His staff did deserve half that bottle.

“Djossi flowers,” Gin said, recalling a prior conversation. “But it’ll be fall. We have it all figured.”

“Will it?” He had figured it too, and hoped it would be, and that the shuttle would be up there waiting for them, but he’d happily take bitter winter in their hemisphere, if it set his feet on the ground again and let him look up at a tame and healthful sun on a white sand beach.

“Absolutely,” Jerry said.

“We have our invitation to come up to the bridge soon as we get there,” Bren said. “That’s firm, from the top.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Gin said. Here, it verged on humor.

“So,” Bren said, “seeing they’re going to put us in so close to the station, and figuring we may have a fairly short time to dock, I wanted to issue a formal invitation now, while I have you all in reach. I want you, each and all, to visit my place on the coast, on the continent, as soon as you find it convenient. No great political problems. No fuss. It’s quiet. Remote from most everywhere. Boat and swim—well, it’s cold on that coast, but still, you can last a little while in the water, and there’s nothing predatory in the bay to worry about. All of you. Any of you. If you have trouble getting a visa over to the mainland, give me a phone call. I intend to buy myself a boat, my own boat, with all my accumulated back pay, which I think I may have earned, and have a real vacation. Maybe sail somewhere they can’t find me, oh, for at least a week.”

“To vacations!” Barnhart said, lifting his glass.

So it went. He hadn’t intended to stay as long as he did. But half a glass later he began to ask himself why he wanted to go back to quarters, where there was absolutely nothing urgent waiting for him, where staff knew absolutely what to do and how to pack up. He stayed a little longer, thinking, like Cajeiri, that they would all go their ways and there was no real prospect they would ever share another such evening, never again as they were. They had gotten to be family, the ones of them who had come up from the planet. He would go down with the dowager and with his own staff, Gin would go her own way, back to the hallowed halls of Mospheira’s largest university, and the government. Her staff would scatter.

While Jase—Jase, who was planetary by adoption, at least—

He wasn’t sure he would get Jase back on the planet again, not when Jase had worked into the captaincy they had insisted on giving him. Jase had protested it. But he saw Jase forming ties of his own among his own shipboard cousins and kin, in ways a shipborn human had to have been set up to want very badly. He’d had no particular job that anybody understood; now he had universal respect from his cousins.

And could he fault Jase, who was understudying their senior captain, Sabin, and who was winning that hardest of all prizes, Sabin’s professional acceptance?

Jase didn’t know what was happening to him, yet. Jase didn’t acknowledge it, but he had his own idea that Jase wasn’t going to resign his captain’s seat any time in the near future… or that if he got down to the planet, he’d find his way back to space.

“I’ll miss you,” Bren said to Gin, and made it inclusive. “I’ll miss all of you. Take me up on the invitation. I really mean it.”

“Goes without saying,” Gin said, “any of you or yours, in my little digs in the city. This whole scummy group will keep in touch.”

Best of intentions. Best of hopes. In his experience, people didn’t ever quite get around to it… didn’t visit him, at least, maybe because he didn’t find the time to visit them, either. Something always intervened. Whatever direction he planned, events shoved him some other way. Some emergency came up. Ties grew fainter and fewer, especially to humans on Mospheira. Even his own family.

He was getting maudlin. He wasn’t twenty any more. He was getting farther and farther from twenty, and he still considered himself an optimist, but lately that optimism had gotten down to a more bounded, knowledgeable optimism about his own intentions, a pragmatism regarding his own failings, and a universe-view tinged with worldly realism and personal history. He didn’t believe in the impossible as wildly, as passionately as he once had. Knowing had gotten in the way of that. And what he knew depended on an experience that included betrayals, and his own significant failures to pursue personal relationships across very difficult boundaries of distance and profession.

And when he got down to thoughts like that, it was a clear signal not to have any more brandy.

“Got to go,” he said after a suitable time of sitting and listening in their, admittedly, technospeak society. By now Banichi and Jago had gotten involved, since Jerry had gotten the notion to reschedule the car races, this time as a station event, and Banichi, conscious of his lord’s dignity in the station environment, had demurred and thought it might not be the thing to do.

It was the first crack in their society. It had already come, and on such a small issue.

There was nothing practical to do but agree with Banichi, that their schedules were unforeseeable at present, but surely they knew why Banichi had refused, and that time wasn’t the only issue.

He excused himself and his staff, thanked them one and all, made protestations of lasting correspondence, collected their half of the brandy and promised to see the engineers in the morning.

“I’ll miss them,” he said as they walked back into the foyer between the two wings, Jago carrying the trophy bottle. “These are very good people, nadiin-ji.”

“Indeed, nandi,” Banichi agreed, and Jago: “Gin might truly visit the estate.”

Rely on Jago to mind-read him in a situation, even cross-culture.

“I earnestly hope she does,” he said. And from that perspective—it seemed more likely. Gin was like him, married to the job, to her robots and her computers. She was over sixty and gray-haired and while the two of them had nothing in common, except this voyage—they did share lifelong passions for things that transcended the need for family ties and picket fences.

Jago was right, he decided, cheering up: if there was one person of the lot who might show up at his door some day, it was Gin. Djossi flowers. The memory of perfume on the air. Himself and Gin, maudlin together on a certain evening in the deeps of space, far, far from home. They’d kept one another sane, in the human sense.

While these two, Banichi and Jago, had kept him solidly centered in the atevi world… and helped him keep a grip on what was important. Helped save his neck—uncounted times. And had a way of jerking him back to sanity.

“Time we packed the duffles,” he said. “Time I finished my records.”

Chapter 2

This is, I hope, the final entry before I transmit this letter to you. Catching the first shuttle home is at a high priority right now, maybe not an unrealistic hope, so I’ll be able to phone you on a secure line shortly after you receive the file.

We’re informed we’re going to drop into the solar system, Jase swears, extremely close to the station—it sounds reckless to me, but Jase is very sure… and supposedly the area is clearer of debris than farther out would be, because of the planetary system sweeping it clean, so it will actually be safer than farther out. So I understand. I can’t conceive of doing much business on the station, though there may necessarily be some meetings for me to attend to, notably including a general debriefing with Captain Ogun.

Primarily, my first duty is going to bring me downworld to inform Tabini as fast as I can, and that debriefing is going to take longest. Once that’s done, I’m actually free for a while, I earnestly hope, and I can get over to the Island and see you. I just promised Gin Kroger a vacation at the estate, but I want you to come across the straits first of all, brother, just as soon as I can get a few days free—I’ll stretch my time off into a month, if I have to get a decree from Tabini to do it, and we’ll finally take that trip down to the reef, with no duties, no starched lace, just walk barefoot on the deck…