“You’re insane.”

“No. By all you say about an oncoming threat, we and you don’t have two hundred years to learn one another and fight a mistaken war over trivialities. Ask the Mospheirans what they think of sharing the station. They won’t like the idea at all; but they may not refuse it. Atevi don’t want to share it, either; but they know Jase, they think he’s been telling the truth, and they’re disposed to work with you and with the Mospheirans to gain their own say. It’s a situation they know they have to live with.”

“You mind my conveying this to them?” Ramirez asked, sitting in a similar attitude, arms on the table. Ogun frowned, no different than his other frowns.

“I’d be happier with free access to the Mospheiran delegation, but I don’t think you want us to have that, as much chance as we’ve had to do it beforehand.”

Ramirez cast a glance aside at Ogun.

“What do you want in exchange,” Ogun asked, “to arrange this delivery of goods? What coin are we going to trade in?”

“Ideas, captain. Atevi understand that commerce. Knowledge. The agreement that they’ll run this station.” It wasn’t the end of the agreement; there was the question about whose law was going to prevail, but the first objective was possession of the station. “Tabini-aiji declared the terms he wants; I’ve relayed them. I’ve relayed to him what I know about the kind and amount of supply Phoenixhas used; I think he can do it.”

“Can he build another starship?”

That stopped him cold, for at least a handful of heartbeats. It was the logical extension of the request. It was completely reasonable, in that sense.

“I can relay that request.”

“Can he do it?”

“Yes. I think he can. How many are on the ship? How many does it take?”

“Jase didn’t tell you?” Ramirez asked.

“I ask the senior captain, who probably has figured the size of the request he’s making of the planet: how many does it take?”

“Up here? To man the station and handle the equipment? Five hundred minimum. To build… varies. Several hundred at mining; several hundred at refining; several hundred at fabrication…”

“The old figure, the first figure, was three thousand.”

“Twice that. Twice that.”

“Five shuttle trips to start.”

“Mr. Cameron, this station is holed in a dozen places.”

“That’s not as difficult as not having a station, is it?”

“Why was there a war?” Ogun asked. “The Mospheirans say the atevi are inclined to war.”

Bren shook his head. “The War happened because humans moved in with atevi, allied with the wrong party in a chaotic situation, ignored their boundaries, and didn’t know what they were doing. Atevi didn’t see it coming, either. That’s why we have paidhiin. That’s why only one human after the dust settled was licensed to live on the mainland and mediate trade.”

“You turned on your own leaders.”

“Mospheira still pays me. I’ve objected. They keep putting money in my account, and I just don’t spend it. It’s their position I still somewhat work for them, despite my advisements to the contrary, and the plain fact is that I do mediate. They don’t want a war; the aiji doesn’t. None of us want your war, but if it comes here, we don’t see any chance of ignoring it.”

“Do they understand?” Ogun asked, shifting a glance to Banichi and Jago.

“Perhaps some,” Bren said.

“The solar system, is it? Do you have any concept?”

“I can tell you that if unwary humans thread themselves among the atevi, or ignore atevi presence on the planet, there might be another war. Territorial integrity is an imperative, a biological imperative with atevi. Living with atevi is simple. Living among them is difficult, impossiblefor humans who can’t understand that imperative is gut-level, emotional, life and death. If you work with atevi, the interface will be limited, regulated, and very narrow, exactly as it is on the planet, the same people, the aiji and the President of Mospheira, will control that interface; but the goods you want will arrive and youwill never notice the inconvenience.”

Ramirez gave a strange half laugh and shoved back from the table. “I’ve dealt with you for three years, and you’ve been a pain in the ass.”

“I tell you the truth.”

“Your own security,” Ramirez said, with a look up and at the end of the room. “Banichi and Jago?”

“Nadiin,” Bren said, without quite taking his eyes off Ramirez and Ogun. “The captain inquires whether he knows you.”

“We are the paidhiin’s security,” Banichi said.

“Assassin’s Guild.”

“Yes, Ramirez-nandi.” Banichi was very polite in his salutation.

“He calls you Lord Ramirez,” Bren said, and saw Ramirez take that in with mild embarrassment, in the Pilot’s Guild’s long pretense of democracy. Bren added: “Banichi and his partner aren’t security as your Guild defines it. They also have the aiji’s ear, and rank very high in their Guild.”

“Would they care to sit?”

“It’s not their tradition. But they will report, to those places where they report. You always have to assume their Guild knows what’s going on. It has to. They’re the lawyers.”

“With guns.”

“That custom limits lawsuits,” Bren said.

“And this Guild enforces the aiji’s law?”

“The aiji himself enforces the aiji’s law by hiring certain of this Guild; but likewise his opponents may do the same. But the law theyenforce, the law as the Assassins’ Guild sees right and wrong, has no codification, only tradition: that rule of theirs is the one constant, sir, in the whole flexible network of man’chi.”

“Man’chi: loyalty.”

“Don’t fall into the trap of defining their words in human terms. Man’chi: an ateva’s strong instinct to attach to an authority. As long as man’chi holds the organizational structure steady, there’ll be more smoke than fire in any dispute, and you negotiate with the head of the association. Man’chi transcends generations, settles disputes, brings atevi to talk, not fight. The War of the Landing happened because humans insisted on making associations in one man’chi and turning around and making them in another. We call that peacemaking; to them it was creating war. I can’t emphasize enough how dangerous that is.”

“So we don’t agree with them?”

“Agree with their leader. Not leaders. Leader. What we bring to this association, sir, is more than resources and engineering. There’s an expertise to contacting foreigners and finding out their intentions, one that might well have saved your outlying station. It’s the most important resource we have in this solar system, one you have now, in Jase Graham, in Yolanda Mercheson. There’s also an art to listening to your interpreters and not letting politics or your own needs reinterpret what they’re telling you. The Mospheirans have something you need: companionship, a nation, a place to belong; the atevi have something else you need: mineral resources, industrial resources, mathematics, engineering, a highly efficient organization, but more than all of that: adaptive adjustment to a species you don’t instinctively understand. You could stand on the ancestral plains in front of a lion, sir—I believe we both agree what a lion is—and you’d biologically understand what it might do. I submit to you that you can’t ask the lion, but that you’d more or less recognize a hungry one and one that wasn’t. With the atevi, with any species that didn’t evolve in earth’s ecosystem, all those signals, all those assumptions don’t reliably work. We’ll teach you what we’ve learned on this world. That, gentlemen, in your situation, is the most valuable thing.”

“You think we could talkto a species that blew hell out of our station and that probably got our records.”

“I think that if you’re dealing with a species which might be numerous, sophisticated, and very different, coming from a place we don’t know, the ability to figure them out and to talk, if it’s appropriate, might save us. I don’t say you have to like them. I’m saying you need to know whythey shot at you.”