind, to try to sabotage the atevi chance at space.

He was (while watching the crowd, the lords, the directors, and his step) negotiating dark, unfamiliar ladders above increasingly dizzy heights, occasionally with spotlights glaring in his eyes. He kept his hand at all times on the rail and refused to be hurried until, in this largest of all assembly buildings, he had a view of the whole floor.

He had no fear of heights. He skied. Or, well, he had skied, before the trips home had become an impossibility for him; and he lacked opportunity to reach the snowy Bergid, where atevi attempted the sport on new and chancily maintained runs. During this winter, he had grown accustomed instead to such catwalks and ladders, to echoing machine plants and clean-suited laboratories, to small spaces of structural elements that were diagrams on his desk back in the atevi capital of Shejidan.

This— thiswas the first sight of pieces that would become a spacecraft, pieces that were real, solid, tangible, pieces bound someday for space, the dream he’d studied so long, worked so hard, hoped so much, to have happen—in the generation after him.

The paidhi all this particular morning had been listening to the detailed problems of atevi engineers, technical matters and problems arisen from a rushed schedule and translated designs, plans and manuals and measurement standards in an alien language. That meant for several moderately pleasant hours he’d been doing the paidhi’s old, original job, patching up dictionaries.

Atevi engineers adopted or made up a word for something hitherto unknown to atevi, and the paidhi dutifully wrote it down and passed it to other engineers via the official dictionary on the computer links that went to all the plants now. Science and engineering were creating their own words for things for which atevi had had no word, no concept, a year ago. The atevi language as a whole had never hesitated to assume technical terms into its grammar—the word arispesawas a hybrid of which he was entirely innocent.

He had his case full of reports, besides, on what worked, what didn’t work well, and what the legislature, the Space Committee, or the laboratories and manufacturing plants upstream of the technological waters needed to improve. But, God, there wasn’t all that much to complain of. At the beginning of last fall he’d toured mines.

Records from the abandoned station, the library which had come along to this star with what had been intended as a colonial space-based establishment—the sort of thing the paidhi had used to turn over to the mainland a piece at a time—had in the past gone for trade goods. But now there was a new source of ideas in the skies, pouring them down for free. Primary among those gifts was the design thisspacecraft was using.

Whether Mospheira had already owned any of the records involved in this free transaction was an answer he still hadn’t gotten past Mospheira’s official silence, but he strongly doubted it. For one thing, the humans who had abandoned the space station to come down to the planet had done so in two waves. The first humans had landed by parachuting capsules into the planetary atmosphere, because the station officials had refused the would-be colonists the resources and the designsto build a reusable landing craft.

The second wave of the Landing had come down to the planet only after the ship had left, as they claimed, to find their way home; and after the station, increasingly undermanned, had begun to fail. Station officials at that time had lacked the resources and the manpower to build a reusable craft, so with what records they had, the last hold-outs and members of management had parachuted in, too, with no landing craft ever built. The station officials might have brought the library with them; or they might not. The craft described in the design sent down from the ship wasn’t heavy-lift like the chemical rockets of the Mospheiran pro-spacers. In the plans of the ship, the heavy-lift aspect didn’t matter. Raw material, the ship either had or could get in orbit the way their ancestors had gotten it, so the ship captain said. The essential thing was workers to use it. So Jason Graham said.

History also held certain troubling details of worker fatalities Jase had never alluded to, the very thing that had driven the colonists down to the planet—but once up there, upthere, dammit, atevi had a voice; and atevi would outnumber the ship crew, a matter hedidn’t allude to with Jase, either.

And the library might have had records of how to build such a craft; or it might not.

Or the atevi shell that had blown up Alpha Base during the War might have gotten more of the salvaged library than human authorities had ever admitted it had.

At the very least a lot of bitter politics had come between then and now. He’d never had the security clearance even as paidhi— particularlyas paidhi—to get into Mospheira’s highly classified library archive files to find out. He thought it even possible that somebody during the station-versus-colonists-versus-ship dispute had deliberately wiped them out of station records and left the only copy in the ship’s possession, to prevent the colonists getting off the planet without improving the industrial base.

But irony of ironies, Jasehad still had to parachute in, wave three, because the sad truth was that the wondrous starship couldn’t build the landing craft to which it had the design because it lacked the necessary manpower, and even if they somehow surmounted that difficulty, they still couldn’t fly the craft down, because no space-bound pilot had the skill to fly in an atmosphere.

So for all those reasons, and even though Ms. Yolanda Mercheson, the starship’s representative to Mospheira, was supposed to be arranging the building of a human-made ship identical to this one, he was increasingly sure that the ship that would first carry personnel and cargo up off the planet was the one he was looking down upon this very moment.

Even with the plans, humans on Mospheira no longer had the capacity to mount the construction effort he had in front of him. A lively aircraft manufacturing industry was a real asset to an accelerated space program. So were the skilled workers to reconfigure those molds and handle the composites.

Unfortunately humans on Mospheira didn’t have that resource, either. Oh, there wasan aircraft plant on Mospheira, but it had stopped manufacturing large jets, due to competition from the atevi industry on the mainland. Government subsidies necessary to sustain a virtually customerless Mospheiran aeronautics industry had been cut by the legislature in a general protest against taxes two presidential elections back, and the human aerospace workers had gone to other jobs.

Meanwhile the Mospheiran composites manufacturing facility, despite pleas by the pro-spacers, had lacked the spare parts to keep it functioning, because it couldn’t find customers outside the now defunct aircraft plant. Atevi-human relations had been peaceful for decades, and the defense implications of buying the few commercial jets Mospheira needed for domestic service from Patinandi Aeronautics on the atevi mainland just hadn’t figured with the legislature against the public frustration with high taxes. Even the humans at the top of the campaign for a human return to orbit had promoted chemical rockets as the way to go, because that was the way humans historically had done it, those were the plans they apparently did have, and because it was easier to sell a historicalconcept to the dim lights of the Human Heritage Party who had fallen into bed with them, politically speaking, than it was to sell the technologically more complex reusable vehicle that depended on the composites manufacturing facility they didn’t want to fund.

So thatpolitical bedfellowship had concentrated their lobbying efforts and the scarce tax money on their rocket program, for, supposedly, as the Treaty of Mospheira provided should happen, the simultaneous development of a human and an atevi space program. For decades after slow decades, through the paidhiin, the Mospheiran Defense Department had released only the minimal data that the Mospheiran government had to release to atevi to get the industry going that was ultimately going to feed both raw materials and finished goods to the human space effort on Mospheira—and in the way Mospheira liked to have such militarily dangerous exchanges, raw materials were going to get into Mospheiran hands sufficiently early to give Mospheira a running start.

He should know; some of it had already happened on his watch, brief as it had been. And on his predecessor, Wilson’s, before Wilson retired.

On the other hand, from what Jase said, the ship had questioned Mospheira very closely on that matter and discovered a truth Mospheira had no way to deny:

Mospheira couldn’t immediately or foreseeably launch a damn thing, manned or unmanned.

Probably the Mospheiran president in recent negotiations had told the truth to Jase’s captain and there had never been a secret rocket launch site even contemplated.

So there they were: atevi had been bothering no one when the petal sails of legend dropped humans in their midst and they’d built their way up from steam engines.

Atevi had barely been contemplating satellites and manned space last year, sure that the station was unmanned and the only humans were on Mospheira, when a new thunderbolt of human presence in the skies had fallen on the world; and when blueprints guaranteed to work without experimentation had descended electronically from the heavens.

In the last six months it had become a national mandate to get the pieces of the atevi space program reconfigured—that was the word that echoed through all departments— reconfigured. Tabini-aiji was in a race, a race to show results to his own uneasy people, a race to get a foothold in the heavens where atevi could maintain their say over the future of theirplanet—and this particular aircraft manufacturing facility was critical.

Manufacture of a spacecraft that had much the same materials base and much the same configuration as the planes this facility had built commercially was far faster than invention of a rocket-driven heavy launch system from scratch.

Testing was on a materials-specifications basis, straight out of very clear records.

Training programs were already shaping up to teach a hand-picked set of atevi pilots the handling characteristics of the craft they were building.

As he understood the situation on the island, humanscientists were running to catch up to the technological dataflood pouring down from the heavens.

He’d personally discovered the information gap in the university physics and chemistry programs: Defense had kept some things sequestered—FTL was only one example of it. The University hadn’t taught him or his predecessors what it didn’t have access to, and, wondrous to say, the people in Defense who’d understood the data had died, and their successors had just guarded the file drawers without knowing what they were sitting on… until the downloads from the ship in a matter of seconds had obsolesced the secrets the Defense Department was keeping.

So now the executive branch of the Mospheiran government had no cards to play. Atevi, holding the principle continent, held most of the developed mineral resources. Humans, on the large, mountain-centered island, had to trade fish for aluminum and copper. And human orders for those supplies hadn’t yet increased, possibly because the human legislature hadn’t moved to authorize the trade; but the aiji had with one pen stroke authorized atevi mines to produce what this ship needed.

Ceramics and plastics as well as aircraft were all mainland items that Mospheira imported. Oilwas an import from the mainland. There was oil to the north of the island, offshore, but that had lain right near the highest priced real estate on the island and that development had stalled because the oil supply from the mainland had never been threatened since that discovery.

The atevi head of state was no fool. The atevi head of state had sold aircraft and oil to the island at very good prices—just as his father before him had done. Aviation guided by the paidhi’s reports and the human desire for trade had run out of domestic market and diverted its ambitions toward satellites. It needed a launch vehicle which it planned to build on the island, but to achieve that it had to bring atevi industry up to such a capability itself in order to supply the components. So even before the arrival of the ship was a suspicion in the skies, rockets of Mospheiran design were on the negotiating table, and Patinandi Aeronautics on the mainland had become Patinandi Aerospace.

The ship arrived: the heavy lift rockets Mospheira envisioned were a dead issue. Plans for a reusable spaceplane arrived from the heavens and in one dayafter accepting the concept as viable the aiji in Shejidan had ordered Patinandi to shift its production of parts sufficient for the commercial air fleet to a somewhat older but still viable facility during the building of an auxiliary aircraft plant.

Consequent to that pen stroke in Shejidan, and literally before another sun set, Patinandi in Sarini Province had begun packing up the dies and essential equipment for that production for freighting to a province other than Geigi’s, a province which was about to profit handsomely.

And with no one being cast out of a job, the aiji instantaneously and by decree converted the largest aircraft manufacturing and assembly plant in the world to a round-the-clock effort to build a spacecraft, no debates, no committees, no dithering. Amazinghow fast the whole atevi system could move now, considering that the space program had once been hung up on a committee debate on the design of chemical rocket slosh baffles for three months.

Half a year ago none of this had existed.

And depending on the technical accuracy of the paidhi’s trans-species interpretation and translation of what were in effect historical documents, that ship down there was going to fly sooner than he was supposed to admit even to Jase. The frame design was by no means innovative; the dual engines, the zero-g systems, the heat shield, and the interactive computers were the revolutionary items.

And as to whyatevi accepted this design without the usual debate on the numbers that had previously absorbed atevi attention and slowed projects down to a crawl, why, the numbers of this craft were clearly felicitous and beyond debate, even its engines and computers. Down to the tires it landed on, it was an historical replica of an actual earth-to-orbit craft named Pegasuswhich had plied the skies of the human Earth for two decades at a similar gravity and on a similar mission, which had never suffered disaster or infelicity of any kind, and which had existed in harmony with the skies and the numbers of infinite space until its retirement, a craft thereby proven to have been in harmony with the universe and to have brought good fortune to its designers and its users.

On that simple assurance—and only the atevi gods knew how Tabini’s canny numerologists had gotten thatagreed upon—the debate which might have killed the project was done. The numerologists, still stunned by FTL, were all satisfied—or at least they retired to study the numbers of its design and to determine what had madeit felicitous, so that atevi science might benefit.

That kind of rapid agreement had never accelerated any otherprogram on record. No one had made anything of that fact in his hearing, but in his view it was a revolution in atevi philosophy as extreme as FTL, and almost as scary. One almost guessed that lives had been threatened or that somewhere in secret meetings the usual people who stood up and objected to the numbers had been urgently hushed. Tabini wantedthis project and if atevi didn’t have it, then the numbers of atevi fortunes might turn against them, indeed.

They’d lightened and widened the seats to accommodate atevi bodies, but to keep, as atevi put it, the harmony of successful numbers, they’d varied no other parameter, and the sum of mass was the same, figuring in that atevi simply weighed more than humans. Atevi would simply have to duck their heads, sit closer, and deal with the comfort factor once they’d become comfortable with spaceframe design.

There was even (to the absolute consternation of certain elements on Mospheira, he was sure) smug discussion of selling passenger slots to humans, if the diplomatic details could be worked out. Some human factions, it had been reported, likedthat idea, as a way to have spaceflight without a sudden increase in taxes.

Others, Shawn had said in his last conversation, liked it because it so enraged the conservatives of the Human Heritage Society. The Foreign Affairs office had probably sent up balloons and blown horns when, eight weeks ago, he’d translated to the President the aiji’s offer of selling seats; and George Barrulin’s phones had probably melted on his desk.

The catwalk quaked as lord Geigi, having been delayed momentarily in conversation on the level below, came up the steps, followed by the rest of the lords and officials. Their respective security personnel took up watchful and precautionary positions and kept the paidhi slightly back from the rail. Black skin and golden eyes were the standard not only of the locals but of the whole atevi world, and he was all too aware that a fairish-haired human dressed generally in house-neutral colors stood out. There was no other way to say it.

Stood out, child-sized, against the silver-studded black leather of Tano and Algini, who represented the power of the atevi head of state.

