Invader

And, worrisome small matter, Jase Graham hadn't called back.

"So?" Ilisidi asked. "You've talked with these ship folk. And now they land."

"Two of them. You've gotten my translations."

"To be sure. But they don't answer questions well, do they? Who are they? What do they want? Why did they come back? And why should we care?"

"Well, for one most critical thing, aiji-ma, they've been to places the Determinists have staked a great deal can't exist, they want to export labor off the planet, they want atevi to sell them the materials to make them masters of the universe, and they probably think they can get it cheap because humans on Mospheira weren't talking as if atevi have any say in the business."

"Too bad," Ilisidi said, dicing an egg onto her toast. "So? What does the paidhi advise us? Shall we all rush to arms? Perhaps sell vacation homes on Malguri grounds, for visiting humans?"

"The hell with that," he said, and saw Ilisidi's mouth quirk.

"So?" Ilisidi said, not, after all, preoccupied with her breakfast.

"I have some hope in this notion of paidhiin from the ship. I think it's a very good idea. I can have direct influence at least on Graham, and he seems a sensible, safety-concerned individual. If nothing else, maybe I can scare hell out of him — or her — and have more common sense than I'm hearing out of Mospheira."

"Scare hell out of Hanks-paidhi," Ilisidi said. "That's a beginning."

"I wish I could. I've tried. She's new. She's quite possibly competent in economics —"

"And she has powerful backers."

"I have freely admitted to it."

"Amazing." Ilisidi held her cup out for her servant to refill. "Tea, nand' paidhi?"

He took the offering. "Thank you. — Dowager-ma, may a presumptuous human ask your opinion?"

"Mine? Now what should my opinion sway? Affairs of state?"

"Lord Geigi. I'm concerned for him."

"For that melon-headed man?"

"Who — nevertheless occupies a sensitive and conservative position. Whom — a pretender to my office has needlessly upset."

"Melon-heads all. Full of seeds and pulp. The universe of stars is boundless. Or it is not. Certainly it doesn't consult us."

"That sums up the argument."

"Do humans in their wisdom know the universe of stars?"

"I — don't know." He wasn't ready to tread in that territory. Not for any lure. "I know there are humans who study such things. I'd be surprised if anyone definitively knew the universe."

"Oh, but it's simple to Geigi. Things add. They have it all summed and totaled, these Determinists."

"Does the dowager chance to have access to Determinists?" Many of the lords paid mathematicians and counters of every ilk, never to be surprised by controversy.

Certainly Tabini's house had a fair sampling of such experts, and he'd bet his retirement that Ilisidi had.

"Now what would the paidhi want with Determinists? To illumine their darkness? To mend their fallacious ways?"

"Hanks-paidhi made an injudicious comment, relative to numbers exceeding the light constant. I know you must have certain numerological experts on your staff, skilled people —"

More toast arrived at Ilisidi's elbow. And slid onto her plate to an accompaniment of sausages. "Skilled damned nonsense. Limiting the illimitable is folly."

"Skilled people," Bren reprised, refusing diversion, "to explain how a ship can get from one place to another faster than light travels — which classic physics says —"

"Oh, posh, posh, classic folly. Such extraneous things you humans entrain. I could have lived quite content without these ridiculous numbers. Or, I will tell you, lord Geigi's despondent messages."

"Despondent?"

"Desperate, rather. Shall I confide the damage that woman has done? He's trying to borrow money secretly. He's quite terrified, perceiving that he's consulted a person of infelicitous numbers, a person, moreover, who let her proposals and his finances become too public — he's quite, quite exposed. Folly. Absolute folly."

"I'm distressed for him."

"Oh, none more distressed than his creditors, who thought him stable enough to be a long-term risk as aiji of his province; now they perceive him as a short-term and, very high risk, with his credit andhis potential for paying his debts sinking by the hour. The man is up for sale. It's widely known. It's very shameful. Probably I shall help him. But I dislike to trade in loyalties and cash."

"I quite understand that. But I find him a brave man — 1 and possibly trying to protect others in his man'chi."'

"Posh, what do you understand? You've no atevi sensibilities."

"I can help him. I think I can help him, dowager-ji. I think I've found a way to explain Hanks' remark… if I had very wise mathematicians, correctmathematicians from the Determinists' point of view…"

"Are you asking me to find such people?"

"I fear none of that philosophy have cast their lot with your grandson. You, on the other hand…"

"Tabini asks me to rescue this foolish man."

"I ask you. Personally. Tabini knows nothing about it. Rescue him. Don't buy him. Don't take a public posture. Don't say that I suggested it. Surely he could never accept it."

"Why?" Ilisidi asked. "Is thisthe mysterious trip to the north?"

"I'd be astonished if I ever achieved mystery to you, nand' dowager."

"Impudent rascal. So you were out there rescuing Geigi the melon?"

"Yes."

"Why, in the name of the felicitous gods?"

He couldn't say in terms he knew she couldn't misapprehend. He looked out toward the Bergid, where dawn was turning the sky faintly blue. "There's no value," he discovered himself saying, finally, "in the collapse of any part of the present order of things. The world has achieved a certain harmony. Stability favors atevi interests. Yours, your grandson's. Everyone's. Stability even favors Mospheira, if certain Mospheirans weren't acting like fools."

"This woman is a wonder," Ilisidi said. "She should have sought me out. But she had no notion she should."

"She's harmless on Mospheira. Where I'd like to send her. But in moments of fright, my government freezes solid. This is such a moment. Let me tell you, dowager-ji, one secret truth of humans: we have self-interests, and truly selfish and wicked humans can be far more selfish than atevi psychology can readily comprehend."

"Ah. And are atevi immune?"

"Far more loyal to certain interests. Humans can be thorough rebels, acting alone and in total self-interest."

"So can atevi be great fools. And if Geigi believed this woman, still I wonder why you took this very long, very urgent excursion, and sought advice of such eccentrics."

"A brilliant old man, nand' dowager. I recommend him to your attention."

"An astronomer"Ilisidi said with scorn.

"Possibly a brilliant man, aiji-ma. I'd almost have brought him back to court, aiji-ma, but I feared court was too fierce a place for him. His name is Grigiji. He's spent a long life looking for a reconciliation of human science and atevi numbers. His colleagues at the observatory have devoted themselves to recovering the respectability of atevi astronomers. They want to create an atevi science that uses atevi numerical concepts to look past human approximations… approximations which I will assure you humans do use, from time to time… to an integration of very vast numbers with the numbers of. daily life."

He said what he said with calculation, in hope of catching Ilisidi's interest in things atevi, and in atevi tradition. And he saw the dowager paying more than casual interest for that one instant, the mask of indifference set aside.

"So?" Ilisidi asked. "So what does this Grigiji say to Geigi?"

Ilisidi was intellectual enough to set aside beliefs that didn't gibe with reality, politician enough to accept some for political necessity; and atevi enough, he suddenly thought, to long for some unifying logic in her world, logic which the very traditions she championed declared to exist.

He reached inside his coat and found the small packet he'd made, copies of the emeritus' equations and his own notes such as he'd been able to render them. She didn't reach for it: the wind was blowing.

"What is this?" Ilisidi asked.

"A human's poorly copied notation of what the astronomer emeritus had to say. And his own words, aiji-ma." A servant, young and male — Ilisidi's habit — showed up at his elbow to take the papers into safekeeping.

"Not the astronomer-aiji?"

It was a gibe. Is there some reason, the question meant, that Tabini's own astronomers, high in the court, failed — and a human sought his sources elsewhere? Doubtless this very moment, Cenedi would be sending out inquiries about Grigiji, his provenance, his background, his affiliations. And Ilisidi, who habitually gave the paidhi a great deal of tolerance, but — propositioned — would notcommit herself to touch such an obviously political gift: clearly the paidhi was being political; so, in turn, was she.

"Nand' dowager," he answered her carefully, "the aiji's own astronomers have other areas of study. And they're not independent. This man, as I understand, and this observatory, have been the principal astronomers engaged on this research. They're not affiliated with any outside agency. This is an exact copy of what I brought your grandson, nothing left out, nothing added. May I ask the dowager — to advise me?"

Ilisidi's hand left the teacup for an insouciant motion. Proceed, she signaled.

"Understand, aiji-ma, I'm not a mathematician. Far from it. But as I understand both what humans have observed and what this man has been attempting to describe in numbers — as I was flying into the city last night, I saw the lights, high places, low places of the city, lights like the stars shining in dark space." He knew Ilisidi had flown at night — very recently — into Shejidan. "I saw — out the airplane window, in those lights in high and low spots, all over Shejidan — what humans have described with their numbers. And what Grigiji's vision also describes, as I faintly understand it. His answer to lord Geigi."

"In the city lights. Writ in luminous equations, perhaps?"

"The paradox of faster-than-light, aiji-ma; say that the universe doesn't stretch out like a flat sheet of black cloth. That it has — features, like mountains, like valleys. Say there's a topology of such places. Stars are so heavy in this sheet they make deep valleys. Therefore the numbers describing the path of light across this sheet are quite, quite true. One doesn't violate the Determinists' universe: light can't go faster, by the paths that light must follow. Light and all things within the sheet that is this universe follow those mountains, and take the time they need to take. So nothing that travels along that sheet violates the speed of light. One can measure the distances across the sheet, and they are valid. Right now the effects of atmosphere diminish the accuracy of atevi observations, but when one observes from the station — as atevi will — the accuracy will be far, far greater."

"You're buying time," Ilisidi said, with another small quirk of the mouth, a flash of golden eyes. "You very rascal, you're setting it on a shelf they can't reach."

"But it is true, nand' dowager, and up there they'll prove it. Those papers, as I understand what I'm told, describe that sheet I'm talking about in terms that admit of space not involved in that sheet. What we call folded space."

"Folded space. Space folds."

"A convenience. A way of seeing it for people who aren't as mathematical as atevi, people whose language doesn't express what that paper expresses. It's the way starships travel, aiji-ma. It's the highest of our high technology, and an ateva may have foundit without human help — if I could read those notations I copied. Which I can't, because I don't have the ability an ateva mathematician has to describe the universe."

"Your madman told you this."

"Aiji-ma, light doesn't travel in a straight line. But because light is how we see, how we define shape, how we measure distance, over huge scale — that makes space act flat."

"Makes space act flat."

"We don't operate on a scale on which the curves normally matter. Like a slow rise of the land. The land still looks flat. But the legs feel the climb. Scale makes the difference to the viewer. Not to the math. Not to the hiker's legs."

Ilisidi regarded him with a shake of her head. "Such a creature you are. Such a creature. And not in touch with your university. Done it all yourself, have you."

"I knowthe essence of things I can't explain by mathematics, 'Sidi-ma." To his dismay he let slip the familiar name, the way he held the dowager in his mind. And didn't know how to cover it. "You show your children far more complex things than they have the mathematics to understand. That's the way I learned. That's what I have to draw on. A child's knowledge of how his ancestors moved between the stars. They didn't teach me to fly starships. I just know why they work."

"Faster-than-light."

"Much faster than light."

"Do you know, paidhi, an old reprobate such as myself could ask to what extent all this celestial mapmaking is new, and how much humans were prepared to give at this juncture. You certainly aren't using Hanks-paidhi for a decoy, are you?"

"Nand' dowager, on my reputation and my goodwill to you, I emphatically did notclear Hanks-paidhi to leak that to Geigi. And I didn't clear with my Department what I've just told you."

" Whencethis astronomer, whenceGeigi's dilemma, at the very moment this ship beckons in the heavens — when you need the goodwill of such as myself, nand' paidhi? Is this my grandson's planning? Is this one of his adherents?"

He was in, perhaps, the greatest danger he had ever realized in his life, including bombs falling next to him.

The daylight had increased as they sat, and those remarkable eyes, so mapped about with years, were absolutely cold. One didn't betray 'Sidi-ji and live to profit from it. One didn't betray Cenedi and harm Ilisidi's interests — and walk free.

Ilisidi snapped her fingers. A servant, one of Cenedi's, he was sure, brought a teapot and poured for each of them.

He looked Ilisidi in the eyes as he drank, the whole cup, and set the cup aside.

"So?" Ilisidi asked.

"Nand' dowager, if it's Tabini's planning, his means eludes me. This is an old and respected man in his district, no new creation, that I detected."

"Then what is your explanation? Why this coincidence?"

"Simply that the man may be right, nand' dowager. The man may have found the truth, for what I know. I'm not a mathematician — but I should never wonder at someone finding what really exists."

"At the convenient moment? At this exactly convenient moment for him to do so? And my grandson had nocollusion with humans to slip this cataclysm in on us, to destroy a tenet of Determinist belief?"

"It doesn't destroy it! By what I can tell, it doesn't destroy it, it supports it."

"So you've been told. And you just happen to rush out where a man has just happened to find the truth."

"Not 'just happened,' nand' dowager. Not'just happened.' It's the whole progress of our history behind this man. We've not been transferring just thingsinto atevi hands. We've transferred our designs and our mathematical knowledge to a people who've proceeded much more slowly in their science than humans did withoutatevi skill at numbers — a speed we managed because we dead-reckon, approximate, and proceed as atevi won't. One can do this — when one builds steam engines and builds things stronger than economical, rather man risk calamity. We were astonished that you took so long to advance. We watched the debates over numbers. We waited."

"For us poor savages."

"We thought so in the beginning. We couldn't figure why you couldn't just accept what we knew as fact, keep quiet, and build by our designs — but the point is, it wasn't fact, it was very close approximation. And atevi demanded to understand. Then, then, we began to realize it wasn't just the designs we were transferring: you were extracting our numbers, refining them in an atevi conceptualization that we knew was going to break out someday in a way we didn't foresee. When we gave you the computers that most humans use to figure simple household accounts, you questioned our logical designs. We knew there'd come a day, an insight, a moment, that you'd make a leap of understanding we might not follow. Not in engineering, perhaps. You are such immaculate perfectionists, when our approximations will bear traffic and hold back the waters of a lake; but in the pure application of numbers — no, I'm not in the least shocked that a breakthrough has come at this moment, not even that it's come in astronomy, in which we've had the very leastdirect contact with your scientists. We gave atevi mathematicians computers. We knew study was going on. It never surprised me that the Determinists hold the speed of light as a matter of importance: it is important; it's far from surprising that astronomers seeking precision in their measurements are using it and discovering new truths —"

Air seemed scant. He was walking a ledge far past his own scientific expertise — far beyond his ability to prove — and on a major, dangerous point of atevi belief.

"I don't know these things, aiji-ma. I'd wish the astronomers of the Bergid and the scholars on Mospheira could talk to each other. But I'm the only one who could translate. And the emeritus was using mathematical symbols I don't remotely know how to render — I'm not even sure human mathematics has direct equivalents. I suspect some of them are couched in the Ragi language, and if they rely on me to get them into Mosphei', humans are never going to understand."

"Such delicate modesty."

"No. Reality. Most humans don't speak your language, aiji-ma, because most humans aren't nearly as good in math as I am. You view it as so important to know those numbers — and we don't, aiji-ma. We can't add that fast in our heads. We haveto approximate — not that we're disrespectful of atevi concepts; we just can't add that fast. Our language doesn't have your requirements, your expressions, your concepts. At times my brain aches just talking with you — and for a human, I'm not stupid. But I'm working as hard as I can sometimes just talking to you, especially about math — far from conveying folded-space mathematics to anyone whose symbols I can't remotely read, nand' dowager. I'm reduced to asking the man's young students what he said and finding out that theydon't understand all he says, even with their advantage in processing the language."

There was long silence, once he stopped talking. Long silence. Ilisidi simply sat and stared at him. Wind stirred the edge of the tablecloth, and blew the scent of diossi flowers to the table.

"Cenedi will see you out," Ilisidi said.

"Nand' dowager," he said, feeling both fear — and real sadness in his sense of failure. He rose from the table, bowed, and went to the door and inside the apartment.

Cenedi met him there.

"I've offended her," he said to Cenedi quietly. "Cenedi-ji, she doubts me."

"Justly?" Cenedi did him the courtesy of asking.

"No," he said fervently. "No. But I can't make her understand I'm not smart enough to do what she thinks I've done. I may have given her the ravings of a madman. I hope I haven't. But I can't read his writings to judge. I could only copy them. I can't judge the quality of it. I don't know what I've given her. I hoped it would do some good."

"One heard," Cenedi said as they crossed the room toward the door.

"At least — tell her I wish her well, and hope for her eventual good regard."

"One will pass the message," Cenedi said, "nand' paidhi."

Banichi picked him up — and asked, since the paidhi wasn't bothering to put on a cheerful face, not how it had gone, but what had happened; and he could only shrug and say, "Nothing good, Banichi. I did something wrong. I can't tell what."

Banichi answered nothing to that. He thought Banichi might try to find out where he'd misstepped — easier for Banichi to ask Cenedi outright, since Banichi had the hardwiring to understand the answer. But it seemed to a human's unatevi senses that he'd simply pushed Ilisidi too far and given her the suspicion she'd very plainly voiced to him: that he was Tabini's, a given; that the whole Hanks business was a setup possibly engineered by Tabini himself; and one could leap from that point to the logical conclusion that if Hanks was a setup designed to push atevi faster than the conservatives wanted to go, it couldn't happen without Bren-paidhi being in on it.

Which meant — perhaps — that in Ilisidi's mind all the relations she had had with him were in question, including how far he'd be willing to go to sweep Ilisidi away from her natural allies. Never mind the broken shoulder: Ilisidi was surrounded by persons of extreme man'chi, persons who'd fling themselves between Ilisidi and a bullet without an editing thought: she was usedto people who took risks. She might not know humans as well as Tabini, but she had expectations of atevi and she had experience of Tabini that might lead her at least to question, and not to risk her dignity or her credibility on someone not within her man'chi.

She hadn't poisoned him. He'd not flinched from the possibility. He'd surely scored points in that regard. But he'd trod all over atevi beliefs, atevi pride — which with Ilisidi was very personal: Ilisidi had unbent with him a little and he'd used that, or advantaged himself of it, and asked the dowager to support Tabini —

The wonder was she hadn't poisoned him. And he was attached to Ilisidi — he didn't know exactly how it had happened, but he was as upset at her accusation of him as he'd be if he'd somehow crossed the other atevi he'd grown close to.

Which didn't include, somehow, Tabini. Not in that sense of reliance and intimacy. Not in the sense that —

That he'd damn well regretted Jago had left his room night before last, experimentation untried. And he was mortally glad Jago had stayed out of his close company the last two days.

But he longed to find her alone and find out what she did think, and whether she was upset, or embarrassed, which he didn't want; and didn't want to risk the relationship he had with her and with Banichi, without which — he was completely —

Alone.

And scared stiff.

From moment to moment this morning he dreaded the intrusion of other humans. He didn't know what to do if the interface went bad. He hada certain security in his atevi associates and he had to spend, hereafter, the bulk of his free time, such as it was, teaching a foreign human what that foreign human might not ever really understand.

