Invader

INVADER

Caroline J. Cherryh

the second foreigner series novel

CHAPTER 1

The plane had entered the steep bank and descent that heralded a landing at Shejidan. Bren Cameron knew that approach for the north runway in his sleep and with his eyes shut.

Which had been the case. The painkillers had kicked in with a vengeance. He'd been watching the clouds over Mospheira Strait, the last he knew, and the attendants must have rescued his drink, because the glass was gone from the napkin-covered tray.

One arm in a sling and multiple contusions. Surgery.

This morning — he was sure it had been this morning, if he retained any real grasp of time — he'd waked with a Foreign Office staffer, not his mother, not Barb, leaning over his bed and telling him . . .God, he'd lost half of it, something about an urgent meeting, the aiji demanding his immediate presence, a governmental set-to that didn't wait for him to convalesce from the last one, that he thought he'd settled at least enough to wait a few days. Tabini had given him leave, told him go — consult his own doctors.

But the crisis over their heads wouldn't wait, evidently :he'd had no precise details from the staffer regarding the situation on the mainland — not in itself surprising, since the human government on Mospheira and the aiji's association centered at Shejidan didn't talk to each other with that level of frankness regarding internal affairs.

The two governments didn't, as a matter of fact, talk at all without him to translate and mediate. He wasn't sure just how Shejidan had made the request for his presence without him to translate it, but whoever had made the call had evidently made Mospheira believe it was a life-and-death urgency.

"Mr. Cameron, let me put the tray up."

"Thanks." The sling was a first for him. He skied, aggressively, when he got the chance; in his twenty-seven years he'd spent two sessions on crutches. But an arm out of commission was a new experience, and a real inconvenience, he'd already discovered, to anything clerical he needed to do.

The tray went up and locked. The attendant helped him with the seat back, extracted the ends of the safety belt from his seat — and would have snapped it for him: being casted from his collarbone to his knuckles and taped about the chest didn't make bending or reaching easier. But at least the cast had left his fingers free, just enough to hold on to things. He managed to take the belt in his own fingers, pull the belt sideways and forward and fasten the buckle himself, before he let it snap back against his chest, small triumph in a day of drugged, dim-witted frustrations.

He wished he hadn't taken the painkiller. He'd had no idea it was as strong as it was. They'd said, if you need it, and he'd thought, after the scramble to get his affairs in the office in order and then to get to the airport, that he'd needed it to take the edge off the pain.

And woke up an hour later in descent over the capital.

He hoped Shejidan had gotten its signals straight, and that somebody besides the airport officials knew what time he was coming in. Flights between Mospheira and the mainland, several a day, only carried freight on their regular schedule. This small, forward, windowed compartment, which most times served for fragile medical freight, acquired, on any flight he was aboard, two part-time flight attendants, two seats, a wine list and a microwave. It constituted the only passenger service between Mospheira and the mainland for the only passenger who regularly made trips between Mospheira and the mainland: himself, Bren Cameron, the paidhi-aiji.

The very closely guarded paidhi-aiji, not only the official translator, but the arbiter of technological research and development; and the mediator, regularly, between the atevi capital at Shejidan and the island enclave of human colonists on Mospheira.

Wheels down.

The clouds that had made a smooth gray carpet outside the window became a total, blind environment as the plane glided into the cloud deck.

Water spattered the window. The plane bounced in mild buffeting.

Unexpectedly rotten weather. Lightning whitened the wing. The attendants had mentioned rain moving in at Shejidan. But they hadn't said thunderstorm. He hoped the aiji had a car waiting for him. He hoped there wouldn't be a hike of any distance.

Rain streaked the windows, a heavy gray moil of cloud cutting off all view. He'd arrived in Malguri, far across the continent, on a day like this — what? a week or so ago. It seemed an incredibly long time. The whole world had changed in that week.

Changed in the whole balance of atevi power and threat — by the appearance of a single human ship that was now orbiting the planet. Atevi might reasonably suspect that this human ship came welcome. Atevi might easily have that misapprehension — after a hundred and seventy-eight years of silence from the heavens.

It had also been a hundred seventy-eight years of stranded, ground-bound humans on Mospheira making their own decisions and arranging their own accommodations with the earth of the atevi. Humans had been well satisfied — until this ship appeared, not only confounding individual humans whose lives had been calm, predictable, and prosperous in their isolation — but suddenly giving atevi twohuman presences to deal with, when they'd only in the most recent years reached a thoroughly peaceful accommodation with the humans on the island off their shores.

So, one could imagine that the aiji in Shejidan, lord of the Western Association, quite reasonably wanted to know what was in those transmissions that now flowed between that ship and the earth station on Mospheira.

The paidhi wanted to know that answer himself. Something in the last twenty-four hours had changed in the urgency of his presence here — but he had no special brief from the President or State Department to provide those answers, not one damned bit of instruction at least that he'd been conscious enough to remember. He did have a firsthand and still fresh understanding that if things went badly and relations between humans and atevi blew up, this side of the strait would not be a safe place for a human to be: humans and atevi had already fought one bloody war over mistaken intentions. He didn't know if he could single-handedly prevent another; but there was always, constantly inherent in the paidhi's job, the knowledge that if the future of humankind on Mospheira and in this end of the universe wasn't in his power to direct — it was damned sure within his power to screw up.

One fracture in the essential Western Association — one essential leader like the aiji of Shejidan losing position.

One damned fool human with a radio transmitter or one atevi hothead with a hunting rifle — and of the latter, there were entirely too many available on the mainland for his own peace of mind: guns meant food on the table out in the countryside. Atevi youngsters learned to shoot when human kids were learning to ride bikes — and some atevi got damned good at it. Some atevi became licensed professionals, in a society where assassination was a regular legal recourse.

And if Tabini-aiji lost his grip on the Western Association, and if that started fragmenting, everything came undone. Atevi had provinces, but they didn't have borders. Atevi couldn't understand lines on maps by anything logical or reasonable except an approximation of where the householders on that line happened to side on various and reasonable grounds affecting their area, their culture, their scattered loyalties to other associations with nothing in the world to dowith geography.

In more than that respect, it wasn't a human society in the world beyond the island of Mospheira, and if the established atevi authority went down, after nearly two hundred years of building an industrial complex and an interlinked power structure uniting hundreds of small atevi associations —

— it would be his personal fault.

The plane broke through the cloud deck, rain making trails on the window, crooked patterns that fractured the outward view of a city skyline with no tall buildings, a few smokestacks. Tiled roofs, organized by auspicious geometries atevi eyes understood, marched up and down the rain-veiled hills.

The wing dipped, the slats extended as they passed near the vast governmental complex that was his destination: the Bu-javid, the aiji's residence, dominating the highest hill on the edge of Shejidan, a hill footed by hotels and hostels of every class, a little glimmer of — God — audacious neon in the gray haze.

Witness atevi democracy in plain evidence, in those hotels. In the regular audiences and in emergency matters, petitioners lodged there, ordinary people seeking personal audience with the ruler of the greatest association in the world.

In their seasons of legislative duty, lawmakers of the elected hasdrawad occupied the same hotel rooms, with their security and their staffs. Even a handful of the tashrid, those newly ennobled who lacked ancestral arrangements within the Bu-javid itself, found lodging for themselves and their staffs in those pay-by-the-night rooms at the foot of the hill, shoulder to shoulder with shopkeepers, bricklayers, numerologists and television news crews.

With the long-absent emergency hanging literally over the world, the hotels down there were crammed right now and service in the restaurants was, bet on it, in collapse. The legislative committees would all be in session. The hasdrawad and the tashrid would be in full cry. Unseasonal petitioners would barter the doors of the aiji's numerous secretaries, seeking exception for immediate audience for whatever special, threatened interests they represented. Technical experts, fanatic number-counters and crackpot theorists would be jostling each other in the halls of the Bu-javid — because in atevi thinking, all the universe was describable in numbers; numbers were felicitous or not felicitous: numbers blessed or doomed a project, and there were a thousand different systems for reckoning the significant numbers in a matter — all of them backed by absolute, wild-eyed believers.

God help the process of intelligent decisions.

The runway was close now. He watched the warehouses and factories of Shejidan glide under the wing: factory-tops, at the last, rain-pocked puddles on their asphalt and gravel, a drowned view of ventilation fans and a company logo outlined in gravel. He'd never seen Aqidan Pipe & Fittings from file ground. But it, along with the spire of Western Mining and Industry and the roof of Patanandi Aerospace, was the reassuring landmark of all his homecomings to this side of the strait.

Curious notion, that Shejidan had become a refuge.

He hadn't even seen his mother this trip to Mospheira. She hadn't come to the hospital. He'd phoned her when he'd gotten in — he'd gotten time for three phone calls in his hospital room before they knocked him halfway out with painkillers and ran him off for tests. He distinctly remembered he'd phoned her, spoken with her, told her where he was, said he'd be in surgery in the morning. He'd told her, playing down the matter, that she didn't need to come, she could call the hospital for a report when he came to. But he'd honestly and secretly hoped she'd come, maybe show a little maternal concern.

He'd phoned his brother Toby, too, long distance to the northern seacoast where Toby and his wife lived. Toby had said he was sure he was all right, he was very glad he'd turned up back on the job under the present conditions — which the paidhi couldn't, of course, discuss with his family, so they didn't discuss it; and that had been that.

He'd called Barb last: he'd known beyond any doubt that Barb would come to the hospital, but Barb hadn't answered her phone. He'd left a message on the system: Hi, Barb, don't believe the news reports, I'm all right. Hope to see you while I'm here.

But it had been just a Departmental staffer leaning over his bed when he woke, saying, How are you feeling, Mr. Cameron?

And: We really hope you're up to this ....

Thanks, he'd said.

What else could you say? Thanks for the flowers?

Wheels touched, squeaked on wet pavement. He stared out through water-streaked windows at an ash-colored sky, a rainy concrete vista of taxiways, terminal, a functional, blockish architecture, that could, if he didn't know better, be the corresponding international airport on Mospheira.

A team from National Security had taken charge of his computer while he was down-timed on a hospital gurney; State Department experts and the NSA had probably walked all through his files, from his personal letters to his notes for his speeches and his dictionary notes, but they'd had to rush. He'd expected, even knowing his recall would be soon, at least one day to lie in the sun.

But something having hit crisis level, when the security team had picked him up at the hospital emergency desk to take him to his office, they'd handed his computer back to him and given him thirty minutes in his office on the way to the airport — thirty whole minutes, on the systemic remnant of anesthetic and painkillers, to access the files he expected to need, load in the new security overlay codes, and dispose of a request from the President's secretary for a briefing the President apparently wasn't going to get. Meanwhile he'd sent his personal Seeker through the system with all flags flying, to get what it could — whatever his staff, the Foreign Office, the State Department and his various correspondents had sent to him.

In the rush, he didn't even know what files he'd actually gotten, what he might have gotten if he'd argued vigorously with the State Department censors, or what in the main DB might have changed. They'd had an uncommonly narrow window of authorization for their plane to enter atevi airspace, itself an indicator of increased tensions: they'd driven like hell getting to the airport, bumped all Mospheiran local aircraft out of schedule, as it was, and when he'd just gotten served a fruit juice and they'd reached altitude, where he planned to work for his hour in the air, he'd dropped off to sleep watching the clouds.

He'd thought — just rest his eyes. Just shut out the sunlight, such a fierce lot of sunlight, above the clouds. He wasn't sure even now the damned painkiller was out of his system. Things floated. His thoughts skittered about at random, no idea what he was facing, no solid memory what the man from the Department had told him.

The plane made the relatively short taxi not to the regular debarkation point but to the blind, windowless end of the passenger terminal. He managed to get unbelted, and as the plane shut down its engines, cast an expectant look at the attendants for help with his stowed luggage, and gathered himself up carefully out of the seat.

One attendant pulled his luggage from the stowage by the galley. He defended his computer as his own problem, despite the other attendant's reach to help him with that. "The coat, please," he said, and turned his back for help to get it on — one slightly edge-of-season coat he'd had in reserve in Mospheira, atevi-style, many-buttoned and knee-length. He got the one arm in the sleeve, accepted the other onto his immobile shoulder — the damned coat tended to slide, and if it were Mospheira, in summer, he wouldn't bother; but this was Shejidan and a gentleman absolutely wore a coat in public.

A gentleman absolutely took care to have his braid neatly done, too, with the included ribbons indicative of his status and his lineage; but the atevi public would have to forgive him: he'd had no one but the orderly at the hospital to put his hair in the requisite braid. He'd intended to protect it from the seat-rest during the flight, but after his unintended nap, he didn't know what condition it was in. He bowed his head now and managed one-handed to pull it from under the coat collar without losing the coat off his shoulder, felt an unwelcome wisp of flyaway by his cheek and tried to tuck it in.

Then he picked up his computer, eased the strap onto his good shoulder and made his unhurried way forward, an embarrassingly disreputable figure, he feared, by court standards.

But he'd gotten here, he hoped withthe files he needed to work with, and he hoped to get to the Bu-javid without undue delay and without public notice. If everyone who was supposed to communicate had communicated and if the aiji hadn't been in nonstop meetings, he should have a car waiting as soon as they moved the ladder up. It thundered, sounding right overhead, and the paidhi prayed that he at least had a car waiting.

He had to remember, too, that he was now leaving the venue where seats and tables and doorways fit people his size: the stairs out there had a higher rise, and he was, lacking the use of one hand, feeling chill and rather petulantly fragile at the moment.

"Thank you," he said to the attendants who opened the aircraft door. The staircase was moving up — notthe canopied portable, much less the covered walk: it bumped into contact, rocking the plane, and one attendant set his luggage out on the rainy landing at the top of a shaky, rain-wet, metal ladder.

No car. It wasn't going well. Everything had the feeling of haste exceeding planning. Wind-driven mist whipped through the open doorway, and he was ready to go back where it was dry, when a van with the airport security logo whisked from around the nose and braked just short of an epic puddle, so abrupt an arrival his security-conscious nerves had twitched, his whole body poised to fling himself backward.

"Take care, sir. The steps are higher."

"I know. I know, thank you, though. Good flight. Thank you so much. Thank the crew." He raised a shoulder to keep the computer strap in place and felt a sudden, perilous challenge of balance as he ventured out onto the stairs into the wind-borne spatter of rain. He grabbed the rail, shoulder still canted, struggling not to let the computer strap slip off.

The van's side door opened. An armed atevi, a brisk dark giant in the silver-studded black of Bu-javid security and the aiji's personal guard, exited the van and raced up the steps, making the stairs rattle and shake under atevi muscle.

"Nadi Bren!" a woman's voice hailed him, and a bleak day brightened.

"Jago!"

"I'll take that, nadi Bren. Give me your hand." Two steps below him, Jago stood eye to eye with him. She seized the computer strap on his shoulder, took it from him in relentless courtesy and captured his chilled white hand in her large black one, competency, solidity in a thunderous, wind-blown world. He had no doubt at all Jago could catch him if he slipped — no doubt that she could carry him down the steps in one arm if she had to.

And on his tottery, rain-blasted way down the ladder, he was not at all surprised, having encountered Jago, to see Banichi exit the van more slowly to welcome them.

He was glad it was them. God, he was relieved —

He was so relieved he had a dizzy spell, forgot the scale of the next step, and if Jago hadn't had an instant and solid grip under his good arm he'd have gone down for sure.

"Careful," she said, hauling him back to balance. "Careful, Bren-ji, the steps are slick."

Slick. Lightning flashed overhead, whiting out detail, glancing off the puddle. He reached the bottom rubber-legged as Banichi stepped out of the way for him and for Jago, who helped him into the van and climbed in after.

Banichi brought up the rear, swung up and in and slammed the door, sealing out the rain and the thunder. Like Jago, black leather and silver studs, black skin, black hair, gold eyes, Banichi fell into the available door-side seat, saving his leg from flexing, Bren didn't fail to note, as he settled next to the far window.

"Go," Jago said to the driver.

"My luggage," Bren protested as the van jerked into motion.

"Tano will bring it. There's a second van."

Tano was another familiar name, a man he was exceedingly glad to know was alive.

"Algini?" he asked, meaning Tano's partner.

"Malguri Hospital," Banichi said. "How areyou, Bren-ji?"

Far better than he'd thought. People were alive that he'd feared dead.

But other people, good people, had died for mistaken, stupid reasons.

"Is there word —" His voice cracked as he leaned back against the seat. "Is there word from Malguri? From Djinana? Are they all right?"

"One can inquire," Jago said.

He hadn't remotely realized he was so shaky. Maybe it was the sudden feeling of safety. Maybe it was the haste he'd been in back on Mospheira to gather everything he needed. His mind wandered back into the web of atevi proprieties, lost in the mindset that didn't allow Banichi or Jago the simple opportunity to inquire about —

Atevi didn't have friends. God, God, wipe the word from his mind. Twenty-four hours across the strait and he was thinking in Mosphei', making psychological slips like that, a dim-witted slide toward what was human, when he was no longer in human territory.

The van swerved around a corner, and they all leaned. It was summer in Shejidan, but they seemed to have the heater on, all the same, because the clammy chill was gone. He leaned his head back on the seat, blinked his stinging eyes and asked, as the straightening of the course rolled his head toward Banichi, "Are we taking the subway out, or what?"

"Yes," Banichi told him.

Banichi hadn't come up the ramp after him.

"The leg, Banichi?"

"No detriment, nand' paidhi. I assure you."

To his efficiency, Banichi meant. Back on mainland soil and he'd assigned Jago a diplomatically touchy inter-staff inquiry and insulted Banichi's judgment and competency. He didn't know how he could improve on it.

"Ignore my stupid questions," he said. "Drugs. Just got out of hospital. I took a painkiller. I shouldn't have."

"How did the surgery go?" Jago asked.

He tried to remember. "I forgot to ask," he admitted, and didn't know why he hadn't, except that in some convoluted, drug-hazed fashion he'd taken for granted he was going to have a shoulder that worked. He hoped so.

Hell, it felt as if he'd picked up where he'd left his life yesterday — was it yesterday? — and everything about Mospheira was a passing dream. It felt good, it felt safeto be back with these two. He wasn't tracking outstandingly well on anything at the moment, except that between these two individuals he felt he could handle anything.

If these two were here, he knew that Tabini, none other, had sent them.

The van's tires made a wet sound on the airport pavement. He let his eyes shut. He could let down his propriety with these two, who'd lived intimately with him, who'd cared for him when he was far less than self-possessed — and he'd know even blind that he was in Shejidan, not Mospheira. He knew by the smells of rain-wet leather and the warmth of atevi bodies, the slight scent that attended them, which might be perfume, or might be natural — it was an odd thing that he'd never quite questioned it, but it was pleasant and familiar, in the way old rooms and accustomed places were comfortable to find.

The van nosed down an incline, and he blinked a look at his surroundings, knowing where they were before he used his eyes: the ramp down into the utilitarian concrete of the restricted underground terminal. The aiji used it — the aiji and others whose safety and privacy the government wanted to guarantee.