Stood out, in the many-buttoned and knee-length coat of court fashion, and in the distinctive white ribbon incorporated in his braid: the paidhi’s color, the man of no house. Tabini had told him he should choose colors, as he had to have something recognizable for formal presentations; and Ilisidi herself had said white would do very well with his fair hair, show his independence from the black and red of the aiji’s house—and offend no one.

He glowed, he was well aware, like a pale neon sign to any sniper in the recesses behind those floodlights.

But count on it: there’d been a thorough security search before he entered the building and one last night, a search not only by his security, with an interest in keeping him alive; but also by lord Geigi’s, interested in keeping their lord alive and in keeping any of lord Geigi’s enemies from embarrassing him in an attack on the paidhi.

He knew for that reason that he was an inconvenience to the plant workers, who’d had to pass meticulous security to get to work this morning.

But the paidhi, personally sent by the aiji in Shejidan,was making a gesture of public support such as atevi politics absolutely demanded. The workers would see it. Atevi interested in Geigi’s fortunes would witness another indication of Geigi’s rescue from economic ruin and his subsequent rise to prominence and economic power in his region.

And standing where he was the paidhi only hoped all Geigi’s people were loyal. Tano and Algini might well have been drinking antacids by the bottleful since he’d set down at the airport, and declared he’d sleep in Geigi’s house, and now at the plant manager’s urging he’d agreed to walk up on this exposed platform. Even they, however, had to admit that the odds of treachery from Geigi were practically nil and that the odds that Geigi would have loyalty from his own people were high. From the atevi point of view Geigi’s numbers were still in active increase and therefore a problem in the atevi version of calculus.

Besides, no one had tried to file Intent on the paidhi’s life in, oh, at least a month.

That was what the analysts in the aiji’s court called acceptable riskin making this stop on his tour in the first place. The professionals guarding him while he was in the district making such spontaneous gestures he was sure had other words for it.

“Splendid effort,” he declared to lord Geigi. “I’m truly amazed at the progress. I’m absolutely amazed. So will the aiji be.”

“Nand’ Borujiri,” lord Geigi said, “has worked very hard.”

“Nand’ Borujiri.” He inclined his head to acknowledge that worthy gentleman, director of Patinandi Aerospace, who despite physical frailty had accompanied him up to the highest catwalk, followed by the lords of townships within lord Geigi’s association in Sarini Province. “I shall convey your recommendations to the aiji. Absolutely splendid organization. One would wish to render appreciation to all the persons responsible.”

“Nand’ paidhi,” Borujiri said, moving slowly, not only because of age but also a long illness. “My monument, this work. I am determined it will be that. I have dedicated a portion of my estate to the recreation of the workers who will entitle themselves in this effort. And such an effort our people have made!”

“Everything here is in shifts,” lord Geigi interposed. “Nothing stops for night. And quality control, nand’ paidhi, meticulous quality control.” A horn sounded several short bursts, a signal for attention; Bren and his trigger-ready security had been advised in advance, and lord Geigi rested hands on the catwalk rail looking out over the vast assembly area. “Nadiin-ji! The paidhi commends your work and your diligence! Attention, if you please, to the paidhi-aiji!”

He grew used to such addresses. But reporters dogged him: there were reporters below who would carry what he said to the news services, reporters who, because of the major transportation lines, were in greater abundance here than in his last two, more rural, stops.

“Nadiin,” he called out to the upturned faces and himself leaned on the forbidden railing. “You have exceeded ambitious expectations and set high standards, highstandards, in work on which brave atevi will rely for their lives in space. But more than that—” It was in truth a beautiful sight in front of him, those pieces. Though for the reporters’ sakes, he tried to provide variety in his speeches and at the same time to keep them brief, he suddenly meant to say somethingdifferent than he’d said before on such tours. In the presence of old Borujiri and lord Geigi, in this first time that he could allow himself to believe there wasa spacecraft, and in the enthusiasm of engineers and ordinary workers who had foregone vacations and ignored quitting times to advance the work—he felt his inspiration.

“More than that, nadiin-nai, high standards in a work unprecedented in the history of the world. Plates of steel may make a sailing ship. But when it takes to the waves, when hands at work make that ship a living creature, then it binds all that ship’s makers and all who ever sail aboard that ship in an association that reaches to every shore that ship touches. Your hands and your efforts are building a ship to carry the hopes of all the world, nadiin! The work of your hands, the vision of your director, the wisdom of your lords, and the courage of atevi who will ride this ship will reach out to new things in the heavens, and draw the heavens and all their possibilities into your arms. The aiji in Shejidan will receive my report of you as extraordinary and dedicated workers, and I do not doubt you will remain in his mind at the next seasonal audience, at which lord Geigi and nand’ Borujiri inform me and permit me to inform you they will sponsor a representative from each shift at their own expense. My congratulations, nadiin, I need not offer you! You have distinguished yourselves and brought credit to your province, your district, your endeavor! Hundreds of years from now atevi will tell the story, how willing hands and the skill of such builders carried atevi into space on their own terms and in their own right!”

He expected nothing but the polite attention atevi paid a speaker, followed by the formal, measured applause.

“Nand’ paidhi!” he heard instead, and then a shouting from throughout the facility. “Nand’ Bren!”

Thatless than formal title had gotten started in the less reputable press. He blushed and waved, and stepped away from the rail, at which point Tano and Algini closed between him and the crowd, a living wall.

“Nand’ paidhi,” lord Geigi said, and wished him with a gesture to go down.

“A wonderful expression.” Nand’ Borujiri was clearly moved. “I shall have it engraved, nand’ paidhi. A marvelous gift!”

“You are very kind, nand’ director.”

“A passionate speech,” lord Geigi said, and kept close by him as they descended. “If the aiji can spare you, nadi, pleaseaccept my personal hospitality and extend your visit to a few days at Dalaigi, at a far slower pace, in, I assure you, the most wonderful climate in the country. The yellowtail will not wait. The paperwork will always be there. And if you provide my cook the fish and a day to prepare it, nand’ paidhi, I do assure you the result will be an exquisite, very passionate offering. He so approves your taste in your brief experience of his art last evening.”

It was partly, he was sure, formality and a desire not to have Borujiri suggest the same; it was likely, also, a truly honest offer, repeated, now, and he understood from Algini that the cook was extremely pleased in his requests for a local specialty last evening. The man was an excellent cook: Geigi’s relationship with food was unabashed and the cuisine of the household was deservedly renowned.

He was weakening. He was about to request his security to inquire of his office whether he could possibly manage one more day.

But he felt a sharp vibration from his pocket-com as they started down the third tier of steps, and that flutter signaled him his security was wanting his attention or advising him to the negative—the latter, he decided, when Tano cast him a direct look and no encouraging if the paidhi would preferregarding that invitation to a change in flight schedules and a return to the lord’s residence.

“I fear, nandi,” Bren sighed, “that my schedule back in the capital precludes it.” He had no warning in that small vibration of imminent danger. He took it for his staff’s warning against lingering in public view or a simple advisement he was, with more urgency than anyone had yet communicated to him, expected elsewhere. “But if the invitation were extended again through your kindness, perhaps for some other seasonal game, I would be more than pleased, nand’ Geigi, very truthfully.”

God, he wantedthat holiday, and he liked-liked-likedlord Geigi against all common sense governing use of that deceptive and deadly word, and he didn’twant to hear from his security that lord Geigi had changed sides again.

He set foot on the floor of the assembly area and the battalion of reporters tried to reach him. But the frontal assault of cameras failed to breach his security, as Tano and Algini directed him and his entire party aside through the plant manager’s office and up against the earnest good wishes of a woman who, like Borujiri, saw fortune and good repute in his visit.

“Nand’ paidhi!” She bowed, and proffered a card with a ribbon, white, for the paidhi, a card which the thoughtful staff had handed out to certain key people. There was the smell of heated wax, a wax-jack waiting in the office for that operation, and immediately lord Geigi and nand’ Borujiri, and a number of other officials came pouring through the door with the news services clamoring outside.

He signed and affixed his seal in wax to cards which would make a proud display on a wall somewhere for not only this generation, but subsequent ones, while his security fumed and clearly wished a quick exit. But there were moments at which haste seemed to create worse problems than apparent lack of it; and they hadn’t yet flung him to the floor and drawn guns, so he supposed it wasn’t critical.

“The car is waiting, nand’ paidhi,” Tano said, the moment the last card was stamped.

Escape lay out the door: the news services hadn’t yet out-flanked them. Algini went out first, surveying the Guild-provided car which procedure had dictated would never leave the personal surveillance of the paidhi’s own security. Tano held the door for him, a living shield against what he had no idea.

For two seconds in that position they were without any locals at all in earshot. “Lord Saigimi is dead,” Tano said to him, low and urgently. “Unknown who did it.”

So thatwas the emergency. Bren took in his breath, and in the next firing of a neuron thought it likely that lord Geigi, stalled on the other side of the same door, was getting exactly the same news from hissecurity.

The lord of the Tasigin Marid, the circle of seacoast at the bottom of the peninsula, was dead, notof natural causes.

The lord of the Tasigin Marid, an Edi, was the one interest in the peninsula most violently opposed to the space program. When Geigi had sided with the space program, and when Deana Hanks had provided the bombshell that weakened him politically, lord Saigimi had immediately insisted that lord Geigi pay his personal debts in oil investment in full, which lord Saigimi expected would ruin lord Geigi and force him from power in Dalaigi.

That had notbeen the case, thanks to Grigiji the astronomer.

Geigi came out the door, sober, dead sober in the manner of an ateva when expression might offend someone. Not displeased by the news, Bren would wager. Possibly—the thought hit him like a thunderbolt—Geigi was even directly involved in the assassination.

No. Geigi wouldn’t. Surely not. Not with the aiji’s representative literally under his roof and apt by that to be thought associated with the event.

“News,” Bren said, resolved on his own instant judgment to ignore suspicion and treat the man as a cohort—as in the following instant he asked himself was Tabiniinvolved—while Tabini’s representative was a guest under lord Geigi’s roof. “Nandi, lord Saigimi has just been assassinated. I’m immediately concerned for your safety; and I mustmake my flight on schedule. I fear events have left me no choice but to attend to business, and place myself where I can interpret to the ship in case theyhave questions. But will you honor me and ride to the airport with me, in my car?”

Geigi’s face bore that slight pallor that an ateva could achieve. Indeed, perhaps Geigi—not involved, and fearing he might be blamed—had been about to cancel the proposed fishing trip as inappropriate under the circumstances, and to offer the use of hiscar for security reasons.

He had, however, just placed the shoe on the other foot.

Offered the man dessert, as the atevi saying went. Meaning the next dish afterthe fatal revelation at dinner.

“Nand’ paidhi,” Geigi said with a decisive nod of his head, “I shall gladly ride with you, and be honored by your company.”

It also was, most definitely, a commitment mutually to be seen in such company: Geigi was casting his lot with the aiji in Shejidan, in case the neighbor lords of the interlaced peninsular association should think of annoying the aiji by striking at the aiji’s prize piece in this province.

Geigi walked with him down the concrete path to the car, a quiet progress of themselves and their respective security personnel. “Do,” Bren said, almost embarrassed to say, “look to nand’ Borujiri’s safety as well, Tano-ji.”

“We have passed that advice to building security,” Tano said as they approached the cars, the centermost of which was his, with others close about it. Tano would in no wise leave him. And somehow Tano had advised building security indeed, probably through Geigi’s security, Gesirimu, while he was signing cards, without him ever noticing. Thatwas how they’d forestalled the news services getting to the outside door.

“Distressing,” lord Geigi said. “I assure the paidhi that no event will threaten his safety. I should be greatly embarrassed if such were the case.”

“I would never wish,” he said to lord Geigi, “to put my host at risk, and please, lord Geigi, never underestimate the value you represent to the aiji. I know that Tabini-aiji would take strong measures in any action against you or yours.”

It was courtly. It was also true. Geigi was getting that ship built. Geigi was the source of stability and employment in the region.

Then as they came close to the road, well-wishers watching from the plant spied them and their company. The plant doors opened, and a crowd came pouring out toward them, waving and offering flowers, accompanied by the news services and the cameras, at which security, his and Geigi’s, definitely looked askance.

But the plant workers seemed to have no inkling that there was a security alert in operation, and atevi polite, expressionless silence during a speech didn’t at all mean restraint once good will was established. There were cheers, there were bouquets tossed at the hand held rope perimeter which hastily moving plant security established. That the flowers landed on the grass and couldn’t be retrieved in no way daunted the well-wishers. The offering was enough, and atevi were used to tight security: the higher the lord, the tighter and more reactive the guard around him.

Bren darted a few meters from the walk to the lawn, stooped and picked up a bouquet himself, as a lord of the Association couldn’t possibly do, but he, the human, he of the white ribbon, he had no such reservations and no great requirement of lordly dignity. He held the bouquet of flowers aloft and waved it at the cheering crowd as Algini and Tano urged him toward the open car door.

But the good will of the commons was his defense as well, and taking such gambles was in some measure his job. The crowd was delighted with his gesture. They shouted and waved the more. It satisfied the news services, who had a good clip of more than people walking to the cars.

Defending him from the consequences of such gestures was of course Tano’s and Algini’s job, and as he and lord Geigi entered the car from opposite sides, Tano entered to assume hisback-facing seat in the capacious rear of the car and Algini took the front seat by the driver. Cars full of security staff preceded them as they pulled out; and more cars would come behind.

“One still extends the invitation,” lord Geigi said. “I know that fish is laughing at us.”

“I look forward,” Bren said, “to the hunt for this fish. I hope for an invitation in the next passage of this reckless creature. I wishI might have had a try this season. I hope you will remember me in the next.”

“One indeed will. Beyond a doubt.”