After which, in a number of years, Jase Graham boarded an earth-to-orbit craft and went back to his ship, leaving the paidhi — whatever the paidhi had left.

He was in a major funk, was what had hit him. Two days ago he'd looked forward to Graham's arrival as the panacea for his troubles. But that was when at least his atevi world had been holding together.

And the paidhi always had that image of the clock stopped. The ultimate, shocked surprise of that moment that atevi had reacted in self-preserving attack on the very humans who really, really likedatevi.

He had to get his mind back in order, his hurts and his self-will packed back in their little boxes, and, God, most of all he couldn't let himself start brooding over how much atevi didn't likehim. Ilisidi never had likedhim. Ilisidi had found him amusing, entertaining, informative, a dozen other things — and now he wasn't. Now things were too serious. Humans were coming down from the sky. Ilisidi had decisions to make and she'd make them for atevi reasons. If he had a duty, it was to inform Tabini of Ilisidi's reaction.

And Ilisidi knew it.

"Banichi-ji, Ilisidi asked me —" One didn't say suspects, didn't say, implied: when the paidhi was deep in the mazes of atevi thought, the paidhi said exactly what hadhappened, not what he interpreted to have happened. "— asked me whether Tabini had set Hanks-paidhi, Geigi, the question, the astronomer happening to come up with a possible answer and all at this crisis."

There was silence for a moment. Banichi drew a long, audible breath as they walked. "Such a tangled suspicion."

"She may have been angry. Under the theory that I may simply have angered her with a social blunder, perhaps you could inquire of Cenedi the cause of her displeasure with me."

"Possible. One might ask. This befell when you gave her the calculations."

"She wouldn't touch them herself. A servant took them before they either blew away or I had to take them back."

"She suspected their content."

"She said she suspected the emeritus as Tabini's creation. I tried to assure her I haven't the fluency or the mathematical knowledge to have understood the reasoning in my own language, let alone to have translated them into this one. The fact that I don't have the concepts is why I went out there in the first place, for God's sake."

"I'll pass that along," Banichi said.

By which Banichi assuredly meant to Tabini. Possibly back again to Cenedi.

"I truly regard the woman highly."

"Oh, so does Tabini," Banichi said. "But one never discounts her."

CHAPTER 17

It wasn't an easy thought to chase out of one's mind, Ilisidi's potential animosity, no more than it was easy to avoid comparisons with Tabini's interested reception of the papers. Tabini had sent him a verbal message at the crack of dawn, by Naidiri himself, Tabini's personal bodyguard, stating confidentially that in the aiji's opinion, the emeritus' papers at least presented the numbers-people something to chase for a good long while, it was the craziest proposal Tabini personally had ever seen, and the aiji was sending security to watch over the observatory.

Which he didn't forget in the context of his falling-out with Ilisidi. He didn't like to think of the likes of the Guild moving in on the little village and disturbing the place — because it wouldn't be Guild members like Cenedi and Banichi, who had the polite finesse to make a person truly believe they were off duty when they never were; he didn't like to think of the place destroyed by his brief attention to it, or the astronomers' lives changed irrevocably for the worse.

But security for the observatory was nothing he should or could protest: he'd been chasing the numbers too concentratedly even to think how the importance of the place had suddenly changed, when the old man had come rushing in with his answer: Grigiji had become someone valuable to Tabini, and therefore a target, as everything Tabini touched directly or indirectly was a target. He'd forgotten, in the delusion he could seek an answer for Geigi on his own, and slip it — God, it seemed naive now — into Ilisidi's hands with no untoward result.

The paidhi had been a thoroughgoing fool. The paidhi had not only blown up bridges with Ilisidi, he'd put the observatory and Grigiji at risk, possibly done something completely uncalculated regarding Geigi and Geigi's province and Geigi's relationship to Ilisidi and to Tabini — the paidhi was consequently thoroughly depressed, thoroughly disgusted with his quick and perhaps now very costly feint aside to chase what had looked like a good idea at the time.

The way for the paidhi to do what Wilson-paidhi hadn't been able to and Hanks-paidhi couldn't: get the conservative atevi and Tabini's faction simultaneously behind an idea.

The hero's touch. The heroics he'd accused Hanks of, that Hanks had come back at him with — and by what he saw now, Hanks had had the right of it.

Hanks deserved a phone call, at least to set up a meeting to brief her on the essentials, and on what a hash he might have made of her slip with Geigi. It wasn't going to be easy to explain, it wasn't going to be pleasant, and he wasn't ready to cope with it. Not yet.

He sat down to go through the message stack — the new office was actually settling in to work, and he had a number of appreciations for the cards he'd sent; the table in the foyer was overflowing with the traditional gifts of flowers from the new employees, so many they'd accumulated in a tasteful bow about the table and in other areas of the floor where they wouldn't impede traffic, and he supposed he ought to have been cheered, but his arm ached, his ribs ached, and breakfast wasn't sitting well. He asked Algini for his computer, took his correspondence to the sitting room, and sat and prepared reports, and reports.

Saidin quietly adjusted the windows for ventilation and light, and set a fan to operation. He'd grown less distracted by the comings and goings of the staff. He almost failed to notice, until Saidin crossed between him and the light.

"I need to speak to Banichi, nand' Saidin," he said. He wanted a time for leisurely discussion. "Is he back yet?"

"Not yet, nand' paidhi. Algini is on duty."

"Jago?"

"I believe she went down to the Guild offices, nadi. One could send."

"No," he said. "It's not urgent." His eyes were tired, and among his messages was an advisement Tabini was directing the mathematics faculty to look at Grigiji's notes. And hisnotes, which he hoped he hadn't mis-copied. He'd protested that to Tabini and urged him if there were mistakes to attribute them to human copying, not Grigiji's math.

Among his messages was an extensive new transcript from the ship, which contained more document transmissions between Mospheira and the ship, more of Mospheira's very specific questions about origins and direction of travel and findings — which the ship hadn't answered fully. There was a direct question about the supposed other station and its location, and whether — a question that hadn't even occurred seriously to him — the ship might have left the solar system at all, but whether it might in fact have established the long-threatened base at Maudette, the red, desolate further-out planet atevi called Esili — the planet to which, before the Landing, the Pilots' Guild had wanted to move the colony rather than have it land on the atevi world.

No, the ship said. It had visited another star. There was no base at Maudette.

Which star? the President wanted to know, and named several near ones.

The Guild said, logically enough, that they had no such names on file; then asked for star charts with atevi names. And renewed the discussion about landing sites — in regard to which the ship wanted general maps and names.

Which Mospheira, in a sudden reticence, refused to provide until the ship was forthcoming with star charts.

At which point the woman Yolanda Mercheson came on com, wishing to speak to the President.

And the President was quite pleasant. Quite encouraging. The President said he advised a landing on Mospheira as the best way to guarantee human sovereignty — and Mercheson said she'd present that view.

Then Mercheson presented a shopping list of raw materials and asked pointedly if Mospheira had those goods.

The President didn't know. The President would get back to her with that information, but he knew they had some extensive stockpiles of materials.

Stockpiles.

Flash of dark. Terror. Pain. Cold metal and a looming shadow, asking him… accusing him…

Most clearly you're stockpiling metals. You increase your demands for steel, for gold— you give us industries, and you trade us microcircuits for graphite, for titanium, aluminum, palladium, elements we didn't know existed a hundred years ago, and, thanks to you, now we have a use for. Now you import them, minerals that don't exist on Mospheira, For what? For what do you use these things, if not the same things you've taught us—

Barrel of a gun against his head. A question he'd taken at face value at that moment, and pain and fear had wiped out the context — no, he hadn't knownthe context at that moment, he hadn't knownthe ship had returned to atevi skies, he hadn't knownthe situation the interrogator was implying… space-age stockpiles for an event the whole human population of the planet might have been waiting to spring on atevi. At that terrorized, dreadful moment he'd thought only… aircraft. Only… a hidden launch program. Only… of dying there. And he hadn't half-remembered the question in the light of what he'd learned later.

Stockpiles — of goods critical to a space program.

He'd protested he wasn't an engineer, he didn't know… and the interrogator had said… you slip numbers into the dataflow. You encourage sectarian debates to delay us…

The argument of Ilisidi's allies. Ilisidi's constituency, the constituency Ilisidi had ostensibly betrayed — but never count an ateva to have changed sides completely. There were always points of stress in an association.

Sectarian debates to delay us…

And he'd said… We build test vehicles. Models. Wetest what we think we understand before we give advice that will let some ateva blow himself to bits, nadi…

He'd thought that was all the truth. He'd told that to an interrogator whose identity he still didn't know, a man who might have been Ilisidi's, or a partisan of someone affiliated to Ilisidi.

He'd hadn't known then… about the ship. He hadn't understood the matter about sectarian debates. Or the significance of stockpiles of materials for a space program. He'dtalked to them about aircraft. He'dmaintained human innocence…

He lost his place in the tape. His fingers were cold as he punched buttons and ran it back, and heard the section through again, and knewhe'd promised Ilisidi along with Tabini a transcript of all his translations.

Stockpiles… the atevi held to be extensive. Stockpiles of minerals Mospheira didn't otherwise have…

Stockpiles begun — God knew how long ago. The paidhi, on informed opinion, didn't believethey could be that extensive, since the paidhi knew with fair certainty what had generally gone to Mospheira and what Mospheira would use — unless there were Defense Department secrets too deep and too old for the current paidhi to know, or trading — as could sometimes happen — that didn't get reported accurately to Shejidan.

There were bunkers in the high center of Mospheira, places fenced off from hikers and guarded by people with guns, which citizens accepted — you didn't go there. You didn't mess with those perimeters. They were antiquated, increasingly so, in an increasingly peaceful world — at least — the idea of air raid shelters seemed antiquated, in his generation. But there'd been fear of atevi landings on the beaches before there'd been aircraft.

There'd been fear of atevi air attacks, when they'd given atevi aviation, and situated aircraft manufacturing on the mainland. The bunkers were supposed to be nerve centers, critical command posts, things to make sure no attack ever drove humans to the brink of extinction again.

They saidthey were command posts. Nothing about how deep they were, how extensive they were — or what they contained. And ifthey contained what he'd been asked about, if there were stockpiles the President of Mospheira could use to deal with the ship —

Mospheira couldn'tcall the aiji's bluff. He couldn'thave set Tabini up to make a threat of boycott and have Mospheira go around the obstacle with some damned antique storage dump.

But it was supply. Even if it existed — it didn't manufacture itself. The manufacturing plants that did exist on Mospheira couldn't be converted at a snap of the fingers to do what they hadn't been designed to do —

But Mospheira didn't educate the paidhiin in what the Defense Department did, or had, or wanted: it was specifically excluded, that area of inquiry. And when the government and State specifically cleared some plastics factory on the East Frontage for ecological impact — you trusted they were making domestic-use articles.

The Department sent the paidhiin into the field not knowing that for an absolute, examined fact. The paidhiin knew there were no death rays. He knew that as an article of faith. There were no nuclear installations. There were no truly exotic sites: the colonists hadn't had those kind of weapons and hadn't given atevi a nuclear capability… yet.

But this talk of stockpiles made a chill down his back, and told him the paidhi might for once in a career of mandated consultations before moving truly need to consult — and might now, if his current actions hadn't set the Defense Department on its ear and sent the Secretary of Defense straight to the President's door with a reckoning of exactly how far and with what offer to the spacefarers they could call Tabini's hand and defy a boycott.

Dammit, he couldn't trust his files regarding a history he had no idea whether the censor Seekers had reached, or not reached — he couldn't trust what he'd been told. How did the paidhi even trust that his own education hadn't censored or even lied about vital facts? Once censorship was at issue — how did anyone, any official trust how far it would go, when it would have begun, whose information it would have censored, or what it would have constructed as a substitute for the truth? Humans had come close to annihilation. They hadn'thad weapons. Atevi in the early days couldn't trade them aluminum or titanium or any space-age material. Mospheirans could get plastics, they could get anything vegetable fiber could produce, anything they could get from limited drilling along the North Shore; they had solar energy and electricity, but they hadn't been set up to realize a need two centuries along and slip enough into storage to hold out against the interlinking of the Mospheiran/atevi economies —

Mospheirans hadn't, all along, been that damn canny, that damn persistent, or that damned concerned about their future — the radicals might wish they'd been, the radicals might have a fantasy they'd been, and maybe something did exist in stockpiles, but it didn't translate to real capacity to hold against an atevi cutoff of supplies —

— or to anticipate some traitorous paidhi cutting a deal with Phoenixand trying to exclude Mospheira, all for the planetary good. They couldn'thave him boxed in. Neversay to atevi at large that the aiji had made a threat he couldn't back or a promise that made him look foolish. Blood could flow in the streets if that happened. Blood was ready to flow in the streets, if he made such a mistake.

He wrote, Aiji-ma, regarding the most recent ship conversations with Mospheira, the expected behind the doors negotiations have proposed human stockpiles of materials I have proposed you threaten to withhold. My hope based on experience living on and traveling on the island is that they're small, not containing everything a space program needs, and that they might be used for bargaining and for attempting to attract the ship to their point of view, and that the Mospheiran government might exaggerate their size in an attempt to get a better agreement.

This, however, does not guarantee I am right about their size. If they should be larger, I have advised you badly, and you must take whatever measures you deem appropriate.

On the other hand, the ship can determine even buried reserves from orbit, as well as the character of factories. It is my hope that factories are not sufficient even if such stockpiles exist, and that they cannot be built in a timely enough fashion to satisfy the ship's leaders.

Further, we have presented the ship extensive political reasons to accept your conditions.

But I am dismayed to know now that I was asked about this matter in Malguri and did not at the time realize its impori, nor recall it in preparing my estimates and advisements to you. I am completely to blame for any negative result. I have erred once today in estimating the dowager's response, as I believe Banichi will have told you. At the reading of the enclosed transcript you may judge I have erred repeatedly and egregiously. If this is so, I urge you not to listen to me further, and to take my advice as that of an underinformed official to whom his own government has not confided sufficient truth to rely upon.

I feel I have no recourse now but to write the dowager, and I have given a firm pledge to do so. But I shall delay my response and take the disgrace on myself for doing so, in hopes that events or greater wisdom than mine will find a means for you to secure your own interests in advance of my fulfilling a rash promise that may have placed me in a position incompatible with your best interests. If I were placed under arrest, I could not send such a message, aiji-ma.

Please believe, as I have in profound embarrassment urged upon llisidi, that I wished to do good for her and for you, and that it is not through hostile intent or orders of my government that I have done what I have done.

It was not a cheerful message to have to write. He appended the transcript. He sent the message, via his remote, to the aiji's fax, rather than using courier, if for nothing else, that propriety mattered less than speed of getting that message next door.

He sat staring at the blowing curtains and asking himself, with a certain tightness in the throat, how far he could impose on atevi patience.

Or how far he could even believe in his own increasingly remote attenuation of logic.

He knew what interests he was fighting on Mospheira. He hadn't been utterly sure until Shawn's message turned up — but that confirmed he'd guessed right, that far, once the ship was in the equation, exactly where the pressure would come from and who would apply it. He just —

— had reached the end of his personal credit, his personal ability, his personal strength, and he'd made a couple of mistakes in his sudden downhill rush to get the landing finalized that had cost him, personally, cost Tabini, personally, cost Ilisidi, and might cost political credit and lives across an entire atevi and human world before the shock waves settled.

Where did he thinkhe could go setting up an atevi way to see the universe — knowing, God help him, that the old, old wisdom in the Department had always held that atevi would make some conceptual break and go spiraling off into a mathematical dark where humans weren't going to understand. And where in human helldid he think that point of departure was likeliest going to come if not in the highest, most esoteric math — which he, in his personal brilliance, had gone kiting off to beg of the persons most likely to come up with it —

Good merciful God, what did he expect but upset when he tossed the mathematical bombshell into the capital, the court, the touchiest political maneuvering of the last century — and let it lie on the breakfast table of the ateva least likely to benefit?

How in hell did he reconcile that little gift with his emotional appeal for 'Sidi-ji to rise above politics, rise to the good of the Association, sacrifice herself on the altar of her grandson's success?

He'd done that, after what he'd adequately remembered once prompted, and he hadn't seen it? Damned right he hadn't drawn the two threads together, when a faster mind could have anticipated Mospheira would fight back on the boycott issue. He should have asked himself what Mospheira could have stored; most of all he should have rememberedthe stockpile question that atevi themselves had asked him in what his foundering mind had catalogued as some totally unrelated event.

Damn it to bloody hell, he'd danced into it blindly surehe had a good gift to give in that paper. And it had probably nailed the lid on the coffin, so far as Ilisidi's confidence he wasn't stupidly playing the same game her associates had accused humans of playing for centuries: undermining atevi belief, atevi institutions, all at the same time reserving supplies and fostering an atevi manufacturing program not for atevi's sake but only to get those supplies they needed for themselves.

For a ship maybe some humans had believed more strongly than others was going to return.

His eyes hurt. He pinched his nose. And the arm hurt, lying inert in his lap, perhaps objecting to two-handed keyboard work, perhaps objecting to how he'd slept on it — he'd no idea, but it ached.

From frenetic, the place had grown too quiet. He wanted company. But Banichi and Jago were off about various business, Tabini was probably dealing with the matter he'd dropped in Tabini's lap, Tabini was probably too angry to speak to him, or even preparing orders for his arrest, as he'd invited, who knew?

The very changes he'd taken office to moderate and conduct slowly and without damage were all let loose from Pandora's fabled box, without review, without committee approval, without advice — just fling open the lid and stand back, maybe with one final choice of intervening to try to moderate the effects —

But that choice, even to make it now, entailed human values, human decisions, human ethics; or, perhaps the wiser course — to stand back until atevi action made it clear what was likely to result from atevi values, atevi decisions, atevi ethics — and then decide again whether to interpose human wisdom, at least as the older of two species experiences, the one of the two species who'd been down the technological path far enough to see the flex and flux of their own cultural responses to the dawning of awareness of the universe. Human beings had surely had certain investments in their planetary boundaries, once upon a time. Humans had had to realize the sun was a star among other stars. The paidhi didn't happen to know with any great accuracy how humans had reacted to that knowledge, but he'd a troubled suspicion it could have set certain human beliefs on end.

Though that they couldn't work the numbers out exactly wouldn't have broken up associations, re-sorted personal loyalties, cast into doubt a way of looking at the universe — had it?

For all he knew, the way atevi handled the universe was hardwired into atevi brains, and that was what he was playing games with.

He didn't want to think about that.

He got up and wandered finally as far as the library, and took down delicate watercolored books of horticulture, one after the other, to find whether he knew the names.

