Meanwhile the Mospheiran composites manufacturing facility, despite pleas by the pro-spacers, had lacked the spare parts to keep it functioning, because it couldn’t find customers outside the now defunct aircraft plant. Atevi-human relations had been peaceful for decades, and the defense implications of buying the few commercial jets Mospheira needed for domestic service from Patinandi Aeronautics on the atevi mainland just hadn’t figured with the legislature against the public frustration with high taxes. Even the humans at the top of the campaign for a human return to orbit had promoted chemical rockets as the way to go, because that was the way humans historically had done it, those were the plans they apparently did have, and because it was easier to sell a historicalconcept to the dim lights of the Human Heritage Party who had fallen into bed with them, politically speaking, than it was to sell the technologically more complex reusable vehicle that depended on the composites manufacturing facility they didn’t want to fund.

So thatpolitical bedfellowship had concentrated their lobbying efforts and the scarce tax money on their rocket program, for, supposedly, as the Treaty of Mospheira provided should happen, the simultaneous development of a human and an atevi space program. For decades after slow decades, through the paidhiin, the Mospheiran Defense Department had released only the minimal data that the Mospheiran government had to release to atevi to get the industry going that was ultimately going to feed both raw materials and finished goods to the human space effort on Mospheira—and in the way Mospheira liked to have such militarily dangerous exchanges, raw materials were going to get into Mospheiran hands sufficiently early to give Mospheira a running start.

He should know; some of it had already happened on his watch, brief as it had been. And on his predecessor, Wilson’s, before Wilson retired.

On the other hand, from what Jase said, the ship had questioned Mospheira very closely on that matter and discovered a truth Mospheira had no way to deny:

Mospheira couldn’t immediately or foreseeably launch a damn thing, manned or unmanned.

Probably the Mospheiran president in recent negotiations had told the truth to Jase’s captain and there had never been a secret rocket launch site even contemplated.

So there they were: atevi had been bothering no one when the petal sails of legend dropped humans in their midst and they’d built their way up from steam engines.

Atevi had barely been contemplating satellites and manned space last year, sure that the station was unmanned and the only humans were on Mospheira, when a new thunderbolt of human presence in the skies had fallen on the world; and when blueprints guaranteed to work without experimentation had descended electronically from the heavens.

In the last six months it had become a national mandate to get the pieces of the atevi space program reconfigured—that was the word that echoed through all departments— reconfigured. Tabini-aiji was in a race, a race to show results to his own uneasy people, a race to get a foothold in the heavens where atevi could maintain their say over the future of theirplanet—and this particular aircraft manufacturing facility was critical.

Manufacture of a spacecraft that had much the same materials base and much the same configuration as the planes this facility had built commercially was far faster than invention of a rocket-driven heavy launch system from scratch.

Testing was on a materials-specifications basis, straight out of very clear records.

Training programs were already shaping up to teach a hand-picked set of atevi pilots the handling characteristics of the craft they were building.

As he understood the situation on the island, humanscientists were running to catch up to the technological dataflood pouring down from the heavens.

He’d personally discovered the information gap in the university physics and chemistry programs: Defense had kept some things sequestered—FTL was only one example of it. The University hadn’t taught him or his predecessors what it didn’t have access to, and, wondrous to say, the people in Defense who’d understood the data had died, and their successors had just guarded the file drawers without knowing what they were sitting on… until the downloads from the ship in a matter of seconds had obsolesced the secrets the Defense Department was keeping.

So now the executive branch of the Mospheiran government had no cards to play. Atevi, holding the principle continent, held most of the developed mineral resources. Humans, on the large, mountain-centered island, had to trade fish for aluminum and copper. And human orders for those supplies hadn’t yet increased, possibly because the human legislature hadn’t moved to authorize the trade; but the aiji had with one pen stroke authorized atevi mines to produce what this ship needed.

Ceramics and plastics as well as aircraft were all mainland items that Mospheira imported. Oilwas an import from the mainland. There was oil to the north of the island, offshore, but that had lain right near the highest priced real estate on the island and that development had stalled because the oil supply from the mainland had never been threatened since that discovery.

The atevi head of state was no fool. The atevi head of state had sold aircraft and oil to the island at very good prices—just as his father before him had done. Aviation guided by the paidhi’s reports and the human desire for trade had run out of domestic market and diverted its ambitions toward satellites. It needed a launch vehicle which it planned to build on the island, but to achieve that it had to bring atevi industry up to such a capability itself in order to supply the components. So even before the arrival of the ship was a suspicion in the skies, rockets of Mospheiran design were on the negotiating table, and Patinandi Aeronautics on the mainland had become Patinandi Aerospace.

The ship arrived: the heavy lift rockets Mospheira envisioned were a dead issue. Plans for a reusable spaceplane arrived from the heavens and in one dayafter accepting the concept as viable the aiji in Shejidan had ordered Patinandi to shift its production of parts sufficient for the commercial air fleet to a somewhat older but still viable facility during the building of an auxiliary aircraft plant.

Consequent to that pen stroke in Shejidan, and literally before another sun set, Patinandi in Sarini Province had begun packing up the dies and essential equipment for that production for freighting to a province other than Geigi’s, a province which was about to profit handsomely.

And with no one being cast out of a job, the aiji instantaneously and by decree converted the largest aircraft manufacturing and assembly plant in the world to a round-the-clock effort to build a spacecraft, no debates, no committees, no dithering. Amazinghow fast the whole atevi system could move now, considering that the space program had once been hung up on a committee debate on the design of chemical rocket slosh baffles for three months.

Half a year ago none of this had existed.

And depending on the technical accuracy of the paidhi’s trans-species interpretation and translation of what were in effect historical documents, that ship down there was going to fly sooner than he was supposed to admit even to Jase. The frame design was by no means innovative; the dual engines, the zero-g systems, the heat shield, and the interactive computers were the revolutionary items.

And as to whyatevi accepted this design without the usual debate on the numbers that had previously absorbed atevi attention and slowed projects down to a crawl, why, the numbers of this craft were clearly felicitous and beyond debate, even its engines and computers. Down to the tires it landed on, it was an historical replica of an actual earth-to-orbit craft named Pegasuswhich had plied the skies of the human Earth for two decades at a similar gravity and on a similar mission, which had never suffered disaster or infelicity of any kind, and which had existed in harmony with the skies and the numbers of infinite space until its retirement, a craft thereby proven to have been in harmony with the universe and to have brought good fortune to its designers and its users.