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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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