No was a hell of a lot easier from orbit than from a few hundred miles away. I can’t visit the islandwas more palatable than I physically can, but won’t.

But what could he do? He’d told his brother—he’d tried to tell his mother that he didn’t want to go onto the island for exactlysuch reasons as the SunDrink/Harbor business. He didn’t want another phone call from his mother saying some damned extremist of one stamp or the other had vandalized her apartment building, because his picture had been on the news. He didn’t want his face in the news reports reminding every random lunatic in remote points of Mospheira that the object of a lot of local resentment had a vulnerable human family in their reach.

So he didn’t come. He lied. He dodged.

But this time the news was bound to let them know he could have come. He hadn’t anticipated the television broadcast… and that, this time, was going to be hard.

He switched over to solitaire, pretending to work rather than think. Ginny was doing useful work. The paidhi, who lived by mathematics and pattern arrangements, couldn’t win a single game for the next two hours, not a one.

Chapter 4

The stewards reunited coats and small bags with their owners during the last half-hour of approach.

There was the usual advisement: “The dock will be cold, nadiin.”

Understatement. Bren went aft, accepted his knee-length formal coat, bullet-proof vest and all, and wrestled it on in that slow-motion effort which was the only successful tactic in free-fall. Floating fabric had to be maneuvered just so, and lace cuffs had to be extracted from the sleeves and allowed to float.

He also had to get back forward and belt himself back into his seat without wrinkling the coat-tails. Ginny Kroger, herself in that battered parka, gave a helpful tug on the coat-tail and smoothed it behind him as he drifted down.

“Not the most sensible dress for freefall,” Bren muttered. “Didn’t have time to change.” On principle, he never changed half-and-half, no mixing, for instance, of a more practical casual crew jacket with the formal court trousers; and no mixing of Mospheiran clothing with atevi, either. When he was in court dress he was nand’ Bren, paidhi-aiji. When he was in island mufti and speaking Mosphei’, as he did aboard station from time to time, guesting with Mospheiran station officials, then and only then he was Bren Cameron. Never the two should confuse his often-drifting brain.

On this flight, to and from, he had been stiffly, doggedly nand’ paidhi, and he dressed to exit that way, in the rib-hugging coat… apt to freeze half through on the dock, but socially very proper.

He searched his small carry-on for his gloves. In vain.

The stewards made their final pass, gathering up loose items and advising passengers to put away every item that could break free or drift free.

The forward screen meanwhile showed them the station—then Phoenixherself, a huge, dust-stained wall of white. Tenders moved like dustmotes about her: robots. Ginny’s robots: she watched them with proprietary interest, and pointed out to him one of the oldest models.

“A-4. We’re upgrading the memory, refitting the grappling arm for the newer version. The frame won’t go out of use.”

Far, far different scene in Bren’s memory, than the desolation at his first approach.

The stewards meanwhile addressed a novice worker who hadn’t a clue that loose itemapplied to a pen in an unzippered pocket.

The imminent-maneuvering warning sounded, routine approach toward the docking mast. The forward screen showed them one of the unused sectors of the station, now, an unlovely, impact-pocked stretch of metal. It was nevertheless a sound section, if it was 21, which Bren was convinced it was—he could just make out the 2 and maybe the 1—but it was a battered and long-neglected section of the station, all the same, due refurbishment in the next scheduled expansion of habitable space on the frame.

They fixed what they could as fast as they could, and before it broke, pressed ahead on program. The concentration of effort lately was to get residential and systems operations sections repaired, assuring residences where the influx of workers could find accommodation. Every area opened meant more workers could come up from the planet, and that increased the speed at which they could work, but it also exponentially increased the need for services—

And that need got more companies involved, with their help and their own concomitant problems. Like Sun and Harbor, one of which was going to win, and the other, not. Development had been a snowball rolling downhill ever since the first shuttle flew. Now they were at work on the construction cradle that orbited independently—well, cradlewas premature, and orbitedwas a little optimistic. But it wouldbe a shipyard cradle: orbiting in a linked mass, herded by robot tenders and occasionally by human intervention in their few runabouts, they had pieces… modules, whole prefab cabins of the starship they were going to build, all mixed with pieces of the shipyard that was going to build it.

There was a lot of that, everywhere. If they had room, and it was built, they lifted it to orbit. They wasted not an iota of cargo space. They had elements of the exotic engines up here. None of them had a frame in which to function yet, let alone a hull to which they could attach, and they were not yet stable where they rode, but there they were, herded by robots. It looked a lot like the atevi-Mospheiran-Phoenix cooperation itself.

But with all the problems, he had to say both it and the threeway cooperative worked. Atevi operators ran robots designed by Mospheiran robotics experts—by Ginny Kroger, among others—using atevi-designed computer systems newly linked to Phoenixsensors and remotely monitored by crew. The plans for supercomputers necessary to run the starship were already undergoing analysis in atevi labs—God only knew what atevi would do with the supercomputers, or what politics that would turn up. Atevi dreamedmath and patterns, and hadn’t had human-designed computers and software in their hands for a week before someone was saying there were obvious advantages and obvious possibilities, and someone else was saying there was an obvious infelicity in this and that code.

Change, change, and change. But they built on a pre-tried design they’d drawn out of the newly-recovered archives. They’d had no need to invent their way to space. In fact some held that the act of invention shifted all-important numbers that had already proved fortunate, a scary, foolish and unnecessary modification—

That, they could have settled. But it wasn’t only atevi number theorists who threw monkey wrenches into what might have been a smoothly-running production line. The whole station refit and the shipyard assembly could have run a damned lot faster if Phoenixcommand hadn’t suddenly taken it in their heads that the ship refueling, which hadn’t been done since Phoenixhad arrived back in the system, had to be a priority.

He’draised objections to that with senior captain Ramirez, pitched his only fit of privilege, but in the labyrinthine ways of stationside politics, he’d lost. And fueling had proceeded, monopolizing robotics resources, taking up precious station construction budget when the mining operation, as one could anticipate, developed bugs.

But it was good to know sooner rather than later. They’d worked the bugs out of their plans and their equipment.

And now that was a refueled starship out there… which might be smart. Maybe it was. He supposed it let everyone sleep sounder at night. It made the crew happy, knowing that they weren’t sitting inert at dock while the station drew down power for no few of its systems. And could anyone blame them, when a Mospheiran union wanting a second annual vacation in the contract delayed critical components, or when an atevi launch manager delayed a shuttle five days to gain felicitous numbers for an engine?