Of a book of water plants he was mostly ignorant. It was stupid, in the midst of such desperate events, to go back to his computer and enter words, but he was incapable of more esoteric operations.

Saidin came in to ask whether the paidhi would care for supper in, and whether the paidhi's personal staff would eat at the same time or at some later time.

The paidhi didn't know. The paidhi's staff didn't fill him in. He didn't know whether he'd be here for supper or whether he'd be hauled off to confinement.

But that wasn't Saidin's question.

"I can only hope your surmise is more effective than mine," he said. "Nand' Saidin, I have not been a regular or prompt guest. I apologize for myself and my staff."

"Nandi," Saidin said with a bow, "you are no trouble. Do you admire water gardens?"

The book. Of course. "I find the book beautifully drawn."

"I think so. Have you seen the Terraces?"

"On the Saisuran?" The book held a major number of plates of water plants, delicately rendered in pastel tones. "No, I fear the paidhi has very few chances. Malguri was an unusual excursion."

"If you have the chance, nand' paidhi, I recommend them. They're quite near Isgrai'the. Which is very popular."

He was intrigued — by the idea of the famous water gardens, and the Preservation Reserve at Isgrai'the. By the notion he might someday have such a chance.

But most of all he was intrigued by madam Saidin's unprecedented personal conversation. The book, almost certainly a favorite. One was glad to discover a mutual, noncontroversial interest in a subject; a source of ordinary, mundane conversation.

She'd felt the tension in the house and in the guest — and the protector of the house had followed her inquisitorial duty, perhaps; or just — counting that word of doings in the house hadonce found their way to Ilisidi —

He was too damn critical. Too damn suspicious. Wilson's fate beckoned: the man who never laughed, never smiled.

"Nand' Saidin, thank you. Thankyou for recommending Saisuran. I'll hope for it, that I will be able to see it. I'd like that. I truly would."

"One hopes for you, also, nand' paidhi," Saidin said, and left the room, with the paidhi wondering where that had come from, or what Saidin had really meant, what she'd heard from what source inside Tabini's apartments — or whether he'd simply presented her a dejected picture, sitting there staring at the curtains, so morose that the provider of hospitality had simply done her duty for the lady who wanted her guest taken care of.

He knew the mental maze he'd wandered into, wild swings between atevi and human feeling, making only half-translations of concepts in that strange doppelganger language his brain began to contrive in his unprecedented back-and-forth translation, in his real-time listening to one language and rendering it into the other, no time for refinement, no time for precision — leaping desperately from slippery stone to slippery stone, to borrow the image of the book open on the footstool — the water flowers, the stones, half obscured in sun on water —

A visitor would be very foolish to try that pictured crossing. He knew the treachery of it, from Mospheiran streams — which Saidin, in their crazed, divided world, couldn't visit, either.

There was a place like that once and long ago — a stream set well off the road most took up from a remembered highway, a dirt road he'd hiked up from the ranger station, stones over which water lapped in summertime —

But if one went far, far from that pool, farther up, they'd said in a youngster's hearing, a waterfall poured from high up the side of the mountain. One couldn't hear anything but thundering water from the foot of that waterfall, one just stood there, feeling the mist, enveloped by blowing curtains of it —

Wind-borne, the gray sky above him, and the wind racing off the height: the gale-force winds bent down the trees and swept down deluges on the young and very foolish hiker. He'd been soaked to the skin. He'd had to walk down toward that ranger station to keep from freezing.

There were so, so many half-thought experiences that had brought him to what he was, where he was. He remembered walking long after he thought his knees couldn't stop shaking. He'd known he'd been stupid. He'd known he could freeze to death — at least he'd known that people did, in the mountains; but twelve-year-old boys didn't — he wouldn't, he couldn't, it didn't happen to him.

In fact it hadn't. A ranger had come out looking for him on that trail and brought an insulated poncho. The ranger had said he was a stupid kid and he ought to know better.

Yes, sir, he'd said meekly enough, and he'd known then that even if he might have made it, he'd come close to not making it, and he was aware hiking up there with no glance at the sky hadn't been the smartest act of his life.

But he'd never forgotten, either, the storm sweeping sheets of water off the top of the falls. He'd never forgotten being part of the water, the storm, the sound and the elements up there. He'd felt something he knew he'd never forget. He'd wondered on that shaky-kneed, aching way down if the ranger ever had.

And by the time they'd gotten to the ranger station he'd begun to think, by reason of things the man said, that maybe the ranger had gone up there more than once, but stupid kids up from the tourist camp weren't supposed to have that experience: stupid kids from the tourist camp were what the rangers were up there to protect the wildlife and the falls from. So he'd been embarrassed, then, and understood why the rangers were upset with him, and he'd said he was sorry.

The rangers at the station had phoned his mother, fed him, got him warm, and he'd told the man who drove him down the mountain that he'd like maybe to be a ranger himself someday.

And he'd said that he was sorry they'd had to go out looking for him.

The ranger had confided in him he didn't mind the hike up. That he'd hike up the trail in blizzards and icestorms himself to take photographs.

Then for the rest of the trip the man had told him about what gear you really needed to survive up there, and how if he happened by when he was older, he should come up and see about the summer program the rangers had.

In the way of such things, his mother hadn't let him repeat his escapade. She'd chosen the north slopes of Mt. Allen Thomas the next season, probably to keep him from such hikes, and he and Toby both had taken up siding, to the further detriment of his knees, Toby's elbow, and the integrity of their adolescent skulls.

Saidin said — he should see this place. Atevi appreciated such sights. Atevi found themselves moved by such things. There was something, something, at least, that touched a spot in two species' hearts, or minds, or whatever stimulus it took to take a deep breath and feel — whatever two species felt in such places that transcended — whatever two species found to fight about.

He felt less abraded and confused, at least, in the memory-bath. He regretted lost chances — messages unsent: he wondered what Mospheira would think if he asked the international operators to patch him through to the ranger station above Mt. Allen Thomas Resort.

He imagined what contortions the spies on both sides of the strait would go through trying to figure out that code. It all but tempted him.

But he lived his life nowadays just hoping that things he remembered were intact, unchanged, still viable in a rapidly evolving world. He tried to reckon what the man's age had been. He couldn't remember the man's name. The paidhi — with all his trained memory — couldn't recall the man's name.

More, he was afraid to learn the man might have left, or died. He lived all his life somewhere else — afraid to know something he'd left, if he tried to access it, might have changed — or died.

And that particular cowardice was his defense against all that could get to him.

God, what a morass of reasoning. Sometimes —

Sometimes he was such a construction of his own carefully constructed censorships and restraints he didn't know whether there any longer was a creature named Bren Cameron, or whether what he chose to let bubble to the reflective surface of his past defined the modern man, and the rest of him was safely drowned under that shiny surface that swallowed childhood ambitions, childhood dreams, childhood so-called friends — about whom he didn't like to think —

Was thatthe origin of his capacity to turn off that human function and look for something else?

Strip those pieces away and he guessed there wouldn't be a whole man left. Break down the constructions he'd made of his memories and something essential went — that old business with the ranger station, that was a stone that held up other stones, and it would mean something calamitous to him if the man was dead, he supposed — thatwas why he instinctually tucked it close and wouldn't change it, the way he wouldn't change other things, not the hurts, not the flip down the snowy slope that had provided his first experience with mortality, and crutches, not slipping off a mossy stone on a summer hike on the mountain, either, and squishing back to camp in an experience that gave a portrait of the fabled Terraces textures and temperatures and value in his adult and harried mind.

He didn't know what damn good it did to accumulate more and more experiences like that as you lived, so that you could forget them all when you died — unless somehow what mattered was doing something with them: the older you got, the wiser you grew, the more power you got within your hands.

Maybe that was what it meant. Doing something.

Young, you ran the risks the way he'd gone up on that mountain; fresh from college you ran the risks you knew about because you had life to spare and nothing touched the truly fortunate; experienced in infighting and with more power to screw things up than you ever wanted — you sweated blood, and questioned every damn step of the way, foresaw/remembered the disasters, and kept on the track and kept sweating and trying to do your job only because you knew the young and the educated didn't remotely know where they were going.

The ranger might have his own reasons for climbing up there. But he'd gone up that night after a kid who might have made it on his own, and, who knew? Being a kid all the same: maybe if he'd made it on his own, he might have been the same cocksure disaster as Hanks was.

Or he might have tried hiking up there again in a storm, with less luck, in which case, no Bren, Hanks would have succeeded Wilson, Tabini would have been dealing with her and all history might be different. The ranger who'd trekked up the hill in the driving rain hadn't been interested in returning starships and international crises, and probably wouldn't have stopped to listen to a protestation Bren was going to be somebody vital — he'd have just said, as he had said, "Here, kid, get warm."

That man hadn't counted on knowing the outcome of what he did. He'd done what he did for the reasons that brought him to the mountain. He might have hauled a hundred kids down off the trails. He might not know that he'd saved a life. Or damned the planet to lose what he valued.

There was a step in the hall. It wasn't the aiji's advisement he was under arrest. It was Saidin come personally to say dinner was about to be served.

"Still so thoughtful," Saidin said.

"Still so much to do," he said, thinking to himself that he evidently had to write that letter to Ilisidi —

Saying, what? I'm sorry. Evidently we've been doing exactly what you suspected, and I forgot to wonder about what you asked me?

I'm sorry — the assurances I wanted you to give your associates may not be justified?

Stone to damn stone to damn slippery stone. Tabini hadn't arrested him. Therefore Tabini wantedhim to do that — he guessed so at least. He'd do so after supper. He'd find diplomatic language. He'd find words to explain himself.

His mind was back in that battering blast of cold spray and rain and sound and wind. Everything was gray and his skin was numb. He should have seen that numbness as a danger signal. To him, at that time, it had been environment, like the sound, like the color of the air. He hadn't known he could die of it. He hadn't known he should question his own reactions.

One was supposed to get smarter than that, over time. At least one told oneself so.

CHAPTER 18

Supper was solitary. Algini was on duty, Tano was still out seeing to something regarding the clerical office, which had occupied an inordinate amount of Tano's time. Neither Banichi nor Jago was available yet, and by no i means would Saidin sit down to table in front of the staff. Everything he wondered about seemed negative. He still had a difficult letter to phrase to Ilisidi, he hadn't had a reply to his message to Tabini, he hadn't gotten the anticipated message from Jase, and he told himself that ifhe hadn't it wasn't Jase's personal decision; no, that level of responsibility was ultimately by the decision of the ship's captain, possibly the occupation of ship's communications in hot and heavy conspiracy with Mospheira, and it wasn't exactly politic to call the ship and ask whether Jase was available, like some stiffed and forgotten assignation.

Not politic, though an option at this point; but, always to take into account, he spoke for Tabini, at least until arrested, and if Jase missed appointments it wasn't the paidhi's job to cajole Jase into keeping them. The paidhi's job was to report the missed communication to Tabini, which he had done, translate Tabini's response, which he hadn't yet received, always supposing Tabini wasn't trying to restrain his temper and weigh the paidhi's value future and present before ordering him dropped into a quiet place out of the way of trouble.

Harm him — he didn't think so. But he'd given Tabini one hell of a headache, and reason to think that the human advice he'd had wasn't that reliable.

He hopedthe Jase Graham matter and the whole agreement with the ship wasn't becoming one more item to blow up in his face today, unraveled by better bribes from Mospheira. It would total out his account with no few skeptics in the hasdrawad and the tashrid, and if he could guess a reason for the prolonged silence, he'd bet Phoenixwas using whatever means it had to discover what Mospheira did have.

If he had to place an interpretation on Graham's missing two days contacting him, they coincided well with Mospheira's new proposal, and he didn't expect the diplomatic obstacles at this point to fall like dominoes: things didn't work that way, not with so many interests to protect.

Which meant, given the initiative toward the ship might fail, the Mospheiran initiative and his offer of cooperation with the President might fail.

In which case — back to square one, with vastly damaged credibility, even granted Tabini left him in charge of anything. If they had to go back to negotiations, Tabini wouldn't budge from what he saw as already his — though Tabini might sound as if he were budging — and come after the matter from a new vantage, one of those small privileges of a leader with consensus pre-voted and as yet unwavering. And he might want to cut off communications for a while. Not what the paidhi would suggest. But —

Maybe — maybe the ship had found some technical glitch in the lander. Maybe they found their target date slipping for safety reasons and they were waiting for reports.

Maybe it just took a long time to analyze the imaging he was sure they were using.

One certainly had to ask what the captain's motives were for speaking so frankly with Mospheira, considering he had to know the mainland picked up the conversations. They could encode, he was relatively certain, using things the Defense Department knew and he didn't.

But the ship didn't do that, unless there was something going through the telemetry.

He could think himself in circles. Nothingwas worse than sitting in an informational blackout.

He held himself to tea, not liquor, told himself even the quantity of what he'd been pouring down wasn't without effect on the nerves, and he had to stop gulping entire cups of it as the only relief from thought and action — tea that lacked alkaloids was still native to the planet and contained minute amounts of stimulant that could add up.

But, damn, it did keep the mouth from drying. He thought of asking for it iced, which would scandalize the house — and wished the weather would take that pending turn to cooling. The active sea-winds of morning had become a sultry Shejidan night, and good as the concealed ventilation generally was, he longed for autumn, when he could pile blankets on the bed and sleep the night through. Sleepwas increasingly attractive, even lying abed was — and he still had to draft that letter to Ilisidi.

"Nand' paidhi," a servant came to the tableside to say, "nand' paidhi, the telephone."

Jase, he thought, and left his chair in haste. His glum mood evaporated — he was ready to get on with the business of the ship, the site, the landing, the whole future that otherwise he couldn't deal with.

"Bren?"

Barb.

"Hello? Bren?"

It took a second to catch his breath, switch mental gears, switch languages so he could thinkwhat Barb wanted. "Yeah," he said.

"Bren, what's the matter?"

"There's nothing the matter."

"You asked me to go over to your mother's."

He remembered. He remembered the conversation with Toby, which didn't rest in the same memory area with Tabini, Ilisidi, and Jase Graham. "Yeah."

"Bren, are we all right to talk?"

"Yeah, yeah, go ahead."

"She's all right. A little spooked. Somebody wrote some letters, somebody kept calling on the phone, leaving messages on the system, got some of her private numbers."

"Private numbers."

"Just things they shouldn't have accessed. She said she was all right. The police are on to it."

Things they shouldn't have accessed. Access numbers. Access to systems. Not random off-the-street trouble, then. That smelled like the Heritage agitators. Connections. Professionals, who'd ring your phone and drive you crazy. "Yeah. Yes. You tell her I'm fine?"

" Sure." Asilence followed. " So how are you?"

"Fine."

"You sounded a little vague when you picked up."

"I suppose I did. I was expecting a business call. Sorry."

"So how are you?"

"The cast is off. No real problems. Thanks for chasing that down."

" Yeah, thanks, Bren."

"So how are you getting along?"

" Fine." Another small silence. " I sort of expected you to call me."

He didn't know what he'd heard for a moment. He replayed it twice in his head and drew a measured breath.

"Bren?"

"Barb, there is no choice. There is no choice. I won't be calling you. You did what you had to do, I think you did the right thing —" He found a certainty in his own mind that he wasn't going back to Mospheira again. Not soon. Or not the same.

But he couldn't say it. Not to Barb. Not to Shawn. He couldn't let them draw the conclusion, or Tabini lost his fair broker. "I think you ought to work on it, give it a chance. Paul's a nice guy."

" I loveyou, Bren."

It wasn't even painful to hear that maneuver, except in the response and comfort-giving it asked of him. And in what it said about her that he'd never wanted to face. That had rung alarm bells the last time they'd talked. And the timing of the phone calls. And her message to him after he'd left. And her not showing up at the hospital. He'd thought in her turning away from him she was giving himthe reality dose. He doubted all of a sudden that she had it to give.

"Bren?"

Tears. He heard the quaver.

"I can't help you," he said. "I can't fix it. You hear me?"

" Bren. You don't know what it's like, youdon't know, you've got the whole government around you, and we protect you from it, everybody protects you from it, because you come home to rest, but we live with it, we live with it all the time, your mother's scared to answer her phone, your brother's scared— they're saying you've gone over, they're saying you're selling us out, and people believe it — people at work believe it, and it's ourfault, isn't it? And we're left here shaking our heads and saying, Oh, no, Bren's not like that, Bren wouldn't do that, Bren'sjust getting what he can get— but I've got reporters ringing my phone, I've got messages stacked up on the system, my parents are scared—"

"All the more reason to keep your distance from me."

"They say you're not coming home."

"Who says that?"

"People. Just people."

"I'm doing my job, Barb. Same as always." He hadn't been in the habit of lying to Barb. It was one more curtain falling. It was no worse for his mother or Toby than he'd already found out. That they hadn't come to the hospital began to make a certain amount of sense. And maybe it was a good reason and a good time to say a firm goodbye. Leave the game to those who had signed on for it. "You take care, Barb. Don't pay attention to fools. Don't tolerate them, either. If you're getting those calls, you call the police."

" I have. A lot of times you don't know about. I mean, a long time before this, Bren. A lot of times."

"Best I can do, Barb. Best I can say. I won't be calling. Hear? Don't put off the rest of your life. You made a good decision. Stick by it."

"Don't talk to me like that!"

"You know Wilson. That's my reality. It's not yours."

" Dammit, no— Bren, don't you hang up on me!"

"Don't overdramatize, Barb. It won't work. Good night, see you sometime, get it straightened out."

Herphone slammed down.

Good, he thought, and stood there a moment, aware there were servants near him. Always. Always witnesses. Atevi didn't have a single word for lonely. Just — without man 'chi.

He laid the handset in the cradle and stood there holding the aching arm against him; stood, with nowhere to go, now that he'd put paid to the account. He was hurt. He was disappointed in Barb. He'd thought Barb had things better put together. He'd thought — he didn't know. He'd thought maybe he was the one who lacked — whatever it took to form relationships. But it was one too many turnabouts, it was one too many richochets from decision to decision — and Barb expecting rescue. Barb expecting praise for living, which in his book, people just — somehow — did.

Maybe that was what he'd been for Barb. The fantasy life. The rescue from mundanity. When the real world piled up — when it rang phones and intruded on her in her life — she'd fled to Paul. When it kept after her and Paul didn't solve it — now she was mad at Paul and she loved him. Angry people on the street wasn't what Barb wanted to confront. That wasn't the fantasy she had. She just wanted the relationship to look forward to. The pie-in the-sky fix-up… when he got home— — -Always when he got home.

Not a charitable analysis. But from hurt, he was back to damned mad, and two totally disparate things fell into place: Paul and his computers. Him and his absences. It came to him that Barb didn't want engagement, didn't want day-to-day reality in a relationship. She wanted to wait. That was what she did. She'd go on waiting. No matter how he wrenched his gut to try to offend her — he couldn't. They'd fought before, and she'd find a reason to forgive him for the way he'd signed off; she'd stop being mad, she'd wait for him. She'd chatter with her friends at work, them with their on-again, off-again relationships.