Clearly Tano and Algini weren’t going to relax until he was out of the province.

But he trusted they had heard the news of the assassination before the news services had heard, unless reporters of the same news services had happened to surround lord Saigimi at the very moment of his death—and then only if they had the kind of communications the Guild had. His security had heard as fast as they had because the agency responsible (or Saigimi’s guard) was electronically plugged into the Assassins’ Guild, which was able to get direct messages to Guild members faster than the aiji’s personal representatives, who weren’t always told what was going on.

And it wasa Guild assassination, or there’d be real trouble. The Guild was a fair broker and a peacekeeper. It might authorize a contract for an assassination to be carried out by one member but it didn’t withdraw resources from other members in good standing who might be defending the intended target. It most severely frowned upon collateral damage— biichi’ji, finesse, was a point of pride of the Guild in authorizing and legally notifying targets as well as in carrying out contracts—and the Assassins’ Guild did pass warnings where warnings were due in order to prevent such damage.

So, of course, did Tabini-aiji pass warnings of his own intent to his own security, who might not be informed by their Guild—even the aiji filed Intent, as he had seen once upon a time. But lords and lunatics, as Tano had once said, didn’t always file, and defense didn’t always know in advance. If Tabini had taken lord Saigimi down, Tano and Algini might possibly know it from Tabini’s sources.

Unless it was Geigi who had done it. He was very conscious of the rather plump and pleasant ateva weighing down the seat cushion beside him, in this car that held the pleasant musky scent of atevi, the size and mass of atevi. It would certainly make sense. Geigi was not the complacent man he’d seemed, and Geigi had shifted loyalties last year awayfrom lord Saigimi’s plots against the aiji.

It made thorough sense that Geigi, with his new resources, had placed Guild members as near Saigimi as he could get them; it was an easy bet that Saigimi had done exactly the same thing in lord Geigi’s district.

So there was very good reason, in the direct involvement of lord Geigi with past events, for the paidhi’s security to be very anxious about that gesture of stopping and picking up the flowers. Sometimes, Bren thought, he had an amazing self-destructive streak.

Geigi leaving his own security to other cars, to sit beside him surrounded by Tabini’s agents, was a declaration of strong reliance on the paidhi and on the aiji in Shejidan; but it also tainted the paidhi and the aiji with collusion if Geigi had done it.

Damn. Surely not. Tabiniknew where he was and what was going on. Tabini’s security wouldn’t let him make that mistake.

Meanwhile all those reporters who had gathered to cover the plant tour were back there to report his inviting lord Geigi under his protection the length and breadth of the peninsula, not to mention reporting the gesture to all the lords of the Association.

Among them, in the Padi Valley to north, was the lady Direiso of the Kadigidi house, who truly did wish the paidhi dead, and who was alive herself only because the power vacuum her death would create could be more troublesome to the aiji than her living presence.

Direiso. Thatwas an interesting question.

3

The cars of the escort passed like toys under the right-hand wing as the private jet made the turn toward home. A bright clot of flowers, more bouquets and wreaths, showed on the concrete where the plane had stood. Now they surrounded a cluster of black car roofs.

So lord Geigi hadn’t driven off once the plane’s doors had closed, nor even during the long wait while the plane had taxied far across to the east-west runway. Geigi had waited to see it in the air.

Even now, a small number of atevi were standing beside the cars, watching the plane, extravagant gesture from a lord of the Association, in a politics in which all such gestures had meaning.

No word for love in the Ragi language, and no word for friend, even a friend of casual sort. Among the operational ironies of the language, or the atevi mind, it rendered it very hard for an ateva in lord Geigi’s situation to make his personal position clear, once there were logical reasons to suspect his associations—because associations colored everything, demanded everything, slanted everything.

Bren found himself quite—humanly speaking— touchedby the display now vanishing below his window, not doubting the plant workers and the common people of the white-plaster township that came up in his view. They were the offerers of those flowers.

But from this perspective of altitude and distance, he was no longer blindly trusting.

Not even of lord Geigi, except as Geigi’s known and unknown associations currently tended toward the same political focus as his own: toward Tabini, aiji of the Western Association, Tabini, who owned this plane, and the security, and the loyalties of lords and commons all across the continent.

Man’chi. Instinctual, not consciously chosen, loyalty. Identical man’chi made allies. There was no other meaningful reckoning.

You couldn’t say that human word ‘border,’ either, to limit off the land passing under them. An atevi map didn’t really have boundaries. It had land ownership—sort of. It had townships, but their edges were fuzzy. You said ‘province,’ and that was closeto lines on a map, and it definitely hada geographical context, but it didn’t mean what you thought it did if you were a hard-headed human official trying to force mainland terms into Mospheiran boxes. So whatever he had experienced down there, it didn’t have edges, as the land didn’t have edges, as overlapping associations didn’t have edges.

A thought like that could, if analyzed, give one solitary human a lonely longing for somethinghe touched to mean something human and ordinary and touch him back, and for something to satisfy the stirrings of affection that good actions made in a human heart.

But ifsomething did, was it real? Was affection real because one side of the transaction felt it, if the other side in responding always felt something different?

The sound of one hand clapping. Was that what he heard?

The plane leveled out to pursue its course to the northeast. Outside the window now were the hills of the southern peninsula, Talidi Province, a geographical distinction, again without firm edges. Beyond that hazy range of hills to the south sat the Marid Tasigin, the coastal communities where lord Saigimi had had greatest influence, which would be in turmoil just now as the word of their lord’s assassination spread.

Out the other window, across the working space on this modest-sized executive jet, he saw only blue sky. He knew what he would see if he got up and took a look: the same shining, wave-wrinkled sea he had seen from Geigi’s balcony, and the same haze on the horizon that was the southern shore of Mospheira.

He didn’t want to get up and look in that direction this afternoon. He’d done too much looking and too much thinking this morning, until, without even thinking about it, he’d rubbed raw a small spot in his sensibilities that he’d thought was effectively numb.

Thinking about it, like a fool, he began to think about Barb, and his mother and his brother, and wondered what the weather was like and whether his brother, ignoring the death threats for an hour or two, was tinkering with his boat again, the way he did on spring evenings.

That part of his life he just had to seal off. Let it alone, quit scratching the scab. He’d just come too close to Mospheira this leg of the trip, had it too visible to him out the plane window, had sat there on that balcony with too much time to think.

The other part, his job, his duty, whatever he wanted to call it—

Well, at least thatwas going far better than he’d hoped.

Every cheering success like that in the town and factory dropping away in jet-spanned distance behind them was another direct challenge to contrary atevi powers only uneasily restrained within the Association: if they didn’t get rid of Tabini fast, the dullest of them could see that the change they were fighting was going to become a fact of atevi life so deeply rooted in the economy it would survive Tabini. Life, even if Tabini died this minute, would never be what it would have been had Tabini never lived.

Numerous lords among the atevi were hostile to human cultural influence—hell, one could about say everylord of the Association including Tabini himself had misgivings about human culture, although even Tabini was weakening on the issue of television and lengthening the hours the stations were permitted to transmit, a relaxation the paidhi had begun to worry about.

Other lords and representatives were amenable to human technology as far as it benefited their districts but hostile to Tabini as an overlord for historic and ethnic reasons.

And there were a handful of atevi both lordly and common who were bitterly opposed to both.

In all, it was an uneasy pedestal for a government that had generally kept its equilibrium only by Tabini’s skill at balancing threat and reward. Geigi was a good instance: Geigi had very possibly started in the camp of the lords hostile to Tabini for reasons that had nothing to do with technology and everything to do with ethnic divisions among atevi.

But when Geigi had gotten himself in over his head, financially, politically, and by association, Tabini had not only refrained from removing him or humiliating him, Tabini had acknowledged that the peninsula had been on the short end of government appointments and contracts for some time (no accident, counting the presence of Tabini’s bitterest enemies in control of the peninsula) and agreed that Geigi, honest, honorable lord Geigi, was justified in his complaints.

Now Geigi, who’d had the only large aircraft manufacturing plant in the world in his province, which couldhave been replaced, out-competed, even moved out of the district by order of the aiji, owed his very life and the prosperity of his local association to his joining Tabini’s side.

So now director Borujiri was firmly on Tabini’s side, and so were those workers. If atevi were going to space faster than planned, it was a windfall for Patinandi Aerospace, the chance of a lifetime for Borujiri, prosperity for a locally depressed job market, and a dazzling rise to prominence for a quiet, honest lord who’d invested his money in the Tasigin Marid oilfields and lost nearly everything—no help from Saigimi, whose chiseling relatives were in charge of the platforms that failed.

What promises Saigimi might have obtained from Geigi and then called due in the attempt last year to replace the paidhi with the paidhi-successor, he could only guess. Geigi had never alluded to that part of the story.

And how dismayed Geigi and Saigimi alike had been when the paidhi-successor rewarded her atevi supporters by dropping information on them that had as well have been a nuclear device—all of that was likely lost in Geigi’s immaculate discretion and now in Saigimi’s demise. No one might ever know the whole tale of that adventure.

And, damn, but he wished he did, for purely vulgar curiosity, if nothing else.

But clearly the Saigimi matter had either stayed hotter longer than he would have believed that last year’s assassination attempt could remain an issue with Tabini—or it had heated up again very suddenly and for reasons that he’d failed to detect in planning this trip.

That was granting Tabini had in fact done in Saigimi.

In the convoluted logic he’d learned to tread in atevi motivations, if Tabini haddone it, perhaps Saigimi’s assassination had been timed preciselyfor the hour he was with Geigi on public view and thereby reassuring Geigi of the aiji’s good will: if the news had come in the middle of the night and on any ordinary day, Geigi might have concluded the aiji was beginning a purge of enemies.

Then Geigi might have done something disastrous, like running to lady Direiso, far more dangerous an enemy than Saigimi, and that might have led to Geigi’s death—if Geigi misread Direiso. Or, potentially, though he himself doubted it, it could have led to Direiso rallying the rest of her band of conspirators, drawing Geigi back to her man’chi, and setting him against Tabini, a realignment that would hold that ship back there hostage to all kinds of demands.

Tabini preferred not to provoke terror. In atevi terms, only a fool made his enemies nervous; and a far, far greater fool frightened his potential allies. Tabini rarely resorted to such an extreme measure as assassination, preferring to leave old and well-known problems holding power in certain places rather than elevating unknown successors who might be up to God knew what without such good and detailed reports coming back to him. That tendency to let a situation float if he had good intelligence coming back to him was a consideration which ought to disturb lady Direiso’s sleep.

And in that consideration, either something had happened sufficient to top Saigimi’s last offenses, demanding his removal or, it was even possible—the assassination of Saigimi had in fact been simply a warning aimed at Direiso, who was the principal opposition to Tabini.

Certainly it was possible that Direiso was the real target.

He certainly hadn’t been moved to discuss that question with Geigi; and as for Tano and Algini, in the one careful question he had put to them as they boarded: “Is this something you know about, nadiin, and is the aiji well?” they had professed not to know the agency that had done it, but had assured him with what sounded like certain knowledge that Tabini was safe.

They were usually more forthcoming.

And now that he began thinking about it—neglecting the business of collating his notes, the paidhi’s proper job—the news of Saigimi’s death was eerily like a letter from an absent—

Friend.

Oh, a badmental slip, that was.

But Banichi was infallibly Banichi as Jago was Jago, his own security for part of the last year, as close to him as any atevi had ever been. And of the very few assassins of the Guild to whom Tabini might entrust something so delicate as the removal of a high lord of the Association, Banichi and his partner surely topped the list.

Banichi and Jago, both of whom he regarded in that spot humans kept soft and warm and vulnerable in their hearts; and both of whom had been on assignment somewhere, absent from Shejidan, unlocatable to his troubled inquiries for months.

Tano and Algini, fellow members of the Guild, had assured him all winter that Banichi and Jago were well and busy about something. He sent letters to them. He thought they were sent, at least. But nothing came back.

And, no, neither Tano nor Algini knew whether or not Banichi and Jago might return. He’d asked them whenever something came up that provided a remotely plausible excuse for his asking: Banichi and Jago both outranked Tano and Algini, and he never, ever wanted to make Tano and Algini doubt his appreciation of their service to him—but—he wondered. He worried about the pair of them.

Dammit, he missed them.

And that wasn’t fair to the staff he did have, who were skilled, and very devoted, and who offered him all the support and protection and devotion that atevi of their Guild could possibly offer, including a roster of Tano’s relatives, one of whom headed the paidhi’s clerical staff and some of whom, technical writers in offices across the mainland, sent him messages through Tano, whose clan seemed prolific, all very good and very solid people.

And Algini, God, Algini, who seemed to come solo except for his long attachment to his partner. Algini had been much longer unbending and had been far more standoffish than Tano had ever been, but Algini was a quiet, good man, who could throw a knife with truly uncanny accuracy, who had gotten (Tano hinted) two very bad assignments from which he had suffered great personal distress; and who had, Tano had said, been so quiet within the Guild they’d lost track of him for two years and dropped him from the rolls as dead until Tano had pointed out he’d been voting consistently and that he could vouch for his identity—they’d been partners for two years on the same assignments—and it was the aiji’s request for them as personal security that had pulled up the information that Algini was listed as dead. Algini thought it a joke quite as funny as Tano did, but the paidhi understood it was a joke that had never gotten beyond the very clandestine walls of their Guild, and it was an embarrassment to the Guild never, ever meant for public knowledge.

It was indicative, however, of how very good Algini was at melding with the walls of a place. After nearly a year with the man, he’d finally gotten Algini to unzip his jacket, prop his feet up in complete informality, and smile, shyly so, but an approach to a grin, over one of Tano’s pieces of irreverence.