He'd discovered a comfortable position in which to sit, good shoulder against the van wall. He truly, truly didn't want to move right now.

"I trust," he said, shutting his eyes again, "that there'll be a chance for me to rest, nadiin. I really, really hope to rest a while before I have to think or do anything truly critical."

Jago's fingers brushed his shoulder. "Bren-ji, we can carry you to the car if you wish."

The van braked to a halt. "No," he said, and remember ing that these two afforded themselves no weakness and rarely a sign of pain, he opened his eyes and tried to drag himself back to the gray concrete and echoing world. "I'll manage, thank you, nadiin, but, please, let's just wait for my luggage. I have every confidence in Tano. But it's only a single case. It has my medical records."

"We've orders, nadi," Banichi said.

Tabini's orders. No question. No dawdling even in a secure area. Possibly there had been some filing of Intent against his life, but most likely it was simply Tabini's desire to have the paidhi in place, under a guard he trusted, and to have one more ragged-edged problem off his mind.

Banichi opened the door and stepped down to the pavement, Jago got out after, taking the computer, and Bren edged across the seat and stepped down with less assurance, into their competent and watchful care.

The subway had its own peculiar atmosphere: oil, cold concrete and echoes of machinery and voices — like any station in the city system, like any in the continent-spanning rail that linked to the city subway; a connection which argued there could be a small risk of some security breach, he supposed, but no one came into this station without a security clearance, not the baggage handlers, not the workmen: cars didn't stop here.

Which meant there was no burning reason now, in his unregarded and probably uninformed opinion, that the paidhi couldn't stand about for half a minute and wait for his luggage — but considering the wobble in his knees and the disorientation that came buzzing through his brain with the white noise of the echoing space, he let himself be moved along the trackside at Banichi's best limping pace.

A pair of Bu-javid guards, standing outside on the platform, opened the door of the car — seemingly a freight-carrier — that waited for them. They were guards he didn't know, but clearly Banichi did, sufficiently that Banichi sent Jago into the car for no more than a cursory look before letting Bren inside.

It was residential-style furnishing inside the car, false windows inside curtained in red velvet. It was the aiji's own traveling salon, plush appointments, the whole affair in muted reds and beige, a complete galley, soft chairs — Bren let himself down in one that wouldn't swallow him in its cushions, and Jago, setting the computer down, went immediately to open the galley, asking him did he want fruit juice?

"Tea, nadi, if you please." He still felt chilled, and his ears had felt stuffed with wool since the change in altitude. Tea sounded good. Alkaloids that atevi metabolisms didn't mind at all in ordinary doses were especially common in herbal teas and concentrated in some atevi liquor, a fact he'd proved the hard way: but Banichi's junior partner wouldn't make mistakes like that with her charge. He shut his eyes in complete confidence and only opened them when Jago gently announced the tea was ready, the train was about to couple the car on, and would he care for a cup now?

He would. He took the offered cup in his hand, as Banichi, having made it aboard, shut the outside door and went on talking to someone, doubtless official, on his pocket-com.

Jago cradled her cup against the gentle bump as the coupling engaged. "We're a three-car train," Jago said, settling opposite him.

"Tano's made it on," Banichi said as he came up and joined them. "Station security wouldn't let him in this car. I did point out he's in the same service, little that penetrates the minds in charge."

Bren didn't worry that much about his luggage at the moment. Climbing up the high step to the car had waked up the pain in his shoulder.

But after half a cup of tea, and with the train approaching the terminal in the Bu-javid's lower levels, he recovered a wistful hope of homecoming, his own bed — if security afforded him that favor.

"Do you think, nadiin, that I'll possibly have my garden apartment back?"

"No," Banichi said. "I fear not. I'll inquire. But it's a fine view of the mountains, where you're going."

"The mountains." He was dismayed. "The upper floor? — Or a hotel?"

"A very fine accommodation. A staunch partisan has made you her personal guest, openly preferring the aiji's apartment for the session."

A staunch partisan. Tabini-aiji's staunch partisan. Tabini's apartment.

The train began braking. Jago extended her hand for the cup.

Damiri?

Tabini's hitherto clandestine lover? Of the Atigeini opposition?

My God. Damiri had declared herself. Her relatives were going to riot in the streets.

And a humanfor Tabini's next-door neighbor, even temporarily, lodged in an area of the Bu-javid only the highest and most ancient lords of the Association attained?

A human didn't belong there. Not there — and certainly not in a noble and respectable lady's private quarters. There was bound to be gossip. Coarse jokes. Detriment to the lady and the lady's family, whose regional association had openly opposed Tabini's policies from the day of his accession as aiji-major.

Slipping indeed. He must have let his dismay reach his face: Banichi said, as the brakes squealed, "Tabini wants you alive at any cost, nand' paidhi. Things are very delicate. The lady has made her wager on Tabini, and on Tabini's resourcefulness, with the dice still falling."

Baji-naji. Fortune and chance, twin powers of atevi belief, intervenors in the rigid tyranny of numbers.

The car came to rest.

The doors opened. Banichi was easily on his feet, offering a hand. Bren moved more slowly, promising himself that in just a little while he could have a bed, a place to lie still and let his head quit buzzing.

Jago gathered up his computer. "I'll manage it, Bren-ji. Take care for yourself. Please don't fall."

"I assure you," he murmured, and followed Banichi's lead to the door, down again, off the steps, into what he assumed was tight security — at least as tight as afforded no chance of meetings.

"Bren Cameron," a voice echoed out, a female voice, sharp, human and angry.

" Deana?" Deana Hanks didn't belong in the equation. She'd been out of communication, the fogged brain added back in; he'd asked that her authorizations be pulled by the Foreign Office, and he'd assumed — assumedshe'd gone home. His successor had nolegitimate business on the mainland.

Had she?

Things had moved too fast today and she was late for the airport. Mad, he was sure. Technically she should have met him at the airport, giving the plane just enough time to fuel and take on cargo, and be airborne inside an hour.

All of which was at the rear of his mind as he extended a friendly left hand, glad she was all right. "This is a surprise. Thank you for the backup."

"Thank you, hell!"

One didn't take a hostile tone around atevi. Guards' hands twitched toward pockets, inside coats, both her security, and his.

"Hata-mai," he said quickly, It's all right, and lapsed back into the atevi language. "Deana, nadi, may we be a little softer, please? I'm sure the plane will wait for you."

"Softer, is it?" She was a dark-haired woman, pale-skinned, flushed about the face most times that he ever dealt with her. She wore an atevi-style coat and had her hair in the court braid, the same as he did. Her atevi escort made an anxious wall behind her. "Softer? Is the government caving in to blackmail now? Is this the best answer they could come up with? They deliver ultimatums and we jump?"

"Nadi, if you please —"

"I'll the hell speak Mosphei', thank you. I want a report. I want to know where you were, I want to know what you were doing, I want to know who you were talking to and what you reported to whom, and I'll talk in the office, this afternoon."

It must be the pain pill. He wasn't tracking that well. Maybe he'd personally affronted the woman — not hard, considering Deana's temper, but he was determined she be on that outbound plane. Two humans weren't ever supposed to be this side of the strait at the same time. "We can settle this by fax. I'll brief you. But you've got a flight to catch."

"Oh, of course, of course Ihave. — I haven't any recall order, Mr. Cameron. Of course, without communications, there's damned little I do hear but court gossip. — And threats against this office. I want written orders. I take it you brought them with you."

"I — don't think they've ever been required."

"Nadi Bren," Jago said. "Please. Let's be moving."

"You takeorders, nadi," Hanks snapped. "This is a matter inside our office, no local concern."

"Ms. Hanks." She'd insulted Jago. That was the last straw. "You're not talking to building security, if you haven't noticed the braid. And if you want an order, you've got an order. You're relieved of duty, your codes are invalid, your presence is no longer required. Get on that plane."

"Get me an order from Mospheira. I don't take it from you. And I've received nothingfrom Foreign Affairs except the advisement you were going back to Mospheira on a medical."

"Well, clearly I'm back."

"Not officially, Mr. Cameron. Not to me."

"I suggest, nadiin," Banichi said, moving between, and addressing Hanks' guards, "that you take this woman out of Bren-paidhi's way or face administrative procedures. Or mine. You arein error, nadiin, don't make more of it — I advise you."

There was threat in the air. All of a sudden Bren sensed resistance from Hanks' escort, aggression from Banichi — who surely had authority. He felt his heart speed, which the pain pill didn't want to have happen.

But Hanks' escort moved to take her out of his path —

He didn't know how it happened — suddenly he had a maneuvering wall of atevi between him and the world, and no one even hit him, as far as he realized, but he felt a painful jolt as he stumbled against the concrete station wall. He cradled his casted arm out of the way as an ateva overshadowed him and seized his good arm.

He ducked to the side, to the limit he could, caught sight of Hanks and her guards. "You," he yelled out, "be on that plane, Ms. Hanks. You're entirely out of line!"

"Show me the order from the Department."

"I'll show you an arrest warrant, next thing yousee."

"Bren-ji," Jago said, and with an inexorable grip on his arm, hurried him toward the lift, as he heard angry atevi voices behind them, Banichi ordering Hanks' guards to get her back to her residency and notto the airport.

Which countermanded hisorders, ominous note; Banichi derived his authority and his instructions from Tabini; and Banichi was in no good mood as he overtook them at the lift door. They went inside; Banichi followed them in and pushed the lift button to take them up.

"Banichi-ji," Bren said. "I fear I aggravated the situation. Not to excuse it, but she believes she was slighted in the Department sending me here without notice to her. That was the gist of it."

"Nadi," Banichi said, still hot. "I will report that interpretation to those who can judge."

He'd never seen Banichi this angry, not even under fire, and he wasn't inspired to continue on the subject. It wanted extensive phone calls to straighten this one out — one hoped before the plane received orders to clear atevi airspace. Hanks had been, even on a second and third thought, entirely out of line back there. He couldn't read what was afoot — except that Hanks belonged on that outbound plane, and that, slow-witted as he might be thanks to the painkiller, he wasn't taking undue offense.

It wasn't a friendship. He and Hanks had never liked each other, not in university, not in the Foreign Office, not in the halls of the Department. Their candidacies for the office had had different political supporters. He'd won; he'd become Wilson-paidhi's designated successor. She'd ended up as alternate, being far less fluent — she'd had the political patronage in the executive of the Depart merit, but he'd had her on technicalities and nuances of the language in ways the selection process couldn't ignore, no matter Hanks' friends in high places.

But that she met him, clearly in breach of the Treaty, and threw a public tantrum — God, he didn't know what insanity had gotten into the woman. It shook him.

Probably she'd been blindsided as he'd been — one branch of the State Department moving faster than Shawn Tyers in the Foreign Affairs branch could get hold of the paidhi-successor through the phone system, possibly this afternoon.

Or, equally a possibility during any crisis between atevi and humans or atevi and atevi, the phone system might be shut down between Mospheira and the mainland. An hours-long phone blackout was certainly no excuse for Hanks' outburst; it was precisely when the paidhi was most supposed to use his head. He hadn't likedHanks, but he'd never considered her a total fool.

The arm ached from the jolt he'd taken against the wall. He wasn't up to physical or mental confrontations today. Banichi had apparently reacted in temper, a first; Hanks had blown up; and, what was more, Hanks' security had been set personally in the wrong, publicly embarrassed and outranked. You didn't do that to atevi loyal to you. You didn't put them in that position.

An atevi internal crisis, which he greatly feared could be the occasion of his precipitate recall — some shake-up ricocheting through atevi government — was no time to fine-tune his successor's grasp of protocols, especially when she went so far as to attack himin public and launch her security against his, who, on loan from Tabini himself, far outranked her middling-rank guards. This performance deserved a report and a strong warning.

More immediately, he needed to get on the phone to Tabini andMospheira and get Hanks out of here. They could assuredly hold the plane for Hanks. There was no more important cargo Mospheiran Air carried than the paidhi and the paidhi-successor in transit, and it could sit there until they got Hanks aboard.

Two phone calls necessitated, Hanks and a security glitch, inside a minute of debarking; God, he had much rather go to the apartment he knew, his comfortable little affair on the lower tier of the building. It had a bed he was used to and servants he could deal with —

And a garden door, which had, in the paidhi's suddenly critical and controversial rise to prominence in atevi society, become an egregious security hazard.

That fact came through to him with particular force as the lift cranked to a halt and he saw thefloor indicator saying, not 1, the public level, but 3, the tightest security not only in the Bu-javid but anywhere on the mainland.

CHAPTER 2

The Atigeini residence certainly lacked, in Bren's estimation, the charm of his single room on the lower garden court — but one couldn't apply a word like charm to a palace.

There was a staff of, Jago informed him, setting down his computer beside the reception room door, fifty. Fifty servants to keep the place in order.

Grand baroque, maybe. Extravagance, definitely.

Gilt and silver wash on the cabinets and tables.

Priceless murals. Gilded carvings. He only wanted a bed. A place, a closet, a couch to sit on, anywhere to let his arm stop aching.

"Nadiin," a woman said, bowing, as she met them in the foyer, "nand' paidhi. My name is Saidin, chief of staff. Welcome."

"Nand' Saidin," Bren murmured, and reflexively returned the bow, stiff arm and all. She was clearly a woman of dignity and proper decorum, even gifted on the sudden with a human guest. "I regret very much disarranging the staff. Thank you so much for your courtesy."

"Our lady is pleased to provide you comfort, nand' paidhi. Would you care to see the arrangement of the premises?"

Banichi frowned and looked to him for opinion — but one could hardly, under the circumstances of being offered a palace, decline the honor.

"I'd be delighted, nand' Saidin. Thank you."

"Please do us the honor," Saidin murmured, and walked ahead of him, Banichi and Jago close behind. Saidin was middle-aged, slender — her coat was beige brocade, her slippers matching, in the very latest fashion; her braid was a simple affair, incorporating pink and green ribbons in the heraldic style of centuries of service to aristocracy. She was of that class of servants, clearly, born, not hired, to the lifelong duty of a particular house to which she was possibly, though unofficially, related. He knew the type — the sort of woman, he thought, who deserved both respect for her position and understanding for her passionate devotion to the premises.

"This is the outer section, nand' paidhi, which serves all the formal functions, with the state dining room, the reception salon, the post-of-guard, which has been modernized___The inner rooms are the master bedrooms, each with bath. The bedrooms all give out onto a circular salon surrounding the private dining hall ..."

Hand-loomed carpets and needlework drapes. The paidhi was never, in the interests of his job, a cultural illiterate, and the areas of his brain that didn't at the moment have all they could handle in etiquette, security and the animal instincts of balance, were respectfully absorbing all the nuances of regional and period design around him. Mospheira imported handmade as well as synthetic fabrics, some very expensive, but Mospheira had seen this kind of work only once, a single sample in a glass case in the War Museum.

And in this apartment, far more extravagant than Tabini's own, one walked on such carpets. In the reception salon next to the entry, one looked out clear glass windows past priceless draperies, intricately figured in muted gold, to the same view that Tabini's apartment enjoyed next door: the tiled roofs of the historic Old City spread out below the hill, the blue range of the Bergid — scantly visible on this stormy evening, beneath gray and burdened clouds. Wind, rain-laden, breathed through the apartment from open windows and hidden vents alike. He'd transited climates as well as provinces, begun to feel summer was decidedly over, and, now, felt as if he'd skipped across months and come in on another spring, another world, a situation months, not days, removed.

The paidhi was a little giddy. Doing surprisingly well, considering. He wasn't sorry to have the tour. He'd grown not merely security conscious but security obsessive in recent days. He wanted to know the lay of the place, and whether there were outside doors, and whether a footfall echoing from one direction was surely a servant and from the other potentially an intruder.

"Are there other outside doors?" he asked. "Even scullery exits?"

"All external exits are to the foyer," Banichi said. "Very secure."

"There have been extensive revisions in the early part of this century," Saidin said. "You'll notice, however, that the stone and the wood matches exactly. Lord Sarosi did personal research to locate the old quarry, which presently supplies stone for other restorations within the Bu-javid, including the new west portico…"

The rest passed in increasing haze — the salon, the solarium, the bedrooms, the dining area. The staff, all women, so far as he saw, appeared and vanished discreetly, opened doors and closed them as the head of staff silently directed, turned on lights and turned them off again, whisked imaginary dust off a sideboard and straightened a tasseled damask runner — forty-nine additional and mostly invisible servants, a propitious number, Bren was sure, to remain, safeguarding the historic family premises and maintaining decorum in the face of human presence.

And everything spoke of a mathematical calculation underlying the decor — the eye learned to pick it out, down to the color and number of the dried flowers in the frequent and towering bouquets.

Every measure of the place was surely propitious for the lady's family, down to the circular baji-najifigure centered in the beautifully appointed formal dining area: Fortune and Chance, chaos in the center of the rigid number-governed design of the rooms.

The room began to spin about that center, and the paidhi, in his private, pain-edged haze, suddenly hoped to not faint on the antique carpet. He was by now only and exclusively interested in the guest bedchamber, and the bed they said would be his, next on the tour —

He walked in, behind the gracious madam Saidin, into a room of immense proportions, with silver satin bedclothes, gold coverlet, gilt bedstead supported by gilt heraldic beasts — a bed wide enough for him and half the Mospheiran Foreign Office. The modern coverlet, Saidin said, exactly duplicated one of the fifty-eighth century, which had been on the bed when the last family occupant of the bedchamber, a fifty-ninth century lord, had met an untimely and probably messy end.

The family had declined to use it thereafter, but the numbers of the place had been altered to remove the infelicitous influences — two bluewood cabinets of precisely calculated dimensions were the addition that, the paidhi could be sure, guaranteed the harmony of the occupant. The chief of staff would be delighted to provide the figures, should the paidhi desire.

Sixguest bedrooms, besides his own, each with its private bath; halls with doubtless felicitous arrangements of furnishings. He had no desire to question Atigeini judgment, and every desire to stay and prove the bed unhaunted, but the gentle majordomo was clearly proud of the next rooms, which she called, in her soft voice, "The most charming area of the house, lady Damiri's private residence," which she was sure the paidhi would find congenial to his work. Lady Damiri had, as an unprecedented favor, opened even her personal library and sitting rooms to her human guest — and he didn't find the will to deny Saidin, who might well have, in that stiff back and formal demeanor, concerns that a human guest would cast gnawed bones on the carpets and leave germs on the china.

Clearly he was going to be an inconvenience to the staff, genteel servants of a very highborn lady. And he wanted to begin with a good impression — knowing reports would be passed and that gossip would make the rounds if only inside the Atigeini family, in itself a security concern Banichi hadn't mentioned, but surely took into account. The last thing he wanted to do for his own safety was to alienate the staff.