She'd top all their crises with hers. She'd fantasize about him coining back. What she had— was always garbage. What she waited for — was always wonderful.

Far from charitable.

Damn right. But he was madder than he'd ever been in their relationship, and it went back to that not-so-chance-timed message she'd blasted him with. He was a man agencies used; transactions he understood, transactions he was used to tracking and evaluating. And he had a sense when the use had gotten outrageous, he recognized crisis-oriented timing, the phone calls timed to get your attention and leave you with no damn choices — every damn phone call she'd made was right when she damn well knew he was finishing his day and trying to get to sleep. He knew pressuring an opponent down to the limit, and a behavior that twined itself around late-evening emotionally fraught messages instead of level-headed waking-hour phone calls for an ex-lover assumed a pattern that really, really set off alarms in his gut; a pattern that argued that his subconscious had been better informed on the feelings he'd been getting than his waking brain had been for the last several years.

Tabini shoved you to the wall. The Department would.

The Department had. But you didn't have them in your bed, you didn't have them telling you they loved you: atevi didn't have the word, the Department had it flagged under restricted usage, and Barb just used it for what she currently wanted.

God, he'd learned at least some few things in semantics.

And while his mind was still in human-mode, and while he had his head momentarily clear of his own brand of wishful thinking, he picked up the handset again to deal with the other unpleasant and inevitable phone call on his own schedule, before he had to write that damned letter to Ilisidi.

"Nadi," he said to the Bu-javid operator, "ring Hanks-paidhi: this is Bren Cameron."

"Yes, nand' paidhi."

He took a breath while the phone was ringing, leaned his shoulders against the wall to ease his legs and rest a slightly aching head, waited. HopedHanks wasn't in a mood. And swore that if she was, and if she crossed him, she was going to run into a meat grinder. He wanteda fight on equal terms, near at hand, nothing long-distance. He wanted, dammit, a human conversation, on whatever terms. Hanks at least fought fair and Hanks wasn't a long-distance call.

Obsessive behaviors. Late-evening phone calls. Barb upset his sleep.

Four rings.

"This is Deana Hanks."

In atevi. In polite atevi.

"Good evening, Ms. Hanks. How's the report coming?"

" I'm working on it. Fast as I can. — On my own, Cameron. Using your information."

He dropped into Mosphei'. "A little news I thought you'd like to know. I ran out to a local observatory, talked with the astronomers there on the theory we don't have the full range of concept words we need. I got a report back. I don't know what the whole gist of it is, but I did submit the faster-than-light business to them as a paradox — and there's a gentleman who's been working on something about human origins that at least has the astronomers and the mathematicians talking. I don't know if it has the merit of solving anything — I've a lot of nervousness about it. But it's atevi. And it seems to be on the right track."

A silence. " I thought that was what youdidn't want."

"It's there. Slip or not, what you said, you can't stop it being there, not now. The atevi gentleman seems to have struggled up to a notion of a spacetime environment — a glimmer of an answer maybe waiting for the right question. It's the old speculation: atevi theory finally pulling ahead of the engineering."

Another long silence. " On FTL?"

"Other sciences, all playing catch-up to what we keep throwing at them — that's filled their time. But astronomers haven't hadour input on any scale to occupy their whole attention. Their work's all been vindication of what they missed, and why they missed it. We'vebeen their focus: where we came from. Why they didn't know. No showy engineering. Just wondering if they could trust their measurements. Asking how to know the real distances."

"That's pretty incredible, Cameron."

"And going from there to the hard questions. How old is the universe? How did a ship get here? Is there substance out there? Is there really an ether?"

"You're setting me up. Right?"

"No setup. I just thought you'd like to know what's going on." The adrenaline had run out. He let himself relax against the wall, let a breath go, actually relieved to have a sane, self-protective reaction on the other end of the line. "We can have our differences, but let's be professionals: nothing to the atevi's detriment. We both make mistakes, that's all. We're bound to. We haven't got a damn lot of Departmental help here. We could blow something up. Major. Let's please try not to."

"What's this about, Cameron? What do you really want?"

"The sound of your voice. It's been a day. The ship's still dealing with the atevi andMospheira, so you know. We still haven't got a landing site — I'm still waiting for a call."

"My sources say a lander is the vehicle. An old lander the station didn't use."

"Your sources are right."

"Graham and Mercheson?"

"Right again. Where doyou get your information?"

"Exactly where and when your people let me have it, I'm damn sure."

"Not my orders."

"The hell."

"If I could depend on you taking orders, certain atevi could get some sleep, now, couldn't they? So could we both. I'd liketo, Deana. We've got one job to do, keeping the peace. Neither of us wants it broken. We don't see eye to eye, but at least we agree on what we don't want."

"So what's the news in the great outside?"

"Committee meetings. More committee meetings. Briefings. The mathematicians are holding court." He'd slipped out of Mosphei' and into atevi without thinking, the moment he hit the schedule. "How isthe report coming, seriously? Have you got everything you need?"

" I have some detailed questions."

"Anything I can answer?"

"I need transport figures. What's the month by month availability on tanker-cars and flatcars, age, type, tonnage, that kind of thing, on the northern lines?"

"God, I can get it. I could tell you, roughly."

"Garbage in, garbage out. But it's a plug-in figure if you want me to play with it and give you far-instances."

He weighed the next offer very carefully. But all the Transport members but Kabisu were solidly Tabini's: that committee was an area of minimal potential damage. "I could set you up with some committee time, if you'd like to have a meeting. I'd do setup with aides first, let them know what you're going to want."

"So what's the catch, chief?"

"None. I see no problem. Fix your vocabulary list in advance. Don't embarrass us."

" Cameron—"

"— Or be an ass."

" I didn't say anything."

Definite improvement in the temperature level. "I'll set it up."

"When?"

"I'll see the minister tomorrow, at least I hope to, barring other glitches. A lot of these committees are running on limited sleep these days. But Commerce, Trade, Transport, any and all of them — they're pretty well staffed, and it's an important piece of work. Just no damn politicking, Deana."

"Don't tell me —"

"— Deana. — All right?"

"All right."

He let go a clenched-up breath. "I want to tell you —"

"Yes?"

"Deana, I appreciate the cooperation. You had a damn hard landing on the job, I'm realizing that. I just wanted to tell you —"

"Let's not drown in sentiment, here."

"No danger of that. Can we just —"

" I know — God! — oh, God! — Baighi? Baighi?"

"Deana?"

Something popped, dim and dull. Baighi was security. He heard the phone fall, he heard Deana's voice, muffled — he had the presence of mind to push Record — and to leave the phone open as he ran out into the hall. "Algini!" he yelled, and ran as far as the center hall, with servants staring in shock.

"Nand' paidhi!" Algini met him halfway to the foyer, gun in hand, servants gathering all around. "What's happened?"

"Hanks-paidhi's in trouble. Something's happened. Get security down there. I think it was gunfire. I was on the phone with her. Hurry!"

Algini didn't ask — Algini ran back for the security station and he turned back from the dining room through a gathering of anxious, frightened servants.

"Just stay inside," he said to them. "Doors locked. Where's Banichi and Jago?"

There was a babble of answers, wide, frightened eyes. No one seemed to know. Tano was out on business. Algini was by himself. Saidin arrived, late and anxious. "Nadi," he said to her as calmly as he could, "an armed attack on Hanks-paidhi. Call the aiji. Warn him. Check all the doors to the hall." He wanted to go back to the phone again and hear what he could — but there was no assurance where the attack was aimed or where it might aim; he ducked into his bedroom, flung open dresser drawers, one after another, desperately searching beneath stacks of clothes for the gun Banichi had told him was there.

Sixth drawer on the left. He pulled it out from under sweaters, checked the clip as Tabini had shown him, his hands starting to shake as he shoved the clip back in. He stood up, tucked it in his coat under the bad arm, and exited his bedroom, headed down the hall to the private rooms, where he'd left the phone open to Hanks' apartment.

Security the aiji could relax at will. Jago had said that. He remembered it as he reached the office and picked up the phone.

The line sounded dead, now. He couldn't tell. He stayed on a moment, thinking of the arrest order he'd courted — looked toward the half-darkened hall. Light stopped where he was, at the office. The rest, toward the lady's personal apartment, was dark.

He laid down the phone, left the recorder going. The apartment around him resounded faintly to doors opened and closed, servants hurrying presumably wherever they had to perform security checks. He went back out into the hall, light to his left, darkness to his right — covering darkness, darkness that didn't cast a shadow. He longed to take a fast look from the balcony down toward the garden courts where Hanks' apartment was to see whether it was a single attack or anything wider going on — wider, meaning an action against the established order. Or failing that — to ask Algini if he'd found out anything. But it was a risk even crossing the wide-windowed rooms in the lighted section of the halls to get back to the foyer where Algini was.

The other direction offered, for someone confident of the furniture and knowing his way in the dark, a chance to look out without silhouetting himself against lights, a chance to spy down from the height at least to see if there were lights below, and where, and if the search was tending higher or lower on the hill.

More — it struck him that none of the servants had come this way. The balcony doors to the rear, the ventilation for the breakfast room, were most probably securely locked — one expected that at this hour — but the servants were all checking the public, more trafficked areas of the apartment, he couldn't call the servants back without risking them passing doors or windows that might make them targets, and it suddenly seemed urgent and incumbent on him to be sure of those balconies. That the doors were shut, granted: he didn't feel a breeze — but whether they were locked was altogether another question, granted also the lady's servants might not have been through two recent attacks — or have any weapon more deadly than carving knives.

He walked briskly down the hall — found the breakfast room as he expected, all dark, the white gauze curtains resting still, in moonlight and the general city nightglow. He took his hand with the gun from under his coat and walked directly and with some dispatch along the wall, taking the lack of draft or movement in the curtains as proof that the doors were closed — the room was almost always drafty and airy otherwise.

He moved them aside, assured of his invisibility there. Light showed, reflected among the lower roofs, not lights that belonged there, he was well sure. One such light even while he watched moved along the roof line; someone carrying a light, he thought — he could see it from the side of the room as he followed the wall.

Then he felt a draft — saw the curtains move, then, and realized to his dismay the farther door was open.

He stopped. He didn't knowthe doors hadn't been open all along. He almost retreated, then thought that was what he'd come for: he had to shut and lock that door.

He went to it, moved to shut it and felt a faint presence on his side of the room — he couldn't see it, he couldn't identify it… he couldn't swear it was there. Panic sweated his palms.

Don't acknowledge you're awake, Banichi had told him. It was like that. He moved slowly away with the gun in hand, asking himself what now, what next — he didn't know it wasn't his imagination, he didn't know it wasn't one of his own — he didn't know what to do.

The glass doors near him burst in gunfire, curtains billowed, glass fell in shards, and the presence he'd felt hurtled out of the dark, knocked him stunned to the floor, scrambled over him. The gun had left his hand. Weight crushed him to the tiles. A second burst of gunfire punched the curtains back, and lights swept the balcony. An atevi body lay breathing hard atop him as shots flew over their heads, raked the walls, showered them with plaster and porcelain until the shots stopped.

Then the ateva got up to a crouch and went out the shattered doors, leaving him a second to scrabble across a dark and fragment-littered floor after the gun — he found it in the dark, but the floor and his head had collided in that fall, his arm ached with a mindful fury and his knees buckled as he tried to get up.

There was no more gunfire, at least. He found himself sitting on the floor of the breakfast room in the dark, finally got wobbly legs under him and edged in what he trusted was a prudent crouch out toward the threshold of the shattered doors, gun in shaking hand.

"Get down!"

Banichi's voice, clearly. Banichi shoved down hard on his shoulder, the night went red, and he sat down, winded and blind for an interval, while Banichi occupied the doorway onto the balcony and kept him out of line of whatever was going on — watching, Bren thought, but having no such luck as a clear target. There were just too many people, too many windows.

But if attack had come here —

"Tabini," he said to Banichi.

"Safe," Banichi said. "Stay down, nadi!"

"Sorry," he breathed. "I was checking the doors."

"One could tell. I came in that way. Stay down."

He was content for the moment, in the flare-up of pain from the shoulder, to sit exactly as he was, in a fetal tuck, with the arm hurting only vaguely.

"Where —" he thought to ask. "Where's Hanks? Is this set up, or — ?"

"Hanks-paidhi is missing from her apartment," Banichi said, "and Baighi is dead."

Then it wasn'tsomething Tabini had done. Baighi was Tabini's. Hanks was in someone else's hands. "I was on the phone with her," he said, still having trouble getting breath. "I heard what might have been a shot, I put the phone on Record —"

"This will have been useful," Banichi said. "Is it still running?"

"Unless someone's stopped it. The lady's office. I laid the receiver down."

"I'll see to it," Banichi said. "Are you all right, Bren-ji?"

"I'm fine. Who wasthat out there? Who's done this?"

"I'm not certain. I don't think I hit anyone."

"Ilisidi —" he said. He hadn't thought, until then, of Ilisidi's apartment below his — of the possibility of Ilisidi's danger — or — he suddenly realized — Ilisidi's involvement.

But that was too crazed. An attack like this, lacking all finesse — Cenedi wasn't like that. Cenedi didn't need to blow walls down.

The Atigeini themselves were a possibility. Damiri's outraged relatives might count doors cheap if they could get a human presence out of their ancestral residence, and get their name clear with the conservatives with whom they had more than slight ties —

Two — very good — very alarming — possibilities. And he could hope it was the Atigeini — he could earnestly hope it was the Atigeini — or even the Guisi. The man who'd fired on him in the legislature, the man Jago had killed — his relatives might have planned a retaliation, except —

"The matter against me," he said to Banichi, "didn't pass the Guild. Did it? Or is there another? These — reckless as they are — -don't feel like amateurs, Banichi."

"No," Banichi said, to which associated question was uncertain. But it covered the matter. And left him with a chill despite the sultry evening.

"Where's Jago? Is she all right?"

"Roof," Banichi said shortly.

Jago was in condition for that kind of gymnastics. Banichi, with his currently game leg, wasn't. And Banichi wasn't pleased, he picked that up. Jago was the junior in the partnership, Jago wasn't the one Banichi would ordinarily have in that position.

But there was in nottoo long a time a shadow against the curtains, and an exchange of some kind with a hand signal — Banichi waved to someone he could see from where he sat — and the affair dragged on in nervous silence, maneuvering or scouting going on, but he didn't want to chatter like a fool into Banichi's ear while Banichi needed his attention for business. What it meant was a power struggle going on in the Bu-javid, a quiet, discreet shifting of position among lords' protective security; a matter of fencing, he guessed, arms clenched on a nervous stomach, as various lords tried to figure out exactly who'd moved, where they'd moved, why they'd moved, and what side they were on^or who was winning in-this unannounced shadow-war.

Ludicrous, on one level. Grimly humorous. And not. Atevi historically didn't engage in vast conflicts, when little ones would do. But important people and ordinary ones could end up quite effectively dead.

Eventually a faint voice spoke from the pocket-com, and whatever the verbal code said, Banichi judged it safe to stand up — hand holding the edge of the door, which Banichi ordinarily didn't need, so the leg was bothering him, considerably; Banichi had taken a heavy jolt himself, in that tackle, and Banichi wasn't in a happy mood.

"Get back," Banichi said to him, no politeness about it, and Bren got up cautiously and moved through the dark room in the direction Banichi pointed him, steps breaking already broken glass where the panes had come in, a shot from outside, Bren judged. There was nothing but empty air out in front of that balcony, until one got a very distant vantage from the ell of the distant roof of the legislative halls: the lower roofs weren't at any useful angle for someone trying to get a shot into the apartment.

The legislative roofs. A very good shot with a very good sight.

Or someone rappeling down from the roof above. Where Jago was. He was worried about her safety up there in what was a very high-above-the-courtyards world of what didn't look like safe tiles. But he had no desire to harass Banichi away from necessary concerns, and he was sure Jago was one of the most urgent.

Banichi shepherded him out into the corridor, out into a darkness farther-reaching than it had been when he'd gone down into the area — more lights were off, and Banichi took him as far as Damiri's dark office before he turned on a very dim penlight, picked up the recording cassette from the phone, and pocketed it.

"This," Banichi said, "was well thought. Thisgives us a chance."

Praise could turn a man's head — and distract him from the other information Banichi gave him by that: that the attack on Hanks might have caught Tabini and the Bu-javid staff totally by surprise.

Which left a broad range of the offended and the ambitious for suspects, if Hanks was the principle target.

But it didn't explain what they'd meant by attacking the third floor, which they couldn't remotely reach except from the roof.

And then carry off a human, granted he was the size of an atevi nine-year-old, over the roofs, with Tabini's guard in pursuit?

Maybe carrying him off really hadn't been the objective.

Maybe dead would have satisfied them quite well.

That thought didn't settle his stomach.

He stayed close to Banichi on the way through the equally darkened sitting room and into the brightly lighted center of the apartment where the servants had gathered in an agitated cluster in the protected, window-less area. There Banichi was all business, giving orders to the servants, answering nothing extraneous — he ordered all passages the servants used shut and locked, ordered no one to move in those passages on any excuse until further notice, and the servants listened in solemn attention.

"Damiri," Saidin said, arriving from the foyer, "says no attack came against them. Are you all right, nand' paidhi?"

"I'm fine. I fear the breakfast room isn't."

"Stay here!" Banichi said, and more quietly, "nand' Saidin."

An attack specifically on the paidhiin. An attack — perhaps on the institution, not the personalities: the institution that made negotiation possible between human and atevi. He found himself increasingly shaken, even protected in the flurry of atevi security precautions and communications between various entities that watched over him. Banichi said they should move to the foyer where they could find Algini, and they went that far, with madam Saidin trailing them.

"Nand' paidhi," Algini began — disheveled clothing seemed to tell the tale, and "I'm quite all right," Bren said, then realized he had sparkles of shattered glass on his trousers and coat and couldn't decide where to dust himself off that people wouldn't track it every which way. Meanwhile Banichi went to the desk inside the foyer security office and called Bu-javid headquarters, at least that was what it sounded like: he heard Banichi report the existence of the tape.

Then Banichi put the tape to play at high volume on their own security office phone system, looking for sounds, names, God knew what. Bren drifted in behind Algini, lost behind a solid wall of tall atevi bent over the machine, and heard only bumps and thumps, a sound that could have been Deana's voice, or furniture being moved. Then a closing door.

Then what sounded like muffled gunfire, he wasn't sure. He hoped not. Banichi began to replay the tape, louder.