Right now Algini was on his feet, zipped up to the chin and all business, up at the forward bulkhead, talking to Tano, who was also sober, while junior staff kept their distance, all frustrating his desire for information. He supposed that his staff was trying to get accurate reports on the situation in the Marid before they told him anything, or possibly reports were coming in from various other affected places, some of which they had to route over, and one of which might even be a touchy situation in the capital. There were times to talk to one’s security and there were times to stay out of their way and let them work.

And right now he had notes to work over, a job to do. Possibly there were deaths happening. Possibly—

Hell, no, he couldn’t do anything about it. And they didn’t need his advice. He’d been long enough on the mainland to know certain things intellectually, and to understand the atevi way of doing things as part of a wider fabric that actually saved lives.

But he’d made the decision some time ago that he never wanted to get so acclimated that he didn’t think about it. It still hadto bother him. It was necessary to his job that it continue to bother him: he was supposed to translate, not transit into the culture, and no matter how emotionally he was tempted to damn Saigimi to hell for the decent people whose lives Saigimi had cost, he had to remember he didn’tknow what the reason was, not at the bone-deep and instinctual level at which atevi knew what they were doing to each other. He had to stay out of it.

He opened his computer as the plane reached cruising altitude, and called up dictionary files that held hundreds of such distinctions as man’chi unresolved.

Loyalty wasn’t man’chi; man’chi wasn’t loyalty. Man’chi responded to the order of the universe, a harmony which in some indefinable way dictated man’chi, and didn’t.

Man’chi, he had learned, was emotional. Association was logical. And to figure how some other ateva saw them, atevi were mathematicians par excellence. One constantly added the numbers of one’s life, some of more traditional philosophy believing literally that the date of one’s birth and the felicitous or infelicitous numbers of one’s intimate associates or the flowers in a bouquet mattered to the harmony of the cosmos, and dictated the direction one moved. Logically.

Tabini was a skeptic in such matters and regularly mocked the purists. Tabini would say, half facetiously, that Saigimi hadn’t added his own numbers correctly, and had been unaware what the sum was in the aiji’s mind.

Best for a human to stay right in the guessable center of a man’chi directed to a very powerful ateva, best that he listen to his security personnel, and never, never, never tread the edges with unapproved persons.

Deana Hanks had started out her tenure by courting the edges, and now had more blood on her hands than she would ever comprehend. Saigimi’s, for instance. The circles of the stone she’d so recklessly cast into the waters, in her seeking out atevi who could give her an opinion opposed to the aiji (every dissident she could find), had associated a number of atevi who might never have been encouraged to associate. Hanks might wellhave killed Saigimi.

In the human sense of responsibility, that was.

Atevi would just say she’d brought infelicitous numbers into Saigimi’s situation and Saigimi had done nothing ever since but make them worse.

“Fruit juice, nand’ paidhi?” the juniormost of the guards asked, and Bren surfaced from the electronic sea of data to accept the offered drink.

It was about a two hour trip from the peninsula to Shejidan, factoring in the devious routing that took this particular flight into Shejidan Airport as if it originated from the east instead of the west. The detour wasn’t much out of their way, but the plane had turned about half an hour ago, and that told Bren fairly well where they were.

He feared he would meet security delays due to the assassination in the south. He almost wished the food offering were something more than fruit juice, but he’d wait for food until he reached secure territory—they’d been to three towns and made four courtesy stops without taking on security-approved food service, they’d crossed boundaries that held the appropriate meat for the season to be something different than the last had. It was one of those little matters that didn’t matter to every ateva, but that had to matter to the aiji’s private plane, and he truly didn’t think he could stomach another fish salad or egg salad sandwich, the items that were almost always kabiu, proper, and almost always the fallback for any plane with a security problem and a lot of seasonal zones to cross.

The sandwiches had seemed quite good, on the first three days of this eight day tour.

“Any news?” he asked the guard, meaning the Saigimi situation, which was bound to be general knowledge by now throughout the country as the news hit the television networks, and the guard said, “Shall I ask, nand’ paidhi?”

There was, he understood by that offer, official news; and the junior guard wasn’t going to inform the paidhi’s serious need to know with his limited knowledge: the junior guard was, by that question, offering to advise his officer that the paidhi was asking.

“Do,” he said, and before he’d downed the second sip of the glass Tano was there, slipping into the seat facing his.

“By your leave, nand’ paidhi, the situation in the Bu-javid is calm and the capital itself is quiet. We thought of routing you instead to Taiben, but there seems no need. Given your agreement, we’ll proceed on to the airport.”

“What do youthink, Tano-ji?” It hadn’t been his intention at all to question the security arrangements. “Absolutely I trust your judgment.”

“I think we should go in as quickly as possible, nand’ paidhi. I’m assured we’ll be met by very adequate security, and the longer we delay the harder it may be to guarantee that, at least for the next few hours. Celebration is more likely than opposition to this event, as I would gather will be the case behind us in Sarini province; and that will discourage fools from unFiled retaliations. Professionals, however, may still be acting under legal contract against persons other than yourself, nand’ paidhi, and I would advise discretion.”

“I’m sure.” Things were stiffly formal when Tano and Algini had the staff present, or he’d invite Tano and Algini both to sit down, share a drink, and tell him the realgoings-on. The plane flew serenely between a human-occupied heaven and an atevi earth in turmoil. And his security, licensed assassins of the Guild, declared it safe to go into the capital city airport, but there were elements loose and still in motion that had them worried. That was what he heard in Tano’s statement: knowledge of a threat not precisely aimed at him but through which he might have to pass. Guild members contracted to Saigimi were professionals who would not waste themselves or their colleagues’ lives in a lost cause, but there would be moves for power within the clan and around it. Aftershocks were not over.

Trust these two, and leave Geigi, who owed him his intercession and thereby his survival? Absolutely. Tano’s and Algini’s man’chi was to Tabini, and if Tabini ever wanted him dead, these were the very ones who would see to it. If Tabini wanted him alive, these were the ones who would fling their bodies between him and a bullet without a second thought. Man’chi was very simple until one approached the hazy ground between households, which was where Geigi’s grew too indistinct to trust in a crisis like this. Man’chi went upward to the leader but not downfrom him. It was instinct. It was mathematics as atevi added matters. And these two advised him to move quickly and not to divert to any other destination.

So he simply began to fold up his work and to shut down his computer as Tano got up again to order something regarding their landing.

The plane banked sharply and dived, sending dignified atevi careening against the seats and up. Bren clamped his fingers to hold onto his precious computer as the smooth plastic case slid inexorably through his grip, aimed by centrifugal force at the window.

Fruit juice had hit the same window and wall and stood in orange beads.

The plane leveled out.

“ Nand’ paidhi,” the copilot said over the speakers, “ forgive us. That was a plane in our path.”

Tano and Algini and the rest of the staff were sorting themselves out. The juniormost, Audiri, came immediately with a towel, retrieved the glass, which had not broken, and mopped the fruit juice off various surfaces.

He had not let the computer escape his grasp. His fingers felt bruised. His heart hadn’t had time to speed up. Now, belatedly, it wondered whether it might have license to do that, but the conscious brain advised it to forget it, it was much too late.

“Nadiin,” Algini was saying to the crew via the intercom, “kindly determine origin and advise air traffic control that the aiji’s staff requests names and identifications of the aircraft in this matter.”

“Probably it’s nothing,” Bren muttered, allowing Tano custody of the precious computer. The air traffic control system was relatively new. Planes were not. Certain individuals considered themselves immune to ATC regulations.

If on a given day, and by their numerology, certain individuals of the Absolutist persuasion considered the system gave them infelicitous numbers, they would changethose numbers on their own and change their course, their altitude, or their arrival time so as to have their important business in the capital blessed by better fortune.

And the assassination to the south had changedthe numbers.

Tabini and the ATC authority had fought that battle for years, particularly trying to impress the facts of physics on lords used to being immune to lawsuit. There were laws. There were ATC regulations. There was the aiji’s express displeasure at such violations, and there was the outstanding example of the Weinathi Bridge disaster for a cautionary tale.

Security today had been very careful to move the aiji’s private plane onto a flight path usually followed by slower-moving commercial air… for the paidhi’s safety.

His security was understandably worried about the incident. But whatever the closeness of the other aircraft had been, the emergency was over. The plane did some small maneuvering as the nose pitched gently down and it resumed its landing approach.

Tano and Algini came to sit opposite him for the landing, and belted in.

“Likely it was someone elseworried by the Saigimi business,” Bren said. “And likewise taking precautions about their routing. Or their numbers. I doubt it was intentional.”

“The aiji will not take chances with you, nadi Bren,” Tano said.

“I’m sure not, Tano.”

The Bergid snowed in the window, hazy mountains, still white with winter, the continental divide.

Forest showed, blue-green and likewise hazed—but that haze was pollen and spores, as a lowland spring broke into bloom and the endless forests of atevi hunting preserves, like the creatures that lived within that haze, reproduced themselves with wild abandon.

The fields came clear, the little agricultural land that developers had left around burgeoning Shejidan. And there were the stubbornly held garden plots clinging to hillsides—always the gardens: the Ragi atevi were keen diggers and planters, even the aristocrats among them. Gardens, but no livestock for food: atevi considered it cruel and uncivilized to eat tame animals.

Came then the geometries of tiled roofs, marching in numerically significant orders up and down the hills—little roofs, bigger roofs, and the cluster of hotels and modern buildings that snuggled as close as possible to the governmental center, the ancient Bu-javid, the aiji’s residence. It was daylight. One saw no neon lights.

The plane banked and turned and leveled again, swooping in over the flat roofs of industry that had grown up around the airport.

Patinandi Aerospace was one: that large building he well knew was a maintenance facility. The aiji had spread the bounty of space industry wide throughout the provinces, and the push to get into space had wrought changes this year that wouldn’t be stopped. Ever.

There was a new computer manufacturing plant, and atevi designers were fully capable of making critical adjustments in what humans had long regarded as one of the final secrets, the one that would adjust atevi society into a more and more comprehensible mold.

Not necessarily so.

Faster and faster the pavement rushed under the wings.

Wheels touched dry pavement, squealed arrival.

The paidhi-aiji was as close to home as he was likely to come. This was it. Shejidan.

And hearing the wheels thump and roll and hearing the engines brake and feeling the reality of ground under him again, he let go a freer breath and knew, first, he was in the safest place in the world for him, and second, that he was among the people in the world most interested in his welfare. Delusion, perhaps, but he’d grown to rely on it.

4

The van transfer to the subway in the airport terminal was thankfully without extravagant welcome, media, or official inquiry. The paidhi-aiji was home. The paidhi-aiji andhis luggage, this time together and without misdirection, actually reached the appropriate subway car, and without incident the car set into motion on its trip toward the Bu-javid, on its lofty and historic hill on the edge of Shejidan.

Then, while he leaned back in comfort and velvet splendor, there arrived, via his security’s com link, a radioed communication from the airport authorities requesting an interview with the aiji’s pilot and copilot, and reporting the identity of the pilot of the strayed prop plane: the son of the lord of the island of Dur, one Rejiri of the Niliini of Dur-wajran, whose affiliations Tano and Algini were ordering researched by grim and secret agencies which, God help them, the lords of Dur-wajran had probably never encountered in their wildest imaginations.

Figure that the owner of such a private plane was affluent. Figure that on the small island of Dur opposing traffic wasn’t a problem the pilot, possibly of the only plane on the island of Dur, had ever met.

But as an accident, or near accident, it wasn’t the paidhi’s business to investigate or to deal with. Someone else had to explain the air traffic regulations to the lord’s son. He sat back in the soft red seats of Tabini’s private subway car and had a glass of fruit juice, confident his second try at a drink would stay in the glass. He timed the last sip nicely for the arrival at the station.

He let a junior security staffer carry the computer as he rose and left the car. He let others, very junior, carry the baggage while the clerical, Surieji, carried the voluminous physical notes. He let Tano and Algini deal with the details of routing himself and his entourage together down the concrete and tile walk in the very security-conscious Bu-javid station. The whole apparatus of government as well as the seasonal residences of various lords was above their heads in this echoing cavern, and he walked entirely at his ease to the lift that would carry him, Tano, and Algini to the third floor of the residences.

His apartment, on loan from the Atageini, was next door to Tabini’s own residence, a location he could hardly complain of for security or comfort; but getting to and from it was a matter of armed and high-clearance security. There was no forgetting something at the office, for damn certain, and dashing solo back after it.

But long gone were the days when he could go anywhere unguarded, anyway.

“Tabini-aiji wishes to see you personally,” Algini reported to him as they activated the lift, information doubtless from the device he had set in his ear. “But nand’ Eidi says that the aiji is occupied with briefings at the moment. He says further that you may rely on him that the aiji will, contrary to his expectations, be occupied all evening, and Eidi-nai will take the responsibility of saying so. He hopes that the paidhi will rest comfortably, quite likely for the night, although I myself would never promise that that will be the case. The aiji does as the aiji will do.”

Eidi was Tabini’s chief of household staff, an elderly man, whose good will and private counsel one wisely kept.

“I have no regrets for a night of rest, nadi-ji, I assure you.” The business with the stray plane had taken the spare adrenaline out of him. He felt bone tired, and a quiet dinner anda night of sleep in a familiar bed before dealing with any political matters, especially the very far-reaching politics afoot at the moment in the aiji’s residence, came very welcome. He’d regretted the day’s vacation he couldn’t get, but now he wondered where he’d have gotten the energy to go out on the boat, let alone fight a fish of record proportions.

He wondered, with the comfort of familiar things, what Jason Graham had been doing in his absence, and how Jase had fared, left alone with the staff who spoke nothing but Ragi.