So it was through silver-washed doors to the absent lady's private sitting rooms, a library with floor to ceiling shelves, a very fine book collection with an emphasis, he saw, on horticulture; and then, across the hall, a small, tile-floored solarium with a view of, again, the city and the mountains. Beautifully carved, windowed doors opened onto a balcony about which Banichi and Jago didn't look at all pleased — a balcony designed, Bren was sure, long before high-powered rifles had entered the repertoire of the Assassins' Guild.

Such thoughts swam leisurely through the paidhi's wavering brain, along with a sharp longing for his comfortable, quiet little garden apartment, and a fevered consideration of the lady of the apartment with her library of books on flowers — but, sadly, not a garden accessible to her —

He should recommend his lower-level garden to Damiri. She afforded him her hospitality. He could show her a charming place in the lower halls she'd likely never visited in her rich and security-insulated life.

In that thought the paidhi was growing entirely fuzzy-minded, and he really had rather sit down than go on to tour the breakfast room. He was certain, all credit to Banichi and Jago, that he had the very best and most secure guest room for himself. He was completely satisfied with the historic bed. He thought the library and the private solarium delightful. He couldn't bear a detailed tour of the other wonders he was sure abounded, which on another day he might have a keen interest as well as the fortitude to see.

There was a chair at the door of the solarium. He sat down in it with his heart pounding and mentally measured the distance back to the bedroom. He wasn't sure he could make it.

"Nadi Bren?" Jago asked as their guide hesitated.

"A fine chair," he breathed, and patted its brocade arm. "A very fine chair. Very comfortable. I'll be very pleased to work in this room. Please — convey my profound thanks to lady Damiri for allowing me this very kind — this very — extraordinary hospitality. I very much regret her inconvenience. But I can't —" He wasn't doing well with words at the moment. "I can't — manage any formality tonight. Please convey to Tabini-aiji my intention — to be in my office tomorrow. It's just that, tonight — I'd like my computer. And my bed. And a phone."

"We're both to stay here, nadi," Banichi said. "In these apartments. Guarding you. We'll carry your messages." They all towered above him, a black wall of efficiency and implacable hospitality that seemed to cut off the daylight. "Tano will occupy the security station and the small suite at the front door. He's already moving in — he has arrived with your suitcase. Your belongings will be in the drawers. Algini will join him in the security station, as soon as he's back from the hospital — we estimate, within a day or two."

"Not serious, I hope ..."

"Cuts and contusions. Perfectly fine."

"I'm very glad." His head was going around. He rested his chin on his fist, elbow on the arm of the chair, to fix a center of rotation in the environment, somewhere around Jago's figure. "I was very glad — very glad you came to the airport. Thank you. I wouldn't —"— wouldn't have trusted, was the expression that leaped to mind. He wasn't censoring quickly enough. He'd made himself a maze of syntax. "— wouldn't have had such confidence in strangers."

Damn, he wasn't sure how that parsed, either. He might just have insulted Saidin and the whole staff. He couldn't remember the front end of his own sentence.

"No difficulty at all," Banichi said. "Jago and I will establish ourselves in the red and the blue rooms, nearest your own, if that's agreeable."

"Of course." He didn't know how Banichi stayed on his feet: Banichi was walking wounded himself, limping slightly all through their tour about the apartment, but Banichi went on functioning, because that was the kind of man Banichi was, while the paidhi —

"Nadi Bren?"

The room went quite around. And around. He shut his eyes a second, until it stopped, and he drew a shaky breath. "Nadiin," he said, determined to settle some details — what was going on, and why the extraordinary security, "is there anything else you can tell me about my situation? Is there a threat, a difficulty, a matter under debate?"

"All three," Jago said.

"Regarding the ship over our heads?"

"Among other small matters," Banichi said. "I regret, Tabini-aiji mustsee you as soon as possible, nand' paid-hi. I know you'd rather be in bed, but these are our orders. I'll explain your exhaustion and your inconvenience, and perhaps he'll come here."

"What small matters? Whatmatters? I haven't had any news since I left."

"The hasdrawad and the tashrid. The ship. Nand' Deana."

The hasdrawad and the tashrid he could guess. They were in emergency session. He'd understood he could postpone his speech to them by at least the term of his illness. The ship. That was a given. He knew that was why his presence and his ability to translate was so vital to the aiji. Touchy, the Foreign Office had said of the course of events with it. But —

"The aiji has not held audience with this Hanks person," Jago said. "He has not regarded this substitution as legitimate."

"But," Banichi said, "certain individuals have indeed approached Hanks-paidhi. Tabini wishes to talk to you about this situation as soon as possible. Within the hour, if you can possibly manage it."

He'd thought he hadn't the strength to get up. He'd thought he'd no reserves left.

But the thought of Hanks occupying his office, holding meetings, as Banichi hinted, with God-knew-whom on her own, making her own accommodations on questions he'd resisted, resisting what he'd already settled — in the middle of thiscrisis —

It wasn'ta phone-call solution. He needed to know what had happened between Hanks and Tabini before he dropped angry phone calls to Mospheira into the mix.

"I absolutely need to talk to Tabini," he said. "Now. I'll go there." The room might still be going around, but he had a sudden sense of what he had to focus on.

Like the apparition in the heavens — which put the entire Treaty in doubt.

Like a woman who'd consistently scored low on culture and psychology, who'd survived the academic committee winnowing process and gotten an appointment as paidhi-designate solely because she had high-ranking, narrow-interest support in the State Department — and a high-level finagle, he was sure of it, had landed her in a damned bad situation for novices.

"I'll advise the aiji," Banichi said.

CHAPTER 3

Tabini's apartment, literally next door and centermost of the seven historic residences on this floor, was no strange territory: a young paidhi and an equally young aiji, both of them suddenly appointed to office with the demise of Tabini's father and the abrupt resignation of Wilson-paidhi — in private, where no politics intervened, he and Tabini laughed and held discussions far more easily than certain powers on either side of the strait might like to think. They were both sports enthusiasts — he skied and Tabini hunted; both single men in high-stress jobs — but he had Barb and Tabini had Damiri for refuge, and they compared notes.

They'd met in Tabini's apartment times uncounted. Scant days ago they'd been on vacation together, hunting in the hills at Tabini's country house at Taiben — where, in technical contravention of Treaty law, which forbade a human on the mainland carrying any sort of weapon under any excuse, Tabini had been teaching him target shooting. In the evenings they'd sat on the hearth ledge in that rural and peaceful house, looking forward to tomorrow and exchanging grandiose hopes for the future of human-atevi relations: a joint space program; trade city contact between their species, from the modest beginning of student computer exchanges —

Now, with their respective armed security drinking tea and socializing quietly in the foyer, the two of them took to the small salon aside from the entry of Tabini's residence — not a room he'd been in before, but Tabini had taken one look at him and ordered the little salon opened, so that, Tabini had said, the paidhi needn't walk another step.

It was a cozy chamber needing only a single servant, slight, bookish Eidi, who was probably a licensed assassin and undoubtedly senior security, himself — Bren had always suspected so — to pour tea and serve the traditional bittersweet wafers.

"Thank you for coming," Tabini said, protocols aside, and in the same moment Damiri herself turned up in the doorway.

"Nand' paidhi," Damiri said, offering a hand, and Bren began to struggle back to his feet, the very least of courtesy he owed his hostess and Tabini's official guest.

"No, no, please, stay seated, nand' paidhi. I'm so pleased you accepted my invitation. Has Saidin made you comfortable?"

"Quite, nai-ma. Thank you ever so much. I'm overwhelmed at such courtesy."

"An honor," she said, offering her hand, and taking it, he stayed entirely on his guard — at social disadvantage, of course, because he hadn't gotten up; which left her free to be gracious. The lady whom Tabini approved — the atevi expression — was neither ingenue nor scatterwit, and shedefined the meeting, shespoke for herself, and not coincidentally for the Atigeini, whose consent or lack of it in the hospitality he had not a clue.

"I hope to be minimal bother to your gracious staff, daja-ma. It's an extraordinary courtesy you've extended to the paidhi's office." He was very careful about that word "office," notattributing the hospitality to anything personal, an instinctively diplomatic distinction which seemed to touch the lady's fancy.

"The aiji's guest is my guest," she said, and made a little bow to him, to Tabini, and left with some quiet word to Eidi.

"Assure her, please," Bren said. "I'm utterly in awe of the apartment. I swear to be careful."

"She's very curious about you," Tabini said, giving no cue whatsoever how much Damiri had just tried Tabini's patience, or added opposition support to his questions, or acted in any wise by his consent. "Quite in touch with her staff, I warn you. But only from curiosity."

Possibly a signal of the situation. Certainly a warning. "Then I hope they report well of me."

"I've no doubts. Is it chill for you? A front moved through this afternoon. One could easily light the heater."

"No. Not at all. It's quite pleasant. Thank you, aiji-ma."

"Is there pain?"

"Some. Fever. I think that's normal."

"I'm very glad to see you safe, nadi. How glad you cannot imagine."

"I should have stayed in Shejidan, aiji-ma. I'd no idea anything was in imminent motion. I earnestly wish you'd told me. I'd have stayed and talked to the hasdrawad immediately."

"I wanted you treated by your own doctors. That demanded I send you to the island. But I was extremely anxious, nadi. I swear I was anxious until I heard your plane was safely in our airspace."

"Aiji-ma." He was somewhat surprised, even touched by Tabini's expression of personal concern — and held himself mentally and emotionally still on his guard, not least because he was glad to beback and had to put the brakes on that warm little human reaction that answered noquestions whatsoever that bore on atevi motivation.

Like — whether the Western Association was holding firm around Tabini.

Like whether all hell was continuing to break loose in the eastern regions of the Association, provinces where Tabini was most politically vulnerable. There'd been bombs dropping there as late as two days ago, to which he could personally attest — bombs that had killed men he knew. He didn't know to this hour how that set-to had come out, or whether the provincial lords, reacting to a strong move by Tabini and a shift of certain lords to Tabini's side, had taken a wait-see as he hoped had happened.

The side-switching could include the Atigeini, but he had no information whether or not lady Damiri had courted assassination by her own family for siding openly with Tabini, whom her association had at first opposed and then only coolly supported; and whether her family supported her in lodging a human guest in rooms hallowed in Atigeini history — when, for all he knew, his broken shoulder owed something to Atigeini suspicions of Tabini.

And he couldn't ask. He daren't ask until he knew more. There were conventions of politeness worth one's life.

"This ship above us," Tabini began.

"Yes, aiji-ma?"

"Mospheira is carrying on conversation with it. What's the general news? Were you able to hear anything?"

"Just that, as I understand, aiji-ma, there's no doubt in anyone's mind it's the same ship that brought us here. Where it's been for a hundred and seventy-eight years — that's a serious question. Someone on Mospheira may know the answer. I don't."

"Where do you guess it might have been?"

"Aiji-ma, all I know is what I've been told since I was a child, which is that it went out looking for the auspicious guide stars to find out where we are."

"Easy question. Here is here."

"Not from their view. As I understand. There's much more to it than that, but I confess, aiji-ma, as a student I didn't study the business about the ship with anything like the attention I should have. It just wasn't expected that the ship would ever come back."

"So. And what opinions are officials debating, now, in the high offices of Mospheira?"

The questions, besides being something he didn't know, tended a step over the edge of the aiji's need-to-know. The paidhi didn't, on principle, provide information on Mospheira's internal politics or Mospheira's moment-to-moment internal debates. The paidhi wasn't officially, at least, supposed to provide such information, as the aiji wasn't, by the Treaty, supposed to ask him.

"Tabini-ma, you know I can't answer that."

Tabini took up his teacup, balanced the fragile porcelain in his fingers. Atevi eyes were gold. Tabini's were a pale shade of that color. Some called them a sign of his father's infelicity. "Bren-ji, whatever we can and can't answer, whatever promises we make, many things will change now, between you on Mospheira and us on the mainland. Is this not a realistic assumption — that change is inevitable? And I ask the paidhi, who is supposed to interpret humans to atevi, in what direction those currents are flowing."

It was so, so quiet in the room, with only the voices from the other side of the foyer carrying through. He tried to gather a breath. Just a breath. He'd not thought of these things, not to the degree he needed to. He'd been preoccupied with a great deal of pain. And flying bullets.

"Tabini-ma, the Treaty created the paidhiin to be honest brokers for either side. Didn't they?"

Tabini took a sip of tea. "And for how many sides, nadi, can you be that honest broker? Are there three conversants, now — or still two?"

"I hope to give you an answer."

"Surely the paidhi can answer that one very simple question. Try this one: do you direct that ship? Or does that ship direct you?"

Adrenaline was definitely flowing. He'd literally bet his life on Tabini in coming back to the mainland. And he knew right now that in the condition he was in, he had no business coming in here to fence with Tabini. He should have taken another pain pill, no matter the urgency, and gone to bed where he belonged.

"Nand' paidhi? It seems to me a reasonable question. Am I unreasonable?"

"I just had my shoulder broken, Tabini-ma, I just had the hell beaten out of me by people who thought they could use the paidhi or get the paidhi to say things they could use. I held out against them. I —" He had to set his cup down. He couldn't keep his hand from shaking. "I would serve you and Mospheira both very ill if I injected my own half-minded interpretation of some official's hasty and possibly uninformed opinion into what I tell you or them. Especially if I myself were as underinformed as I am right now, aiji-ma. The aiji I've dealt with is too wise a man to destroy my value."

"Ah, flattery, now, Bren-ji. Not your usual standard."

"Honesty, Tabini-ma, is my only value. I stand between. I'll carry your messages to Mospheira. I'll tell you what responsible authorities answer after they've had time to think. But I won't inform on debates in progress, theirs or yours. Or the ship's. And, Tabini-ma, consider that I've been out of the information loop for days, I've been hours under anesthetic, I've had a pain pill and I'm not clear-headed at the moment. In such circumstances I can only — only stand by the strict interpretation of the Treaty. I would be ashamed to give you less than my best advice or, worse, to misinform you."

Atevi so rarely showed inner feelings. Tabini's face was an absolute mask, but it became a gentler one.

And, oh, Tabini could use the charm when he wanted to.

"I'm aware of your injuries. I asked for you back, Bren-ji, because I'm convinced of your good will, I rely on your candor, and I urgently need to know, before making any policy decisions, what this ship is saying and what Mospheira is saying to it. I need some warning what Mospheira will decide to do so that I'm not caught by surprise. I know that this may violate the language of the Treaty, but the collapse of the Association will abrogate the Treaty entirely and put everything in question. Believe me: we are in the midst of a crisis and, Bren-ji, let me urge upon you that I'm not the only one playing games with the Treaty when Mospheira sends me twopaidhiin."

"It's ordinary when I'm not on duty. And I'd been out of touch for days. Surely you can't fault —"

"I'm aware of the scene downstairs. She claimed she was going to the airport, when in fact she had no travel pass and no clearance. Her intention was plainly to accost you publicly and create gossip."

"If it was to make dissent in the paidhi's office evident, I fear she succeeded."

"One fears so, yes. Bren-ji, I'd gladly have taken her to the airport under guard; I'd gladly set her adrift in a row-boat, if I didn't feel such a dismissal would not better relations with Mospheira."

"I ask you to give her the travel pass, aiji-ma."

"Is this so? The Treaty says there shall be a paidhi. So since you won't answer my questions about their intent, at least tell me who are you? Do you still have the office, or does this woman hold it? Does her arrival have more to do with your absence from Shejidan — or with the appearance of that ship in our sky? Do you see the drift of my thoughts, Bren-ji? Who is in charge, now, in your government, and whom does this woman represent?"

He felt himself short of breath, putting together the threads — and not certain he had all of them. "There's no change in government or policy that I'm aware of. But I went straight from here to hospital. And my mind isn't clear, aiji-ma. Someone may have told me about Hanks' whereabouts. I — just — can't remember. I — can't — bring that back."

"The day you left for Malguri, your government requested you to answer a message sent to your office. You weren't here, obviously. More messages followed. One can guess their sudden urgency had somewhat to do with the apparition in our heavens."

"One would — indeed — think so, aiji-ma."

"On the third day an aircraft requested landing with this woman aboard. We saw the likelihood of close questions regarding your whereabouts, so we asked for the television interview with you, for —"

"For tape of me?" One didn't interrupt the aiji when he was talking. "Forgive me, aiji-ma."

"It was useful," Tabini said. "One learns about television, among other blasphemous possibilities, that it plays very interesting games with time, with scale, with numbers in general. An impious device. A box of illusions. But it did quiet some general questions about your good health. And it maintained the idea in the public mind that you'd never ceased in office. — But you keep evading my very serious question, Bren-ji. Have they sent you back merely to quiet my demands — or are you back with real authority?"

"The most of my authority, aiji-ma, is the plain fact that I speak the language of the chief atevi Association, and the equally plain fact that I'm here by your invitation and that you choose to deal with me. I assume that you deal with me."

"True."

"Have you dealt at all with Hanks? Is there an agreement? Are there negotiations in progress? Are there proposals on the table?"

"With the likes of Taigi and Naijo. With every damned potential conspirator in the Association — possibly. With me — no."

Appalling information. "Surely she's sought meetings with you."

"Shall I empower this interloper? I dealt with this woman once and only once, when I told her to tell Mospheira send you back immediately or I would have her shot. By the result, I believe she transmitted my message faithfully."

God — was the gut-level, Mospheiran reaction. But this wasn't Mospheira. Indeed Tabini could have had her shot. And if Tabini had threatened it — Tabini absolutely would have had to do it if Hanks hadn't complied.

"I have to ask for her safety," he said quietly. "Please, aiji-ma."

"Does the paidhi ask? Do you have the support of the Treaty?"

"I trust," he said, light-headed with the awareness he was hedging on a breach of Department rules andthe Treaty, "that if persons in authority on Mospheira did send me, they sent me by the terms of your request, and by that, if they receive messages from me they'll know they're your messages faithfully and accurately rendered. I don't believe they consider me corrupt, or incompetent. Logically speaking, aiji-ma, if you choose to deal with me rather than with her, what can they do, if they wish to continue to receive your communications?"

"They can ignore my communications."

"No, aiji-ma. They can't. What atevi do and think is vastly important."

"Then why send this Deana Hanks in the first place? And why is she listening to unacceptable people?"

He temporized. "She is my legitimate successor. If I was gone —"

"She's a fool."

"Aiji-ma, the presumption on Mospheira clearly was that I wasn't on the job, for whatever reason, in what they knew was a very touchy situation. Possibly they sent her with absolute good will to you, as the best stopgap they could manage if some accident had befallen me — such as assassination at the hands of some opposition movement —"

"They needed to select a fool?"

"There are very, very few humans who speak the language, only three who can think in it."

"There are two. You and Wilson-paidhi. This woman does not think."

Tabini was damned mad. Clearly. And there was far more at issue than Hanks' life. Or his.

"Possibly — possibly, aiji-ma, once the State Department is sure I'm well enough to carry on my office, they may indeed recall her. And if they don't, I'll urge they do. I assure you."

