“Unique to this plant,” the man said proudly, a statement which might as well have been, The only one in the world, although the atevi supervisor might not have been aware that Mospheira’s prototype autoclave had died the death of No Replacement Seals a decade ago.

It was more than the pitch of the steps he watched. He walked cautiously for other reasons, moving through this crowd of black-skinned, golden-eyed gods, expressionless and implacable in manner, all with local and some with national agendas, men and women all distinguished by colors of rank, of post, of heritage and association.

His security disliked this part of the tours. On invitation of the Director he climbed to a catwalk exposed to the view of no less than seven hundred strangers below, any one of whom—or their relatives admitted to the plant for the occasion—could turn out to be a threat to his life. Such would be unregistered and unlicensed operators, of course, of which the Assassins’ Guild and the law took a dim, equally lethal view; but still there was a threat, and he chose to put it at the back of his mind.

One of the lords constantly near him was, of course, lord Geigi, who outranked the lot, and who had already had his chance to do the paidhi harm; but there were lesser lords, and provincial elected representatives, and various secretaries and aides, all of whom had their small window of opportunity for whatever reason, including a deranged mind, to try to sabotage the atevi chance at space.

He was (while watching the crowd, the lords, the directors, and his step) negotiating dark, unfamiliar ladders above increasingly dizzy heights, occasionally with spotlights glaring in his eyes. He kept his hand at all times on the rail and refused to be hurried until, in this largest of all assembly buildings, he had a view of the whole floor.

He had no fear of heights. He skied. Or, well, he had skied, before the trips home had become an impossibility for him; and he lacked opportunity to reach the snowy Bergid, where atevi attempted the sport on new and chancily maintained runs. During this winter, he had grown accustomed instead to such catwalks and ladders, to echoing machine plants and clean-suited laboratories, to small spaces of structural elements that were diagrams on his desk back in the atevi capital of Shejidan.

This— thiswas the first sight of pieces that would become a spacecraft, pieces that were real, solid, tangible, pieces bound someday for space, the dream he’d studied so long, worked so hard, hoped so much, to have happen—in the generation after him.

The paidhi all this particular morning had been listening to the detailed problems of atevi engineers, technical matters and problems arisen from a rushed schedule and translated designs, plans and manuals and measurement standards in an alien language. That meant for several moderately pleasant hours he’d been doing the paidhi’s old, original job, patching up dictionaries.

Atevi engineers adopted or made up a word for something hitherto unknown to atevi, and the paidhi dutifully wrote it down and passed it to other engineers via the official dictionary on the computer links that went to all the plants now. Science and engineering were creating their own words for things for which atevi had had no word, no concept, a year ago. The atevi language as a whole had never hesitated to assume technical terms into its grammar—the word arispesawas a hybrid of which he was entirely innocent.

He had his case full of reports, besides, on what worked, what didn’t work well, and what the legislature, the Space Committee, or the laboratories and manufacturing plants upstream of the technological waters needed to improve. But, God, there wasn’t all that much to complain of. At the beginning of last fall he’d toured mines.

Records from the abandoned station, the library which had come along to this star with what had been intended as a colonial space-based establishment—the sort of thing the paidhi had used to turn over to the mainland a piece at a time—had in the past gone for trade goods. But now there was a new source of ideas in the skies, pouring them down for free. Primary among those gifts was the design thisspacecraft was using.

Whether Mospheira had already owned any of the records involved in this free transaction was an answer he still hadn’t gotten past Mospheira’s official silence, but he strongly doubted it. For one thing, the humans who had abandoned the space station to come down to the planet had done so in two waves. The first humans had landed by parachuting capsules into the planetary atmosphere, because the station officials had refused the would-be colonists the resources and the designsto build a reusable landing craft.

The second wave of the Landing had come down to the planet only after the ship had left, as they claimed, to find their way home; and after the station, increasingly undermanned, had begun to fail. Station officials at that time had lacked the resources and the manpower to build a reusable craft, so with what records they had, the last hold-outs and members of management had parachuted in, too, with no landing craft ever built. The station officials might have brought the library with them; or they might not. The craft described in the design sent down from the ship wasn’t heavy-lift like the chemical rockets of the Mospheiran pro-spacers. In the plans of the ship, the heavy-lift aspect didn’t matter. Raw material, the ship either had or could get in orbit the way their ancestors had gotten it, so the ship captain said. The essential thing was workers to use it. So Jason Graham said.

History also held certain troubling details of worker fatalities Jase had never alluded to, the very thing that had driven the colonists down to the planet—but once up there, upthere, dammit, atevi had a voice; and atevi would outnumber the ship crew, a matter hedidn’t allude to with Jase, either.

And the library might have had records of how to build such a craft; or it might not.

Or the atevi shell that had blown up Alpha Base during the War might have gotten more of the salvaged library than human authorities had ever admitted it had.

At the very least a lot of bitter politics had come between then and now. He’d never had the security clearance even as paidhi— particularlyas paidhi—to get into Mospheira’s highly classified library archive files to find out. He thought it even possible that somebody during the station-versus-colonists-versus-ship dispute had deliberately wiped them out of station records and left the only copy in the ship’s possession, to prevent the colonists getting off the planet without improving the industrial base.

But irony of ironies, Jasehad still had to parachute in, wave three, because the sad truth was that the wondrous starship couldn’t build the landing craft to which it had the design because it lacked the necessary manpower, and even if they somehow surmounted that difficulty, they still couldn’t fly the craft down, because no space-bound pilot had the skill to fly in an atmosphere.

So for all those reasons, and even though Ms. Yolanda Mercheson, the starship’s representative to Mospheira, was supposed to be arranging the building of a human-made ship identical to this one, he was increasingly sure that the ship that would first carry personnel and cargo up off the planet was the one he was looking down upon this very moment.

Even with the plans, humans on Mospheira no longer had the capacity to mount the construction effort he had in front of him. A lively aircraft manufacturing industry was a real asset to an accelerated space program. So were the skilled workers to reconfigure those molds and handle the composites.

Unfortunately humans on Mospheira didn’t have that resource, either. Oh, there wasan aircraft plant on Mospheira, but it had stopped manufacturing large jets, due to competition from the atevi industry on the mainland. Government subsidies necessary to sustain a virtually customerless Mospheiran aeronautics industry had been cut by the legislature in a general protest against taxes two presidential elections back, and the human aerospace workers had gone to other jobs.