“Nadi-ji,” Bren said to his major domo, standing in the central hall to view it, “you’ve worked a wonder.” He walked farther, considered the positioning of a desk in the center of the room they proposed for his, and how, within the outside corridor, and by tools and options they had likely found in security’s kit, they had removed and taped a small table to the corridor wall, managed a vase containing dried grasses with three small stones meticulously arranged, and a dish for message scrolls, should any miraculously appear.

Loose furniture might horrify station authorities. But he was vastly touched.

The chairs within his room numbered three, the bed had a piece of tapestry draped across it catty-angled, and he had to imagine how much better his staff felt. Hefelt the tightness and the devotion in their arrangement… in human terms, felt warmed and comforted in senses that had learned to count flowers and colors of flowers in a vase almost as naturally as atevi brains registered that kind of information. They had made it far warmer, far more welcoming, a brave atevi gesture in a world otherwise steel and plastic.

“Thank you, nand’ paidhi. At what hour will you have breakfast?”

Minds were more comfortable with understandable decor, and bodies were happier with things on schedule.

“Nadi-ji, a small breakfast, on schedule as Shejidan judges it, if you please. I may nap, but wake me.”

They were happy in the praise, and went off to perform their miracles in whatever they had arranged as the official kitchen, likely as well their own quarters, where the servants’ hall would develop its customary jokes and pranks and irreverence, free of the lord’s affairs.

“Much, much better,” Jago said. “But tiny doorways. Poor Sabiso.”

The lump on her head had not gone down.

“Even on Mospheira doors are taller,” Bren remarked, one of those small windows of information which once in his career had been restricted. “We must have compromised, when we built houses together, before the War. Beware of ladders and stairs, Nadiin. Either they saved materials and heating and cooling as best they could when they built this place, or this is actually the scale of the remote ancestors.”

“Never considering felicity,” Algini said quietly. “Does one think so? Perhaps we’ll adjust those numbers, nandi, and this time the station will be fortunate.”

As if the lack of flower vases explained all the calamities that had befallen this station and the other… not that any of the staff attached to Tabini’s court believed the numerology with the fervor of the religious.

“One might say,” Bren replied, “never considering harmony among the residents; and that is infelicitous in the extreme. Let’s hope we can set things in much better order, baji-naji.” Given the workings of chance, the devil in the design.

The message tray set outside was so hopeful, so gently expectant of proper behavior.

And considering that, he truly felt he had a base from which to work, a base from which any otherdelegation from the aiji could work.

He entered his room, sat down at the desk, and opened up his computer.

“The clock says rest,” Jago admonished him.

“One small task,” he said. He looked at his watch and performed a calculation. “It’s a number of hours until my meeting with the captain. The Mospheirans are surely first on the agenda. They don’t get to rest. And theyhave to eat the local food. Jasi-ji didn’t recommend it. I, on the other hand, look forward to a fine breakfast.”

“Nandi,” Jago said, amused, and withdrew.

There was no question of pursuing what they had pursued in the apartment in Shejidan, under Tabini’s roof. Some questions simply were not to be asked, and Jago reverted to grand formality, left, probably to have no more sleep herself. Banichi and Tano and Algini were doing setup within the room they had appropriated, however quietly. The security module, like the very carefully negotiated galley, was meticulously thought out, very portable, piecemeal. Crates and baggage had disappeared in the general transformation. His security was happy.

He ticked down the list of crew, with a mind accustomed to numbers, in a language that utilized calculation in every simple statement… a skill at memorization acquired over years of study and experience in the very dangerous years of Tabini’s court. He reviewed names, everything Jase had told him about persons he might meet, their relationships, their spouses. Monogamy was the rule, occasionally serial. Offspring of high-ranking crew tended to be preferred into slots, but had to be capable of the rigid, computer-mediated training courses. Families had been split in the colonization. There’d been a lot of fatalities before the ship had returned, over a thousand lost with the station, and many still-extant families had lost members… it wasn’t considered polite to talk about the fact. In a society where everyone knew everything, discussions about such things were shorthand, and interpersonal understandings were intense and fraught with assumption. There was no one to tell. People swallowed their grief and just went on. The mere notion of people Jase regarded as essential to his welfare vanishing over a horizon had disturbed him, but more to the point, Jase had taken two years even to mention how it troubled him, or even to figure out why he paced the floor and grew furiously angry in their separations.

Jase had gotten better about it. Jase hadn’t mentioned it in their parting with the world, but it was implicit in Jase’s regret for leaving, his wish to have the freedom to come back… there was not a whole damned lot Mospheiran or easygoing about Jase Graham, and he called himself normal and sane.

He had assembled that kind of data on Jase into a profile that might fit the captains: quick explosions, a tendency to compromise their way through conflicts on the one hand and yet to store up points for future explosions, all grievances carefully inventoried. No one on the ship could get away from anyone else. Resolutions had to happen, sooner or later, and bare hands fights happened, weapons anathema in a family dispute. But the captains enforced absolute order, and isolation was a heavy, dreaded punishment among people who were never, ever, separated from each other.

Jase had volunteered to drop onto a planet among strangers and aliens. Jase had learned to speak a language of the earth of humans, that no one else spoke, because Jase, born of a father dead for centuries, had been destined to bedifferent. He’d been born to make contact with the former colonists, no matter how they’d changed.

Jase… and Yolanda Mercheson.

This… from two of the Phoenixcrew: separate by job, separate by choice, in their own strange way competitive and jealousof their relationship with Ramirez… it was likely foredoomed not to lead to friendship, even if it had led to love-making.

And both of them were different from Mospheirans—how different he hadn’t quite figured until he entered a verbal shoving match with Ogun, and saw the responses that had unnerved him in Jase ticking into action, one after the other.

He took notes for a paper he meant to write, notes in Ragi for a paper in Mosphei’. He’d been a maker of dictionaries, once upon a time, and still could find common ground with scholars like Ben Feldman and Kate Shugart, on Lund and Kroger’s team.

But in the contents of that paper, an explanation of foreign ways, he found himself possibly unique, possibly the only one but Jase who could see in what particulars they were strange to one another… possibly the only one but Jase who could spot the shoals and rocks onto which the Mospheirans might well steer; or the crew of Phoenix, since there was no right or wrong in it. Foremost of Mospheiran hazards, the Human Heritage Party had not the least idea how strange humans could get, on a world, on an island; on a ship, locked in close contact, communicating only on things everyone already knew. They thought “original humans” were their salvation; and there were no longer any “original humans.” Both sides had changed.