"This woman is interfering in our politics. Where is their intelligence, nand' paidhi? Is this a deliberate act to violate the Treaty? Or is some other, perhaps ignorant, party now directing human affairs?"

It was a very frightening question, at depth — even confining the implications of that question to the State Department, which he knew wasn't Tabini's entire concern, considering that ship in the heavens.

More, the paidhi didn't have the definitive answer to give. The Foreign Office called talks with the ship touchy. "I'll make your displeasure very clear to the responsible parties, aiji-ma. In the meantime, please, no move to remove her by force. Let me arrange it, in my own way. I believe I can do it without disturbance."

"You're asking a great favor, Bren-ji."

"I know I am."

"And favors have returns."

"I know that too, aiji-ma."

"So what isthe momentary thinking inside the President's office?"

God, his wits were hazed. He should have seen that coming.

And he did from time to time take chances on Tabini, monumental chances, once he'd felt out the ground underfoot — once they were both sure of the extent and purpose of the question.

And especially when the honest answer might give Tabini a reassuring insight into human mental processes.

"Aiji-ma, nothing I've learned on Mospheira inside or outside official channels has changed my initial impression: Mospheira is disturbed — not alarmed, but disturbed, for exactly the same reasons atevi are disturbed. No one planned for this. I agree: no government likes to be surprised. Mospheira was surprised. You were surprised. And I think that ship is surprised. It left a functioning station. It came back to a situation it can't have counted on finding, and a complexity of political arrangements it can't readily unravel."

"So what does this mean? Are there two human associations now, or one? And is the authority in our sky — or on Mospheira?"

Critical questions. Urgent questions. From a ruler who couldn't conceptualize geographic boundaries as valid. "Aiji-ma, my answer from my own understanding is — they're two authorities which once were one, not hostile to each other, each now with separate interests to protect. You've been monitoring transmissions. You surely have recordings."

"Such exist."

"Do you find them encoded?"

"Numbers and names are quite clear. I assume that you can translate the rest of the voice segments for us."

That it wasn't code was reassuring. He was entirely uneasy about an agreement to translate — but Mospheira knewhe had that capacity, as they knew Hanks had when they'd sent her here: they weren't unwilling to have it done — or they hadn't indicated it to him that hecould remember.

"I would think so, aiji-ma. I would naturally prefer to consult with the university on —"

"If the Mospheiran authorities put themselves in association with that ship, tell me, where would your responsibility lie?"

"I can construe no circumstance under which that would happen."

"I can. But perhaps my imagination is extravagant."

"Human associations are more and less hierarchical than atevi." An alarming thought occurred to him. "And they're not biological imperatives. I know it's difficult to construe this, aiji-ma, but on the basis of what I've lately learned, I have to tell you that we feel absolutely nothing about that ship that atevi would feel in our place."

"You haven't convinced me, nand' paidhi. I assure you, many atevi have already assumed a unitary human authority is unquestionably what we're dealing with. Where human biology enters into it — I confess myself at a loss. But that you say two authorities exist separated by time, and that you say there isn't hostility, does confuse me."

They were up against one of those walls — imperfect interface. Atevi gut feelings and human. Tabini didn't understand, absolutely didn't understand that there wasn't man'chi, loyalty in the atevi definition: a gut-level, emotional compulsion for Mospheira to join the authority represented by that ship, which looked strong, which had historically held authority —

Mospheira itself could have no comprehension how atevi would read the situation, either. Tabini was at least canny enough in the differences between atevi and human to know that, gut level, he might think he understood — but chances were very good that he wouldn't, couldn't, and never would, unaided by the paidhi, come up with the right forecast of human behavior, because he didn't come with the right hardwiring. Average people didn't analyze what they thought: they thought they thought, and half of it was gut reaction.

But because lately — very lately — the paidhi-aiji had tumbled across that line and lived far away from experts at making that interface, stayed among ordinary atevi in the hinterlands long enough for the paidhi to meet those gut-level reactions, he at least had awareness how and on what critical points Tabini was coping with him — and in the process changing the interface, unwittingly corrupting what the paidhiin thought they knew about atevi.

"Aiji-ma, wise and perceptive as you are, I'm reluctant to use the word man'chias a human thought, even when it almost works, but it's very close to what Mospheirans feel toward this world. We think we have that feeling in common with atevi, not with the ship. A man'chito this planet."

Tabini's pale eyes were unreadable and thoughtful. Interest in the concept was the best a human could guess.

And after a long moment digesting that idea or another, chin on fist, Tabini said, "Another why, nand' paidhi, when you say you feel no such emotions."

So, so much riding on the understanding. He felt the shakes coming on, a feverishness that made focus difficult. "Whys lead to whys. I should go to bed, aiji-ma, and let you ask me when I've thought it through. I've been through too much to give answers lightly."

"This answer, nand' paidhi. Don't toss me a lure of reassurance and then say don't follow."

"Aiji-ma, it's simply emotional, our attachment to the world. There's no logic. It just is. Like man'chi, it just is."

"You say there's been no preparation for this ship to occupy the station. No — hidden presence up there."

" Youdon't believe there's a human presence up there, aiji-ma."

"But there certainly is now, is there not, over our heads at this very moment?"

"True."

"So. Let me tell you: this is very serious business, Bren ji. Humans swooping down with death rays used to be bad television. Now it's speculation on the evening news."

It was slowly sinking in, how far his mission to the mainland had deteriorated in the passage of a few days: the structure of trust was — if not gone — at least badly bent. "Three days ago, aiji-ma, I'd have sworn I understood what sane atevi believed. Now — I don'tknow. I can at least swear to you there are no death rays."

"On Mospheira? Or on that ship? By the Treaty you agreed to turn over all your technology to us, in such steps as wouldn't wreck — what, our environment? Our cultural destiny? As I recall, our own Space Committee was talking about slosh baffles for a heavy-lift rocket and the launch facilities for communications satellites. I think these people are somewhat beyond that."

"Yes, aiji-ma," he said humbly. "They possibly are."

"And will you turn over theirtechnology to us? I fear we're back to that question again: are these people part of your association, bound by the Treaty? Or are they not? Hanks has been talking recklessly about the expansion of the industrial base. About stars and the distances between stars — and faster-than-light travel, which, you are aware, defies the views of certain sects, even commits heresy."

He felt his head light, his thinking unstable. FTL. Hankstook it on herself —

"Pardon, Tabini-ma, was she perhaps speaking in confidence — or — ?"

"In confidence, oh, yes. To lord Geigi. Coupled with suggestions that, with sweeping advances in technology, the oil price might rise."

"Oh, my God."

"Deity?"

He'd been so confounded he'd reacted in Mosphei' — of which Tabini knew at least a salient few words.

"Tabini-ma. The woman is a —"

"— fool?"

"Naive," he said faintly.

"Lord Geigi, as you know, is a Determinist. With immense oil reserves. Is she insulting his beliefs? Or promising him revenue — what do you say — under the table?"

"One could, if one were Geigi, be very confused."

"Especially since Geigi is heavily in debt. Notfor public release. The man is desperate."

"God," he breathed, and a shaky, perilous vision opened in front of him — the Association tottering on uncertain communications, disaffection of the lords, numerology confounded. Faster-than-light was now a fact in certain atevi minds, God knew how far the rumor had spread. The Determinist numerologists would have heard about it: ultimately the astronomers and the space scientists were going to hear the transmissions from the ship. The seed, as the atevi proverb had it, would see the sun.

Then unless there was some clever face-saving device on which the Determinists might explain their embarrassing paradox, all hell was going to break loose. Important people would be called liars, respected authorities and culturally important systems would be overthrown by incontrovertible fact — possibly even taken down in bloodshed, since flesh and bone supported these glass structures of belief.

"I'll deal with Hanks."

"Faster-than-light." Tabini reached aside to let Eidi pour a cup of tea. "And do we, after all, deal with death rays next?"

"I trust not," he breathed, while his mind was searching wildly for justification, for rationalization with Departmental policy, for somethingthat could let him tell Tabini the thoughts that hit a fevered human brain with sudden, rare, atevi-language clarity. He couldn't count on recovering the moment tomorrow, not the approach to both Tabini and the situation.

"Aiji-ma, here's the fact that occurs to me: atevi assume weapons. But weapons weren't the real threat in the War."

"Ask the dead."

"No, but they weren't decisive. We had the weapons — which did us no good. What hurt atevi — the very threat that hangs over Mospheira andatevi — is the mere shock of them being here. The numbers they deal with. Their bringing new things into the world faster than atevi can adjust. The same mistakes we made — and destabilized the society, the economy. Everything." The shoulder was giving him sudden, particular pain at the angle he'd chosen in the chair, and the threads of logic tried to escape him, but he hung on. "Worse, aiji-ma, we're not dealing with a slow information flow among atevi this time. Now it's instant information, instant crisis, instant reaction, as fast as television can throw it at the world. And if change comes at people so fast the electorate doesn't understand it, aiji-ma, if people can't plan for their own personal futures, if the businesses can't adjust to it — fast enough —"

" Baji-naji," Tabini said, and shrugged — which was to say, proverbially, that the random devil lurked in every design, and the numbers could inevitably forecast, but not infallibly predict. "We survived it once. We even, as you recall, won the resultant war."

"That, I swear to you, I swearto you without hearing them — isn't their intent. We don't want a war."

"War shouldn't have happened the last time. But how will we avoid it? Don't just tell me we're wiser. Or that you are. Tell me who Hanks is representing."

He drew a slow breath, only to win time to think. He'd led Tabini around to hisargument; now, in a turnabout which confused a weary brain, he was back where Tabini had led him — feeling the dull ache spread from the newly fused bone, and sensing Tabini's belief in him, Tabini's expectations of him, riding on a knife's edge of attention.

"I don't know, but I'll find out, aiji-ma. Certainly she's not representing that ship. Or the Foreign Office, at this point. They sent meback. And I will notlet everything we've worked for go down, aiji-ma."

"So. The paidhi will mediate. Is that what you say? The paidhi will convince the Mospheiran authorities, the Foreign Office and the internal authorities of this ship, and speak my arguments and myrequirements?"

Tabini was pushing a sick man and Tabini damned well knew it. Tabini had his own job to do, for his people, and Tabini wanted information out of the best and readiest source he had.

Tabini also believed in truth under duress. Tabini would push in such sessions until he got something of substance from the paidhi and felt that sufficient truth was on the table. You couldn't put him off, not unless you were prepared to see Tabini pull far, far back.

The paidhi damned well knew that trait. And knew when to gamble.

"All right, aiji-ma, you want to know what course humans on Mospheira can possibly take. One — fall in line behind these people and end up negotiating with them for the ability of their young, their talented, and their ablest people to go up to the station and live, because — and I gather Hanks has raised the issue — neither you nor we have the industrial base to build a launch system. If we take their transport, we become passengers — on somebody else's space program. Or —"

Pain was coming in waves. He had to shift back in the chair and risk mistaken interpretation of body language. "I'm sorry, aiji-ma, a twinge."

"Or," Tabini said.

Primary rule: neverleave an explanation for an ateva to fill in the blanks.

"Or, aiji-ma, the world can try, as I think Hanks is legitimately suggesting, aside from her oil industry estimates, to build the requisite industrial base under our own regulation, as fast as the world can deal with it, and refuse to go faster. Ordinary folk aren't going to give up their homes or their plans. The aiji in Shejidan can't trample on the opinions of a Wingin brickinason, no more than the President of Mospheira can tell some North Shore fisherman in my brother's town that he's going to go up into space and work on some orbiting fish farm. They'd have to come and get him. The same as your atevi mason."

"Ah, but what when these celestial visitors offer you cures for disease? Instant technology? Instant answers? It strikes me that Mospheira is in the same position we were in when you came floating down out of our sky. These people can offer you your dearest ambitions. These people can make you lords."

"Aiji-ma, these people should approach Mospheira and Shejidan both with greattrepidation. You're absolutely right about the bait they'll use, consciously or unconsciously. But we can't take it. The Treaty is our collective safety, aiji-ma. You and I haveinternal differences, emotionally, logically, culturally, that these strangers don't know about. You have natural allies in humans who want to stay on this planet. We have to make Mospheira listen, and we have to make the snip crew listen to us."

"They might simply decide our objections were irrelevant."

"Unfortunately they don't need to do a damned thing — excuse me, aiji-ma — but rebuild the station and sit up there to preempt atevi everachieving the future they might have had."

"So? Would this not benefit you — even your fisherman — in the long run?"

"Aiji-ma, we came down to build factories and make roads and transgress the lines of atevi associations with no sense of the damage we were doing. But that ship up there — that's not a chemical rocket. Believe me that it's just as disruptive of my world."

"Not your world."

"Then we've nowhereto belong, Tabini-ma." They'd gone past what he intended and he'd said far more than he meant to. He wasn't sure now what impression he'd created that he couldn't undo. His head was throbbing. He felt a wave of dizziness and nausea. He picked up the teacup, controlled action, trying to control the information he passed. "I wantto go into space, understand, Tabini-ma. I want that — personally, for me, I want so much to go up there I can't explain it. But I won't sell atevi interests to get that ticket, and I won't sell Mospheira."

" Sellthem?"

"Sell out. A Mosphei' proverb. One sells melons in a market. That's proper. But one doesn't sell one's duty to people who aren't qualified to have it."

"Sell one's duty. A curious notion."

"I said — for us it's not biological. Because it isn't, it can be sold, aiji-ma, for money, for other considerations. But good humans will neversell it."

"What then do they do with it?"

"They give it away, very much — but not quite — as atevi do."

"These not-quites are the very devil."

"They always are, aiji-ma."

"Indeed." Tabini set aside his empty cup and rested his chin on his fist. "Indeed. For this very reason I demanded you back, Bren-ji. You are a treasure. And yet you want me not to shoot Deana Hanks. Why?"

Pale, pale and oh-so-sober eyes. Tabini was calling him a fool, by atevi lights. And asking an honest question. There was everything at risk. And it was time to take the debate aside.

"Well, for one thing, Tabini-ma, — it would make one hell of a mess with the State Department."

Tabini gave one of his rare, silent laughs. "Don't divert me, clever man. You've given me nightmares of death rays. Let me spoil yoursleep. Grandmother is in residence."

"God, I'd have thought she'd want to get straight home."

"Oh, this is home, Bren-ji. As much homeas Malguri, at least in title."

"Is the situation in Malguri Province then quiet, aiji-ma?"

"If you mean have my forces stopped the gunfire, yes. If you mean have all the rebels come around to my way of thinking, and is there absolutely no likelihood that certain folk both noble and common would gladly assassinate you and me with one bullet, I fear the answer is no. Doubtless my grandmother will want to talk to you. Bear in mind her associations with the rebels. You have such a generous, unsuspicious nature."

"I'll remember that."

"Beware of her. I tell you, there are far too many people in the world who would wish to silence you."

"Has anyone filed Intent?"

"No. But I tell you this, nadi, I may be utterly mistaken, but I fear some of those individuals may reside on Mospheira. And do I understand, on Mospheira they don't have a law requiring a filing?"

He'd believe in betrayals of other kinds, perhaps, but not in physical danger from Mospheira.

Though silencing him need not be physical. He had sufficient reason for misgivings in his successor's presence on the mainland.

"Tabini-ma, I honestly — honestly don't think even my dedicated detractors would want to give up the only means they have of talking to you, now that they know you won't talk to Hanks. Not when —" He didn't know what happened to him. There was a black space. He wasn't holding the cup all of a sudden, and made a grab for it as it fell on the priceless carpet. It rolled — unbroken, but tea stood on the immaculate designs. He was appalled — he seized his napkin and flung it down on the spill, trying to bend to see to it himself.

But Eidi was there instantly, to recover the cup and to mop up the damage.

"Forgive me," Bren said, intensely embarrassed. "I've had terrible luck with teacups."

"Bren-ji, it's only carpet." Tabini made a furious wave of the hand, dismissing Eidi, dismissing the whole fuss. "Listen just this moment more. I need you as soon as you can possibly bring yourself up to date with this crisis, to go before the joint legislatures, explain these strangers in our sky and translate the dialogue between Mospheira and this ship. End the speculation. More — tell this ship the things atevi have to say to them. Thatis what I need of you, Bren-ji. Do you agree?"

"I — have no authorization to contact them, aiji-ma, not even to translate, and I would prefer —"

"You have myauthorization, Bren-ji. The Treaty document said, did it not, there shall be one translator between humans and the atevi? Did it not say, the paidhi shall interpret humans to the atevi and atevi to the humans? I take this as the basis of the Treaty, Bren-ji. No matter the division in your Department that sends me twopaidhiin, no matter they're in violation of the Treaty — youwill make this contact and render our words honestly to these strangers."

"Tabini-ma, I need to think. I can't think tonight. I can't promise —"

"I requested Mospheira to send you back. Surely they aren't so simple-minded as to believe I wouldn't use your abilities, Bren-ji. Can you place any other interpretation on it?"

"But it may not be straightforward. That we do use audio records is going to slow linguistic drift, but the vastly different experience of our populations is going to accelerate it. I can't be sure I'll understand all the nuances. Meanings change far more than syntax, and I've no wish to —"

"Bren-ji, linguistics is yourconcern. The Association is in crisis. There must be some action, some assertion of the legitimate human authority. Every day you spend preparing — we may lose lives. Don't tell me about your problems. Mine generate casualty figures."

It was true. He knew what delay cost. He tried not to think too much on it — when worry only slowed the process. The human brain could only take so much. "Tabini-ma," he said. "Give me tomorrow to get my wits about me. Get me the transmissions."

"Bren-ji, understand, there's nothing in the world more dangerous than politics running without information. I have heads of security, heads of committees, clamoring at my doors. There's a meeting of committee heads going on right now —"

"Aiji-ma," he began.

"Bren-ji, tonight, before this can go further in rumor-making conjecture, at least go down and address that meeting, only briefly. This woman — this Deana Hanks — has created speculations, panic, angers, suspicion. Be patient, I say, wait for Bren-paidhi. And they're waiting, but the rumors are already running the corridors. I know you're in pain. But tonight, if at all possible, at least assure these people I haven't deceived them."

He'd thought he'd finished his duty. He thought he was going within the next few moments to his borrowed apartment and to his borrowed bed. The arm hurt. The tape around his ribs was its own special, knife-edged misery, growing more acute by the minute, and he couldn't do what Tabini wanted of him. He couldn't face it.

But Tabini was right about people dying while experts split semantic hairs; and God knew what rumors could be loose, or what Hanks could have said.

"Paidhi-ji, lives are at issue. The stability of the Association is at issue. The aiji of Shejidan can't askhelp of his associates. It would insult them. But so the paidhi understands, across the difficulty of our association —" Tabini couldn't imply his associates didn't share his needs — without implying they were traitors; Tabini was doing the paidhi's job again.