Tano wasn't available. Jago was somewhere up on the many-angled roofs. Banichi could look for information, and Saidin could give orders to the servants, but the paidhi had no job and no distraction in the crisis: he finally went out to the foyer, cradling an aching arm, worrying helplessly about Tano and Jago and, disturbed, he was forced to admit it, at the memory of Deana's alarm. Banichi and Algini had made another phone call, in the security station, and straying near the door, he overheard with a sinking heart that not one but two of Tabini's agents were dead.

Killed by someone with skill enough to go against the level of Guild members Tabini employed; and not just one, but two of them. No contract was out, Banichi had said so. It surely wasn't amateurs, this time. It wasn't legal, either. That meant Guild-level assassins on private business — which happened, he knew that; but it didn't make the Guild happy.

And whatever Banichi had found, rapid-scanning the audio tape, whatever information Algini was still searching for in his continued phone-calling, Banichi started up a converse now with various posts via the pocket-com and paced the foyer and the security station alike with a predatory glower, wantingto be more directly involved, and clearly frustrated in what other searchers had found or hadn't found.

"Nadi," Banichi said at one point, into the com, "don't tell me. Doit!"

Someone had just caught the edge of Banichi's exasperation; and the paidhi judged it a good time to stand very quietly against the wall of the foyer and not be in Banichi's way or Algini's, the both of them hampered by injuries and in no pleasant reception of what they were hearing from elsewhere in the Bu-javid.

"There's no sign of Hanks-paidhi," Banichi finally said with a sharp glance in his direction. "This is difficult to achieve in the quarantine of the lower courts."

"Someone who knows the area?" Bren asked. "Inside? Servants' passages?"

"Few such passages, none to that area. Knowledge of the area, yes, and, one suspects, the silence of the victim."

"Dead?"

"Why remove a body?"

"She doesn't weigh much. They could tuck her up in a box, a serving carrier —"

"A possibility. One we're investigating. But so far no one noticed. And that —"

Came a signal at the door of someone wanting entry, and Algini, who had just that instant been on the pocket-com, ordered the door opened, which said, apparently reliably enough for Banichi, that he knew who was there.

Naidiri was wanting entry, Tabini's security — withTabini himself, and Damiri and an accompanying crowd of uniformed security personnel and Bu-javid police.

"Bren-ji," Tabini said, as the visitation flooded into the foyer.

Saidin was quick to welcome Damiri-daja — Tabini was quick to disperse his staff and the police to various points of the foyer, the security office, the apartment and the servant corridors.

Meanwhile Tabini laid a hand on Bren's shoulder, fortunately not the one that ached like very hell.

"You're safe, nadi? One hears there was a window shot through."

"Doors, aiji-ma." He didn't know why now, in all that had gone on, he should suddenly have the wobbles back in his knees or the flutter back in his stomach. He still had the gun in his pocket, and wished, with Tabini's security suddenly everywhere around him, that he had put it back where he'd gotten it, in his bedroom drawer. Tabini knew he had it — or on principle, Tabini knew — but his security might not; and even Tabini might not explain it to the hasdrawad. "I fear there's serious damage to the premises. The breakfast room. I don't know how bad. I'm very sorry. I haven't seen it with the lights on."

"One can hardly hold you responsible," Tabini said.

Not responsible and not entirely useful in the investigation. Did you see anything and did you hear anything? were the obvious questions from Naidiri, and, No, was his lame answer, Nothing except a few words before what's on the tape from the telephone, which Banichi was able with some satisfaction to produce; and graciously attributed its existence to the paidhi's quick Slinking.

He quoted Deana's outcry, gave his interpretation of it — and his memory of where Deana would have been standing in that apartment if the furniture was where he'd last seen it.

Then ensued another attempt to hear the background noise — atevi hearing being quite acute, they seemed to pick up something of significance or interest, but they were unclear what. He heard nothing at all, and there wasn't agreement, except to turn the tape over immediately by junior officer courier for Bu-javid security technicians to refine.

Meanwhile the paidhi found it prudent to stay out of the argument of trained security personnel and out of the general traffic: he leaned against the wall, amongst the flowers that had come in earlier that evening, wishing to get out of his glass-impregnated clothing, wishing for a chair, and acutely wishing Banichi had been a little more gentle in falling on him, though he by no means preferred the alternative. He was still trying to think how he could manufacture an excuse to return to his room to rid himself of the incriminating gun, in itself a fracture of Treaty law, a cause of considerable diplomatic flap if even some well-meaning someone happened to notice the weight in his pocket.

And what could he plead then? Tabini gave it to me, when Tabini's position and relation to humans was already being questioned by atevi conservatives bythis very attack?

Someone else would have to take the blame, and that someone would clearly be Banichi, whose gun it actually was, thanks to a trade they'd made before Malguri, and who was loyal enough to Tabini to take whatever consequences the law or the hasdrawad or Tabini's enemies demanded. If he asked to go back to his room even to change clothes he foresaw some security person going with him for fear of assassins lurking in the shadows, and if not that, at least a handful of servants and maybe Saidin, which had the same result, so it seemed the better part of discretion to stay where he was, to look occasionally interested to excuse his presence underfoot, and to try to remain otherwise as invisible as possible, with the telltale pocket turned to the nearest large vase.

Tabini and Banichi and his senior security began to talk about probable motives: thatwas worth the listening. He strained through the occasional noise from other debates and questionings of the servants to gather where various potential suspects in the Bu-javid had been associating and where certain loyalties were reckoned to lie; who might be exonerated, absolutely, and who might have been tacitly or financially in on the proposal against the paidhi in the Guild, the motion that had failed the vote — a matter in which Banichi and Naidiri knew the specific names and even Tabini, evidently, did not, nor inquire — but there were generalities passed that involved the obvious names, the heads of the conservative clans, not, one noted, studying the floor tiles, the Atigeini, but it wasn't a name to raise with Damiri in the vicinity.

Then notification via pocket-com came in to Tabini and his security chief about the progress of the search through the lower court, where Hanks had disappeared — nothing encouraging so far, and the paidhi, feeling wobblier and wobblier, could, finally, only ask himself whether they were right in suspecting something against the established order and whether it was not instead the paidhiin's doings, placing the atevi universe-concept under attack.

Grigiji's mathematics.

His visit to the observatory.

Ilisidi hadn't read the paper and then gotten angry: Ilisidi had grown colder and colder, once that paper landed on her table and its implications landed in the delicate equation of atevi politics.

Which might mean — another perusal of the floor tiles, which had brown squares and brass inclusions in a floral pattern — the paidhi had stuck his good intentions into atevi affairs and atevi debates Ilisidi was already familiar with, come back with a theory that wasn't as new as he thought, or that was somehow controversial in ways a human didn't easily twig to.

Certainly possible when the math came far too esoteric for the paidhi to unravel, when the search after ultimate rationality that atevi had made over thousands of years was bearing atevi results and things proposed to them were going to break down very, very basic beliefs such as — God knew — might set off psychological, political, sociological earthquakes.

The paidhi could only ask himself in that light how much else could come undone today, and how much of it he might have caused, and what subtleties he should have long since guessed. All well-meaning, he'd brought that theory of Grigiji's to the city, he'd let it loose in blind hope that atevi argument might make sense to atevi, and maybe not known enough — as no human was able to know — what other bombshells might lie buried in the document. Hanks had tossed FTL into the dialogue and he'd called her foolish. He'dgone into that meeting to Ilisidi in blind faith in her numerical agnosticism, never once considering that Ilisidi herself might hold some well-concealed articles of faith Grigiji could challenge.

He kept playing and replaying the breakfast meeting in his mind, how strange it had seemed to him then that Ilisidi hadn't looked at the papers, that she hadn't deigned to take them — I

Dammit, he didn't yet understand Ilisidi's reaction, except to conclude that she disapproved what he was doing, or distrusted what he was doing — or disapproved unread what he had brought her. He didn't think Ilisidi herself would flinch from intellectual challenge, but she would take offense if she thought he was being a gullible fool or if his actions indicated he took her for one.

All of which still left Ilisidi among the suspects. He hadn't heard Tabini bring up the name, but he suspected she was on Tabini's short list. And failing Ilisidi — I

"Show me," Damiri said, "show me where these fools attempted, Saidi-ji. I want to see. I'm tired of waiting. We've chased them, we're surely clear by now."

"Nandi," Naidiri began to say.

"I am notgoing to cower in the foyer, naiin-ji. This is Atigeini territory, this is myhouse, and myorders, fact; this is mywindow that was broken, fact; and my security and the paidhi's security has things in hand, fact. — So may we quit discussing theory in my house, please, and have a look at factbefore we loose the Guild?"

"May we discuss factbefore we rush into the line of fire?" Tabini retorted. "We have too many willing suspects, not all of whom are outside this house."

"I suspectnothing! Look to your own relatives!"

"My relatives? Myrelatives? Give me an heir, woman, and we'll discuss our relatives. Meanwhile kindly don't walk in front of windows."

"Heir, heir, heir, of course the heir! Any moment, nai-ji, perhaps tonight, nai-ji, and in the meantime —"

"In the meantime, take orderslike a lady, nai-ji, and make less of a target, fortunate gods, woman!"

At a certain point one decidedly found the floor tiles preoccupying and, as the paidhi reflected that, while it was an honor to be treated as part of the household, along with security and the servants, he had much rather —

"Fortunate gods, inform me why I chose an Atigeini!"

"Intelligence. Resourcefulness. Our distinguished history. My breakfast room, nai-ji, if you please, with my servants, with your security if you've such doubts of my relatives."

"Gods least favorable, let's see your damn doors," Tabini muttered, and waved a gesture toward the recesses of the apartment. "Naidiri! Have a care to the windows, the lot of you. Damn!"

Forthwith there began an expedition, Saidin in the lead, along with Algini, a crowd of security and police, even certain of the servants, to let Damiri assess the damage to the doors and the breakfast room. The paidhi found nothing quite graceful to do but tag f | along as, at least, a witness to the destruction. He hoped for a chance along the way past his bedroom to duck in and put the gun away; but there was security before and behind, and no lingering invited. Someone at least had closed the inner shutters in the study as they passed, and the servants who lined the way were all very quiet, very subdued and worried, bowing like grass in the storm of Damiri's passage and doubtless staring at their backs after they'd gone.

Lights were on throughout the apartment, now; they passed scattered police, scattered security guards, especially in the area of the breakfast room.

And the damage there proved appallingly worse than Bren had feared: not only shattered glass from the doors, but shattered wall tiles where the shots had raked the walls and splintered antique porcelain reliefs that one only hoped restorers could repair. He felt a physical shock, realizing the small size of the fragments where porcelain had met high-powered bullets — some of it might be the dust on his clothing, and he asked himself if they could possibly recover enough chips of porcelain to reassemble or recreate the bas relief of flowers and vines —

"Gods damnthem!" Damiri said.

Saidin — Saidin looked absolutely devastated.

"Damiri-daja," Bren felt it incumbent on him to say, perhaps foolishly, seeing the thunderous frown on Damiri's face. "Nand' Saidin — I am inexpressibly sorry. I wish — I wish — if I was the target — I'd stood somewhere far less delicate."

Damiri whirled on him so suddenly he feared she meant to hit him. But all the violence in her scowl and the lock of her arms, one in the other, scarcely reached her voice. "Nand' paidhi," she said, "this affront to my house will have an answer. This attack on my guest and my staff will have a severe answer. This willful destruction will have blood. There are those who will carry that answer with or withoutthe Guild, with or withoutother Atigeini approval."

"'Miri-ji," Tabini said reprovingly.

"Don't caution me! This is intolerable! Our human guest can express his shock — so wherein can civilized atevi accept such goings-on? I do not, I donot, aiji-ma! Fire at random into the premises? Shoot the servants wholesale along with the target? Naidiri, Sagimi, is this Guild work or is it not?"

"It is not," a man said, and Naidiri echoed, "Not possibly."

Certainly not Cenedi, Bren thought, then, finally finding a landing place for the doubt that had been buzzing around his brain. Not Cenedi. Not any of the men who worked for Ilisidi. He wanted desperately to believe that that was the truth, and on that thought, he wanted to know for certain that Ilisidi was safe.

Not to mention Jago and Tano and his own household.

He listened to the arrangements for restorationists to come in to assess the damage, without, Damiri said, disturbance to the paidhi.

" Iwill not," Damiri declared, still hot, "let this insult happen and not retaliate. They have meto deal with, if they trust in your forbearance, nai-ji. They hope to provoke my uncle. They hope to send a signal. Well, they've certainly sent one." She bent and picked up a shattered flower, a three-petaled lily. "Look, lookat this destruction. I want my uncle to see this, aiji-ma. I want the whole world to see it, I want it sent out to the news services, along with the advisement the paidhi is quite well and undisturbed by this foolishness. He can sleep in my own bedroom and have breakfast with my staff and with me in this breakfast room. I tell you I will notbe intimidated."

"No, no, no, 'Miri-ji," Tabini said softly. "I'd rather far less publicity until we find them and eliminate this problem. Thenuse the television, yes, and all the pictures. On the other hand — ifyou wish to send the image of this handiwork to your uncle —"

Damiri cast Tabini a silent, sidelong look.

"Send him a piece of the porcelain," Tabini said. "The lily… would do quite well. One believes possibly someone exceeded orders. On the other hand, perhaps they wished to signal their contempt of Atigeini claims to command by using this as a diversion."

There was a positively fierce enjoyment in Damiri's eyes. "Your plane."

"At your disposal. But I want it back by morning. And it doesn'trefuel there. — Bren-ji, you're quite safe, one assures you, in whatever bedroom you choose tonight. Don't let 'Miri-daja bully you. It's a damn stiff mattress."

One could well blush. "Tabini-ma." The ache in the shoulder made his teeth hurt, he had never yet found the chance to be rid of the gun, and he tried consistently to keep that side and that pocket away from atevi eyes. Especially those of the Bu-javid police. "I only, earnestly, regret that I attracted such difficulty to this house, and I'm quite content with my bedroom."

"The paidhi is very gracious," Damiri said, and offered her hand, expecting his: he gave it, perforce, compelled to look up to a straightforwardly curious stare, a very solid handclasp. "Scandal, scandal, scandal. I think it's a very nice, a very honest face, myself, and my aunt can swallow her salacious and doubtless entirely envious suspicions. — You're so exquisitely polite, nand' paidhi."

"I — hope to be, daja-ma."

"I may never get my staff back. They're quite besotted."

"I — hope I've done nothing improper, daja-ma."

"Bren-paidhi. They dreamnightly of you doing something improper. I've heard the reports."

"Daja-ma —"

Tabini rescued his arm and his hand and walked him a little distance away. "Atigeini internal politics be damned, the lily porcelains are notthe question, Hanks-paidhi is. The attack on your residence might have been quite serious, but I doubt they expected to succeed: it was likely intended as a diversion from the real objective, and my prospective wife's relatives will nottake this lightly, not the attack, certainly not the collateral damage, least of all the slight of such damage being a mere diversion, no matter how they've regarded your tenancy here on other principles. Have you any personal suspects in the kidnaping of Hanks-paidhi, Bren-ji?"

"I — no, aiji-ma, discounting that it was anyone of the Guild, no, all my suspects vanish. Except — someone who wanted revenge. Or someone who —" the thought nudged its way to the center of his apprehensions "— who wanted both: her in their hands and me dead — leaving no paidhi between you and Mospheira at this juncture. For whatever reason."

"If they could achieve that. Which they surely don't expect."

"I would not say," Damiri interjected, having overtaken them, "that this attempt evidences great intellect. Desperation. But not great intellect."

"Or carelessness of Atigeini disposition."

"Stupidity," Damiri said. "Aiji-ma."

"The fact that one doesn't care what your uncle thinks is not necessarily evidence of stupidity. — Daja-ji."

"The fact Iregard the lilies as myholding and the artist however dead as in my man'chishould have them sleep less at night. If my uncle demurs, I demand satisfaction!"

"One will have it, lily-daja, but the paidhi's safety is in my own, and you will notinitiate actions that jeopardize Bren orthat disagreeable woman whose life I foolishly agreed to protect."

"One has no wish to jeopardize Bren in any way." Damiri laid a hand on Bren's sore shoulder: a very gentle hand, of which he was glad. "Have I ever shown such an inclination?"

What did one do? Flinch from under the aiji's lady's hand? One stood still, aware of the double entendre, and said, solemnly, "By no means, nai-ma."

"Aiji-ma." It was Algini in the doorway, bidding for Tabini's attention, with: "The ship is asking for Bren-paidhi. Forgive the intrusion."

The mind — wasn't ready for one more extraneity, not for Mosphei', Mospheiran politics, or foreign negotiations. The mind was on shattered porcelain, Damiri's not-entirely joking threats, and the intricacies of atevi association: that, and Ilisidi, and the Guisi, and politics 11 and the disappearance of Hanks-paidhi, which, outside its atevi impact, was going to play very badly in certain Mospheiran circles — let alone aboard a ship contemplating sending personnel down to them.

The ship mustn't find out. The associations within the Association had already absorbed all the strain the bonds of man'chiwould bear. Tabini could notbear any reneging on the landing, no matter the reason for caution.

"If I could guess," Algini said, as he headed for the doorway, "it's a young man, nadi-ma."

"Jase," he said.

"The landing," Tabini said, tagging him close. "Possibly."

"Very possibly," he said, on his double train of thought, trying to gather up the lost threads of the Jase Graham affair: like why the ship hadn't called the mainland for two days, and what Mospheira had been trying to argue with the ship, latest, in the meantime, and what he had to say as a contingency to the ship trying to back out for reasons that might have nothing whatsoever to do with assassination attempts.

At least one answer to matters held in suspension — or news that another deal was collapsing — was waiting for him on the phone.

CHAPTER 19

" Hello ?" Jase's voice was cheerful, perhaps, Bren thought, to put the best face on a change of mind. " Bren? Is that you?"

He refused to be seduced. But answered the tone. "It better be, since nobody else here can talk to you. How are things up there?"

"Doing fine, actually. How are things below?"

"Oh, fine." He was taking the call in Damiri's office, standing, because otherwise the crowd overwhelmed him: Tabini, Damiri, Banichi, Naidiri, Saidin and two of Naidiri's aides. Which fairly well accounted for the wall space and all the standing room except the small area by the desk that he maintained, holding the phone. "Just kind of waiting for your call."

" Well, sorry about that. Things just proceeded slower than I thought. I hope I didn't worry anybody, but just getting through the notes you sent up and talking to the captains— meetings, chain-reaction meetings, I suppose it's no different where you are."

"No, no, unfortunately not. One of those things that seems to go with air-breathing biology. — So how's the process running?" He didn't wantto sound short of breath, he tried to keep his voice cheerful and light, and all of a sudden his hands were shaking so he feared he couldn't keep the tremor out of his voice, either. "Sorry. A little out of breath. Had a bit of rush to get here down the hall. Are we agreeing or disagreeing?"

"Agreeing, actually, pretty well. We've picked Taiben for a landing. What's your assessment?"