And he wondered whether or not the workmen repairing the historic Atageini lilies in the breakfast room (a casualty of a security incident) had gotten the painting done. They’d proposed to do that during the dry weather that had been forecast—accurately, as happened; he’d followed the weather reports as one touch he could maintain with Shejidan.

He’d imagined the tiled roofs of Shejidan under sunshine, under twilight—security might change the view on him, moving him here and there within the Bu-javid, and he knew that one of these days the Atageini clan who really owned the apartment he was using had to repossess it, but for the while it was home to him; and the weather on the television in his hotel room had linked him with this place, and with what had become home.

And, oh, he was glad to be back, now. If there was a piece of hardwiring atevi and humans must share, he thought in that wandering way of a mind unwinding its tensions, it had to be the instinct that needed that anchor of a place to come back to. He felt vast relief as the lift let the three of them out upstairs, in the most secure area in the Bu-javid, a familiar hall lined with extravagant porcelain bouquets in glass cases, marble floor hushed by a broad carpet runner, gold-colored, hand-loomed and elaborately figured.

They reached the door of the apartment, a short walk from the lift, which would bring up more of the party, and items of luggage. Instead of using the key he was sure Tano had, Tano quietly rang for attention.

The lift opened again. Their luggage was catching up. The door in front of them opened, the deadly devices deactivated, one sincerely trusted, which would have been the delay, and a servant let them in, as a half dozen other servants (they were all female in this household, which had been lady Damiri’s before she scandalized the whole Atageini clan by moving next door and residing openly with Tabini) converged to take custody of the paidhi and his coat and his luggage.

“Nand’ paidhi.” Saidin, major domo of the lady Damiri, came from the inner halls to meet them in the foyer. She was a genteel and gentle household administrator who took her human guest’s comfort and safety very seriously—and who probably rendered reports to lady Damiri on a regular basis. “One is very glad to see you safely arrived, nand’ paidhi.”

“Thank you.” He’d bet any amount of his uncollectible wages that Saidin was well-briefed on the reason for the just slightly early arrival, maybe even on the ATC incident; and he knew by experience that everything he could possibly need would appear like magic.

“Bath and dinner, do we correctly apprehend your wishes?”

“Nand’ Saidin, very correctly.”

He was hungry, and in no mood to deal with the message bowl which sat on the small ornate table by the entryway, but he could see there a number of waiting cylinders. The only such that reached his apartment nowadays were messages his clerical staff couldn’t handle without advice. And there was a fair collection of them, about twenty, most in metal message cases; but one—one was a caseless vellum scroll characteristic of a telegram from the wire service. It could be from some department across the country, some place he’d visited. The rest could wait. He picked that one up, cracked the seal with his thumbnail, scanned the content, because there was the remotest chance it mightbe from Barb, who had sent him a couple of messages on island gossip since her marriage; or it might be from his mother; or even from official channels in Foreign Affairs.

It was from his brother. From Toby. Dated two days ago.

Mother’s been in the hospital. I’ve asked her to come and stay with me. If you can bring any influence to bear, it might help. She says her doctor’s there and she won’t leave the city. I’ll write you a longer letter later. Don’t worry about it, but I think we need to bring some pressure to bear to get her to move. I want your backing in this.

Damn, he thought. Justwhat their mother needed. Pressure.

Damn, again.

He supposed he’d stopped quite still, when in standard procedure he ought to have left the foyer and let his staff get to work on his behalf. They were all standing there. The door was shut. There came a rap from outside.

“That will be the luggage, nadi,” Tano said, and took a look outside to be absolutely sure before he opened the door.

Bren pocketed the message. Write you a letter later. Hell and double hell. He didn’t think Toby had anything pleasant to say in his next message. Toby never had made the obvious complaint to him: Give me some help, get home, brother, do something to reason with the government—it’s not fair what you’re doing to us. It’s not fair what you’re doing to Mother.

He couldn’t go home and fix things for his younger brother. There wasn’t a way in hell.

And their mother had been headed for this crisis for some time. Maybe her doctors would finally sit on her this time and make her take her medication and watch her diet.

Phone calls at three in the morning didn’t help. Knowing her grandchildren were being followed on their way to school didn’t help. He wasn’t sure it would be better for her to move to the north shore, where the police and the phone company seemed to ignore Toby’s complaints for what hefeared were political reasons.

Damn, damn, damn, and damn. He’d been in a good mood until he met that, which wasn’t the first time their mother’s health had been a concern. It wasn’t even an acute crisis with their mother’s health. It was just an ongoing situation. It was the first time for her checking into the hospital, but the doctor had been saying all along if their mother didn’t get some rest and mend her ways, she’d have to go in, and it was probably good news in its way. They needed to get her to slow down, calm down, stop yelling at the fools that called at three in the morning: it only inspired them.

And for God’s sake, she needed to stop arguing with the newscasters. Toby had already reported she’d called a national program and accused the head of the Human Heritage Association of harassing her with obscene phone calls.

Then she’d said, also on the air, that she didn’t like her son living on the mainland with a lot of godless aliens.

He didn’t know what to do about that. He really didn’t. He’d written her letters. He’d gotten one furious letter back. She’d said he was ruining his brother’s life.

The servants had opened the doors: the rest of the luggage had made it in, a considerable pile which they’d apparently waited to accumulate outside until it was all there before the security personnel handling it asked that the apartment door be opened. Maids valiantly seized cases and carried them off to deal with laundry and unpacking. His security was getting and giving information via their own pocket communications and the larger array in the security station just off the foyer, where several black-uniformed Guild members clustered.

Madam Saidin, chief of domestic staff, was still waiting.

He expected one other person to have come out to meet him, and stood, a little dazed and battered, looking toward that vacant hall that led to the private rooms.

“Where’s Jason?” he asked Saidin. Jase was shy, still struggling with fluency, and for that reason generally avoided mass gatherings of servants, but he’d have expected Jase to be standing in that hallway by now, at least. The hauling about of a large amount of luggage had to advise Jason he was home early.

“Dressing, I believe, nand’ paidhi.”

Dressing? Dressing, at this hour. That was very odd for Jason, who kept a meticulous schedule and always bathed precisely at the same time every morning, and wanted breakfast precisely at the same hour every morning.

More, there’d been just a little hesitation on Saidin’s answer. Has he been ill? he almost asked her. Perhaps he’d been studying late?

If he asked that question, he might get an answer.

Before his shower.

Before dinner.

Hell, no, he didn’t ask. They had a deal. The day started on Jase’s schedule, like clockwork. The day ended on his, when he managed to find time to eat. Jase would show up for supper. Whatever was going on to have thrown Jase off his meticulous schedule, he was bound to hear the details. He had faith in Jase that if the foyer looked intact and the servants were still alive, it wasn’t catastrophic. He had faith in Saidin that if it were outrageous or against the dignity of the Atageini, he would have heard it implied much more strongly than that.

The hot water in the Atageini residence was, to Bren’s experience, inexhaustible. The force of the spray, set at atevi height, could drown a man of human stature, and after traipsing about all day up and down steep atevi-scale steps and after having been spattered with sticky fruit juice at 5000 meters Bren was oh, so willing to melt against the shower wall and stand there unmoving in one of the few places of utter, total privacy available to him. He breathed a froth of water and air and let the spray hammer a knot of muscles in the back of his neck he’d forgotten to unclench.

He trustedTano and Algini. He’d had no hesitation at all to put himself in their hands during the trip.

But he grew just a little anxious when unscheduled planes veered into his path. It probably was exactly as security said, an island pilot not used to the concept of air traffic, let alone control. The son of the lord of Dur was not a likely sophisticate, much less a plotter in high places.

He shut his eyes and was thereagain, in the same plane seat where he’d spent so many hours this last, long, meandering trip. He could all but feel the cool surface of the juice glass in his fingers, a contrast to the heat of the water that pounded down on him.

He could if he thought about it look again out that aircraft window onto the vast mineral-blessed south, Talidi province just off the wingtip, misty blue-green hills, grass with that slightly younger green of springtime, well advanced in the south, and all that pollen, hazy clouds of it.

Talidi province and the Tasigin Marid.

He couldn’t say he blamed atevi for asking themselves at least now and again what the paidhi-aiji ortheir esteemed aiji had in mind for the nation, in moving the paidhi into such prominence and now having twopaidhiin in residence under the same roof, when the very essence of the Treaty was emphatically onepaidhi. Some lords of the Western Association had indeed been more than a little suspicious of human motives even before the ship had shown up.

While a handful of truly devout conspiracy-theorists believed Tabini had known the ship was coming back and that he’d been in collusion with the human president on Mospheira from the day of his accession: a more unlikely combination one couldn’t imagine.

But since the events of today, everythingin that equation had to be re-reckoned.

Not that one expected immediate capitulation in the fall of a major player in the opposition to Tabini today: atevi lords weren’t so graceless or quick to desert former allies. But they might sidle gracefully and as unobtrusively as possible closer to center, and closer to Geigi, who would thus undergo the most dangerous period of his rise in importance, because the neighbors would try him, now. They would test Geigi’s cleverness, his finesse, his business acumen and his personal dignity. It was almost a sure bet that no less than Direiso would, directly or indirectly, test Geigi’s security.

But no one had to tell an atevi lord that.

And since, with the lord of the Tasigin Marid dead, Talidi province, in which the villages of the Marid lay, now found its best customer for industrial supplies in lord Geigi’s province, thatwould surely give the pro-Tabini dissidents and the worker associations within Talidi province the encouragement to turn toward Tabini and the central authority, not toward the coalition that had been trying to form in the Marid.

It was typical of Tabini’s politics. A river would be flowing in one direction, and Tabini would place a charge to divert it so suddenly into another channel the fish swimming in it had no warning.

As Direiso up in the Padi Valley (she was not a peninsular lord) had to be doubling her security this evening, perhaps not even yet believing the degree of danger she was in if she didn’t change course fast: she was clever and quick—she was alive because of that. But she was self-confident, meaning she hadno man’chi, meaning she feltno man’chi, as aijiin of highest rank had and felt none, and was not a follower of anyone, but attracted man’chi: thatmeant she was dangerous in a way other atevi weren’t psychologically armed to be.

Her followers were scattered, and wouldact after her death, breaking up into smaller associations difficult to track and possibly attracting others due to the different chemistry of the sub-associations. That was the protection high lords always had against assassination: kill them and you had not one large problem but twenty smaller ones, harder to track.

But so did Tabini have that defense. More so. Direiso only thoughtshe could ride the waves Tabini’s fall would generate. It was a time when atevi, threatened from the skies, could least afford to be indecisive, and most of the lords of the Western Association knew that Tabini was the only leader saving them from civil chaos.

He truly wished the Direiso matter were settled. He didn’ttrust any stated changes of direction or belief on her part. Even if atevi emotion andpolitics made it instinctually natural for her to make such changes, he wouldn’t believe them. He’d never met the woman but he knew he didn’t likeher or any one of her followers.

Another psychological warning flag. Hecouldn’t feel it as natural, hecouldn’t judge in his own blood and bone what was natural for any atevi to do, and he couldn’t help but think how very, very delicately poised the whole of human and atevi survival was right now.

Lose Tabini? There’d be a bloodbath the like of which the world had never seen.

Let the conservatives on Mospheira get out of hand?

Same result.

He was just outright shaken by today’s events. He admitted it to himself finally. He’d been riding a fierce downhill course, and leaping from point to point to point until it was damn well no good mapping out where he’d been: where he’d been didn’t exist any more. There was no going back to the atevi state that had existed, once upon a time. There was no dealing with the government on Mospheira that had sent him. The people he was loyal to hardly had any power left.

The plane was a pure, unheralded, no-damn-reason accident. Near accident. He was safe. So was a very chastened teenager.

His fingers were wrinkling. He had to go out and breathe air again. Problems were not his problems tonight. Supper was waiting. A very fine supper, prepared by a cook who accommodated his needs quite expertly.

He shut the water down and exited into the cooler air outside, wrapped instantly in a thick towel, a comfort and luxury of having servants which he did enjoy; and which by his order to this all-female staff was the job of one of the older, more—motherly—women.

But a blink of water-hazed eyes showed him not a maid who had flung it about him, but Tano, continuing the personal attendance Tano had given him on the trip. He told himself he should decline Tano’s attendance: the man had worked harder today than he had by twice.

On the other hand, since it was Tano, he was able to ask him—

But no, dammit, no. He wasn’t going to ask about the content of the other messages that might be disasters awaiting his return. He’d been near a radio, and within reach of security communications, and his staff (forty-seven secretaries and a skilled supervisor devoted to such problems) would have known how to call him if there were anything amiss, including unreadable foreign language telegrams or phone calls. The one bombshell he’d picked out of the basket he’d chosen precisely because it was a telegram, and by that criterion urgent and newly arrived.

There couldn’t be any more surprises. Peaceful dinner. Quiet sleep. Back to routine. It was all he wanted. Parsing verbs at Jase. A walk in the gardens—suitably guarded.

He let Tano wrap him in more warmed thick towels, a human vice grown harmlessly popular among atevi, although some still used the traditional sheeting. He accepted an informal and human-sized pair of drawstring trousers, a shirt, and a short, wide-sleeved lounging-robe which was adequate for an intimate dinner in the private dining room. He let his hair, toweled to a residual dampness, rest on his shoulders, as a gentleman or a lady could, in private and before a trusted staff.

A shadow turned up in the tiled doorway, along a row of several such showers.

Jase, coatless, dressed in a dark shirt. His dark hair just barely, in half a year, grown long enough to braid, was tied back and still falling loose around his face. The servants would not have let him out of his room without a coat. Or he’d been—troublesome thought—ignoring the servants.

“There you are,” Bren said cheerfully, trying to ignore the glum look Jase gave him. “One wondered about your whereabouts, nadi.”