"I understand that," he said. "But I don't think I can walk far, aiji-ma." His voice wobbled. He felt irrationally close to tears. The shock of bombs in Malguri was still jolting through his nerves, the spatter of a close hit: not just dirt and rock chips, but fragments of a decent man he'd grown to like —

"It's just downstairs," Tabini said. "Just down the lift."

"I'll try," he said. He didn't even know how he was going to get to his feet. But Tabini stood up, and ignoring the pinch of tape around his ribs, Bren made it.

To do a job. To make sense of the incomprehensible, when the paidhi hardly conceived of the situation himself.

CHAPTER 4

Acable lift existed in the guarded back corridors of the aiji's apartment, a creaky thing, an antique of brass filigree and an alarming little bounce in the cables; but Bren rated it far, far better than a long walk. He went down with Tabini, with Banichi and with Tabini's senior personal guard, Naidiri, a two-floor descent into the constantly manned security post below, and out a series of doors which gave out onto a hall not available to the public.

By that back passage, one came to a small guard station with a choice of three other doors that were the secure access to separate meeting rooms which had, each, one outside general access. It was the closed route the Bu-javid residents used to reach the area where atevi commons and atevi lords met elbow to elbow, with all the vigorous give and take the legislatures employed.

On this route the lords of the Association, who held court at other appointed times, could reach their meetings safe from jostling by crowds and random, improper petitioners — and on this route one comparatively fragile and battered human could feel less threatened by collision in the halls.

More, the walk from the lift to the committee rooms was quite short, the room being, in this case, the small Blue Hall, which the Judiciary and Commerce Committees regularly used.

Jago and Tabini's second-rank security had preceded them down, were already at the doors, and briskly opened them on a noisy debate in progress among the twenty or so lords and people's representatives — the Minister of Finance shouting at the lord Minister of Transport with enough passion to jar the nerves of a weary, aching, and somewhat queasy human.

Perhaps they'd rather shout and finish the business they clearly had under consideration; and if he asked Tabini very nicely they might get him to his bed where he could fall unconscious.

But the debate died in mid-sentence, a quiet fell over the room, and lords and representatives of the Western Association bowed not just once to Tabini, but again to the paidhi, very clearly directing that courtesy at him.

Bren was taken quite aback — bowed before he thought clearly, and doubted then in muzzy embarrassment whether the second courtesy could be possibly aimed him at all.

"Nadiin," he murmured, confused and dizzy from the exertion, hoping only to make this short and not to have to answer more than a few questions.

Aides and pages hastened to draw out chairs and to settle him at the table, a flurry of courtesy, he thought, unaccustomed to the solicitousness and the attention, as if the paidhi looked to be apt to die on the spot.

Death wasn't an option, he thought, drawing a breath and feeling pain shoot through the shoulder, the wind from the air ducts cold on his perspiring face. But fainting dead away — that, he might dp. Voices came to him distantly, surreal and alternate with the beating of his heart.

"Nadiin," Tabini said quietly, having sat down at the other end of the table, "Bren-paidhi is straight from surgery and a long plane flight. Don't be too urgent with him. He's taxed himself just to walk down here."

Came then a murmur of sympathy and appreciation, the tall, black-skinned lords and representatives who set a lone, pale human at a childlike scale. A small tray with water and a small pot of hot tea arrived at Bren's place, as at every seat, then a small be-ribboned folder that would be, like the other such folders, the agenda of the meeting. He opened it, perfunctory courtesy. He wanted the water, but having settled at a relatively pain-free angle, didn't want to lean forward to get it.

"We were hearing the tape," lord Sigiadi said, the Minister of Commerce. "Does the paidhi have some notion, some least inkling, what the dialogue is between the island and the ship?"

"I haven't heard the tapes, nand' Minister. I'm promised to have them tomorrow."

"Would the paidhi listen briefly and tell us?"

The whole assembly murmured a quick agreement to that suggestion. "Yes," they said. "Play the tape."

At which point the paidhi suddenly knew, by the suspicious lack of special ceremony to Tabini's arrival, and by the equally elaborate courtesy to the paidhi, that the committee had almost certainly seen Tabini earlier in the same session.

And that the paidhi had just been, by a master of the art, sandbagged.

But it was a relief to sit still, at least, after a long day's jostling about. Even in the brief spell of sitting he'd had in Tabini's apartment, he'd exhausted himself, and the Council of Committees demanded nothing of him more than to sit in this late-night session and listen to the week's worth of tapes he urgently wanted to hear and get the gist of.

Which made it necessary to keep every reaction off his face, while men and women of the Western Association, themselves minimally expressive and capable of reading the little expression which high-ranking atevi did show in public, were watching his every twitch, shift of posture, and blink.

So he sat propped at his least painful angle, chin on hand, facial nerves deliberately disengaged — the paidhi had learned that atevi art early in his tenure — listening to the numeric blip and beep that atevi surveillance had picked up from Mospheira communications to the abandoned space station, machine talking to machine, the same as every week before the ship had arrived out of nowhere.

"This is computers talking," he murmured to the committee heads. "Either stored data exchange or one com puter trying to find the protocols of another. I leave the numbers therein to the experts, to tell if there's anything unusual. If the technician could go directly to the discernible voices —"

Then, with a hiccup of the running tape: " Ground Station Alpha, this isPhoenix. Please respond."

Even expecting it to happen, that thin voice hit human nerves — a voice from space, talking to a long-dead outpost, exactly as it would have done all those centuries ago.

But it was real, it was contemporary. It was the ship-dwelling presence orbiting the planet — a presence expecting all manner of things to be true that hadn't been true for longer than anyone alive could reckon.

"They're asking for an answer from the old landing site," he said, trying to look as blas6 as possible, while his pulse was doing otherwise. "They've no idea it's been dead for nearly two hundred years."

On that ship might even be — his scant expertise in relativity hinted at such — crew that rememberedthat site. The thought gave him gooseflesh as he listened through the brief squeal and blip, computers talking again: as he judged now, searching frequencies and sites for response from what optics had to tell the ship was an extensive settlement. He was about to indicate to the aide in charge of the tape to increase the playback rate.

"What are the numbers?" Judiciary asked. Loaded question.

"I believe they have to do with date, time, authorizations. That's the usual content."

Then he heard an obscure communications officer in charge of the all but defunct ground-station link answer that inquiry. " Say again?"

Which he rendered, and rare laughter touched the solemn faces about the table — surprise-reaction as humor being one of those few congruent points of atevi-human psychology; he was very glad of that reaction. It was an overwhelmingly important point to make with them, that humans had been as surprised as atevi; he hoped he'd scored it hard enough to get that fact told around.

That recorded call skipped rapidly through an increasingly high-ranking series of phone patches until he was experiencing the events, hewas waiting with those confused technicians — recovering the moments he'd missed while he was tucked away in remote places of the continent, and which, with Hanks sitting idle and unconsulted, atevi had had to experience without knowing what humans were saying.

After the first few exchanges, the realization that the contact was no hoax must have rocketed clear to the executive wing in less than an hour, because in a very scant chain of calls, the President of Mospheira was talking directly to the ship's captain.

"He's telling the ship's captain that he is in charge of the human community on Mospheira. The captain asks what that means, and the President answers that Mospheira is the island, that he is in charge…"

He lost a little of it then, or didn't lose it, just whited out on a wave of acute discomfort. He caught himself with a tightness around the mouth, and knew he had to keep his face calm. "Back the tape, please, just a little. The shoulder's hurting."

"If the paidhi is too ill —" Finance said; but stern, suspicious Judiciary broke in: "This is what we most need to hear, nand' paidhi. If you possibly can, one would like to hear."

"Replay," he said. The paidhi survived at times on theater. If you had points with atevi you used them, and going on in evident pain did get points, while the pain might excuse any frown. He listened, as the President maintained indeed he was the head of state on an exclusively human-populated island —

God. It already hit sensitive topics. He was no longer sure of his own judgment in going on when he'd had a chance to stop and think; he thought wildly now of falling from his chair in a faint, and feared his face was dead white. But pain was still a better excuse than he'd have later.

"The captain asks about the President's authority. The President says, 'Mospheira is a sovereign nation, the sta tion is still under Mospheiran governance. The ship's captain then asks, 'Mr. President, where isthe station crew?' — he's found the station abandoned — and then the President asks, 'Why — ' " He tried not to let his face change as he played the question through and through his head in the space of a few seconds, trying not to lose the thread that was continuing on the tape.

"What, nand' paidhi?" the Minister of Transportation asked quietly, and Bren lifted his hand for silence, not quite venturing to silence an atevi lord, but Tabini himself moved a cautioning hand as the tape kept running.

"The President of Mospheira complains of the ship's abandonment of the colony. The ship's captain suggested that the humans on Mospheira had a duty to maintain the station."

And after several more uneasy exchanges, in which he knewhe'd gotten well over his head in this translation, came the conclusion from the ship: " Then you don't have a space capability."

Bluntly put.

He rendered it: "The ship's captain asks whether Mospheira has manned launch capability." But he understood something far more ominous, and there seemed suddenly to be a draft in the room, as if someone elsewhere had opened a door. He sat and listened to the end of that conversation, feeling small chills jolt through him — maybe lack of sleep, maybe recent anesthetic, he wasn't sure.

No. Mospheira didn't have a space capability. Atevi didn't have, either. Not to equal that ship. And there was clear apprehension on atevi faces, expression allowed to surface; these heads of committee were steeped in atevi suspicion of each other — in a society where assassins were a legal recourse.

Damn, he thought, damn. He didn't know what he could do. The ship was notflinging out open arms to its lost brethren. The Foreign Office had called the exchanges touchy, and they were clearly that. His expression couldn't be auspicious or reassuring at the moment, and he hoped they attributed it to the pain.

"Cut the tape off," he said, "please, nadi. I think we have the essential position they're taking. The two leaders are signing off. I'll give you a full transcript as soon as tomorrow, I'm just —" His voice wobbled. "Very shaky right now."

"So," Tabini said in the silence that followed. "What does the paidhi think?"

The paidhi's mind was whited out in thought after tumbling thought. He rested his elbow on the chair, chin on his hand, in the one comfortable position he'd discovered, and took a moment answering.

"Aiji-ma, nadiin-ji, give me one day and the rest of the tapes. I can tell you… there is no agreement between the ship and Mospheira on the abandonment of the station. It seems an angry issue." Set the hook. Convince the committee heads they were getting the real story. Make them valuetheir information from the paidhi, not Hanks and not the rumor mill. "Please understand," he said in a very deep, very profound silence, "that I haven't heard the full text, and that the bridge between the atevi and human languages is very difficult on some topics such as confidence or nonconfidence, for biological reasons. Even after my years of study I've discovered immense difference in what I thought versus what I now realize of atevi understanding. Words I've always been told are direct equivalents have turned out not to be equivalent at all. But that I do understand gives me hope, even if —" he laid a hand on the sling "— it was a painful acquisition — that if my brain can make the adjustment to your way of thinking, then there must be words; and if I can find the words I can deal with this. Believe me, tonight, that what I hear on that tape disturbs me, but does not alarm me. I hear no threat of war, rather typical posturing and position-taking, preface to negotiation, not to conflict."

"Have they, nadi, not mentioned atevi?" The question, coldly posed, came from the conservative Minister of Defense. "Am I mistaken that that word occurs?"

"Only insofar as, nandi, in the discussion of territory, Mospheira asserted its sovereignty over humans."

"Sovereignty," Judiciary repeated.

Loaded word. Very.

"Sovereignty over humans was the phrase, nand' Minister. Remember, please, the President can't use the atevi word 'association' to them and make the ship's captain understand it. He has to use words — as do I in translation — which carry inconvenient historical baggage. We don't have a perfect translation for every thought. This is why the paidhi exists, and I will be very sure the President understands his Treaty obligations and that he's sensitive to implications in translation. The Treaty will stand."

Suspicions remained evident, but tempers were settling, judgment at least deferred. The shoulder ached, muscle tension, perhaps, and he tried to relax — impossible thought, when he was beginning to shiver in the draft from the doorway.

"There is a rumor," Finance said, "that humans have built more ships."

"I believe I can deny that, nand' Minister, unless someone besides the paidhi understands that from some tape I haven't heard." He said it, and Hankslanded on his mind like a hammer blow. "I ask you, nadiin, please, when you hear such things, make me aware of them, so that I can address them as they deserve in information I give to you. I'll certainly listen to the tapes with that in mind, nandi, and I thank you for the information."

Finance gave a mollified bow of assent, her face entirely expressionless as she leaned back and regarded him under lowered brows.

Meanwhile the room was swinging around and around, and there was no good trying to request to leave until it stopped — the waves of dizziness when they started having at least a few minutes to run. "Be assured," he said, "that I'm back in business — a little weak today, but don't hesitate to send me queries and information at any hour. That's my job."

"The paidhi," Tabini interjected, "is staying in the Atigeini residence for security reasons. You may direct your phone calls and your messages there. Hanks is not here officially. We have cleared up that matter and are proceeding to clear it up with Mospheira."

Some little consternation and curiosity attended on that remark.

"What of the Treaty?" Judiciary asked. " Onehuman."

"They apparently thought I'd died," Bren said. "And since I'm alive, but injured, it's possible they left Hanks in place thinking I wasn't up to my duties. I left Mospheira very rapidly after surgery this morning, and it's possible they briefed me on a number of things immediately after I came to, but I fear I didn't retain them. I by no means dispute she's in violation, but it's likely only a confusion of signals in a very rapidly evolving situation. While I'm paidhi, I promise you, nadiin, ship or no ship, Mospheira will stay within the Treaty."

Triti, in the atevi language. Which they roughly defined as a human concept of association — as humans thought atevi association meant government or confederation, not feelingthe instinctual level of it. Bandy "treaty" about in the atevi language in most quarters with any suggestion of it as a paper document and one risked real confusion of human motives.

"But this 'sovereignty,' " Transportation objected.

"Is a difficult word," he said. "A rebel word to you, but it doesn't have such connotations in Mosphei'. It applies to their relations with each other, not with atevi, nand' Minister. How does it stand now? Has there been much more conversation?"

"Not between these two individuals," Defense said, dour-faced, and finding preoccupation in his pen and a paper clip. "We do have numerous exchanges between what we suspect to be lower-level authorities."

"Probably correct, nadi." He felt a sense of panic, sorting wildly through two languages, two psychological, historical realities, trying to make them seamless. "The fact that they've turned talk over to subordinates doesn't mean a settlement or a feud, merely that there's no agreement substantial enough to enable two leaders to talk."

"Two leaders, nadi." Defense was unwontedly peremptory, even rude in that "nadi," evidencing disturbance in his voice. "Two, is it?"

"It's not certain." He fought for calm. It wasn't terri tory he wanted to explore. "Not at all certain, nand' Minister. I think they're trying to see if association exists. I think historically they'll conclude it does. But if they can't find it, I can't imagine that one ship could think it outranks the entire population of Mospheira. At worst, or best, the ship might withdraw to elsewhere in the solar system. I just can't — can't — be definitive right now —"

"The paidhi," Tabini said, "is very tired, and in pain, nadiin. Thank him for his extraordinary effort on this matter, and let him go to his bed and rest tonight. Will you not, nand' paidhi?"

"Aiji-ma, if I had the strength I'd stay, but, yes, I — think that's wise. The shoulder's hurting — quite sharply."

"Then I'll turn you back to your escort and wish you good night, paidhi-ji. I ask you to consider your safety extremely important, and extremely threatened, perhaps even from human agencies. Stay to your security, night and day, nand' paidhi."

Why? was the question that leaped up, disturbing his composure in front of a table full of lords and representatives, some of whom might have been in consultation with Hanks. He wished Tabini hadn't added that — and tumbling to why, he thought: to let the troublemakers in the Association think about the hazard of making associations no ateva understood — like Hanks.

Clever of the man, Bren thought. One could admire Tabini's artistry at a distance. One just didn't want to be the subject of it — and he couldn't protest to the contrary, or call the aiji a liar. He certainly couldn't say that Hanks was an innocent in Tabini's difficulties.

One just, with the help of the table, struggled to his feet, bowed to the assembled committee chairmen — and lost the coat off his shoulders — another twinge as he tried to save it.

Banichi quietly intervened to save his dignity, adjusted the coat, and the lords and representatives gave him the courtesy of bows from their seats, two even rising in respect of his performance, when he was less than certain it was credible or creditable.

"See he rests," Tabini said to Banichi and Jago. "Straight to bed. No formalities, no excuses."

The paidhi had no argument at all with that instruction. He'd believed only giddy minutes ago that he'd controlled that conversation at least enough to hold his own.

But once out of Tabini's immediate presence the spell was broken, the excitement ebbed, and adrenaline was shifting from second-to-second performance to the raw fear that he had a human situation on his hands and that he'd given atevi far too much information.

It hadn't been a total mistake to agree to Tabini's requests. Sometimes he'd gotten extraordinary results when Tabini pulled one of his must-talks. Sometimes he'd been able to skate along on dangerously thin ice, maybe giving just a shade more to Tabini's demands for information than the Department would ever feel comfortable with —

But, dammit, getting concessions back, too — more cooperation between this aiji and Mospheira in his few years in Shejidan than his predecessor had gotten from Tabini's father in his whole career. He'd won expansions of the Treaty, he'd increased trade —

He hadn't said anything that, by the Treaty, they weren't entitled to have, or done anything that he hadn't promised to do when he got back to Shejidan, but he walked the lower hall from the meeting room under the escort of Banichi and Jago, in increasing distress over the tone and tenor of the meeting — definite deterioration in atevi confidence. Definite unease. And maybe justified unease. He needed to talk to Hanks — find out what she'd done and said, and what she understood as the truth.

Meanwhile Banichi talked to someone on his pocket-com, the device against his ear, and directed him to an express lift he was well familiar with, the one he'd used «n his other visits to the third floor. He rode it up with Banichi, seeing the conference room downstairs more vividly than the utilitarian metal around them — reviewing the nuance of remembered dialogue, and agonizing over how, without going back and forth with Mospheira, he was going to straighten out concepts.

More, there were names in the text, which made it a human Rosetta Stone for atevi grammarians. An extensive text limited to topics on which atevi already knew certain Mosphei' words — and knowing words didn't mean knowing the language. Words like loyalty that didn't quite mean man'chi;and propriety that didn't quite mean kabiu;and, on the atevi side, tritithat, unknown to most humans, didn't mean treaty, but a homing instinct under fire — damnHanks and her assumptions.

Her campaigning for atevi partisans of her own couldn't be Foreign Office policy. The faction behind Hanks had absolutely no interest in screwing up on that dangerous a level. Hankswanted the job; Hanks wanted what she'd trained for all her life, heunderstood that — and she was flattered to be making real headway with the likes of lord Geigi and the hard-to-handle fringes of the Association, real proof of her competency, the hell with the university liberals who couldn'tbe right about the associational fringe elements…

Damn, damn, and damn.

They exited into the upper hall, near the door, walked the hand-loomed carpet runner past extravagant porcelain bouquets in glass cases.