He cast a look across at Tabini before it dawned on his shock-numbed brain that Tabini didn't understand. "Taiben," he echoed, and looked in vain for a reaction. "It's convenient, easy to get to and from. Has a jet-port, wide, wide flat with no trees, no likely complications, at least." He got a sign from Tabini, finally, that told him that Tabini understood the choice and accepted it. "Fine with us."

" I've been practicing. How'sDai ghiyi-ma, aigi'ta amath-aiji, an Jase Graham?"

" Hamatha-aijijin, but that's real good." Ears around him had gone quite attentive, and he hoped Jase tried nothing with infelicitous variants. "I'm impressed. You puzzled that out of notes."

"I'm anxious for this to work. They don't just shoot, do they, if they don't recognize you? The island's been saying there's a chance of attacks. But Taiben is the aiji's estate."

"Public land, actually, in the way atevi reckon. But the people on the land are the aiji's staff. And, no, atevi don't go shooting at the aiji's invited visitors. They're trying to scare you."

"That's not difficult at this point. Tell me again the chute's going to open and this is all going to go without a glitch-up."

"Ninety-nine point nine percent of the pods worked." He'd no idea of the real statistic, but statistical accuracy wasn't the reassurance Jase was asking for. "The second that chute takes hold, you're all right, and I imagine you'll feel it; that's what they say in the old accounts. How's the pod look to your experts? That's the important question."

" They've substituted the heat shield. On your advice and our discussing it in committee, they didn't ever unpack the parachute. They're just providing a second one. If the drop— Ireally hate that word— doesn't slow after the original chute should have deployed, the second chute's supposed to blow open automatically. If they put the canister together right."

"The first one won't fail. You damn sure won't lose two. You're sure of your coming down where you want. They've got that figured. Just don't use the old targeting. You'll land on Mospheira for sure."

Another nervous laugh. " I'll be right on the mark, if the parachute opens. If we go to the backup chute, well, I'll fax you the charts and figures. Can you receive those where you are?"

"No trouble. Just use the protocols I gave you, and I'll walk down the hall and get it."

"Then we're go for launch. Or drop. Or whatever. Landing's due for thirty-two some hours from now, Taiben's dawn, 0638 hours local. Right? Daybreak after tomorrow?"

Less than two days. He took a breath. "0638, dawn, day after tomorrow. I hear you. — That fast, Jase?"

" They're ready. We're ready. They're going to tow us in close before they drop us, a chance to back out, I guess, down to the point they cut us loose. — At which point we trust to atevi hospitality and the gods of gravity wells."

Atevi hospitality. Taiben. Everything Jase was saying indicated the ship had ignored the President's offer to cut atevi out of the deal. Which was incredible to him.

And in a dizzying two seconds of trying to sort out the implications, he'd bet any amount of money the ship knew it would have the same deal out of Mospheira without giving Mospheira a single one of its requests —

Mospheira being the ally they could always have made it completely unnecessary to risk the ill will of atevi, whose reactions they didn'tknow as well — and, thank God, somebody on the human side had thought down a train of logic. Excitement made it hard to keep his voice calm. "Sounds good," he said, he hoped without missing a beat. "There'll be somebody out there to meet you. I'll be there to meet you if I can talk the aiji into ferrying me out to the estate. What do you need from us on landing?"

" Get my partner onto the island as soon as possible. Me— I'm at your disposal, I guess. Next several years."

"Well, it's your partner's choice, a good dinner at Taiben, a personal intro to atevi leadership and a night's sleep — or a quick pickup and no-frills rush to the airport at Taiben, then straight on to Mospheira. You, on the other hand, absolutely get the deluxe dinner, the personal intro, and a whole night's sleep before they expect you to be fluent."

Nervous laughter. " Sounds fine to me. I'll take the fancy deal. I'll put it to the captains and Yolanda about the ace-all treatment. Any requests from space?"

"Just pack walking boots. Something real comfortable. There are places you can land where there are no roads. You'll get a welcome committee. But even after they meet you, you may have to walk to a road, even to a place where we can get overland vehicles, if you happen to drop in somewhere truly inconvenient. It's kilometers of grass out there, dust and heat with no sanitary stops. At worst case, you come down in some woods and we have to cut you out of the trees first. Please be on target. It's much easier. My mark was in an area where they can drive right in and pick you up in fine style."

"As long as they don't shoot at me and as long as that parachute opens, I'm happy."

"So are we all. If you shouldsee wildlife, by the way, don't panic; there's no animal out there in the grassland that's going to attack you, and we'll be tracking you all the way down. We'll be there — hopefully I will — but if anything intervenes, trust the atevi, be very polite, bow if they bow, and don't worry about where they're taking you. The aiji will have every ranger on the estate warned to watch out for you and to take good care of you. That's a promise."

" I' ll take it. Deal."

"I really hope to be there. With luck, I will."

"I'd really feel better."

"I don't blame you in the least — but with me or without me, you'll make it fine. Keep me posted on progress. If I do go out to Taiben, it may take some moments to get to the phones, but I'm almost never out of reach of radio. You can get to me."

" I appreciate that. — And I'd better sign off, now, and quit tying up the chair. Com's got some people working to link with the pod, I'm just cargo at this point, and I really don't want to annoy the techs. See you. I really mean see you."

"Yeah. Good luck. Good luck, Jase, good wishes from me andfrom Tabini-aiji. Kaginjai'ma sa Tabini-aijiu, na pros sai shasatu. All right?"

He was looking at Tabini when he said the latter. And Jase signed off with, gained from the material he'd sent up, a courteous repetition, kaginjai.

Tabini lifted a brow. Damiri and Saidin stared in evident amazement as he hung up the receiver. Banichi, arms folded, listening from the side of the room, also lifted an eyebrow as if to say, well, there it was, suns might be stars and stars might be suns, and neither bothered him, but a paidhi falling out of the sky into Tabini's estates was about to become real, and for good or for ill within his man'chi.

So now Banichi cared about stars, and suns, and people from them.

"Landing at dawn," he said to Tabini. "Day after tomorrow, at the Taiben site. They want one of them possibly to go immediately to the airport after landing and on to Mospheira, but I proposed a slower schedule and an overnight at Taiben, and they're going to present that idea to their authorities. They could well, referring to the information I sent you, aiji-ma, have agreed to deal with Mospheira. And haven't, so far as what the young man just said."

"This suits very well," Tabini said. "Well done, Bren-ji. This young man — Jase Graham — Jase, is that the name?"

"Yes, aiji-ma."

"A long way from fluency. But comprehensible."

"Aiji-ma. Also — I promised him I'd be there to meet him. Knowing I hadn't your confirmation, I told him it might not be possible, but that it was my hope to be at Taiben when the pod touches down… I want very much to do this, aiji-ma, in spite of events tonight. If security is going there — I'd like to be with them."

It seemed all unreal to him. With the breakfast room in ruins. With Hanks — alive or dead or God knew where, in the proceedings of atevi and human politics. And the lander coming down in a game reserve he'd hunted in not so long ago.

He feared he was, at least in Tabini's reckoning, far too protected a piece, if shooting had begun. But — damn, to see events to change all their lives, and to try to make sure there was no glitch in understanding —

"What does the paidhi's security think?"

"No question," Banichi said. "Nai-ma. One could much easier guarantee security there than here."

"Certainly less breakage," Naidiri said wryly.

"More range of operation," Banichi said.

"Though," Naidiri said, "those who've kidnaped Hanks-paidhi certainly haven't made their last move. Best we secure Taiben tonight. One assumes they've attempted to intercept communications."

"See to it," Tabini said, with a wave of his hand. "Our man'chiwill already have taken whatever precautions they deem necessary, if they're not deaf and blind tonight. — Miri-ji, Bren and I will spend the next few days in retreat at Taiben — fishing, I think that should be pleasant. I leave it to you to maintain the residence during the interval. Will you appoint suitable staff out of your household, for a gentleman guest?"

"Saidi-ji," Damiri said. "See to it." A wry twist of the mouth. "And arrange for the restorationists to survey the breakfast room. There will be nocleaning until they've approved. Have them get at it tomorrow, if the paidhi is determined to leave us; have them get their measurements, collect what they want and get out. If not my bedchamber, I expect the paidhi lodged in suitable comfort at Taiben, if you please. And I expect his return to very quiet, very quick repair."

"Daja-ma," Saidin said, "nand' paidhi. Sixteen staff, I recall, is correct for a guest at Taiben, four more with the paidhi's appropriate numbers of his personal staff — and expecting the paidhi's single guest, would seem to be a fortunate number, even if this additional woman were to stay. But in her interest, three more, which in no event is unharmonious."

On Mospheira no one would have made sense of it. On the mainland, it added five to sixteen to get twenty-one, a three-number of the unbeatably felicitous seven times three union with the three entities correctly represented: the paidhi, the aiji, and the ship; a union which with each participating entity subdivided in twos, as he saw it, let the aggressive Ragi mode of accounting deal with the temporary presence of an additional guest, owed to Mospheira, which made a fourth estate, whose numbers were clearly made transitory in the situation. A transitory influence of less felicitous numbers was acceptable if you could foist them off on an opposition — such as Mospheira. But Saidin gave him the option of shifting the numbers to a five of indivisible fives, likewise fortunate.

And a man could worry about his sanity that he really understood her question.

"One thinks — yes, three more servants to attend the Mospheira-bound paidhi," Bren said, "if one would, nand' Saidin."

"Gods greater and lesser," Tabini said, "just so the armed ones exceed the numbers of the opposition."

Tabini was not a superstitious man.

Nor were those closest associated with him, nor did Saidin seemed shocked at the official irreverence: she was clearly expert in gracefully observant appearances, and would, one could lay odds, never have it reported of her arrangement that things were less than proper.

And with that question of appearances in Saidin's hands, Tabini and Damiri and their security set out to the foyer, declaring they were, for which the paidhi thanked God, going home to Tabini's residence next door, and the police were going to their office after collecting the tape, and the whole commotion was rapidly dying away to a numb, bruised quiet.

"Nand' paidhi?" Saidin asked, when the door had shut on the last formalities. "Will you care to see the list of accompanying servants before I issue it to the staff?"

The tremor that had manifested while he was dealing with Jase on the phone threatened to become thought absorbing. "Nand' Saidin, nadi-ji, I leave everything to your discretion. Please pack what I'll need, for myself and my personal staff. Send only people of discretion, flexibility and good sense. I'd have you along, foremost, except I know the lady needs you here."

"Nadi," Saidin said, with a bow, "please come back safely."

"I promise you I'll try to do that, nadi-ji. Not least to please you."

"You are a scandalous flatterer, nand' paidhi."

"Nadi-ji, never. You're a treasure. Please, rest early. I'll see myself to bed. I've two hands now."

"Nadi," Saidin said, and not least among her virtues, understood when a man was tired enough to fall on his face, and withdrew quietly.

Banichi lingered, speaking with Algini in the small secuity office — and Bren eavesdropped, wanting most of all to know Jago and Tano were all right. "Any word?" he asked. "Where's Jago and Tano? Do you know, Banichi?"

"We're in contact," Banichi said.

"They're safe."

"Separately. They're safe. — Are you all right, Bren-ji?"

"Tired. Quite tired. That's all right. I can walk."

"Nadi," Banichi said, and left the office and the com to Algini, and took him by the arm.

Which was probably a good idea, considering the wobble in his legs.

He took off the coat. He gave the gun to Banichi, and Banichi said he would take charge of it, which was altogether agreeable to him.

"You know," Banichi said, tucking it in his pocket, "it was very foolish, what you did."

"I didn't know where you were. I thought Algini was alone by the front door. I had a gun. I didn't leave it to the servants to check the back balcony because I stood a better chance to stop someone if there should have been a problem…"

"Then it was, over all, well done. Well you were armed, but I admit to extreme anxiousness when you aimed at me, Bren-ji: you presented a disturbing quandary for your own security."

"I apologize, Banichi."

"Well done, too, that you waited to confirm your target; one hopes you recognized me. But one fears that you simply hesitated, which is not good. Besides, I must teach you about doors, nadi-ji. Due to their size, and the design of the building, those were not, obviously enough, bulletproof."

"Banichi, as my life's become, I'll pay closest attention to anything you can teach me, and, no, I didn't recognize you. I knew it was a possibility of it being you."

"Far easier for me to tell it's you, paidhi-ji. Anyone can. If you perceive presence, assume they won't fire if you don't seem to see them. Dangerous, but less so to your security."

"I'll remember that."

"Word from Tano. The scene downstairs indicates a likelihood of Guild members operating without Guild sanction. Despite the evidence of the breakfast room, these are professionals, Bren-ji. This is not the sort that assailed you in the legislature."

"Professionals acting under man'chi."

"Evidently so."

"Does every association have such high-level professionals? I assume they are, since Hanks' guards —"

"Not every association has such professionals, and that's a very likely assumption. Such as guarded Hanks-paidhi were not careless."

"Do you then havesuspicions?"

"Four or five."

"Names known to me?"

"All."

"Then who, Banichi?"

Banichi hesitated. "Cenedi is a remote possibility."

"No. Surely not. Not with such lack of finesse."

"A possibility, I say. One believes the breakfast room itself was a target."

"And not me?" He wasn't sure whether to be relieved or insulted.

"Possibly. The other names… you would not know the Guild members involved, but the second possible instigator is Atigeini: Tatiseigi. Another is lord Geigi. A fourth is Direiso, who, for the Kadigidi, carried the Filing against your name to the Guild. I'm ordinarily restrained from telling you that, but there's been an action which makes it needful for you to know. That the proposed contract was voted down, if she has pursued it, would place her and her man'chiin dire opposition to the Guild; but she is constitutionally capable of that, and if the action tonight is on the part of an association of which Ilisidi herself is a part, it would involve Direiso. Likewise another of close association with the Kadigidi — Saigimi of the Marid Tasigin, which is the center of an unwholesome sub-association of suspicious interests. Oil is their unifying interest. Oil. And Talidi province."

He knew the Kadigidi, one of the perpetual annoyances Tabini tolerated both as contentious neighbors and opposition leaders in the tashrid, in the name of, Tabini swore, the value of peaceful opposition —

And though he didn't know Saigimi by direct experience — Saigimi didn't occupy a seat in the tashrid — he knew the Marid Tasigin and most of all he knew the business of Talidi province.

Certainly Banichi did.

"Talidi," he said to Banichi, "is your province."

"Bren-ji. Don't doubt me."

"Banichi," he began to say, and then knew salads didn't remotely cover it, and the language didn't really have a word for lonely. You could substitute. But it didn't communicate. And neither could the paidhi, on what the paidhi felt Banichi's loyalty to be.

"Bren-ji," Banichi said, "I am notthe one."

"I know that, Banichi. I'm capable of being deceived, of course. But if I were —" A knot had arrived in his throat, and he flashed on that painful darkness as Banichi carried him to the floor. "— if I were, Banichi-ji, it's hardly necessary for you to go to such trouble. I've no association outside Tabini's but to you and Jago."

He'd disturbed Banichi. Clearly. "Not to us, paidhi-ji."

He was in a dark, self-destructive humor all of a sudden — emotional, and not knowing why. "To Tabini, oh, yes. And to you. I stick like glue. You'd have to kill me to get rid of me, you know. We're like that."

He'd never seen Banichi show such a troubled expression. "Nand' paidhi, one has no such intention. I assure you. But you have no man'chito me orto Jago. Which I'm assured you don't feel, anyway, nadi. So this is nonsense. Is it not?"

"Who knows what we feel? Maybe I do feel it, Banichi. If I'd shot you, I'd have been very upset."

"One is certainly glad to know you'd wish otherwise, nand' paidhi. And I would have been professionally embarrassed. You scared me."

That, from Banichi, of the Guild he was from, was an intimate confidence.

"But you are not," Banichi insisted, as if it still troubled him, "of my man'chi. Nor, I hope, physically attracted to me — which is your other choice. Jago, on the other hand — does not entail necessary loyalty to me. — Or does it, among humans?"

They were entering far too deep a subject for a man as tired as he was, as emotionally frayed as he was — and as guilty as he was, on that touchy private ground between Banichi and his partner. He was getting in well over his head, and suddenly Banichi, whom few secrets eluded, seemed to be implying a suspicion and questioning an event he couldn't forget, couldn't altogether ignore, and had no wish ever to admit had happened.

So he ignored the question at least, in favor of what he most wanted to know. "Where isJago right now?"

Ordinarily neither Banichi nor Jago answered such questions of whereabouts, except obliquely. He realized by now that it might be the policy of their Guild or of Tabini's service, to say nothing about business in progress, and that therefore Banichi would never give him a straight answer. But Banichi seemed to consider a moment, perhaps noting the sidestep he'd done on Banichi's question.

"At the airport, at the moment. No planes got away. No rail left the Bu-javid underground."

"Then Hanks can't have left the premises."

"One wishes that were the only conclusion. It's almost impossible to move fast enough to guarantee about rail on the perimeters, unless one is at least anticipating a movement or a direction. The damned hotels down below are a security sieve with connections to the rail."

"Hard to conceal a human."

"Less so a willing one."

"You do strongly think she knew them."

"One suspects so."

"Banichi, in my hearing, Hanks called out to her own security. She was distressed and concerned for their danger as well as her own. I heard it in her voice."

"That's a very great deal to hear in a voice."

One couldn't overgeneralize with Banichi. "Say — I know the woman personally, and I know my species and my culture. I recognized her concern and by the tone of her voice the concern was for them — she was warning them. Hardly logical for a conspirator — though humans have certainly been known to fail in logic."

"This one more than most."

"But not unwilling to fight for them, Banichi. That was in the voice. Take my word it was there."

"She may well have been startled. She may even have been opposed to the attack. Then either overpowered or simply pragmatic, if their man'chilies with the troublemakers. I suspect they went right down among the hotels, they went directly onto the public rail, and to a safe place somewhere in Shejidan, after which, with some less notice, they'll attempt to leave the city. Willing, she could pass as a child quite easily. A little large for a sleeping child. That's why I say, willing. A family group on holiday. What police would question them?"

"The Bu-javid could equally well have swallowed her. Some apartment, some lord sympathetic —"

"True. But less likely. Very few of the dissident lords would act openly against the aiji's declared interest, unless something happened that seemed to undermine the present order. It's a short list of those who would dare under other circumstances. It's even remotely possible someone seeking favor with Tabini misapprehended and thought disposing of the woman would quiet the waters. Certainly the list of those she's annoyed would be a much longer list."

He sat down on his bed, exhausted, to pull off his boots — and remembered, suddenly, and now that they were alone, the most critical question he had to account for. "Hanks' computer. Where is it? Do you know?"

"It apparently went with her. They've searched the apartment."

"Damn. Damn, Banichi."

"Indeed."

And one wished, earnestly wished, that one could exclude the searchers or even Banichi and Jago from those with a motive to take the computer and claim otherwise.