“I don’t know where else I’d be.” Jase hadn’t spoken in the Ragi language. There was no cheerfulness on his face. But it was a homecoming. One supposed. “How was the trip?”

“Fine,” he said, persisting in Ragi and in cheerfulness. Jase wasn’tsupposed to speak the human language. Jase had agreed to follow the regimen by which he’dlearned: no Mosphei’ at all. “How have you been, nadi-ji?”

“Fine.” Jase switched to Ragi. “I hear there was trouble in the peninsula.”

“Saigimi. Yes. Correct noun choice, by the way.—So you did hear.”

“Not that much,” Jase said. “But the staff was worried.”

“Security was in a little hurry to bring me home. But nothing serious.—And you, nadi-ji? Nothing wrong, I hope.”

A hesitation. And in the human language: “Welcome home.”

Welcome home.

A little edge to that, perhaps. A little irony. Or friendliness. He wasn’t sure. It was a term they’d had to discuss in Mosphei’. Jase hadn’t understood what homewas in relation to thisplanet, one of the myriad of little human concepts that had somehow not made it back from the stars unchanged. Hometo Jase’s original thinking was a world. Homewas Earth. Homewas, equally, an atevi star neither Jase nor his parents had ever seen, to which they’d returned from wherever they’d gone for nearly two hundred years.

And whatever homemeant, Jase had never in his life been out of the steel world he’d been born to, until he’d entered a tiny pod and plunged into this world’s atmosphere.

“Home, yes, nadi.” Bren gave the ends of his hair, which reached the middle of his back when it was loose from its braid, a final squeeze of the towel. Tano was still standing there, along with two of the female servants. Jase had been practicing disconnecting the face and the tones of voice from the content, but it wasn’t appropriate here. Or there were other interpretations. Jase had a temper. He’d seen that proved. But he wasn’t going to light into Jase with lectures. “Relax. It’s staff. Is there a problem?”

“No.”

Which meant Yes, in that leaden tone of voice.

Fine. Disasters. He saw it coming. There’d been a crisis in the household.

But it didn’t need to preface supper. Dammit, he refused to have it before supper. Not unless there’d been bloodshed.

“Can it wait until after dinner, nadi?”

Jase didn’t answer him. It was a sulk. It was aimed at him.

He was in the witness of atevi, both servants and security. He was under a noble roof. He was getting angry—as Jase could make him angry, with a human precision no ateva quite managed. And, dammit, he wasn’t going to argue. He made his tone smooth and his expression bland. “All right, if it can’t wait, let’s go to the library.”

“All right,” Jase said in that same dead tone.

He led the way. Jase walked with him quietly down the short curving hall from the baths to the main hallway and back to the isolation of the lady Damiri’s private library, mostly of antique, fragile books.

Tano followed. Tano, having it unshakably in his atevi mind that Jase wasof a different leader’s man’chi, would notallow him alone in Jase’s presence, or at least not far alone in Jase’s presence when Jase was acting like this. It was well possible that, species aside, Tano picked up some of the same signals he did, of hisanger, and that he wasn’t damned patient at the moment for one of Jase’s tempests in an atevi teapot.

Tano took up a post outside the door when he followed Jase inside and shut the door.

“So what is it?” Bren said.

“Just—” Jase lapsed into his own dialect. “Dammit, you could have phoned, that’s all.”

“For what?”

“It doesn’t matter! I waited. I waited every evening. I couldn’t even get the damn security to say what city you were in!”

Tano and Algini outranked the security he’d left guarding Jase, that was why. But it was petty business. Notthe real issue. Jase began arguments by diversion—he’d learned that, and all right, Bren thought, he could chase diversion, if that was where Jase wanted to take this conversation at the moment; and they’d pretend to talk, and pretend to reach a conclusion and have the real issue for dessert.

In the meanwhile, and inRagi:

“Security is security is security, Jasi-ji. They’re not an information service. Don’t swear about them. They doknow that word.—And I’m sorry. I couldn’t phone and, frankly, risk what you’d say without your knowing you were compromising my security. I’m sorry. I warned you I’d be impossible to reach. I called you four days ago—”

“For ‘Hello, I’m fine, how are you?’ Thanks!”

“I told you I wouldn’t have a secure phone and I didn’t. This afternoon, with the situation what it was, radio traffic had to be at a minimum. Whatthe hell are we arguing about?—Is something wrong?”

Words didn’t come easily in moments of fracture, and the paidhi-aiji knew, hell, yes, he knew, he’d expected it. Jase was close to nonverbal at the moment, too frustrated to find a word in Ragi or otherwise—and he himself, years of study, he’d been through it, too, the moments of sheer disorientation across the cultural interface. Jase’s ship didn’t remotely comprehend what they’d sent Jase into, without the years of training, without the killer selection process in a University that weeded out candidates with any faults in self-control, and Jase had made heroic efforts at holding back his temper—so much so that atevi had begun to realize they had two very different personalities under this roof and occasionally to observe the fact.

Jasi-ji, madam Saidin had put it to him, is rather more excitable, is he not, nand’ paidhi? Is this a correct observation? Or have we offended him?

By no means is it your fault: he’d said that to Saidin in early winter.

Consequently it was hisjob to cover for Jase’s failures in composure now in spite of the fact that he himself was too tired to reason. Atevi outside the staff weren’t going to understand Jase’s difficulties, and wouldn’t, and didn’t quite give a damn.

He gave it a few seconds while he watched Jase fight for composure, careful breaths, a deep, difficult calm. Improving, he said to himself, while his own blood pressure, even with evidence of that improvement, exceeded his recent altitude.

“Bad day,” Jase said finally, and then, having won his approval, had to add, “I can see you’re not in the mood to discuss it.”

“I’ll discuss it.” He hatedhimself when he agreed to suffer.

“We have cook waiting. I don’t want to stand between you and supper.”

“Control your temper, nadi.” Jase had spoken in Ragi. Bren changed languages. Fast. While he had his temper in both hands. The atevi language reminded him of calm. It exertedcalm, force of habit. “ Face.”

There was a scowl on Jase’s face at the moment. It vanished. Jase became perfectly calm.

“Is there a danger?” Bren felt constrained to ask, now that reason was with them both. “Is there something I can imminently do something about? Or answer? Or help?”

Jase had been locked in this apartment for six months trying to learn the language, and there’d been moments of frustration at which the monolingual staff, without the experience Jase was going through, could only stare in confusion. There were moments lately when not only the right word wouldn’t come, noword would come, in any language. There were moments when, helpless as an infant’s brain, the adult mind lost all organization of images and association of words simultaneously, and the mental process became less than three years of age. Deep fluency started by spurts and moments.

Jase seemed, this day, this hour, to have reached saturation point definitively and universally.

“I’m back for a while,” Bren said gently, and, which one didn’t do with atevi, patted Jase’s shoulder. “I understand. We’ll talk.”

“Yes,” Jase said, in Ragi, and seemed calmer. “Let’s go to dinner.”

5

Jase sat at one end of the small formal table and Bren sat at the other as the staff served a five course supper with strict adherence to the forms. The staff might easily have kept less formality with the paidhi nowadays, though he was generally careful of proprieties, but he wanted Jase to learnthe formal and correct set of manners, the correct utensil, the correct grip, the correct posture, the correct communication with the server: he had left orders, and the staff had mercilessly followed them, even today, when he would as gladly have omitted them.

Jase was in effect a child, as far as communication went, and in some regards as far as expectations of the planet went. Bren had said that to Saidin, too, and she perhaps put Jase’s fits of temper in that basket along with her observation and with his recent declaration that the staff were all rain clouds— ghidari’sai uchl’sa-ma—when Jase had wished to tell Saidin he’d possibly offended members of the staff— jidari’sai uchi’sa-ma.

Rain clouds had instantly become the running joke in the household the day before Bren had left. The staff had been accustomed to believe Jase couldn’t understand.

And before he’d left he’d had delicately to explain to Saidin that, yes, Jasi-ji did understand the joke; and yes, Jasi-ji had been embarrassed, and, no, Jasi-ji would not pursue the matter of the staff’s laughter to anyone’s detriment, so they need not worry, but it was time not to laugh any longer.

Possibly that was what had blown up while he was gone. Jase might be a child in size to the atevi, and might use the children’s language, which didn’t have the rigid expectation of correct numbers, but Jase was nota child, and Jase had been on edge since before he left on the trip.

The staff brought in the third round of trays and served the seasonal game.

“I’ve been battling the irregular verbs,” Jase said conversationally. “The staff has been very helpful. No more rain clouds. Get. I’ve been working on get. Indivisible plurals.”

“Common verb. Defective verb?”

“Defective verb?”

“Old verb. Lot of use. They break.”

Jase gave him an odd look.

“True,” Bren said. “The common verbs wear out. They lose pieces over the centuries. People patch them. People abuse them. Everyone uses get.” It was only half facetious, and having led Jase on a small chase that tested his command of unusual forms, he thought it time for explanation: “If only professors use a verb, it remains unchanged forever. Fossils. Getisn’t such a verb. It’s been used by the common man.”

“It’s a difficult verb.”

“It certainly is. But your accent’s vastly improved. Very good.—Listen: master getand you’ve got the irregular indivisibles of shikira, makkiura, and shis’urna. Any three quarters of any verb in the -ireiclass: they rhyme with the -raplurals, at least in the past tenses.”

“You’re sure. You swear.”

“In formal Ragi, there are, I swear to you, three hundred forty-six key words. Learn those, and most everything that rhymes with them follows their paradigm.”

“You said there were a hundred and twelve!”

“I’m speaking of the court language. You’re getting far beyond the children’s forms.”

“Not very damn fast, I’m not.”

“It does go faster from here. Trust me.”

“That’s what you said when I landed.”

The conversation had gone to banter. To high spirits. “What couldI say? I couldn’t discourage you.”

But Jase didn’t take up the conversation. Jase ducked his head and had a piece of fish, no longer engaging with him, and the mood crashed.

He looked down the length of a table set with dishes not native even to him, knowing he couldn’t imaginethe mind of a man who’d never seen a horizon with a negative curve, who’d never seen a blue sky, never seen the rain clouds he mistakenly invoked. Jase had never even met a stranger until he’d fallen down from the sky and met a world full of strangers and unguessable customs. Jase’s world had consisted of the crew of his ship— hisship, not theship.

Jase had somehow acquired curiosity about things outside his steel world. That adventurousness, the ship’s captain had declared, was why he’d sent Jase, who was (he and Jase had worked it out on the computer) two planetary years younger than his twenty-seven-almost-eight; and it was why they’d sent Yolanda Mercheson, who was a little older, a little steadier, perhaps. He’d never gotten a chance to know her when she landed with Jase—they’d rapidly packed her off to her job on the island—but he thought she might be a match for some of the harder heads on Mospheira. In his brief experience of her, Yolanda Mercheson would watch anything, no matter how odd, completely deadpan and without reaction—and remark it was certainly different than they did things on the ship.

Considering Jase’s volatility, Jase’s uneasiness at strange things, and his tendency to let his expressions slip his control, Bren asked himself if the ship-folk hadn’t mistaken their envoys. Atevi would have accepted Yolanda’s dry and deadpan humor, though mistakenly; it was tooatevi without being atevi. But Jase didn’t keep himself in the kind of shell his own predecessor, Wilson-paidhi, had built around himself. Say that for him: he was willing to risk everything, was willing to risk emotional and psychological hurt, getting close to the atevi.

Jase had come armed with curiosity and a history of the atevi-human conflict that not-well-disposed humans on Mospheira had fired at the ship; and, coming from a steel-walled ship-culture which he’d hinted had distinctions of rank but not of diversity, he’d gone into the business more blind and more ignorant as to what he was getting into than a native of the world could possibly imagine.

The personal recklessness it had taken for both Jase and Yolanda to come down here would have washed both of them out of the Foreign Studies program. Jase had been willing, intelligent, and had no essential duties aboard the ship, a computer tech, but in cold, blunt terms, the ship could risk him: low-level and ignorant. Exactly what Mospheira’s government had thought itwas sending into the field when it sent one Bren Cameron.

But paidhiin had a tendency to mutate on duty. It remained to be seen what the job would do to Jase, but the ship wouldn’t get back the bright-eyed and curious young man it had sent down to the world, if that man had ever really existed. Hehadn’t seen that side of Jase, the Jase that had existed in the voice transmissions from the ship, not since the capsule had landed; and he was, he admitted it, disappointed in the transaction. Stress and communication problems and the need for one of them who knew all the answers to tell the other when to hold that frustration in and how long to hold it all took their toll. It had certainly undermined the relationship they might have had.

“So are there any messages in?” he asked Jase, meaning messages from the ship, via the big dish at Mogari-nai.

“The regular call from Yolanda.”

“So how is she, nadi?”

“Fine.”

They spoke the atevi language in the exchange. Madam Saidin dropped by to put a note beside his plate.

Join me after breakfast, it said. It bore Tabini’s signature, was entirely in Tabini’s hand, a rarity. Unless there’s urgency about your report. I shall expect you at the usual time.

“No,” he said with a glance up to Saidin. “Thank you, nadi. I can leave matters at that. I don’t need to reply. This is a confirmation only.”

“News, nadi?” Jase asked.

“An appointment tomorrow, with the aiji. Routine matters.—Although nothing’s routine at the moment.” He saw expression on Jase’s face. Or had seen it. “Jase?”

“No,” Jase said. And drew a breath. “Glad to see a human face.”

Meaning hehad an appointment and was bound out of the apartment and Jase was alone. Again.

“The mirror gets old,” he said to Jase with all sympathy, “doesn’t it?”

“You said I’d get past it. I frankly don’t see how you’ve stood it alone.”