He ought to call Mospheira and brief someone — tonight, if he could get a call through — if he could keep his wits about him to make a report, no surety at all.

Worse, he wasn't sure, in view of Hanks' being left here, that he dared pick up a phone to make a call or even receive one. He'd started down a course of action he couldn't backtrack on — and he couldn't afford to have the upper echelons of the Department pull the rug out from under the Foreign Office or the paidhi with any wait-for-official-decision or a mandated consultation with Hanks.

The paidhi had damned sure better have authority in the field. Atevi certainly thought he did. The aiji of Shejidan wouldn't talk to anyone who didn't have authority to make a decision stick.

It was a situation you had to stand on both sides of: for the currently serving paidhi, it meant living up to your ears in real-time guesswork.

And yes, sometimes even that paragon of Departmental rectitude, his predecessor, Wilson-paidhi, hadn't consulted.

The hall was a haze of gold carpet patterns and pastel porcelain bouquets and he felt increasingly sick at his stomach. He wanted to be in his bed without fuss, unconscious.

He wanted to wake up in the morning with an arm that didn't hurt and with a clear-headed, logical insight into how he was going to keep everything humans and atevi had built together from blowing up in their faces.

He also wanted, pettishly, to have had more personal time at home, dammit, before they dropped him back into the boiling oil. He'd won his time off: he'd planned to sit for at least a day on his brother's white-railed porch watching the waves roll in and letting his mind go to the zero-state it longed to achieve —

Paidhiin had taken fast action before to keep an aiji of Shejidan in power. But they'd never — never — handed over the human fall-back positions in negotiating before the State Department ever got to the negotiations.

God — he thought suddenly, as that hit, asking himself what he'd done. Or what he'd actually said, or they'd implied. He suddenly couldn't remember. It was all coming apart in his mind, bleeding into confusion as they reached his door, as Jago keyed through the lock into state-of-the-art security systems which could, if forced, deal death on an intruder in ways that made a human unused to such conveniences feel very, very queasy.

Tano met them in the foyer. That was a welcome surprise. Tano might have been chasing them since the airport, but he hadn't actually seen Tano since Malguri, and in the surreal flux of events around him he was ever so glad to see the man in good health. Tano was security the same as Banichi and Jago were: deadly and grim and all of that. But Tano was on hisside, on Tabini's orders, more particularly on Banichi's, and Banichi ranked very, very high in the Guild of Assassins by all he could figure.

"Your luggage is safe, nand' paidhi," Tano said. "I've also set your computer in safekeeping."

"Thank you, nadi. I verymuch regret your difficulties. I hope to be a very quiet resident here and give you absolutely no adventures."

Tano took his coat. "One does hope so, nand' paidhi." Another, probably real, servant appeared a few steps ahead of the gracious nadi Saidin, captured the coat from Tano and whisked it away under Saidin's direction, one supposed for cleaning and pressing. "There are messages," Saidin said, indicating the reception table by the door, where filigree silver message cylinders in daunting abundance waited in a silver basket, along with one paper simply rolled and sealed.

"The paidhi is exhausted, nadi," Banichi objected, which was only sense. Bren knew he should let those messages alone, go to bed and sleep the uneasy sleep of the truly morally compromised, without knowing or imagining who would have sent him messages so urgently early in his return: every head of every committee he'd just talked to downstairs, he was certain; plus every atevi official who saw in his accession to this apartment, and his return to Shejidan, the new importance of the paidhiin.

And possibly ordinary citizens as far as Malguri had recently seen the paidhi on local television and seen the ship in their skies and just wanted to ask: Are we and our children safe in our towns?

Certain cylinders announced their nature at a cursory glance. And, dammit, he wasn't constitutionally capable of walking past that table without assuring himself there wasn't a life-and-death communication in the lot.

Or word from Mospheira.

"A moment, nadiin-ji. Just a moment," he said and, shaky with exhaustion, nipped out of the basket the ones in particular that had caught his eye — the plain, uncylindered one: that usually meant telegrams from Mospheira; men two more, one seal that he feared he recognized, and one he was damned well sure of. Other familiar seals he didn't need to question: the head of the Space Committee — who hadn't been at the meeting, and who would have urgent, businesslike and thoroughly reason able questions to ask the paidhi, such as: Is there still a space program, nand' paidhi? What do we do?

And, dead sure, What can we tell the Appropriations Committee?

One certainly understood that good gentleman's concern. He saw the seals of Transportation and Trade, too — logical that they had questions for the paidhi: he hoped he'd answered them adequately downstairs.

But that cylinder of real silver was indeed the seal he'd thought it was, a diamond-centered crest he'd seen not so long ago and, in view of Tabini's warning, expected.

Grandmother.

The aiji-dowager.

Ilisidi had brought him to Shejidan. Saved his neck. And risked it. Awkward with the cast, he cracked the seal with his thumbnail, slid out the little scroll and pulled it open.

Nand' paidhi, it said, in a fine, spidery hand, Iswear to your safety. The return of this cylinder on whatever day you feel able will signal your availability for breakfast. You must keep me posted. An old woman can grow so quickly out of touch with the world.

He really truly wanted to go to bed and not to think about Ilisidi.

But there remained the two letters, one with his own white ribbon and red wax seal.

I hope you are aware, it read, that the aiji has resorted to threats of assassination against this office to secure your return to the mainland, while repercussions of your unannounced venture into the hinterlands are still disturbing the capital. In the present crisis, I have taken measures to smooth over the damage in public relations.

Damn!

/ am continuing to conduct business, to hold discussions with responsible parties, and to send regular reports to the Department as the sole functioning diplomatic officer. That the aiji has offered you his personal hospitality is beside the point. I have not received, nor under the present conditions expect to receive, nor can I accept from you, any instruction whatsoever. I shall continue as paidhi in Shejidan until I receive official recall from the head of the State Department.

He trusted he kept his face calm. He let the paper roll up and dropped it and his own, damn the woman, message cylinder with the paidhi's seal back into the basket, before he unrolled the paper he was glad to read, the one he was sure was a telegram from Mospheira — a communication from his family or from Barb, certainly not from the Department, which used other, more secure, means to reach him.

It said, in Mosphei'-to-atevi phonetic rendering, Sorry I missed your phone call. Bren, I know it's probably not the time to tell you, but there's no good time and this mustn't go on longer. I've married Paul. Forgive me. I wish I could build a life on your visits, but I can't. — Barb.

He couldn't believe it. He read it again. Then somewhere inside him a little autopilot tick of professionalism reminded him he was under the witness of atevi who had every reason to assume danger to themselves lay in telegrams from Mospheira.

So he rolled up the scroll. The steadiness of his own hands amazed him. He trusted his expression was calm.

"Is there a problem, nadi Bren?"

He hadn't managed, then. Jago saw through it.

"A personal one. My — f-f-fiance'e —" Atevi language failed him. The word was just suddenly there in his mouth — no other atevi way he could think of to explain a long relationship and emotional investment. "— got tired of waiting. She married someone else."

There was silence around him. He supposed they didn't know what to say. He didn't either, except, "Hold the rest of the messages, Tano, please, I'll deal with them in the morning. The aiji-dowager's — is not that urgent."

"Was this expected?" Banichi asked him, not, he was sure, regarding the dowager.

He shook his head. Then remembered with a little trepidation where he was and to what a dangerous agency he was speaking. "No, nadi. But she's quite justified."

Another small, uncomfortable silence. He supposed he'd passed their professional limits. He didn't know. Then Jago said harshly, "She was notjustified."

"Jago-ji," Banichi said. "Go set up for the night with Security. The paidhi is retiring. The aiji was right. We shouldn't have delayed."

"Yes," Jago said, and quietly took herself off into the apartments, pocket-com in hand, back stiff, braid swinging, while Banichi waved a hand in the same direction, toward the inner apartments.

He'd never seen Jago blurt out anything so uncontrolled. But Jago was Banichi's business, and he was more than willing to take Banichi's direction and go to bed, where he hoped he was exhausted enough to fall immediately into a sound sleep. He couldn't take any more physical or emotional jostling.

He went with Banichi and Tano through the sitting room and on to the inner chambers. The rest of the rooms were a geographical jumble in his mind, but he knew where the bedroom was.

"Will the paidhi want a bath tonight?" Banichi asked. "Or had the paidhi rather go directly to bed?"

"Bed, nadi. I'm very tired." He was grateful that Banichi had reverted to formality, Banichi's cure for too much intimacy, perhaps: it cooled the air and quietly distanced him from the problems of the world, the most important of which certainly weren't the paidhi's botched-up personal life, the paidhi's nonexistent personal life.

The paidhi had had a lot else on his mind for no few days prior; Barb had probably been trying to reach his office in Shejidan time after time without getting him — chasing him down with a telegram at his Mospheira office had probably been her last resort. Barb wasn't an ungracious person — was a very kind, very gentle person, in fact, which was what he was most going to miss, and he hoped that Paul Saarinson appreciated what he'd won. He hoped there'd be a chance to take them both to dinner and wish Barb well.

The gracious thing. The civilized thing to do. God knew he was civilized. He took his losses with entirely professional perspective.

But, dammit!

"Nadi," Tano said, and wished to help him with his shirt cuffs. He'd never felt comfortable letting servants, or security only masquerading as a servant, dress and undress him. It was the one atevi convention he'd evaded.

But he was the prisoner of a cut-up, taped-together shirt, a human-style shirt the Department must have come up with, because the one he'd arrived in at the hospital had been a total loss, and the hospital had turned up the next afternoon with this, which they'd cut to accommodate the cast.

He didn't, come to think of it, know how he was going to get into a shirt in the morning, or how he was going to bathe except with a sponge. For God knew how long. He was numb.

It hadn't, he knew, quite sunk in yet about Barb.

It hadn't altogether sunk in yet about what Tabini had pulled, and what he'd done downstairs, either. It kept coming back to him in flashes, snatches of what he'd said and what Tabini had said, like a recurring nightmare.

He managed the trousers on his own, kicked the shoes off, and intended to sit down on the bed just as a female servant, arriving out of nowhere, flicked down the covers. He was so tired he flinched at the whisk of coverlet and sheets from under him and sat down suddenly, jolting the arm.

A servant tried to kneel — he bent to cope, one-handed, with the socks, before she took that over. He was appalled, locked, he began to realize, in an atevi lady's female household, with servants accustomed to do things he'd never wanted servants to do for him, and no provisions at all for a man's privacy.

"I'm terribly tired," he said in a wobbly voice, an appeal to Banichi for peace, for quiet, for some kind of guard against a troop of women relentless in their hospitality. "Please," he said. "I'd like a small light left burning, Banichi-ji. I've been in too many strange rooms lately, and I'm afraid if I have to get up, I'll walk into a wall."

"Perfectly understandable," Banichi said, though one was certain Banichi would never do such a foolish thing; Banichi passed the requisite orders with more fluency than the paidhi could manage at the moment — and the women absconded with his clothes, shoes, socks and all.

"The shirt will be a problem in the morning." Small obstacles preoccupied him, looming up as insurmountable. He turned querulous, close to tears, for no sane reason. "I don't know what I'm going to do."

"The staff will have them adjusted, nadi," Tano said. "It's all taken care of. We'll manage."

"They gave me a folder for the doctors. — Pills. I'll want my traveling case by the bedside. Water."

Such things arrived, from one source and another, servants going hither and yon. He fumbled together a nest of pillows, there being no scarcity of them in the huge bed, and stuffed them about him to rest his arm and his shoulder, while Banichi and Tano and random female servants hovered over him.

"Do you want your medicine, nadi?"

"Not right now," he said. The arm ached — but he'd been moving about, and he hoped it would ease without it. He'd regretted taking the painkiller this afternoon. They hadn't warned him it would make him dim-witted. He'd made one mess of things this evening. He didn't want to wake up stupid in the morning.

As much as anything, he didn't want to move from where he'd settled, not until daylight, not maybe for the next five days.

Banichi laid a pocket-com on the table in front of his face.

"What's that for?"

"In case, nadi. Don't go wandering about if you need something. Please call. One of us will come, very quickly. Don't walk into a wall."

"Thanks," he said, and Banichi and Tano found their way to the door — put out the lights, but left the one he'd requested.

Barb was married. Well, he thought — hell. They'd talked about marriage, in a couple of foolish moments when, early in his career, he'd thought his life would be so routine he could arrange regular trips to Mospheira. But she'd said no, said she didn't want marriage — and she'd probably known he was dreaming.

Paul Saarinson was stable. Solid. Paul would be there, all the time.

The one thing he for damn sure couldn't give her. He was the occasions, the events, the flying trips onto the island for a glittering weekend on a far from modest, saved-up salary — then off again, with promises and dates that somehow didn't turn out to be available.

She was right. You couldn't build a life off weekends. He knew that. He guessed Barb just had never told him what she really wanted.

He blinked. The dim light shattered, rebuilt itself. You could get used to pain.

Part of the job, wasn't it? He seemed to have made himself a hero to the atevi around him. Theyappreciated him in their way, which hadn't anything to do with the sense of human companionship he had from Barb; but it wasn't a bad thing, if you couldn't have other things, to be appreciated by the people you most associated with.

Appreciated, hell, tell that to Tabini. Tabini appreciatedhim. Tabini appreciated him the way an atevi lord appreciated any useful, entertaining, personally pleasant resource you could put on the spot and get solid value out of.

You couldn't say love, you couldn't say friendship, you couldn't say all sorts of things that resonated off human nerves and satisfied human feelings. That was a trap the first settlers had walked right into, sure that atevi, who laughed at the right times and seemed perfectly agreeable, did, in their own way, understand such feelings; or thinking that atevi would somehow learn to understand, that humans would teach these godlike, tall, reserved natives of the world the way to access their own repressed emotions.

The simple fact was atevi weren't wired for what humans wanted, they weren't in the least repressed, and they didn't feel all the same impulses humans felt. He couldn't take Jago's little outburst of support for him in the foyer and build off it the fantasy that behind that momentarily fractured reserve Jago felt anything like human sympathy. Jago felt. No question that Jago felt strongly about the situation, but you couldn't warp it into what a human wanted to understand, or you missed everything that was Jago.

And did her a great disservice in the process — one always had to remember that, on the other side of the equation. As the ateva she was, Jago was wonderful, reliable, and brave. Banichi — God love him, which Banichi wouldn't at all understand — Banichi had seen him in distress and saved him from total embarrassment out there in front of Tano and the staff, because Banichi had reacted to defuse a charged situation, for whatever reasons ran through atevi nerves, be it only Banichi's sense that protecting the paidhi meant protecting the paidhi's dignity.

A human wanted a familiar tag to call things, and Banichi was a lot of things that humans the other side of the strait would be scared to death to share a room with. So was Jago. And when they'd risked their lives to save yours, you could love them so much — if you didn't need to be loved back.

Like Ilisidi, the other ateva he'd grown close to — God, if he shut his eyes he could have nightmares of the bone snapping and ligaments tearing, which hadn't been the nicest experience of his life — but he figured if nothing else he'd won points with Ilisidi and her associates simply by surviving, and backing off that invitation of hers would lose everything he'd won.

If somebody did make a move to assassinate Tabini — and him — Ilisidi was one of the likeliest perpetrators. But she asked the paidhi to breakfast at his earliest convenience.

Made perfect sense.

Maybe, the thought came recurring to him during the course of a troubled, hallucinatory night, maybe he should nerve himself, swallow his pride, and call Barb. Maybe there was more to the Paul business than he understood. He didn't like it that he'd gotten the answering machine when he'd called — he didn't know where she'd have been but home on a work night. If she'd moved uptown to Paul's place, her number should still route her calls to her.

Maybe she'd left the answering machine on precisely because she knew he was flying home and just didn't want to deal with the news on the phone — she hadn't meant to blindside him back on the mainland with that letter. He refused to believe that.

That letter had, he was absolutely convinced now, chased him from his office to the hospital and back to his office, then transferred right across the strait on the automated system. He'd messaged her that he was going into hospital for some minor repair work — he hadn't elaborated. Maybe she'd planned to see him before he left. She'd certainly had no way to know Tabini was going to request him to do a twenty-four-hour turnaround back to Shejidan.

And he couldn't blame her for the timing. There just was no good time to tell him a piece of news like that. There'd never been a good time to tell each other much of anything: that was the trouble, wasn't it? Never a way to discuss the future, no real complaint except that he'd worked too long and given too much to the job, and he'd always known the office he'd trained for was mistress, wife, mother and sister — he couldn't talk about what he did, he couldn't offload his troubles to anybody without an equivalent security clearance, and he damn sure wasn't romantically inclined toward the Foreign Secretary.

Time after time he'd come back wound tight as a spring and so atevi-wired he couldn't speak or think Mosphei' for the first few hours; and Barb would be the first refuge after the debriefing, someone who, unlike his relatives, never met him at the door with a list of must-dos and a catalog of family feuds. He and Barb hadn't put a load on each other, that was the whole idea of R&R, wasn't it?

But maybe she'd been toogood-hearted — she'd known from the start she was the refuge, the safety valve for an occasionally available and generally stressed public servant the whole human race relied on. She'd ask him no classified questions, which was almost everything he knew; she'd never met him at the door with her troubles, never complained about his job, having the sense to know that he and the job weren't ever separable.

She'd laughed and she made him laugh — and he'd lost that without ever imagining it was threatened. That was what felt unfair. To him. Not unfair, he told himself, to Barb.

Hell, maybe human caring was a survival disadvantage. Who knew? It sure screwed up lives.

And where in human hell did this Paul business come from? Paul — God, Paul was so damned dull, so damned safe, a real Department man, never any interest in anything but his computers. He couldn't imagine party-loving Barb sitting in front of the television knitting while Paul was off in computerland. The whole scenario was unbelievable.

If he'd only thought to call again, when he'd stopped by his office on the way to the airport. He'd been so anxious about the travel order, so worried about getting the computer commands in . . .

He hoped those files he'd requested had all transferred. They'd rushed him, the car had been waiting on the street — he should have delayed to check the contents. He couldn't exactly call up Mospheira now and say, Hello, I'm planning to violate Departmental policy, and I need the files you didn't send me…

The State Department was where actions the Foreign Office knew atevi wouldn't tolerate ran head-on into humans who wouldn't remotely understand the atevi view. The State Department refused to admit that the paidhi in the field had authority to negotiate, although it accepted his negotiations for debate; it believed since it selected the paidhiin, that the paidhi, meaning the Foreign Office, should take orders from the State Department, a small disparity in what the Treaty meant to atevi and what humans insisted was the legal reality on their side of the strait.

Translation was going to be worrisome, even paper translation, let alone real-time dealing with the language with a raft of new concepts.

He could make semantic mistakes. He had no Mosphei' dictionary at all, a human-language dictionary being a forbidden item on this side of the strait; the Department and a university committee even censored the entirely atevi-to-atevi dictionary and semantic/contextual reference he could take with him across the strait, since there were, in the usage of certain atevi words (in the active imagination of the committee), ways the paidhi could deliver semantic clues Mospheira didn't want in atevi hands — or minds, as the case might be — until Mospheira was sure officially that they were there.