But one didn't ask. Instead, exhausted, he unfastened his shirt and peeled it off, with nothing to do with it, but Banichi took it and hung it on a chair.

"You'll make the trip with me to Taiben. Won't you? Won't Jago?"

"We certainly intend so."

He felt a little less shaky in that knowledge. Perhaps even willing to sleep once his head hit the bed — except the computer business told him he didn't have that luxury. He had to think what to do. What to report.

Or not.

"Tano and Algini are coming, too?"

"We purpose so."

Things on the mainland were as well handled as they could be, given the situation. As for Mospheira, he'd no notion what was happening there or what might be going on when the news of the landing and his treasonous assistance to Tabini spread across Mospheira — but coupling that with a warning that Hanks' computer was in foreign hands… God, how would thatlook? And what could they think?

Please believe me, Mr. Secretary, but it was some otheratevi group that snatched her?

Sorry about cutting you out of the landing, but I was preserving my credibility with the aiji?

Sorryabout Hanks. Sorry forHanks. I wish I could help her. I wish I knew where she is.

He unfastened his pants, peeled out of the rest of his clothes while Banichi lingered — but he wasn't focused on Banichi: his brain was beginning to sort wildly through other matters he couldn't lay hands on — like Barb, like his mother and Toby and his family.

He personally couldn't protect them, if somebody reacting to his treason decided to break through a less than enthusiastic security and attack his relatives, but he had friends in the State Department all through Foreign Affairs, friends well enough in the information flow and maybe — sometimes he thought so — well enough organized against administrative actions that some of them, some who had security clearances and some who even had covert operations skills might see a problem developing for his family beyond the usual nuisance groups and quietly try to handle it for him, if for no other reason than to to prevent him receiving a piece of news that might make him unstable in the field.

But, God, what could they really do? How fast could they realize it for a problem — and how thin could they stretch their confidence in him, when he'd gone step by step past the limits of their interests — at least, their interests as essentially supportive of the government.

His mother's letter the censors had reduced to lace. And his mother not returning phone calls. But Barb had talked to her. Barb said she was fine. Barb wouldn't lie to him about that. And his mother was as self-protective as Barb was. Took care of herself. First. Centrally.

Rely on her for that much, On friends in low places for the rest.

He lay down and pulled the covers over him, to look, at least, as if he were going to sleep.

Banichi, strange action, pulled the second coverlet up and lingered with a touch on his covered shoulder.

"Bren-ji," Banichi said, "over all, it was well done."

"I wasn't too stupid?"

"You did quite well, considering. Just — please leave things to your security personnel."

"If security personnel would keep me briefed in future where they are and what they're doing — it would relieve my anxieties, Banichi-ji. And make my targets much easier to identify."

"Not a bad notion."

"Please," he said, and let his head sink into the pillow, let his eyes drift shut to what he wished were a totally numb and night-lasting dark.

"In respect of security," Banichi said, "you should bear in mind that a chief suspect in the attack is Damiri herself."

The eyes came open. He couldn't prevent it.

"The aiji," Banichi said, "favors Damiri of the Atigeini. This doesn't mean he can rely on her."

The eyes still wanted to slide shut, as if he'd been slipped a tranquilizer he couldn't fight. On one level, Banichi could have said the building was afire, and he would have asked himself if he could possibly wait till the next alarm.

But the thinking brain said, Ask. There won't be another chance. Banichi wants to talk.

"So? Where does Tabini stand?"

"He doesn't rely on Damiri. In my own estimation, perhaps in his, Damiri-daja is testing the currents and trying to decide for her own association how powerful Tabini is and what an alliance with him is worth — pragmatically and historically. The Atigeini official position is against him."

"I know that — but this business of shooting in among your own servants —"

"The uncle she named, Tatiseigi, happens to be senior in the family and officially opposes her alliance to him. She, we think, favors it, being quite strongly attracted to Tabini, who is —" Banichi seemed to search for a word "— a man of some natural favor with various women."

"One understands."

"Tatiseigi might have decided that Damiri's gone much too far, and Damiri might be in extreme danger from within her own staff."

"And mine."

"Just so. In moving to Tabini's apartment she's abandoned her own security as a sign of affiliation with Tabini. On one level her personal security may back what she's doing. And certain ones might be offended. If she has offended her security — they'd immediately fall under Tatiseigi's man'chi, to her great danger. If they're not there already."

"Are they here?"

"At least one."

"An assassin? Of the Guild?"

"Saidin."

"Good — God." He was waking up faster and faster.

"One would have thought you'd suspect so."

In a lordly house. In the Bu-javid. In an apartment clearly under potential threat conspicuously lacking in Guild presence, except those Tabini provided. It wasa reasonable question to have asked, Banichi was right, and he — had no excuse.

"But you," he asked Banichi, "personally think Damiri to be telling the truth to Tabini?"

"What I think is little relevant. One doesn't know. I do believe someone exceeded orders in the destruction of the antiquities of that room. I believe Damiri's anger is real. I suspect Tatiseigi won't be pleased — whoever ordered the attack. The aiji's jet leaves within the hour, taking security to Taiben — and a lily porcelain on a side trip, to the Atigeini estates not so far distant."

"I appreciate the nature of speculation. And how little you dare do it, Banichi-ji. But what of Ilisidi's involvement?"

"One doesn't know. One frankly doesn't know whether you've persuaded her. That's a major point at issue. Clearly she leaned to your side once. Now one has to ask you where Ilisidi stands."

"I might have failed. I might well have failed."

"Even Tabini, who knows her very well, does not think he penetrates the dowager's reserve."

A clear enough warning — fora human astute enough to take it. "Emotionally speaking, Banichi, I confess I'd rather it not be Ilisidi behind this."

"Certainly a formidable individual."

"More than that, I think her a pleasant conversationalist. An antidote to my isolation. This is perhaps foolish on my part."

"Perhaps a human who flings himself down mountains for recreation could think her a challenge. But one cautions you, most earnestly, nadi, this is not without risk, this flirtation with the aiji-dowager."

"Oh — damn."

"Bren-ji?"

"I need to send her word about the attack and the landing. I promised her, Banichi, to keep her briefed. No matter what. This isn't a time to break promises to her. And I have."

"The dowager has left, nand' paidhi."

"Left?"

"An hour before the attack."

He felt mildly sick at his stomach. Mildly, numbly — chilled to the core. "Damn," he said again.

"It could be prudence," Banichi said. "But one can't rely on such gracious supposition."

"The ones who took Hanks — what do they likely want with her? Stupid question, Banichi, I know. But do you see something I might not?"

"Certainly no suitors for marriage," Banichi said dryly. "I'd say — the obvious things. Her skills. — Her computer."

"She's not a bad woman," he found himself saying — never would have credited he'd be pleading Hanks' case. But it wasn't Deana as a hostage: atevi didn't quite understand hostages in the human sense of personal value; the conservatives she most appealed to for reasons of opposition to Tabini were the very atevi not long on patience with human manners — some of them not long on patience with human existence.

If it was those, as best he could think, it wasn't a live human they wanted. It was information on human activities and on secrets Tabini might hold.

Or they wanted words from Deana that might inflame popular feeling against Tabini. God, he knew the position Hanks had gotten herself into. He felt it, personally, in the pain that nagged at his shoulder and his ribs.

Behind his eyes, another pain, a stinging, angry pain, that a man in his job shouldn't feel, shouldn't entertain — not — not regret for Ilisidi's behavior. Attaching affections to atevi was a foolish, personally and professionally dangerous mistake.

One could be like Wilson. One could forget how to love anyone. One could stop doing it.

Or one could take the pain, and try to stand it, and steadfastly, professionally, refuse to be surprised or self-accusatory when atevi answered to their own urges and ran roughshod over human sentiment.

"Thank you," he said to Banichi. "Did I say thank you? I meant to."

"My —"

"— job. Yes, dammit. I know that. But prefer me just adequately, Banichi-ji, to Hanks-paidhi."

"Fervently so, Bren-ji."

"Still too little," he said. "Still too little, Banichi. I'd have let you shoot me before I took a chance it wasn't you tonight. Does that reassure you?"

"Far from it."

"Then you worry about it, Banichi-ji. I'm far too tired to."

"It's my job," Banichi said, infallibly, reliably numb to human feelings, missing the point. "You're quite right. We should keep you better informed."

The knot in his throat didn't go down. But there wasn't a solution. There wasn't a translation. Not in the paidhi's vocabulary. Not in the dictionary.

Banichi turned out the lights with, "If there are alarms tonight, trust I'll answer them, Bren-ji. And stay in bed."

Atevi asked what hecouldn't feel, either. He supposed it might bother them just as much. Atevi hadn't a word for lonely.

There was something like orphan.

There was something like renegade.

Otherwise they couldn't bealone — and knew, better than humans, he supposed, why they did things. Psychiatry was a science they hadn't practiced, and still didn't, possibly because no atevi would confide outside his man'chi, possibly because, among them, there was just pathology.

And, ever popular, solving all possible mental health problems — bloodfeud.

Or whatever atevi actually felt that answered to that ancient human word.

Possibly he'd troubled Banichi's sleep tonight. Possibly he'd made Banichi ask himself questions for which Banichi had fewer words than he did. If there was indeed some secret atevi dictionary of human language, Banichi might be consulting it tonight and asking himself what the paidhi had meant.

He'd kept after Banichi until he knew not only that everyone he cared for was safe — but as far as he could, until he knew to his satisfaction, wherethey were; which possibly wasn't love, just a neurotic desire to have them all in a predictable place for the night so he could shut his eyes.

But he couldn't shake the punched-in-the-gut feeling he'd felt when he and Banichi started talking about loyalties, and he'd seen how far he'd gone from safety in his dealings, how much, God help him, he needed, and kept telling himself wasn't — ever — going to be there for him. He'd known it when he'd gone into the job, and he'd known in the unscarred, unmuddied wisdom of youth that he'd one day meet the emotional wall, of whatever nature, in whatever remote time of his career, and remember where he'd been heading and why.

Needwas such a seductive, dangerous word. Needwas the vacancies. Needwasn't, dammit, love, not in any sense. If love was giving, it was the opposite of love, it drank love dry, it sucked logic after it, and it didn't ever output. Barb was need. She'd tried to become hisneed, and he'd seen that shipwreck coming.

Then he'd gotten himself the possibility of a backup in Graham, if Graham made it down safely. And the shaky character of his dealings with Banichi, who knew how to forgive him, at least, told him he hadto pull himself together or hand Jase Graham the keys to his soul, which Jase might not be good enough or benign enough not to use. Jago touched him, not in an unknowing way, and he hadn't, in small idle seconds, forgotten the feeling of her hands, the sensation that shivered through his nerves and said… he needed. He wanted not to have been responsible. He wanted Jago to have ignored warnings and gone ahead with… whatever atevi did with their lovers, which had become in his thoughts a burning curiosity.

Jago… and Ilisidi. He'd made a place in his human affections for the woman with all her edges and all her secrets — he'd ignored all the rules, even given her a piece of human loyalty that must have, in some intrusive way, taken Ilisidi herself by surprise and sent her judgment of him skittering off at angles no ateva could figure, as if he'd touched on man'chiand given a chivalrously honorable — aristocratically possessive? — old ateva a real quandary of the spirit. Like Tabini, he suspected, she'd tried to figure him, adjusted her behavior to fit her conceptions of hisaction, and gone off into that same unmapped territory of mutually altered behavior that he and Tabini wandered.

His fault and not hers. Ilisidi was angry with him. Jago, thanks only to Jago, could take care of herself. Jago hadtaken care of herself and walked out when he warned her. And Banichi knew. Banichi found everything out.

Or Jago had outright told him. Whatever that meant, in a relationship Bren had never puzzled out.

Damned fool, he said to himself. He heard people move about in the apartment, up and down the hall outside his bedroom. But he knew that Banichi knew who they were, and that no one moved there who Banichi didn't approve. So that was all right.

He heard the door open and close, very distantly. But, again, he expected comings and goings. He hoped it was good news. Or at least that bad news of whatever nature was being handled as well as it could be.

He had the damn code. Shawn or somebody had risked a great deal to get him a code that he didn't, on sober reflection, believe he'd gathered in his computer when he'd plugged in and sent out his Seeker.

He had a sure knowledge that Hanks' computer was in unauthorized hands, on Tabini's side or the opposition's. And that code Shawn had gone to great lengths to give him could, if it was what it seemed, blast through Mospheira's electronic obstructions and get at least one message to the right channels in the Foreign Office.

He had the remote unit plugged in. He could send that warning here, from his bedroom, without any need for lines, without tipping off more than the massive security he was sure Tabini mounted on his phone lines, that he had been in direct communication with Mospheira after the attack. But Tabini gave him all the latitude he wanted — an enviable position for a potential spy.

If that spy wanted to act, tipping off Mospheira that violence had happened in the Bu-javid, that Hanks was in foreign hands, possibly being interrogated, possibly being coerced to breach Mospheira's electronic defenses.

The aforesaid spy could also expect that Mospheira would lose no time relaying the information to the ship, who might delay the landing, or change the landing site, just the same as if he'd admitted on the phone that he was standing in the aftermath of a double murder and the kidnaping of a human representative.

In which light — he didn't send the warning to Mospheira. The aforesaid potential spy and employee of the Mospheiran government had to lie abed and not make a move more than he had, letting whatever happened to Deana happen, because Mospheira couldn't do a damned thing. His own security and Tabini's was the only chance Deana had for rescue, and if he made that call, as Shawn and other people pinning their careers on him might not understand in its emotional or logical context, Tabini could lose his gambit with the ship and Deana —

If they let her live, Deana could find herself in the position of paidhi to the opposition to Tabini, dammit.

Exactly the position she'd courted, if she lived to have the honor, if her bones held out — atevi didn't always exercise due caution — and if she could use her head.

God, she might callMospheira and say she'd been kidnaped with precisely the idea of aborting the landing. She might, in fact, work for the opposition. It might serve Mospheira very well.

On that thought his eyes came open again, staring into an answerless dark. He asked himself how he'd gotten into this position, except one good intention at a time; asked himself, too, how he'd gotten so much invested in betraying his president, his government and every democratic process on Mospheira that said one man didn't make decisions like this.

Step by step and on understandings of the situation Mospheira's government didn't have: it wasn't the kind of answer a good government servant gave to his government —

But, dammit, the officials ofhis government backed Hanks, who might still be able to reach Mospheira, with the conspirators' full permission, for all he knew — and blow everything.

He wasn't thinking clearly. He wasn't reasoning in a way that came up with answers — just — the arrangement he'd worked out led to atevi being dealt in on the development; Shawn might stand by him, a handful of the FO might stand by him, even in notusing that code, and letting the landing go ahead — at least Deana couldn't use the big dish. Not without relay to Mospheira.

Which might tell the ship folk something, too.

That was the only thought that let him finally settle toward sleep.

CHAPTER 20

The plane's engines were running as they boarded, not surprising since the plane had flown two trips during the night before their own, at dawn, and refueled. Of baggage, there was a mysterious lot already going on board that had Tabini's red-and-black seals on the bags, nothing to do with his own small bags, all for cabin storage, which were simply clothes enough to last until the lander came down, to last until they came back to the Bu-javid.

There were at least thirty cases out there on the baggage ramp.

There were — persistent since he'd waked with a bowlful of urgent personal messages in the foyer and, as he left, bouquets standing in the hall outside — well-wishes from officials and others to whom the event was not as secret as he wished.

Now as he looked out the window a van pulled up, the driver argued with security, there was waving and pointing toward his window, the driver peered up at him, and understanding his presence was in question, Bren gave a tentative wave.

After which the driver and an assistant set more bouquets out in view of his window, in the vicinity of the plane, that being as close as his nervous security would let the deliveries come.

It wasn't the last van. Two more pulled up, with more flowers, until it looked like a funeral or a wedding. And the cards at least reached him, carried up by boarding crew, and security, even by the crew who carried the carefully inspected galley load aboard. The bouquets were from committee heads. They were from the serving staff.

They were from the clericals, lately begun in their jobs, one of which said,

Nand' paidhi, this is my first job. I am rereading all the mail I did in hopes that the threat against you was nothing I missed.

And another:

Nand' paidhi, please be very careful. Don't let there be a war.

And one in elaborate court calligraphy from the gentleman of Tano's acquaintance, the manager who'd come out of retirement, who said, more expansively, Nand' paidhi, I have all confidence in your security. Please accept my wishes for your long life and the wishes of all my house for the continued benefit of your good counsel to the aiji and his house, long may he direct the Association.

The latest delivery people understood their restrictions and simply laid the bouquets within sight of his window, a mass of pastel color in the grayed and cloudy dawn. He felt walled off from his well-wishers, lonely, seeing the bouquets abandoned to the weather and the wind from the engines, comforted by the gesture, though, and also appalled, thinking how expensive some of those bouquets were, from clericals who didn't make all that lot of money. He tucked the cards one and all into his document case, the ones with plain citizen ribbons, the ones with heavy noble seals, to answer when he could. He vowed to send at least a small floral recognition along with each one of them to the clericals, who, he was confident, hadn't missed any warning. No, dammit, not a blossom or two — real bouquets, and put it on the paidhi's florist bill, which went right to the State Department, with notations to bounce it back to him if State balked.

Another van. Another bouquet arrived, a huge, extravagant one. The delivery agency wished vehemently to board with it. He watched the argument through the window. But his security was adamant, called Banichi, and Banichi himself brought the card aboard and gave it to him, clearly the price of the agreement.

"An importunate well-wisher," Banichi said, and the first glance determined that it and the bouquet were lord Geigi's.

Nand' paidhi, it said, wiser heads than I are studying the answer which you have returned in regard to my question, at unanticipated personal effort. I deeply regret that your absence in pursuit of this answer may have given opportunity or motive to some person or persons to attack the paidhiin, an action in which I realize that I am necessarily suspect, but which I personally deplore. I have written under separate seal to Tabini-aiji, and hope that you will also confirm my good wishes to your associates of whatever degree. I also hope for the safety of Hanks-paidhi and will bend whatever efforts I and my staff can make to assure that no harm comes to her.

"Do you believe this gesture?" he asked Banichi.

Banichi took the card, read it, lifted a brow. "One would never question." And added: "Nor accept the bouquet from this source under one's roof."

"Surely it doesn't contain bombs. They've been fueling out there. The truck —"

"One doesn't know what it doesn't contain. Gambling is not a passion with me. I'll convey your politic appreciation. I've already suggested they move the fuel truck, and pull us away from the area ahead of schedule."

"Jago isn't aboard."

"Jago is coming," Banichi said, "at all possible speed. If she should miss us, she'll come out this afternoon with Tano and Algini. I agree with you. I increasingly dislike this accumulation of good wishes near our fuel tanks. Especially the latest."