It wasn’t the time to lecture Jase again about reliance on one’s native tongue. Like it or not, one had to give up one’s native tongue at least for a while if one wished to make that mental jump to full fluency. Jase couldn’t give it up, because Jase was their source of technical words: Jase had to stay connected to the human language because Jase’s jobwas to take concepts in shipboard engineering terms and teach himenough engineering and enough of the ship’s slightly skewed-from-Mosphei’ way of speaking to get it translated accurately enough for atevi engineers. Hewas having to deal far more in the human language than he ordinarily ever would on this side of the strait, and the back-and-forth was keeping him off his stride, too.

But tonight everything he was picking up from Jase said that something major was wrong with that situation—or with some situation. Jase wasn’t talking after that last glum statement. Jase took a sip of guaranteed-safe tea and dipped bits of seasonally appropriate meat into sauce one after another with studied mannerliness, not engaging with him on the issues.

Damn, he was so tired. It wasn’t just today. It was all the sequence of days before. It was the months before.

It was Saigimi. It was the meeting tomorrow. He knewJase had reasons. He knewJase had been through his own kind of hell in isolation, and he felt sorry for his situation, he truly did, but he was suffering his own post-travel adrenaline drop, and had no mental agility left. He wasn’t going to come across as sympathetic, humane, or even human, if Jase wanted to push him, and he didn’t know whether he could postpone their business until the morning without offending Jase, but that was what he should do.

Next course, the last course: Jase asked one servant for two bowls, baffling the young woman considerably.

“ Assoshi madihiin-sa,” Bren said quietly. “ Mai, nadi.”

“ Mai, nadi, saijuri.” Jase echoed him and made a courteous patch on the utterance, with good grace. Maybe, Bren thought, Jase was working through his mood and getting a grip on his emotions: he chose to encourage it.

“Difficult forms,” Bren said in Ragi. The conditional request and the irregular courtesy plurals, six of them, were to create felicitous and infelicitous numbers in the sentence. “You were never infelicitous.”

“One is pleased to hear so.” The courteous answer. The flatly correct answer.

The courtesy plurals weren’t the easiest aspect of the language. Jase had tottered along thus far using the ath-mai’in, commonly, the children’s forms, which advised any hearer that here was an impaired speaker and no one should take offense at his language. Damn some influential person to hell in Mosphei’ and it was, situationally at least, polite conversation. Speak to an atevi of like degree in an infelicitous mode and you’d ill-wished him in far stronger, far more offensive terms and might find yourself filed on with the Guild unless someone could patch the situation.

“I just can’t get the distinctions,” Jase said bitterly. “I’m guessing. You understand me?”

“It’s like the captain,” Bren said, drawing his inspiration from sailing-ships and human legend. “Never call the captain mister. Right? And the more important the person, the greater the politeness-number: just err on the side of compliment.”

“I know it’s a melon!” was the approximation of what Jase retorted.

Jase clearly wasn’t in a mood for mild corrections. A servant was fighting laughter.

“You know it’s important,” Bren corrected him, deadpan, deciding on confrontation.

“Damn,” Jase said, and pushed his plate back in the beginnings of what could become an outburst. Bren thought, having grown tolerably cold-blooded over the course of several months of Jase’s temper-fits, thank goodness he’d gotten almost to dessert. He’d been hungry. And damn Jase anyway.

“Jase.” He attempted diplomacy. “This is the rough part. This is really the roughest part. I swear to you. The language comes to you pretty quickly after this. You’ve done a marvelous job. You’ve done in six months what takes much more than that on Mospheira. You’ve done a brilliant job.”

“I don’t see how you do it! I can’t add that fast!”

“It develops.”

“Not for me!”

“It will come. Maybe you’d better let me do the translations for a few days and let me muddle along with the engineering and develop the questions I really need to ask. Going back and forth is confusing. There comes a time you should be totally inside the language. You seem to have reached it.”

Jase looked aside. “Not all I’ve reached.”

“Well, I’m back for a while,” Bren said. “And if you can just get the courtesy forms down, maybe we can go together on the next trip out. Would you rather?”

“I’d rather be on my ship, nadi!”

“It won’t everhappen if you break down, nadi. And you know that.”

“Maybe,” Jase said, with a slump to the shoulders and a sadness he’d not heard. It was defeat. He’d not seen Jase defeated. Jase turned quietly back to the table, drew a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and said: “I apologize, nand’ Bren.”

The servants served the next course, a light fruit ice. Jase had two spoonfuls and wanted a drink to go with it.

“Serve us the liqueur, nadiin-ji,” Bren said quietly, “in the sitting room. We can open the windows and sit and breathe the fine spring air. The workmen are through for the day, are they not? We can tolerate the paint.”

“Indeed, nand’ paidhi,” the response was. “And the paint smell is much abated. One will advise nand’ Saidin, nandiin-ji.”

He rose from table, waited for Jase and walked with him to the formal sitting room where other servants appeared, opening the jalousies and letting the night air waft through.

It was on the verge of cold air that billowed the gauze curtains wide. But their chairs were near a comfortable gas-fired stove, wasteful notion, and the maids gave them lap robes and glasses of a liqueur like brandy.

“Do you want to talk?” Bren asked. “Jasi-ji?”

“I’m having trouble-with-a-neighbor,” Jase said.

“You mean trouble-in-the-house,” he guessed.

They were alone now in the room. “I am a fool,” Jase began. Possibly he meant awkward. The words sounded alike. But Bren forbore to suggest so or to correct him further: he’d beenthrough sessions like that, and had sympathy for someone trying to collect his thoughts in another language. “May we speak Mosphei’, please?”

“If you wish.” He spoke in that language. “What’s the matter?”

There was silence. A long moment of silence in which Jase breathed as if air had gone short in the room. “I’m not likeyou. I don’t know if I can take this.”

“Only two other people on Mospheira are likeme,” Bren said mildly, “and the staff completely sympathizes with your mistakes. They admire your tenacity. They shouldn’t laugh, but it’s very well-intentioned. If they didn’t laugh, you should worry.”

“You mean it’s all right if they think I’m a fool.”

“If you were not a member of the household they wouldn’t laugh. They call you Jasi-ji. They wish to please you. That’s progress. You’ve worked very hard and come a long way. They respect that. Dealing with complete aliens to their way of life is comparatively new for this staff. It’s not something nature or their culture equipped them very well to do. They’ve never met strangers, either.”

“Can I be blunt? Can I be terribly blunt? I don’t care. I don’t want to live here. I want off the planet. I want to go back to my ship. If I have to stay here I’ll die. I don’t likeit. I know I’m not supposed to use that word, but I can’t take it here. I dolike. I dodislike. I’m cold half the time. I’m hot the rest. The light hurts my eyes. The smells bother me. The food upsets my stomach. And I’m sorry if it’s funny among the staff, there was a flying thing in my room—I didn’t know it wasn’t poisonous.”

“This morning?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s spring. Flying things do come to the lights. That’s informational, not a criticism. If they laughed, it wasfunny, Jasi-ji. And probably your reaction was. They do not mean you ill.”

“You say. I made a fool of myself!”

“And I’m sorry to state the obvious, but you have no choice—you have no viable choice but to smile and be pleasant. You knew when you came down here with no return that it wouldn’t be easy. I know the exhaustion that sets in when nothingyou touch or deal with is the same. I know what you’re going through.”

“You can’t know! You were at least born to a planet! I wasn’t! I don’t likethis, and I don’t care that the language can’t accommodate likeand dislike, it’s what I feel!”

“Possibly I can’t imagine.” He thought, and didn’t say, and then did: “But I can’t go home either, Jase, as I’m sure you’ve overheard at some time in your stay here, so be a little easy on me, if you can find it in you. I can’t go home, and if we get this ship flying sometime this next couple of years, you cango back. And you’ll be a hero and I won’t, not among the people that I was born with. So don’t say I don’t know at least something about how you feel.”

Jase wasn’t prepared to grant that point. He saw that in Jase’s angry expression, and didn’t push the point.

It was training. He was always professional, always rational, and when good reasons made him want to get up, drag Jase out of the chair and pound Jase’s head against the wall, he didn’t. This was, he reminded himself, a man capable of gentle humor and lightning wit, though neither was in evidence tonight.

“I’m telling you,” Jase said, “I don’t know if I can take it. I don’t know that any more, Bren.”

“And you know that it’s not only you in danger if you cave in. So you won’t. That’s all. You won’t.”

“I can’t exist here and not talk to human beings except on a radio!”

That stung. That really rather stung, right in the area of his own self-doubts. Bren sat there quite still and told himself there was nothing emotionally significant to him in Jase’s unthought remark.

But to the diplomat, it was significant information regarding Jase’s view of him.

And being the diplomat, he didn’t bring that slip to Jase’s attention. Pointing out that Jase might have a bias against the natives, including humans on Mospheira, was an egg which, the atevi proverb had it, once cracked, had to be eaten.

And, in truth, it was possible he himself didn’t wholly trust the Pilots’ Guild, the old human distinction between crew and passengers on the ship. The crew had once maintained the passengers didn’t have a vote, until the descendants of the crew needed the descendants of the passengers for dangerous and vital work.

There was a lot of history between the long-ago passengers and the crew; and a lot at stake for the ship in that interface. The Pilots’ Guild had never wanted the Landing, and had given in on the issue only grudgingly and in the confidence the project would have no support from the station management. The ship had surely expected to return to a spacefaring civilization with a well-maintained station, maybe with the original landing party dead; but not what they’d met—no station presence, no launch capacity, and a thriving planetary colony with very touchy relations with the native atevi.

“I understand your frustration,” he said finally, and maybe Jase never realized his slip, but damn sure if Jase were taking the tests to enter the Foreign Studies program over on Mospheira, he’d have washed out, right there, first for making the slip, and then for not realizing it.

Though, again, maybe Jase did realize. Once you learned, atevi-style, to disconnect your face from your thoughts, you grew harder and harder to track in human terms.

And old friends in the human world grew harder and harder to keep.

“I know,” Jase said. “I know that you do, Bren. But—”

Jase left that statement unfinished.

“You may never bewhat I am,” Bren said. “I say that with no arrogance at all. You may not want to be. But your way to space has to go through atevi construction workers, to whom the paidhiin must be polite and infallibly encouraging, and it has to go through Tabini-aiji, to whom the paidhiin must be useful, and we can never, ever forget either fact.”

“I try. God, I’m trying.”

“I know you are.”

“Bren—Bren, tell me the truth. Tell me the honest truth. When that spacecraft goes up, am I really going to go with it?”

What in hell brought that on? he asked himself. “Who said otherwise?” he asked.

“I just want to hear it.”

“There’ll be test flights. But when it’s proven safe, you’ll go.”

“Dependent on the aiji’s permission, of course.”

“He’ll let you go.”

“How do I know that?”

“Well, outside of the fact he said so—which is considerable assurance—he’s investing quite a lot in your education. This place. The training. Why shouldn’t he want you on the job translating to the ship?”

“I might be a hostage.”

“It’s not the aiji’s style. It wouldn’t be dignified.”

“He did with Hanks.”

“Say he knows the Mospheiran government. It’s different. He chose not to shoot her.”

“I don’t see the difference. What about when he wants something from mypeople?”

“Have you had a hint he does?”

“Don’t be naïve, Bren.”

“Whatever brought thisup?”

“I just want to know there’s going to be an end to this!”

“It doesn’t seem to me you’re being reasonable. Why do you think he wouldn’t let you go?”

“Look—I want to get out of this apartment. Who do you have to ask?”

Maybe Jase wouldn’t have washed out of the program. The paidhi, experienced in diplomacy, nearly fell into that little pitfall.

“I can take you wherever I like.”

“Then why noton this last trip? Why not on the next?”

Because it wasn’t that simple. But Jase wasn’t in a reasoning mood. “You go nowhere until you learn the verb forms.” That set it at some distance. “And until you don’t make statements as rash as that you just made about our hosts.”

“The hell with the verb forms!”

First the disorientation, then the anger. He’d been there, too. At least Jase wasn’t fool enough to damn Tabini. “You can die of old age on this planet if we mistranslate a design spec and the program fails. You could die sooner if you don’t understand culturally where you’re likely to find security wires. You can die if your insults to the aiji disturb the peace of this country. Or you can sit idle and become a ward of the state while I do your work. These are serious choices. It is not‘to hell with the verb forms.’ Your choices otherwise are all unpalatable.”

He’d made Jase mad. Real mad. But Jase didn’t get up from his chair and stalk from the room as he’d done once last autumn.

“You do it even in human language,” Jase said, “don’t you?”

“What?”

“Nadi,” Jase said in measured tones, in Ragi, and with no expression whatever, “one understands my options to be balanced with a felicitous fifth choice.”

“That being?”

“The one you wish: my compliance, nadi.”

He hadposed it in a foursome, infelicitous four, when three, the human cultural choice, was felicitous. And Jase had at least feltit. “Good. Very good. You’re catching on.”

“Nand’ Saidin has assigned a servant to assist me. And I have worked, nadi. I work very long hours because I hope for a release from this confinement and a sexual assignation with my job.”

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t let his face twitch. “An opportunity.”

Jase’s face went red.

“Yes, nadi. An opportunity.”

“I’m encouraged, nadi-ji, none the less. And I shall make every effort to include you in the next itinerary. Jase, it will get easier.”

“How doyou stand it?”

A deep breath. A sip of the liquor. “Stubbornness. I had alternatives early on. Now there aren’t any. You do what you have to.”

“You could quit. You could go back.”

“I’d have Deana Hanks for my successor.”

“Does that matter? Ultimately you’re one man. After you, things will be what they’ll be. Does that matter?”

“Yes, it damn well matters. This is my job.”

The conversation was depressing him. He didn’t want to discuss his own situation. He didn’t think it would help.