There was some sense behind that view — there were concepts, even nontechnological concepts, that the committee rated too risky, too culturally based, too biologically based to address in the current atevi-human context, even if the paidhiin had devised reliable ways to express them in answer to questions atevi themselves had asked him.

The whole university/Foreign Office review process meant that the words the paidhi used on the mainland often ended up not being, in the classified official dictionary, the same as what his predecessor had proposed. The damned thing was constantly out of date — or subject to revision once atevi, moving consistently faster than the committee, came up with their own expression in popular usage —

Which the committee still debated, as if they could veto what atevi themselves had decided to call a thing.

More, even the Mosphei' equivalents remained flagged for censorship in documents the computers let cross the strait, computers which made electronic lace out of documents — brilliant decisions like censoring the Mosphei' expression air traffic control system, because supposedly, in the astute minds of the committee, air traffic control systemhad Defense Department connotations — a censorship that had lasted until well into the implementation of an atevi ATC system on the mainland, part of which, on a technological level, he was still trying to get installed past the objections of provincial atevi lords who thought directing air traffic and assigning landing sequence smacked rather of associational preference, a bad word on thisside of the strait.

And faster-than-light?

God help him. They trusted him with a computer with defense codes in its layered programs and restricted him from comprehensive dictionaries.

Meanwhile atevi, miffed at theirinability to gain a dictionary of human language (though atevi had compiled one, he was dead certain) didn't allow comprehensive atevi dictionaries into the paidhi's hands on this side of the strait. And he'd bet his unused paychecks that there were atevi who could marginally understand Mosphei'. Banichi came equipped with a little understanding of Mosphei', which surfaced just now and again; Jago had a very little; Tabini very frequently surprised him with a word he'd picked up.

More and more interest from atevi in learning Mosphei' in recent decades, when it became clear that computers, read human number theory, were all bound up in that language, and, oh, damn, yes, even conservative atevi were interested in knowing the human numbers that described the universe. They were avid and eager learners of anything numerical — passionate in rejection of certain human ideas, even ones that patently worked, where they contravened some elegant and elaborate universal number theory; and suddenly, in the last ten years, atevi were presenting elegant solutions to classic problems that the computer people and the mathematicians were still trying to work into their own theory — and spy out further elaborations thereof.

The servants, the security that kept the paidhi safe, doubtless spied on his library and kept it pure of atevi reference.

Damnable situation. A war of dictionaries. A duel of conceptual linguistic ignorance — when the only thing that had brought the real war to a halt was a farseeing aiji in Shejidan and a scholar on the human side who had, in fact, reached the concept of "treaty" as equivalent to atevi "association" and thereby stopped the bloodshed and the destruction — the dictionary again, victorious.

Meanwhile Hanks stayed, in danger of an assassination that was apt to fracture the Treaty. And Tabini through, he was sure, no wish of his own, had the Association legislatures in session, not only the hasdrawad and tashrid, but the provincial legislatures, in districts whose lords were ready to make a grab for power at any moment Tabini remotely looked like stumbling.

Damned right Tabini needed him to do something fast; Tabini, damn his conniving heart, needed a miracle, ideally a piece of drama pulled off right in front of the joint legislatures — the whole atevi world was waiting for official answers from the Bu-javid, from the aiji and from the paidhi's office.

God only knew what Hanks had actually said. Inexperienced humans, even humans who'd sweated through advanced mathematics courses in the candidacy courses, never believed at gut level how quick atevi were to work math in their heads. The language with its multiple plurals set up a hell of a quick-reckoning system that was a major barrier to a human trying to learn it as a second language; Hanks wouldn't be the first translator who in the simple struggle to handle the verb forms in conversation had edged her way into deep linguistic trouble.

Thoughts like those chased each other in circles for what felt like hours, intermittent with the shoulder aching until he could only count the pulses of the pain and wish in vain for sleep.

Enough to make him think about the pill and the water on the bedside table. If he didn't need his brain tomorrow. But it was a toss-up how the lack of sleep was going to help find a solution, either. He needed a jolt of adrenaline. If he could just summon it up for about six hours tomorrow, he had a fighting chance of thinking his way through to what he ought to do.

Damn, he said to himself. Damn.

He wanted to go back and replay the meeting with Tabini and do it all differently.

He wanted to have made that second phone call from his office, before he'd gone to the airport.

Oh, Barb, you damn fool. Paul, for God's sake.

But when they'd broken his shoulder and he'd believed he'd die, he'd not been able to think about Barb, or Toby, or anybody — just the mountains. Just his mountain and the snow... And he'd felt hollow, and didn't know why he couldn't think of Barb or find any feeling in himself. He'd found it disturbing that he couldn't scrape together any feeling about it — he'd tried, triedto reconstruct his feeling for Barb, but he couldn't get it back the way he remembered it being, not then — not when he'd gotten home.

He'd thought to call her.

He'd been worried when he couldn't reach her — last thought he'd had going under anesthetic, where was Barb? So he'd felt something.

He'd felt real pain when he'd read her message, felt it right in the gut; he was losing Barb — when he didn't know he'd ever hadBarb, had no reason to think what they had amounted to a life, didn't know if he loved her — just — a feeling that blinked out on him under the gun in Malguri and blinked on again when he got back to familiar referents and places he was used to being.

So what was it? Love or a habit he'd gotten into? Or what in hell was the matter with a man who hadn't been able to remember Barb's face when he was in the worst trouble he'd ever been in? What was the matter with a man whose deepest feelings blinked on and off like that?

Too long on the mainland, maybe. Too long wrestling the demons of atevi emotions, until what he'd studied grew commonplace to him and what he'd been grew foreign. He was fluent, he was good, he could find his way among atevi by the map he'd made, he'dmade, whole new understandings that humans hadn't had before — but he wasn't sure he'd charted the way back.

Snap. And he was playing by human rules and he loved Barb.

Snap. And he was deep in atevi thinking and he didn't know how to do that.

He was scared. He was really scared.

It was two hours before dawn, by the watch he'd pulled out of his office drawer. And he had to function tomorrow. He had to pull his wits together tomorrow.

He hadto get some sleep. He daren't take the pill, now; he'd sleep half the day and drag through the rest and he couldn't afford that.

He tried counting. By hundreds. To the highest numbers he could think of.

He tried thinking about committee meetings, reconstructing lord Brominandi's speeches to the Transport Committee, sane lawmakers arguing for fifteen solid days whether requiring airports to maintain computer records on flights could accidentally assign infelicitous numbers and cause crashes.

He woke up dreaming about atevi shadows asking him questions, about an urgent meeting he had to get to — and woke up again with the impression of a beast leering at him from the bedroom wall. But the beast wasn't here, it was in Malguri.

He'd flown home. He'd flown back. He'd met with Tabini, that was where he was. The outlines of the room were strange. He was in an atevi lady's apartment, in a bed a man had died in. He was supposed to solve the ship problem tomorrow.

Stave off the invaders.

Hold the world economy together.

Try to shave and take a damn bath.

Thirty minutes before dawn. If the servant staff started moving about right now and woke him up, he'd have them all assassinated. He wanted at least two hours sleep. He wasn't budging until he'd gotten those two hours. Not if the ship orbiting over their heads started firing death rays down on the city.

Then he started worrying about the computer files and couldn't get back to sleep.

The servants began stirring about in the farther halls.

Don't touch me, he thought. Don't dare come in here.

If I don't move, they won't make any noise. If I don't move, they won't bother me maybe till they think I'm

But he had to find out whether the files had transferred.

And he didn'thave that much time to prepare: Tabini had said it, people could die — and he had to be right about the translations, which couldn't — couldn'tconvey anything atevi could construe as irrevocable threat to them: the answer Tabini got back had to be something that would reassure atevi, not something that would hit the evening news with panic — he had to go over the entire vocabulary he'd allot himself in dealing with the matter; after that he could ad lib all he liked — but not until he was sure of extended and obscure meanings.

He stuck a foot out from under the covers; he got his working elbow under him, unstuffed pillows from under him and made a try to turn on the light.

Knocked the water glass over.

On the carpet.

The pocket-com followed. And the pill bottle. And the lamp.

The room lights went on.

"Nadi?" Jago asked, all concern, her hand on the light switch. "Are you all right?"

CHAPTER 5

It was a strange perspective, either on the scale of human problems or human capacity for delusion, that one hour of daylight could dull acute, even rational, concerns and persuade an exhausted man he'd had 'a night's sleep.

At least he'd achieved a functional distance from the insanity he'd slept with, the carpet had survived the water, the lamp had survived the fall, a breakfast of tea and toast and jam to cushion the necessary antibiotics — not the pain pills — hadn't upset his stomach, and the breakfast room turned out to have a beautiful view.

More, life on earth had not after all ended with his relationship with Barb. He couldn't fix it from where he was, he probably hadn't the right to fix it — it was the old story: it was going to be too late for him to do a damned thing by the time he had a chance to do anything.

Meanwhile he had urgent work to do, and the context-sensitive language programs he needed to work out his translation appeared to have made it into his machine.

So after a tolerably leisurely breakfast in a privacy for which the paidhi's bathrobe was completely if informally sufficient, he sent Tano to attack the bowlful of mail, so that, excused by his injury, he could sit in said bathrobe in the solarium in view of the magnificent Bergid range, rummage through his Mospheira-origin computer message files and wait for the voice records Tabini had promised him would arrive as soon as possible.

The message download was immense. Whenever he logged on at his Mospheira office port he'd inevitably acquire, through the filter that censored and frequently made hash of what it let him have, a mishmash of messages, some official, some scholarly inquiries, some the advisories of the hard-worked staff that supported the paidhi's office, from the devoted crew that sifted the outpourings of the phone-ins of every ilk, to the more reliable information that came to him down official channels, and to the Mospheira news summaries, neatly computer-censored for buzzwords and restricted concepts the paidhi couldn't take with him across the strait. That he'd gotten anything on his flags reassured him that, Hanks or no Hanks, he was getting cooperation from official channels, and he did have his authorizations intact.

His message-load held personal letters from a list of correspondents he'd flagged as always full-text, at least as full-text as the censors let him have, ranging from university professors of linguistics and semantics, to old neighborhood friends giving him news of spouses, kids and summer vacations.

And came the State Department output, which was not, this time, highly informative: information on pensions. Helpful. God.

Some of it had to go — he ordered Explore, and saw the Interactives come back with characteristics and content of the files; he asked it next to Search ship/Phoenix/station/history content, and it came back with lists.

And lists.

And lists.

With tags of correspondents both regular and names he didn't at all know: everyone with access to the Foreign Office had had an opinion and offered it when the news broke about the ship returning, that was what had happened — he'd done such a fast turnaround the staff hadn't had the time they usually had to weed and condense — meaning he had the whole damned load, God help him, every crackpot who could find the address in the phonefile.

Several of the files were absolutely huge. University papers. Theses. Dissertations.

He hadn't thought it possible to crowd the memory limits. It was a bigstorage. He checked through the overlays, scared something might have started a memory resident to chewing up the available space, but nothing checked out as active but things that ought to be, and nothing was actively eating memory. It was just that much data he'd sucked up in his connection time.

It wasn't going to be an easy sift-out. The computer was going to have to search and search.

And there was one thing he had to do, before he sank all the way into study: he asked Saidin for a phone, sat down in his bathrobe and, calmly composed, called through the Bu-javid phone system with a request for Hanks-paidhi.

Not available, the operator said.

"Message to her residence," he said patiently, very patiently.

"Proceed, nand' paidhi. Record now."

"Hanks-paidhi," he said in the atevi language. "Kindly return my call. We have urgent business. End, thank you, nadi."

The bloody hellHanks wasn't available. He took a deep breath, dismissed Hanks and her maneuvers from his list of critical matters, and went back to his chair and his computer.

He set his background search criteria, then, to his needs, defaulted to print-matches-to-screen at his own high-rate data-speed, which was damn fast when he was motivated and the criteria were subject-narrow: a lifetime of foreign language, semantics, dictionary work and theoretical linguistics gave him some advantages in mental processing and rapid reading, and what he did in his head with the files was a personal Search and Dump and Store that didn't even half rely on conscious brain. Just the relevant stuff reached the mental data banks, a process that rapidly occupied all the circuits, preempted the pain receptors, turned off everything but the eyes and the fingers on a very limited set of buttons.

What came through to him was an impression, variously derived from his university scholar correspondents and the mishmash from correspondents both authorized and not, of a degree of concern about the ship's long absence, and its careful questioning of Mospheiran officials.

He couldn't nail the specific questions: the letter that might have been most specific was full of censored holes.

But references abounded to that bitter dispute among the original settlers, whether to land on the one livable world in the system, or mine and stay in space. There were specific names of ship crew, which he tagged as useful — who had been in important positions versus where descendants ranked might tell him something about the difference between the power structures that existed two hundred years ago — the foundation of scholarly and governmental assumptions — and those that existed now: clues to the passing of power downward.

A university professor he'd thought long-retired offered him information about the final ship-station exchanges, a file which contained exact quotes. Those he dived after and read, and read, and read, at a speed at which his eyes dried out and his teacup stayed suspended until a deft touch removed it from his hand.

Banichi said, "Would the paidhi care for hot tea?"

"Thank you," he said, stopped the dataflow of that not-friendly exchange, and took a brief intermission to what atevi genteelly called the necessity.

A servant had meanwhile supplied a fresh teapot, a clean cup and a plate of wafers, and he restarted the dataflow three minutes before the interrupt point.

The sun inched up out of the window. Lunch appeared, sandwiches ceremoniously brought to his chair. .

There arrived, with it, Banichi, and a message from Tabini that asked whether he had any questions Banichi and Jago couldn't answer. "No, nadi," he said to Banichi's inquiry. "Just the ground-station transmission records. Please. Do you have any idea the reason of the delay, nadi?"

"I believe they're changing format," Banichi said.

"Banichi, if I'm supposed to listen to the tapes, I don't need the intelligence people to clean them up. Peel the access codes out, I don't careabout the numbers, I swear to you, I don't have to have their precious numbers — we're not 'counters here. Just get me the damn — excuse me — voice recordings. That's all I ask, nadi."

"I'll urge this point with Tabini. I need the paidhi's authority to approach him against other orders."

"Please do." He was frustrated. Time was running. Someone in Defense was apparently holding things up for real concerns or obstructionist motives. He couldn't guess. He couldn't let go of his thoughts. He'd built too fragile a web of translated conjecture. He'd never yet taken his eyes from his screen and the reminders of where he was in the structure; and when Banichi left, he reached for half a sandwich with the same attention he'd given his teacup, then dived back into his work, only moving a leg that had gone to sleep.

"Tabini-aiji asks," Banichi said at another necessity-break, "if the paidhi would care to issue a statement for the news. It's by no means a command. Only a suggestion, if the paidhi is able."

> "Tell them," he said, floundering brain-overloaded in a sea of input, "tell them in my name that I would wish to speak to them, but I'm in the middle of a briefing. Whatever you can contrive, Banichi-ji. I can't possibly issue a definitive statement yet. I'm translating and memorizing as fast as I can. I'm drowning in details. — And they won't get me the records. What in hell are they doing, Banichi?"

"One is aware," Banichi said carefully. "Steps have been taken. Forgive my intrusion."

Banichi was a professional — at the various things Banichi did. The paidhi at the moment had one focus: data and cross-connection; reading for hourson end at unremitting scroll.

Figuring out how, with a limited dictionary, to explain interstellar flight in unambiguous words for the Determinists and the Rational Absolutists, whose universe didn't admit faster-than-light, was absolutely terrifying. Hedidn't understand FTL, himself, and finding two atevi-mentality numerical philosophies a linguistic straw of paradox to cling to, to keep two provinces of the Association from disintegrating into riot, made his brain ache. It was all a structure of contrived cross-connections and special pigeonholes for the linguistically, historically, mathematically and physically irresolvable — and he hoped to God nobody asked the question.

Especially when all the historical information contradicted itself — and indicated the Mospheiran records, God help him, were not infallible.

Paidhiin before him had elevated atevi science from the steam engine to television, fast food, scheduled airlines, and a space program — and he didn't know if the next step might be Armageddon.

So he bent himself again to his reading, seeing the Seeker had come up with a further digest of content — slow, memory-hungry operation, running slower than usual in the background — and had the summary of thirty-three trivial files, all inquiries, none informative.

That could go down to temp-store on a card. Free up memory. Make the computer run faster. The paidhi had other problems.

And, seeing that the Seeker had created another ship/ history thread through a chain of files, he said, "Thread, ship/history, collect," and saw the result rip past at his fast-study speed.

But the information wouldn't coalesce for him. He'd blown his concentration or there was something else knocking at the back door of his awareness, something large and far-reaching, all associative circuits occupied —

"Forgive me again," Banichi said, and Bren restrained a frantic impulse to wave it off, because he had almost realized there was something there.

But Banichi laid a recorder on the table — along with a message cylinder carrying the red-and-black seal that indicated it came from Tabini himself.

Thoughts went to the winds. He suffered a cold chill, murmured a, "Thank you, nadi, wait a moment," and opened the message cylinder, finding a note in Tabini's hand: This is the complete record, paidhi-ji, with the numbers. I hope this proves helpful.

He hoped to God. He found lunch not sitting well on his stomach. "Thank you, nadi-ji," he said, dismissing Banichi to his own business, and lost no time first in setting his computer to run full bore on the time-consuming Seeker summary program, then in setting the recorder to play back.

The first of it — he'd heard last night. He sped past that and fast-played the computer chatter.

More voices, then.

It fit the suspicion he'd formed from the records he'd been handed — the parting nastiness of Pilots' Guild politics suddenly played out real-time in what had gone on while he was in the east: the Pilots' Guild, for reasons for which one had to trust the distinguished university professor's unpublished history, had cast some obstacles in the way of the Landing all those years ago, ostensibly to protect atevi civilization.

But, the professor's account suggested, the Guild had both promoted and double-crossed the operation, because the Guild's real objective had been to maintain the ship as paramount, over the station, over any planetary settlement. The Guild had intended to run human affairs — as it had done during the long struggle to get to the earth of the atevi.

Trusting any history for the truth in a situation rapidly becoming current was, by its very nature, trusting a sifted, condensed account of hour-by-hour centuries-old events that he couldn't recover — events sifted by somebody with a point of view rooted in his own time, his own points to prove. He doubted that the detail he needed still existed even in the computer records on Mospheira: the war had taken out one big mass of files.

The fact was — he knew far less about Phoenixthan he knew about atevi; he knew Phoenix'present attitudes, inclinations and crew list less than he knew the geography of the moon. He didn't knowwhat Phoenixmeant, or intended, or threatened.