"Have you any word yet on Hanks?"

"They're still looking."

"Jago —" He could see, past Banichi's shoulder, the aiji's other security preparing to shut the door.

And a running figure coming from the building and headed for the steps.

The men inside evidently saw her, too. They waited. In a moment more Jago was through the door, the door shut, and the crew outside was pulling the ramp back.

"Have they found anything?" he asked as Jago, smoothing her uniform to its usual impeccable state, came down the aisle to join them.

"One doubts. Would you care for a snack after takeoff?"

"Just word on Hanks."

"None. Are you sure? I'll be having fruit juice, myself."

"The same, then. Thank you." He cast a look at Banichi as Jago passed him down the aisle. "I thought the new policy was to tell the paidhi the truth."

"No. One resolved to brief the paidhi on matters regarding his safety. Not on operations."

"Dammit, Banichi!"

"Information which might tempt him to assist. Or make impossible his innocent reaction to other information. You have such an expressive face, Bren-ji."

The engines grew louder. The flowers and the fueling truck passed out of view as the plane turned and moved out toward the runway.

Banichi and Jago sat down with him and belted in. Other security moved from the door to the cluster of six other security agents at the rear, men and women who talked together in voices that didn't carry above the engines and held no humor at all. The servants had gone on the last flight, before daylight; servants in the number that Saidin had determined as fortunate.

Saidin. Damiri's security. Tabini had directly suggested Saidin do the picking, knowing, as the paidhi hadn't known at the time, Saidin's nature. It had been a direct invitation to Saidin, a challenge to Saidin, to put one of her people on the Taiben staff — for good or for ill.

The paidhi had been so stupidly blind on that point, knowing, intellectually, that security necessarily went in such places — but he'd come in drug-fogged, had formed his subconscious, subsequently unquestioned opinions on the staff, catalogued Saidin as an elder matron, and never, dammit, asked himself the obvious. He'd gotten fond of Saidin — and Saidin might have assumed he knew what she was; which might, Banichi was right, have changed his reactions, his expressions, his levels of caution, if he'd known what he should have known, what any atevi would have known —

He must have perplexed Saidin no end. And, dammit, he still liked the woman.

There seemed a quality to people the Assassins' Guild let in and licensed. He didn't know why. He didn't know what they had in common, except perhaps an integrity that touched chords in his shades-of-gray soul, a feeling, maybe, that one could do things that rattled one's conscience to the walls and foundations and still — still own a sense of equilibrium.

Banichi was going to teach him about doors. It wasn't what he wanted to learn from Banichi. What he wanted to understand was something far more basic.

When he and Jago had almost — almost — gone over the line, and he'd panicked, maybe it was that integrity he'd felt shaken. That very inhuman integrity. That more than human sense of morality.

That Jago hadn't given a damn about.

Which didn't fit with her character.

If one took her as human. And Mospheiran, at that. Which she wasn't.

She was — whatever atevi were in that department. In that sense he trustedJago not to have put him in a difficult position.

And, dammit, he was thinking about it again. Which had absolutely no place in considerations that ought to be occupying his mind.

They swung around for the runway. The wheels thumped down the pavement and cleared the ground. The familiar roofs slipped under the wings and the noise of one more outgoing jet probably disturbed sleep across Shejidan, making ordinary atevi ask themselves what in hell was going on that took so many doubtless official and unscheduled flights to and from the capital —

They might well ask. And — in the light of recent crises — guess that it involved the paidhi, the foreigner ship, the aiji, and a great deal of security and government interest.

Atevi added very well.

The plane climbed above that altitude regularly jeopardized by atevi small aircraft and into a magnificent view of sunrise above the cloud deck — doubtless the better view was from the other set of windows, where the Bergid would thrust above those clouds, but the paidhi hadn't the energy or the heart to get out of his seat to take a look. He wasn't in the mood for beautiful sunrises. The one he did see jarred his sense of reality. The gray below the clouds had better suited his mood. The unseemly sheen of pink and gold made hope far too easy when so much was uncertain.

But the security personnel began to stir about at the rear of the aircraft, and Jago went back, she said, after fruit juice.

"Biscuits," Bren said, before she escaped. Maybe it was the sunrise, but he began to decide he wanted them — having rushed off before breakfast, into a chancy situation.

And in not too long Jago was back with biscuits, a hot and fragrant pile of them, adequate for healthy atevi appetites, oneof which was sufficient for a human stomach, along with tea and juice he knew was safe.

"Thanks," Bren pronounced, on diplomatic autopilot. He took his biscuit, he took the tea, he took the fruit juice, and reflected that he finally had what he'd wanted all along: hispeople safely gathered for breakfast, well, except Tano and Algini, who were still chasing about the local investigation. They proposed, Banichi had said, to take another cycle of the same aircraft out to Taiben this afternoon.

But he couldn't get Hanks out of his head, and couldn't convince himself yet that things were in hand. One didn't attack the aiji's guest in the Bu-javid and carry her off as of minor consequence to the welfare of the Association. A lot of firepower had gone out to Taiben. Tabini's arrival out there was still to come — if it came. Tabini was stationing security out there in numbers that could repel real force.

And in the excess of feeling that had suddenly, after this assassination attempt but not the other, prompted a deluge of flowers and well-wishes from associates, one had the notion that ordinary atevi took this attempt far more seriously than they took the actions of a single irate man in the legislature.

Thisattempt smelled to them like serious business.

It smelled that way to the paidhi, too.

"Have you heard?" he asked. "Have you any current notion whether the troublemakers will make an attempt on the landing itself?"

"No doubt they'd like any means to make the aiji look weak," Jago said. "An attack on Taiben is fully possible."

"Aimed at Tabini? Or at the whole idea of human contact?"

"One certainly wishes the ship had chosen some other site than that near and convenient to the city," Jago said. "It makes logistics for the conspirators far easier. Direiso andTatiseigi are both in the region."

"Meaning anywhere but Taiben would have been preferable. Then why for God's sake was it on the list?"

"It has its advantages. Access is equally easy for us. And we sit close to the neighbors' operations, which means more readily knowing what they're doing."

"But there're more than nonspecific reasons to worry?"

"There's a suspect association," Jago said. "Local. But powerful."

"Localized geographically?" One neverknew the full reach and complexity of atevi association. Atevi themselves didn't admit the extent or the nature of them, God help the university on Mospheira trying to track them.

"Understand, nand' paidhi, Taiben is one estate of a very ancient area, of very old, very noble habitation — very old households, adjacent, of longstanding uneasiness of relations."

"Meaning historic feud." It was the Padi Valley. It was an old area. Historic.

"No, not feud," Banichi said, "but along this ancestral division of lands — the paidhi may be aware — one has thousands of years of history, among very ancient houses each of whom have powerful modern associations."

Not to say borders. Division of lands. There was a difference.

"An easy neighborhood in good times," Jago said. "But many unsettled issues. In chancy times, very easily upset."

"Meaning," Bren said quietly, "if there was a conspiracy a thousand leagues away, it would most easily nest here, next to Taiben, because of these houses."

"Five households," Jago said. "Before there were humans in the world, there were five principle landholders in the Padi Valley. Historically, all the aijiin of the Ragi have come from these five. The Association at large would hardly be able to settle on any aiji who didn'tcome from this small association. They're all the Ragi families who have everheld power."

"But Tabini's house settled the Treaty. By donating its lands to the refugees, from the war." That was answer number one anytime the primer students heard the question. Unquestionably there was more involved. There was the intricacy of the atevi election process. "They brokered the Treaty."

"Keeping only the estate at Taiben — not alone for its nearness to Shejidan, on the Alujis. Clearly association by residence. But also by nobility. The hunting association. And, very clearly, the association of ancestral wealth."

"And the Atigeini have holdings fairly close to Taiben."

"Thirty minutes by air," Banichi said.

"You think there'll be trouble from them? Is that what you're saying?"

"The relationship with the Atigeini may become clear before sundown. Old Tatiseigi is still the chief question."

"And Ilisidi," Jago said,

"What about Ilisidi? Where isshe? Does anyone know where she went?"

"Oh, Taiben. But Tabini moved her out last night. Now — we think she's guesting upland at Masiri, with the Atigeini. With Tatiseigi himself."

"Damn," he said quietly. But what he felt gathering about him was disaster.

"Tabini, of course, knew where she would go," Banichi said.

"And proceeded," Jago said. "He will not be pushed, at Taiben. Thatsmall association is historically sensitive."

"Challenging his enemies?"

"Collecting them, perhaps, under one roof."

He had an increasingly uneasy feeling. But it was empty air outside the window. He was wrapped about by atevi purpose, atevi direction, atevi mission. A trap — a conspiracy, a — God knew what. He'd called down a landing from the ship into the thick of atevi politics, arguing them out of trusting Mospheira.

And the atevi he most trusted — one of those words any paidhi should, of course, flag immediately in his thinking — had let him propose Taiben among the other sites he'd offered to the ship, and hadn't mentioned until now the web of associational relationships around Taiben, which — God, was it only a couple of weeks ago? — hadn't mattered once upon a time in his tenure. He'd no more wondered about local associations before the arrival of the human ship threw everything into uncertainty than he'd asked himself with daily urgency about the geography of the sea bottom.

Atevi associations in the microcosm, which atevi tracked in all their complexities back hundreds of years, weren't something the paidhi could politely ask about, weren't, something the paidhi was well enough informed on to involve himself in, and he didn't. The larger Association was stable. He'd not questioned it. He wasn't even supposed to question it. It had been ironclad Foreign Affairs policy that the paidhiin dealt only with the central Association and kept their noses out of the smaller ones. Reports the paidhiin could get were laced with misinformation and gossip, recrimination, feud histories and threats —

But ask how Taiben's neighboring estates had stood with each other in prehuman times — and, damn, of coursethe Padi Valley associations must be among the oldest: take it for that if only because archaeologists — a new science, a contagion from humans — had established several digs there, looking for truths earlier aijiin might not have tolerated finding.

"There were many wars there," Jago said, "many wars. Not of fortresses like Malguri. The Ragi always prided themselves that they needed no walls."

"Association would always happen among those leaders, though," Banichi said. "And Taiben belonged to Tabini's father-line. The mother-line, two generations ago, was from the Eastern Provinces."

"Hence Malguri," Jago said.

"Which," Banichi said, "to condense a great deal of bloody history, then united with the Padi Valley to marry Tabini's grandfather. Which had one effect: Tabini's line is the only Padi Valley line not wholly concentrated in the Padi Valley — or wholly dependent on Padi Valley families. An advantage."

"So if a new leader tried to come out of the Padi Valley now, he or she couldn't hold the East. Is that what you're saying?"

"There's obviously one who could," Banichi said.

"Disidi."

"She failed election in the hasdrawad because the commons don't trust her," Banichi said. "The tashrid would be altogether another story. Unfortunately for Ilisidi, the tashrid isn't where the successor is named — a profound reform, Bren-ji, the most profound reform. The commons choose. The fire and thunder of the debate was over the Treaty and the refugee settlement, all the lords struggling for advantage — but that one change was the knife in the dark. The commons always took orders how to vote."

"Until," Jago said, "the Treaty brought economic changes, and the commons became very independent. And will not vote against the interests of the commons. The Padi lords used to be the source of aijiin. Now they can't get a private rail line built — without the favor of the hasdrawad andTabini-aiji."

"It's certainly," Banichi said, "been a bitter swallow for them. But productive of circumspection and political modesty — and quiet, most of the time. The commons simply won't elect anyone with that old baggage on his back."

"The Atigeini?" he asked. It wasn't a conversation, it was a rapid-fire briefing, leading to something Tabini wanted him to know — or that his security thought he'd better know — fast. "Does Damiri tie him back to them? The paidhi, nadiin-ji, wishes he had information that helped him be more astute. I suddenly don't follow what Tabini intends in this alliance."

"An heir."

"And an alliance with someone from these families? These very old families? I don't know what you're trying to tell me."

"No other aiji has the history with the commons that Tabini's line has," Jago said, "Tabini-aiji was elected by it; naturally the aiji whose line it favors wishes to keep the democratic system. Certain of the other lords, of course, might wish to change it back. But they'll never secure election. A coup, on the other hand —"

"Overthrow of the hasdrawad itself?" Suddenly he didn'tlike the train of logic. "Change back to the tashrid as electors?"

"Such are the stresses in the government," Banichi said. "One certainly hopes it hasn't a chance of happening. But that Damiri-daja, of the Padi Valley Atigeini, suddenly came into the open as Tabini's lover — was directly related to the appearance of the ship, and to yoursafe return from Malguri."

Stars and galaxies might not be in Banichi's venue. But Banichi was a Guild assassin and very far up the ranks of such people: depend on it, Banichi knew the intricacies of systems and motives that caused people to file Intent.

" Myreturn."

"It meant," Banichi said, "ostensibly that she felt Tabini-aiji was likely to be strengthened by this event in the heavens — not overthrown. That the longtime Atigeini ambition to rule in the Bu-javid was best achieved in the bedchamber, not the battlefield."

"Is that yourassessment of her thinking?"

"The paidhi is not a fool." Banichi had a half-amused look on his face. "Say I ask myself that question often in a day. Exactly. The affair between them — I doubt is sham. They've shown —" Banichi made a small motion of the fingers "— singularly foolish moments of attraction. That, I judge, is real; and staff in a better position than I to judge say the same. That doesn't mean they've taken leave of higher senses; Naidiri has standing orders that propriety is notto keep him out — while Damiri has relinquished her security staff, at least so far as her residence in the aiji's apartment: the necessary concession of the inferior partner in such an arrangement, and a very difficult position for her security to be in. Your presence — has been an incidental salve to Damiri's pride, and a test."

"In case I were murdered in my bed."

"It would be a very expensive gesture for the lady — who's made, by both gestures, a very strong statement of disaffection from the Atigeini policies. You should know that Tatiseigi has made a career of disagreement with Tabini and Tabini's father and his father with Tabini's grandfather, for that matter. And Damiri offers the possibility of formal alliance. Not only her most potent self as mother of an heir, but a chance to break the cabal in the Padi Valley — and possibly, withTatiseigi's knowledge… to double-cross the aiji. Or possibly to overthrow Tatiseigi's policies and his grasp of family authority."

"I take it this is not general knowledge."

"Common gossip. Not common knowledge, if the paidhi takes the difference in expressions."

"I do take it."

"This is a very dangerous time," Banichi said, "within the Association. Quite natural that stresses would tend to manifest. In Mospheiran affairs… likewise a time of change. As we understand." Banichi reached inside his jacket and pulled out a silver message cylinder. "Tabini asked us to brief you at least on the essentials of the neighbors. — And to destroy this andthe accompanying tape after you've read it."

Tabini's seal.

Damn, Bren thought, and took it with no little trepidation. He unrolled it, read, very simply put, after Tabini's heading,

Please observe great caution, do nothing to elude your security even for a moment. We expect a great deal of trouble, on very good advisement from very good sources.

The whereabouts of Hanks remains, specifically, a question. But we would not be surprised to find that she has been moved near Taiben, since the conspirators are few, their connections are strong in that vicinity, and they wish to bring as few as possible others of their fringes into public knowledge should matters go wrong for them. Certainly their more cautious supporters will not want to commit until and unless they demonstrate success.

I will not at all be surprised if individuals frequent in Hanks' association initiated the matter. She seems to be operating in some freedom. Banichi has a tape copy of a communication we intercepted on the mainland. Listen to it and see if you can make sense of it.

He expected, dammit, before Banichi gave him the tape and Jago got up and brought him a recorder to play it on, that the tape involved not ship-to-ground communications but very terrestrial connections indeed.

And that the front of the tape would be a great deal of computer chatter — as Deana's access code went through Mospheira's electronic barriers like a knife through butter.

Damn right her authorizations weren't pulled. Completely live. Completely credited, where they were going. He jacked in, captured-and-isolated, read-only, as scared of those codes near his computer as he would have been of a ticking bomb.

The text was, again foreseeably, scrambled. He tried three code sets with his computer before one clicked.

After that, text flowed on his screen.

Cameron has turned coat and threatened the ship with unspecified atevi hostilities in order to have them land under the aiji's control. He has meanwhile participated with the aiji's authority to place me under communications blackout and, I am warned by reliable sources, to have me assassinated. The motive is complex, resting in the aiji's ambitions to make the precedent of central control of dams, power grids, and rail apply to all natural resources, which will strip the provincial aijiin and the landholders of financial resources and centralize all international trade, with monopoly to the aiji in Shejidan, and consequently price controls which will considerably enrich the central government at the expense of local governments and rightful landholders.

Cameron has cooperated in this plan, whether wittingly or unwittingly, has actively backed the nationalization of resources, has suggested boycott as a tactic, has gone on a remarkable excursion to a remote observatory supported by the aiji of Shejidan and brought back a warped-space theory that I strongly believe is not based on atevi research, but on unauthorized translation of classified human mathematical concepts. This is calculated to disturb certain atevi conservative religious beliefs which are in stark contrast and political opposition to the aiji, who is not a believer in any philosophy, most particularly to throw certain provinces into religious upheaval and certain philosophical leaders into disrepute and disregard.

I am making this transmission from a secure base afforded me by the persons who have placed their lives in jeopardy by opposing this power grab on the part of the central government. In my judgment, we will do well to make this situation extremely clear to the representative from the ship if she in fact reaches Mospheira alive, which my informants suggest may not happen. The aiji may assassinate this individual and put the blame on his opposition. Since he clearly controls the Assassins' Guild, getting a filing against his political enemies at that point would be possible. This would also, I am informed, serve as a purge of the Guild, as all Guild members opposing his aims would very quickly find themselves targeted by the aiji's very extensive network.

I urge under the strongest terms that the government recall Cameron, revoke his authority and his codes, and demand an explanation of his actions, which are by no means in the interest of Mospheira, of the human population in general, or of atevi citizens. I do not know and cannot ascertain whether he is aware what he is aiding or to what purpose his advice and ability is being used, but I consider that my life is in present danger from agencies with whom he is working. Therefore I will move from place to place and attempt to preserve my usefulness in my job.

Please pass a message to my family that I am at the moment safe and well and protected by persons who have acted in behalf of their freedom and rights of self-determination.

He didn't swear. He didn't want expression to cross his face — he wasn't sure he was going to translate this message exactly, at this time, or in the foreseeable future. He rested his elbow on the armrest and his knuckle against his lip, thinking. He'd defined the beginning of the section; he defined the end; he captured, reran it, rereading to determine that, no, there was no hint of it being taken under duress, there were none of the words to signal that such was the case — and he'd hope, in a piece like that, to see words like discorrespondance, decorrelationary, or contrarecidivistic, that to a human eye didn't quite belong in typical text in the worst diplomatese — the standard freehand signal that the whole piece was under duress, always a worry when a note that explosive came in on computer-to-computer transmission.