“You have people harassing your family,” Jase said.

“Where did you hear that?”

Jase had a troubled look. “I’m not deaf. And, as you say, I dopick up things from the staff now.”

“My family’s situation isn’t the official situation. There isa difference, Jase, and the ship needs to know that. Theoretically—” Theoretically the government was looking for the perpetrators. But it never found them. The police never caught anyone. And he had to ask himself how long before he had to hold international politics hostage to the threats against his family and get Tabini to demand something be done.

It was what the perpetrators wanted. It was exactlywhat they wanted. It would give themthe leverage to threaten the government and become noisier than they were. And he tried to deaden his nerves and not react when he got news that upset him.

“Theoretically—” Jase said. Possibly Jase didn’t know that word.

He’d not wanted, for one other thing, to lose his credibility in a descent into name-calling and accusations. He’d never wanted to bring the whole of the stresses on him into question in the household here: it would raise concerns even with the staff. But maybe Jase wasable to understand the complexity of the constraints on him. Maybe he’d been around atevi long enough not to draw wrong conclusions and maybe it wastime to lay some of the truth on the table, if Jase was listening behind doors. He changed to Mosphei’.

“More than theoretically, Jase, the sons of bitches are calling my mother at three in the morning. She’s got a heart condition.—But they’re freelance operators so far as I know. Isolationists. Pro-spacers. Anti-spacers. The whole damn gamut, Jase. It’s the radical fringe that wants another war. Or an end to building on the north shore. I’m sure Ms. Mercheson has had lunch with them, though I haven’t wanted to act as if I were trying to affect herindependent judgment. They’ll be perfectly polite to her. They’ll be dressed in their Sunday best and telling her atevi can’t be trusted.” He knew he’d wandered further than he’d intended, into areas he probably shouldn’t discuss with Jase, politically speaking. But if he didn’t find a starting point to include Jase on the inside of the information flow, Jase couldn’t understand the atevi’s chosen isolation, either.

The hell with it, he thought. It wastime to talk, seriously, about the con job the Mospheiran government was bound to be trying on Yolanda Mercheson; and he’d tried to take the high ground rather than have his own side sound like a con job. But that strategy could backfire, if Jase had gotten some report from Yolanda that painted the other side of the strait as flawless and cooperative; and he wasn’t sorry to have hit Jase with the nastier truths of Mospheira’s underside.

“There’s a lot of humans,” he said, in Ragi again, and more calmly, “who don’t want atevi to go to space. And among those, some are crazy. Some are honest, law-abiding citizens.”

“An infelicity of two: you mean—some are neither.”

That was a first. He waspleased. If Jase had gotten that far, they couldtalk, and he was ready to do so. “Just so, nadi. Better and better. Another such improvement and I might well present you at court.”

“Not—quite ready for that, I think.”

“But very much better. I don’t know if information helps the digestion, but that’s the truth from my side. What’s yours?”

A slight hesitation. Then: “My father’s dead.”

For a moment he didn’t even hear it. Or didn’t believe he could have heard what he thought he had.

“God, Jase.—When?” He couldn’t figure out how Jase would learn such a thing. Whenever the ship called, it created a stir in the household; and he hadn’t heard of it.

“Four days ago.—I got it from Yolanda. I haven’t even been able to call my mother. Security wouldn’t let me call the ship because you hadn’t left instructions and I couldn’t reach you.”

Thatwas the distress over the period out of contact. That was the aborted conversation before supper.

“Damn. Damn, Jase, what do I say?—I’m sorry.”

“It’s one of those things, you know. Just one of those things. He just—just was working—” The glass trembled in Jase’s fingers, and he lifted it and drank. “An accident. Yolanda had talked to the ship. She heard. She thought I already had. She offered condolences—All right?” The glass met the small table. Click. “But I haven’t been able to call herback. I found out four days ago and I haven’t been able to get hold of you. I haven’t been able to call the ship.”

He had to revise a great many estimations of Jase, with this performance, both cool-headed and confrontational, recklessly so: Here’s what I know, be damned to you, I want off this planet.

No wonderJase had been bearing down on the lessons in the last several days. To the point of hysteria, alternated with cold, clear, bloody-minded function. He was speaking now in Ragi and doing it with steady self-control.

“Jase. I didn’t hear. I don’t know why I didn’t hear. And I don’t know why you didn’t get a call from the ship. I’ll ask official questions. I’m extremely sorry.”

The facial nerves were verywell under control, as perhaps his were. He forgot, he feared, to adjust between languages. Between mindsets, he forgot to respond in the human sense. He forgotto use human expressions.

“Jase.” He switched to Mosphei’ and, like an actor assuming a role, brought expression consciously to his face. “I didn’t know. I’m going to find out why I didn’t know. I know that atevi will be concerned that you didn’t learn this in any proper way.”

“Can we use the word ‘care’ here? Are we finally permitted?”

“In this, Jase, I assure you the staff would care.”

“Shed tears, I’m sure.”

“No.” He refused to back up from the attack, and equally refused to attack back. “But making demands like that serves no one.—I’m sorry. I’m extremely sorry. I put you off and I’m sorry. I wish I’d been here. I am here now. Can I do anything?”

“No. I’ve been keeping up with my studies.” Jase’s tone was light, his eyes distracted by something across the room. The wall, perhaps. Or a blowing curtain. “It’s the only choice I have, isn’t it?”

“Is your mother all right?”

Slight pause. Restrainedly, then: “I have no idea.”

“Damn. Damn, Jase. I willstraighten out the phone situation.”

“I’d like to talk to my mother. Privately. If you can arrange that.”

He didn’t know what to say. “I’ll arrange something. As soon as I can. Do you want to speak to her tonight?”

“If she’s gotten to sleep, I’d rather not disturb her this late.” The ship-folk had sensibly adjusted their day-night schedule to the Mospheira-Shejidan time zone. And it was still evening up there on the ship, as it was evening here, but he didn’t argue that fine point with Jase, either.

Excuse, he thought. And asked himself why, and with what motive, and didn’t come up with charitable answers, a reaction he didn’t trust in himself. Hewas angry. He didn’t know why that was, either. He didn’t think he was angry at Jase. Or the staff. Having just talked about his own home situation, he knew why he mightbe angry.

He wasn’t sure, though, why he wasangry, or at what he could even be angry, and was far less certain that his anger would do any possible good to anyone.

The servant came in, hesitated, and at a slight lifting of his hand, poured two more drinks.

But Jase said, after the young woman had left, “I’ll take mine to my room, if you don’t mind, nadi. I’m feeling unsteady.”

Jase rose. Bren did. One part of him said in spite of Jase’s evasions and in spite of his anger he should go over to Jase and put his arm around his shoulders. He should offer—something of an emotional support.

But he didn’t. As Jase never quite addressed him with the intimate form in Ragi, though he did it toward Jase.

Jase had never made such gestures toward him in that interpersonally sensitive language. Maybe Jase didn’t think he was of status to do it. Maybe there was another reason.

Whatever it was, they’d never made such gestures toward one another, certainly not intruded so far as an embrace, between the only two humans on the mainland. He’d held out a hand to welcome Jase when he’d pulled him from the capsule and into the world. Jase had accepted that hand, but hadn’t met him with the enthusiasm or the openness the transmissions from the ship had prepared him to expect.

The one gesture, nothing more, from either side. And somehow they’d found no way to begin again. Not in six months.

It seemed impossible to try in this situation, when sensibilities were raw-edged and, he admitted it, when he wasn’t sure he’d mean any such move toward a greater closeness with Jase, because of an anger the causes of which he wasn’t himself right now sure of.

He stood there as Jase walked away and out the door.

6

Maybe he should have made the try. Maybe, Bren thought, he should go after Jase all the same and make the gesture and try to sort out exactly why and at what he was angry, and why (he detected so, at least) Jase was so deeply angry, too.

But at such a juncture, what he did could intrude on sensibilities and shove the situation beyond all reason. He might instead do something he could bring to Jase as a peace offering. He might take measures to calm the situation. He might try to ease the strain on Jase and then talk to him, once the anger had settled. In both of them.

He saw the servant standing at the door, hands folded, waiting for his order, aware, perhaps that something was wrong.

“Is nand’ Saidin still on duty?”

“I believe she has retired, nand’ paidhi, but I doubt very much she is asleep. Shall I call her?”

“No. Is nadi Tano awake? Or nad’ Algini?”

“Both or either, nand’ paidhi. Shall I call them?”

“Do,” he said; and stood sipping his drink until a quiet step and a shadow in the doorway advised him of presence.

“Nadi?” Tano asked. Both of them had come, and entered the room at his implied invitation.

“Nadiin,” he said, intensely aware how they would blame themselves for a failure in information. “Jase says his father has died. He had this news from Mospheira, he says, four days ago, and complains he was not able to contact his mother on the ship because security couldn’t clear a call to the ship or contact me. Are we able to remedy this?”

“I will make immediate inquiry, nand’ paidhi,” Algini said, ever the proper, to-the-point one; and Tano, equally atop any business he was supposed to monitor: “The record shows the call from Mospheira. The staff has it on tape. It was in Mosphei’. Do you wish to hear it?”

“I do.” It was his business to. Someone had better find out what was going on, and how much else that message had contained, and he was the one who admitted to speaking the language. He was sure that certain atevi did, even that certain atevi close to him were staying up nights increasing their fluency at Jase’s expense, while Jase persisted in resorting to human language, but with what accuracy atevi were understanding the biology behind the vocabulary, he was far from certain. “Did nand’ Jase seem upset?”

“That was not in the report, nadi. He stayed to his room a great deal, that was all. One phone call came to him from Mospheira, late in the evening, four days ago. No others are on the record.”

He didn’t have enough information to cue them to report information they might not know they had.

More, he had to be extremely careful. Everything at the interface of atevi responsibility and human emotions was difficult and subject to error. As long as he’d lived among atevi, he could guess one’s man’chi toward a lord, and he knew the specific man’chi of Tano and Algini and others toward Tabini, but he knew very little of their family ties or how man’chi to a lord fit into man’chi toward a mother or a father. He’d heardTano speak of his own father, and of a desire to have the man’s good opinion, but he also knew that Tano had defied his father’s wishes to pursue a Guild career. He’d had Tano recommend relatives for posts as ‘reliable persons,’ a reliability one could attribute to man’chi, and the fact that it wasn’t biologically likely for treason to operate where man’chi existed.

He knew that Damiri had defied her clan to associate herself romantically and politically (or should that be, politically and romantically) with Tabini, who was close to an ancestral enemy of her clan, a close neighbor in the Padi valley holdings, and certainly persona non grata with uncle Tatiseigi, the head of the Atageini clan. Antipathy on the part of a clan head (toward whom Damiri held man’chi) certainly hadn’t daunted Damiri—but then, few things did.

The one wisdom about atevi family relations that two centuries of paidhiin had gathered was that the bonds of affection that held a human family together were not only not present, they weren’t biologically possible.

Different hardwiring.

Different expectations.

Different familial relationships and different necessities.

One didn’t know, for instance, what an atevi child expected of his parents. Food and shelter up to a certain point, yes. The point of separation seemed to be about seventeen years, maybe twenty. That was all the accumulated experience could say. Anything else was rated speculative, in the textbooks. He himself tentatively theorized that as humans had to mature beyond emotional dependency on their parents, atevi had somehow to get out of man’chi toward their parents or the family unit would never mature. There had to be a psychological break, somewhere, for the culture to function beyond the family.

“If this were an ateva who had heard this news,” he asked the two closest of his companions and guards, persons who, if they were human, he would have called friends, “what would other atevi expect of him? Principally, what would other atevi expect him to feel, or do, under these circumstances?”

“If relations with his father were good,” Tano said, “then one would expect sadness, nand’ paidhi. He would go to his household. He would bury his father. He would confirm man’chi within his house and within his associations.”

Confirm man’chi. Confirmman’chi. With atevi, it was not only an overriding emotion. It was theoverriding emotion. A homing instinct under fire. The place you’d go. The person you’d rescue from a burning building.

“In what manner can one confirmman’chi, nadi, if I may ask such a question? Please decline to answer if I cross some line of decency.”

“An expression, nand’ paidhi. It’s an expression. One visits the household. One remembers. One assembles the living members of the household, for one thing, to know where their man’chi may lie now that this man’chi is put away. The household has to be rebuilt.”

“The man’chi to the dead man is put away.”

“Into the earth, nand’ paidhi, or into the fire. One can only have man’chi to the living.”

“Never to the dead?” He watched a lot of machimi plays, in the standard of which man’chi and its nuances was the pivot-point of treachery and action, double-crosses and last-moment decisions. “In the plays, nadi, this seems possible.”

“If one believes in ghosts.”

“Ah.” It was a belief some atevi held.

And more had believed in them, as a matter of course, in the ancient world of the machimi plays. Such a belief in the supernatural didn’t include the two men present with him, he was quite sure. But belief in ghosts of course would tie directly into whether or not the dead could still claim loyalty.

“Also,” Algini said in his quiet way, “the living will exact a penalty from living persons who might have been responsible. This does notrequire a belief in ghosts. But in the old days, one might equally well exact a penalty of the dead.”

He was curious. It went some distance toward explaining certain machimi, in which there seemed to be some actions of venerating or despising monuments and bones, heaving them into rivers and the like.

But it wasn’ta solution for the problem he had. “Jase is upset,” Bren said, “because he can’t reach his home or assure himself his mother is well.” One didn’t phrase a question in the negative: atevi, if cued that one expected a negative, would helpfully agree it wasn’t likely. “Would security be concerned for an ateva’s actions under such a circumstance?”

“If this death was due to another person,” Algini said, “one would expect to watch him carefully.”