He didn't know the capabilities of the ship, whether it had traveled at FTL speeds or — considering the length of time it had been gone — sublight, which seemed a possibility.

But, ominously, the dialogue between ship and ground-station had gone from massively informative and high-level in the initial moments to, finally, the converse of under-secretaries and ship's officers niggling their way through questions neither side was willing to bring anybody to the microphone to answer.

What was the state of affairs, the ship asked, between Mospheira and the world's native population?

Mospheira wasn't answering that question. The State Department, the same close-mouthed upper echelon that backed Deana Hanks, was advising the President on an entity it didn't know a damned thing about; and the executive once it got involved was used to having weeks, months, even years and decades to study and debate a problem.

Mospheira didn't haveor wantrapid change. The social and technological dynamics meant what was, would be, foreseeably, for fifty, a hundred years, and its planning was always well in advance, a simple steerage of the world at large, atevi and human, toward matching technological bases, toward goals decades away. And if the executive got off its butt and moved — the sub-offices through which governmental communications ran weren't geared to decide faster than they did.

And if the ship knew what it wanted and pushed…

He listened, as back the two sides came to another foot-dragging exchange of minor ship officers demanding station records which they thought Mospheira should have; and after a day and a half, by the time markers, another exchange demanding in turn where the ship had been for two hundred years.

Damn again, Bren thought, hearing Phoenixignore the question and then hail the world at large, wondering if anyone else down there was listening.

Phoenixwas trying to make contact on its own. Thank God nobody in the atevi world understood enough to fire back an answer and begin a dialogue. Thank God the Treaty provided the paidhi at least as a unified contact point. Phoenixwas unknowingly charting a very dangerous course.

After that the ship broke off transmissions for what seemed a long time, and atevi date notations on the tape confirmed it. The ship asked no questions and ominously provided not one answer, not one clue to the President's persistent questions: Where have you been? Why have you come back? What do you want here now?

Mospheira had revealed a great deal to the incomers — necessarily, with the whole planet spread out for the orbiting ship to see — a tapestry of railroads and lighted towns and cities and airports, the same on one side of the strait as on the other, which had not at all been the case when the ship left. And he knew what the ship's optics were capable of seeing, at least the equal of what Mospheira had been able to see through the failing eyes of the station — hype that several times, for what a ship with undamaged optics could pick up.

And there was no way to see inside the ship or the station.

While Mospheira had, he mused, knuckle pressed against his lips, revealed more in its questions than it might realize, too, certainly to him. He knew the Department, he knew the executive, he knew personalities — the ship didn't, unless it discovered old patterns, but, damn, he could almost detect the fingerprints on the questions, the responses, the attitudes. It was Jules Erton, senior Policy; it was Claudia Swynton — it was the President's Chief of Staff, George Barrulin: the President didn't haveopinions until George told him what he thought.

The records became contemporaneous. Mospheira talked. The ship continued its efforts at contacting population centers, Shejidan in particular. There hadn't been contact between the ship and Mospheira for two days. The ship was notcurrently answering questions from Mospheira about its business or its activities.

The cold that had started with his arm had spread to a general shivery unease and left him wishing — which he never thought in his life he would wish — that he could pick up the phone, call Deana Hanks, and say, amicably, sanely, Look, Deana, differences aside — we have a problem.

Which was not, damn the woman, a comfortable proposition. The rift was not a resolvable rift between two people, it was ideological, between two political philosophies on Mospheira. The camp he feared now had thrown Deana Hanks onto the mainland was the same that had supported Hanks through the selection process no matter her test scores, and he suspected foreknowledge of key questions she stillhadn't answered with as high a score as his, as well as outside help on the requisite paper. She was Raymond Gaylord Hanks' granddaughter, and S. Gaylord Hanks' daughter: that was old, old politics, a conservative element that had, ever since the war, argued that Shejidan was secretly hostile — the same damned suspicion among humans that, mirror-image among atevi, believed in death rays on the station, maintained that the atevi space program got atevi funding because, along with getting into space, atevi meant to take the station and use it as a base to deny access for Mospheira.

The fixation of the conservatives lately was the snowballing advances in technology during his and Wilson's tenure, both technological and social: the conservatives held that Tabini was hostile and using a naive paidhi for his own purposes.

That very conservative camp of human interests moldered away, not in obscure university posts, but in the halls of the presidency, the legislature: they were the old guard politicians, whose families had been in politics since the war, in an island community where politics had traditionally not mattered a damn in ordinary human affairs and nepotism got more immediate results.

In the State Department, most of the view-with-alarmers were at senior levels, entrenched in lifelong tenancies: they had never, ever accepted the official atevi assertion that Tabini was innocent of his father's assassination. It was a tenet of the conservative faith that Tabini had done it, and that Tabini had demanded Wilson-paidhi resign to get a new and naive paidhi to carry out his programs.

In brutal atevi fact, they were very probably right, granted Tabini's grandmother hadn't beaten him to it — but parricide didn't weigh the same on the mainland as it did on Mospheira. One just couldn't judge atevi by human ethics. Assassinate someone of the same man'chi, the same hierarchical loyalty? That was shocking.

Assassinate a relative? That was possibly a rational solution.

The damn trouble was — the paidhi had far better pipelines and mechanisms for dispensing new information into the atevi mainland than he had for moving public opinion on Mospheira. It had never been necessarybefore for the paidhi to convince Mospheirans. It had never been necessarybefore for the paidhi to campaign against the conservatives, because the conservatives had never had a crisis in which they could move members of academe, as he feared they had done, to interfere in the paidhi's office.

But the academic insulation that supported the paidhi and assisted in the decision-making — usually without the politicians involved in the process — was a politically naive group of people, who, confronted with panic, might have been rushed to put Hanks in a position where she could at least observe at a time when lack of information seemed very ominous.

He'd never taken Hanks seriously. He'd taken for granted that she'd drown quietly in academe and be so old if she ever got the appointment she'd likely decline it, immersed lifelong in Mospheiran ways and incapable of adjusting if she got here. He'd trusted the academics to just keep shunting his conservative albatross aside for decades, give her some tenured professorship in Philosophy of Contact or some other nap class. Ask him a year ago and he'd have said that was the future of Deana Hanks.

It wasn't.

The shiver that had started wouldn't go away. It wasn't fear, he said to himself. It was simply sitting in one spot in what he now realized, by the blowing of the curtains, was a draft from the windows, until his legs went to sleep. It was the aftereffects of anesthetic. It was the whole crisis he'd been through —

It was the whole, damnable, mishandled situation. He'd been in the eastern part of the continent, out of the information loop, when atevi needed him most. It might not be his fault; atevi might have put him there temporarily until they were assured they could rely on — not trust — him.

But for whatever necessary satisfaction of atevi suspicion, he had been kept in the dark, all the same, and now if he misstepped — if he was even apprehended to misstep, politically — or if he pulled a mistake like Hanks' mistake with lord Geigi, which he stillhad to clean up —

Hell. He'd made a few mistakes himself, early on in his tenure.

And hell twice — the woman had to have some sense, somewhere located. You couldn't get through Comparative Reasoning or the math and physics requirements if you hadn't at least the ability to draw abstract conclusions. He should give reason a try.

He extricated himself from the chair, bit by slow bit and, letting his foot tingle back to awareness, got up and pulled the bell-cord. Saidin answered it. He sent Saidin after Jago, and Jago to deliver two verbal messages. To Tabini: I've learned all I'm likely to find out. I'm ready to talk to the public.

And to Deana Hanks: I will shortly issue an official position on the ship presence; you will receive a copy. We need to talk. Is tomorrow evening possibly agreeable to your schedule?

Then he went back to his chair, tucked up, and shut his eyes. Amazing how fast, how heavily sleep could come down, once the decision was made and the load was off.

But he could afford to sleep now, he said to himself. Other people could deal with the scheduling and the meetings and the arranging of things. He half-waked when someone settled a coverlet over his legs, decided they didn't need him, that the ship hadn't swooped down with death rays yet, and he simply hugged the coverlet up over a breeze-chilled arm and enjoyed the comfortable angle he'd found.

He waked again when Jago came to him, called his name and gave him another message cylinder sealed with Tabini's seal.

It gave the time of the joint session as midevening, unusual for atevi legislative proceedings, and added, simply, Your attendance and interpretations are gratefully requested, nand' paidhi.

"Any other message?" he asked. "Anything from the island?"

"No, I regret not, Bren-ji."

"Did you talk to Deana Hanks? What did she say?"

"She was very courteous," Jago said. "She listened. She said tell you a word. I hesitate to say it."

"In Mosphei', she gave you this word."

"I think that go-to-'elleis rude. Do I apprehend correctly?"

Temper — was not what would serve him this evening. He made his face quite impassive.

"I made no answer," Jago said. "I am embarrassed to bring you such a report. If you have an answer, I will certainly carry it. Or we can bring this person to your office, Bren-paidhi."

Tempting. "Jago-ji, I've sent you to a fool. You will get an apology, or satisfaction."

"There are less comfortable accommodations than your old apartment, Bren-ji."

"She's in myapartment?"

Jago shrugged. "I fear so, Bren-ji. If I were handling her security, I'd advise otherwise."

"I want her moved out. Speak to Housing. This is not a woman without enemies."

Jago made a little moue, seemed to be thinking, and finally said, "Her security is very tight — for such a sieve. In terms of live bodies, quite a high level. I speak in confidence."

"I've no doubt. Tabini'ssecurity?"

"Yes. Which the aiji can relax at will."

Meaning leave her completely unprotected. Jago didn't breach Tabini's security on a whim. That Jago told him anything at all on a matter she didn't need to mention was troubling.

"Did Tabini tell you to tell me this?"

Jago's face was at its most unreadable.

"No," she said.

Which meant narrowly what you could get it to mean — but when Jago took that tone, there was no more information forthcoming.

CHAPTER 6

Plastic bags, scavenged from the post office downstairs, the female servants declared in triumph; and tape from the same source. It was Tano's idea, so that a disreputable-feeling human, pushed beyond an already-fading interspecies modesty, could enjoy a real, honest-to-God hot shower, with all the bandages and the cast protected: "Nand' paidhi, you don't want to get water under the cast," was Tano's judgment. "Trust me in this."

He did. Waterproofed, he leaned against the wall in a real, beautifully tiled, modern bathroom, shut his eyes, breathed the steam, and felt the world swinging around an axis somewhere in the center of his skull.

He was possibly about to commit treason. Was that what you called it, when it was your species as well as your nation in question?

He was at least about to do something astonishingly foolhardy, going into this speech without one written note card for vocabulary, trusting adrenaline to hit and inspiration to arrive in his brain, when it wasn't entirely certain that he owned the strength necessary to make it downstairs or a vocabulary more extensive than occurred on that card. It was the evening, the fairly late evening, of a very, very long day, and the shower and the steam were reducing him to a very, very low ebb of willpower.

"Nand' paidhi," Tano called to him from outside the shower. "Nand' paidhi, I regret, you should come out now."

It was an atevi-engineered luxury, that literally inexhaustible hot water supply. And he had to leave it. Unfair. Unfair. Unfair.

He delayed the length of two long sighs, went out into the cruel brisk air and suffered the tape peeled; allowed himself to be unwrapped, toweled and, by now robbed of all modesty — and with the servants quite properly and respectfully professional — helped into his clothes: a silk shirt, re-tailored with a seam and fastenings up the arm, his coat, likewise sacrificed; soft, easy trousers of a modest and apolitical pale blue, a very good fit.

Once he'd sat down, too, a further toweling of his past-the-shoulders hair and a competently done braid, the only thing for which he'd habitually relied on his servants.

That was when the nerves began to wind tight. That was when he began to feel the old rush of adrenaline, a lawyer going into court, a diplomat going into critical negotiations. He was sitting, feeling the tugs at his hair as Tano plaited it, when Jago, wearing a black leather jacket despite the summer weather, arrived with a written message from Tabini, which said simply, There will be news cameras. Speak the truth. I have all confidence in you.

News cameras. One didn'tdamn the aiji to hell with the servants listening, no matter how one wanted to.

"Where's Banichi?" he asked. He was slipping toward combat-mode. He wanted everything that was his nailed down, accounted for, tallied and named. He knewTabini in his slipperiest mode. He wanted Banichi on his side of the fence, not Tabini's. He wanted to know what orders Banichi had, and from whom.

"I don't know, nadi," Jago said. "I only know I'm to escort you, nadi, when you're ready."

There was body armor and a weapon under that black leather coat, he was well sure. With feelings and suspicions understandably running high, it was entirely reasonable. And if Banichi wasn't with him, Banichi was up to something that left his junior partner in charge — possibly serving as Tabini's security, which Banichi also was. He had no way to know.

And no choice but the duty in front of him.

He gathered himself out of the chair and let Tano and the servants help him into the many-buttoned formal coat — which occasioned a little fuss with the discreetly placed fastenings that made the sleeve look relatively intact, and in order for the all-important ribbon-distinguished braid to lie outside the high collar. There were tweaks, there were adjustments, there were sly, curious and solemn looks.

He stood, to the ebon, godlike ladies around him, about the size of a nine-year-old. He felt entirely overwhelmed and fragile, and hoped, God, hoped he retained the things he needed in his head, and wouldn't — God help him — say or imply something disastrous tonight.

"Jago-ji, if you'd bring the computer — I don't think I'll need it, but something might come up."

"Yes," Jago said. "Are we ready, nand' paidhi?"

"I hope so," he said, and was surprised and even moved when Saidin bowed deeply, with: "All the staff wishes you success, nand' paidhi. Please do well for us."

"Nadi. nadiin." He bowed to the servants, who bowed with more than perfunctory courtesy. "You've made my work possible. Thank you ever so much for your courtesy and care."

"Nand' paidhi," the general murmur was. And a second all-round bow, on the tail of which Jago took him in charge, picked up the computer and headed him toward the outer chambers and the door. Tano, wearing a uniform identical to Jago's, overtook them just before the foyer.

Then it was out into the hall of porcelain flowers and down to the general security lift, which all the residents of the top two levels used, down the three floors to the broadest, most televised corridor in the Bu-javid, the entrance to the tashrid.

He was accustomed to the territory. His own office wasn't that far removed. But the halls were lighted from scaffolds supporting television cameras and crews, echoing with the goings and comings of staff and aides. If he'd felt overwhelmed by the servants, he was far more so here, in the entry to the hall itself, where the tall, elegant lords of the Association gathered and talked — more so, as silence fell where he and his escort walked, and became a quiet murmur at his back.

There was a lesser corridor, for the privileged not wishing to be accosted in the aisles, a way into the tashrid, the house of lords, down the division between that and the much larger chamber of the hasdrawad, the commons. The screen which divided the two chambers was folded back, affording direct access to the joined chambers, where he could walk past the stares and the murmurous gossip of the members, down the slant of the figured carpet to that small set of ornately carved benches set aside for dignitaries and invited witnesses and petitioners.

There on the front row of the dignitaries' gallery he could sit alone with his single note card, with the reassurance of Jago and Tano hovering in the standing area near him.

The lords of the Association and the elected representatives of the provinces were drifting in rapidly now. He directed his attention to the card he had yet to memorize, a handful of words that could convey what he wanted to convey without unwanted connotations, a handful of atevi-language definitions he'd devised. FTL was an absolute ticking bomb. He didn'twant to handle it tonight. He hoped to steer away from technicalities.

From a third of the seats filled there was a sudden abundance of legislators in the aisles, moving with some purpose, and he was not at all surprised, once that influx had found seats, that Tabini-aiji arrived by the same entry he'd used — but Tabini walked to the fore of the chamber. The gallery was jammed with observers, and while Jago and Tano stood steadfastly on guard near Bren, Tabini walked to the podium.

"Nand' paidhi," Tabini said, the speakers echoing out over both halls.

He got up, picked up the computer Jago had set near him, and began his trek down the aisle while Tabini received the standing, silent courtesy of the joint houses, and then declared that the paidhi would, for the first time in this administration, address the houses of government and the provinces conjointly, "to provide expert information on the event in the heavens."

He came up to the secondary microphone with no other fanfare, bowed to Tabini, bowed to the tashrid, to the hasdrawad, and set the computer down.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the Association," was the correct address, and, "Nand' paidhi," he heard back, as the members bowed to him in turn, then sat down.

He drew an insufficient breath, and found a convenient place to lean a supporting arm on the lower rails of a speaker's platform far too tall for him.

A sea of dark, listening, variously expectant faces confronted him.

"A long time ago," he began, "Nadiin, a ship set out from a distant world, intending to build a space station at a place they thought they were going to live. But some accident sent the ship out of sight of all the stars the navigators knew, into a place so heavy with radiation it was deadly to anyone working outside the hull. Very many of the crew died gathering the resources they had to have to take the ship to safety. The workers who were only passengers on this mission had no skills to save the ship: they voted the ship's crew extraordinary privilege and power so long as it was ship's crew who went outside the hull."

Atevi audiences didn't emote in a formal presentation. They sat. They kept impassive faces and absolute, respectful silence. They didn't cue a speaker what way they were thinking, or whether they were understanding, or whether they wanted to shoot the speaker. Atevi audiences just listened, disconcertingly so.

But the reason for the granting of rank and privilege was absolutely important to atevi thinking. And while privilege could arise from ancestral merit, it had to have constant merit, or it was suspect: thatwas the groundwork he was laying. Deliberately.

"Nadiin," he said, and fought for breath over the constriction of the tape around his ribs, damnably unforgiving of the fact the wearer was scared, needed to project his voice, and needed more air. "Brave people mined the fuel they needed to fly the ship to a more favorable and healthful place, which they had to choose on very little data. This world —" One avoided more precise cosmology. It had to come soon. Just, please God, not tonight. "This world was promising. But once they entered orbit here, they were vastly upset to learn it was an inhabited planet. They'd spent all their fuel. They'd lost so many lives they were growing fragile as a community. The ship crew wanted to withdraw to the fourth planet from the sun and build a station in orbit, thinking it then might be a long time before atevi discovered human presence — but after such a dangerous journey —"

Another pause for air, and he still had no reaction at all, good or bad, to what was mostly old information, with insights that weren't in the previous canon. "After such a terrible journey, nadiin, and so many lives lost, people were afraid of travel and harsh, unknown environments. They reasoned if they built their home in orbit around a life-bearing world, and if something went wrong in space, there was the planet below as a last resort. They saw that atevi were civilized and advanced — their telescopes told them so. They felt much safer where they were, and they voted against the ship's crew."

"But some Mospheirans say the crew of the ship was anxious to maintain the reason for their rank and privilege, and that was their real reason for wanting to take the ship back into deep space."

"Some argue, no, it was a true concern for disturbing atevi lives."

"Still others say that they simply were a space-faring people and saw themselves constricted by this long time at dock."

"But for whatever reason, the crew of the ship wanted to leave and wanted fuel. The workers' representatives opposed more expenditure of effort for the ship in a venture in which they saw no advantage for themselves. That was the point at which the association on the station truly began to fragment."