For the first part of the meal, Prope aimed most of her attention at Festina, trying to wheedle juicy gossip about power struggles on the High Council. The captain was one of those people who went all oozy with charm when she wanted something. She had a pretty good touch with it too — all warm and winning, so you found yourself smiling even when you knew it was only an act. The secret was that Prope herself didn’t realize she was an awful hypocrite; she thought this was as genuine as anyone ever got. I’d seen the same thing in diplomats: honestly believing they were paragons of truth because they thought everybody else was a bigger liar than they were.

Festina didn’t work nearly as hard on the social niceties as Prope. One word answers. No little stories about the time a Myriapod ambassador gave birth at the breakfast table. I got the feeling Festina had some grudge against Prope, one she’d been nursing a long time; she was making an effort not to be petty, but refused to go any farther than frostily polite.

As for the actual content of the conversation — like which high admiral said what to whom during a recent summit on some race called the Peacocks — I sleepily let it pass by till Prope asked me, "So what did your father think of it all?"

I jerked awake. Felt myself blushing. Prope knew who I was; and as I glanced around the table, Harque smirking, Festina looking grim, Kaisho hidden behind her hair but tilting her head to one side as if she was eager to hear my answer — I realized they all knew. Since I’d come aboard, they must have had time to look over my navy records.

Dumb me: I should have expected they’d check. Smart people learn who they’re dealing with. I just wished… I don’t know. I wished I could have stayed Edward York instead of becoming Alexander York’s son. Especially with the way Festina felt about High Council admirals.

"Um," I said. "Um. My father has never told me what he thinks about anything. Except maybe when he was talking to somebody else and didn’t notice I was in the room. I haven’t heard a word from him in the past twenty years; and even back then, he sent letters to my sister, not me. After Sam died…" I stopped, remembering Sam wasn’t dead. "My father and I aren’t close," I mumbled, hoping folks would leave it at that.

Prope didn’t. "Frankly, I’m astounded," she said, "that you and your dad are… estranged." She gave me a sympathetic smile. Prope’s kind of sympathy anyway. "You look so much like him, you know. A chip off the old block. Only better — more handsome."

She laughed lightly. I tried to laugh too, but didn’t do such a great job; no matter how stupid you are, you get good at spotting when someone is flirting with you. If you don’t flirt back, you’re being rude, or a prig. Except that I never think fast enough to toss off sexy banter, especially when I don’t feel sexy. (If you really want to snare me into bed, convince me you’re lonely, not coy.)

So for a second, I just sat there with no idea what to say. I didn’t want to talk about my father, and I definitely didn’t want to talk about being handsome. Then I found myself replying, "Sorry, Captain, but the real chip off the old block was my twin sister Samantha. Another case of ‘my father’s looks only better’ — stupendously better, almost as beautiful as the lovely ladies here at this table — but Sam inherited Dad’s personality too. His force of will. Which I’m afraid led her to a bad end."

"You have our sympathies, Your Majesty," Kaisho whispered. She stressed Your Majesty just a bit, not sarcastically but pointedly. As if she knew she was talking to more than boring old Edward York, Explorer Second Class.

Yes. I’d been possessed again — a backseat passenger watching someone or something else take the wheel. Almost as beautiful as the lovely ladies here at this table… I’d never say something like that. I wondered why Festina didn’t demand, "What’s wrong with you?" Even if we’d only known each other a single day, she should have noticed the difference. But she just said, "Tell us about your sister, Edward. What really happened to the mission on Troyen?"

The thing controlling me was only too happy to give its version of those long-ago days… a version filled with jokes and sly asides, many of them directed toward Prope. "Oh Captain, you should have seen…" "If only I could have shown you…" "Perhaps someday we can walk through the…" Nudging her on the good parts, making Troyen’s descent into war sound like a series of silly missteps and goofed-up blunders rather than a desperate fight to avoid a fight.

As the spirit possessing me made Prope’s eyes gleam, smirking over tales of disintegration, I thought about what really happened. The truth.

What really happened were the wrong ideas at the wrong time. I guess that’s an old, old story in human history, and it’s just as common in other parts of the galaxy.

Mandasars were genetically programmed for monarchy… anyone could see that. But not everyone could accept it. Least of all some of the races who started visiting once Troyen joined the League of Peoples.

You know what I’m talking about — you’ve probably watched The Evolution Hour at least once, where that purple Cashling with the high-pitched voice yells at everybody how Totally Selfish Anarchy(tm) is the only way for any race to advance up the ladder of sentience. Then there are those "free sensuous VR experiences" that really just send you to a Unity Arcana Dance, and the "traveling art shows" that the Myriapods think will inspire you to reject the decadent Culture of Entertainment they say has poisoned human civilization. A lot of aliens are fanatically determined to make humans see the error of our ways.

But humans have always had it easy compared to the Mandasars. We never pissed off the Fasskisters.

The same way Mandasars specialized in medical stuff, the Fasskisters specialized in robotics. You wouldn’t think there’d be much overlap between the two fields, but there is. Fasskister robots have a lot of biological components, because there are fancy things you can do with organic chemistry that are real hard to match with electronics. The other place medicine meets cybernetics is the whole area of nanotech: doctors really love teeny microscopic robots that can get inside a person’s body, snip away at tumors, scrape guck out of arteries, that kind of thing.

So Troyen always had tons of trade with the Fasskisters — selling sophisticated new tissues for use in robots, and buying smart little nanites for doctorish tricks. Both Mandasars and Fasskisters should have been happy with the booming business… except for one tiny problem: Fasskisters can’t stand royalty. It drives them positively manic.

A long time ago the Fasskisters had royals of their own, a whole separate caste like Mandasar queens; and overall these rulers were pretty decent types, competent, generous, not too tyrannical. In fact, that was the problem. One day, someone from the League of Peoples showed up and declared that the royals were sentient, but the commoners weren’t. Next thing you know, most of the noble caste left the home planet for upscale homes in the stars. The normal folks who were stuck behind got so mad they killed the nobles who stayed and swore they’d never tolerate monarchy again. Even after the commoners got civilized enough to be accepted into the League (a thousand years later), the Fasskisters were still totally rabid on the subject of crowns and thrones and palaces.

Samantha said it was a big psychological thing: the Fasskisters still had this bred-in drive to be ruled by royals, but they felt all betrayed and abandoned by their leaders, so they overcompensated with aggressive antimonarchical something or other. Like humans who don’t have a mother, and feel this big hole in their lives, even if they have kindly nannies and all the toys in the world.