“I am determined on that, daja-ma.”

Tabini had moved closer. Bren saw him. And Tabini moved again, this time to intervene, all casualness, all smoothness and ease.

“Your aishid and Geigi’s are waiting, nand’ paidhi. Dami-daja, we should let the paidhi-aiji get his distinguished guest home. Lord Geigi has a flight tomorrow and a long train ride to get there. Nand’ Bren, we hope there will be somesleep for you both tonight. We have kept you so late.”

“We shall manage, aiji-ma.” Bren speared Geigi with a glance and flung another toward the door, a signal. He bowed to Tabini, and to Damiri, and had to pass Ilisidi on his way—not without a sharp glance in return. He bowed. And he got a look back that made his skin prickle.

Well, he had tried. For good or for ill, he had stepped into that sticky relationship and tried to patch the wounds. It was family business, now. It was as much as he could do, and he was glad the boy was abed. One hoped he was sound asleep, because the dowager was still there and showing no sign of leaving.

He gathered up his aishid, Banichi and Jago, Tano and Algini, in the foyer. Geigi collected Tema and his company, and they were very quickly out the door, escaped into the coolth and lower emotional pressure of the hall, a startling, ear-numbing silence around their presence.

“Bravepaidhi,” Geigi said.

“It had to be said,” Bren said as they walked together. It was only a short distance to Bren’s own front door—that being the first apartment after the aiji’s.

One still heard silence behind them as Tabini’s doors shut. And the dowager, Cenedi, and herbodyguard definitively had not yet left Tabini’s apartment.

He was not sure he wanted to know what might happen back there, but he had done as much as he could, and perhaps more than he should. Black Guild uniforms were securely about them both, now, the presence of those nearest and most faithful, in every emotional sense. And he didn’t know whether he wasgoing to sleep tonight, playing that business over and over and trying to think of what he should have said, and whether he should have said less.

“Return becomes a relief, Bren-ji,” Geigi said. “In my steel world up there, in the atevi sector, I am free. The Guilds cooperate, and our little community is so reasonable.”

“May it remain that simple,” Bren said. They reached their own door, and Banichi or Jago had already passed a signal. It opened just as they got there, and Narani and Jeladi met them to take coats and ease their way into the safe quiet of a house at rest.

Interior lights were dimmed. There was not a sound of revelry to be heard, and the air smelled only of the flowers in the hallway. The aiji’s had not been the only party going on. His domestic staff and Geigi’s had held their own farewell celebration; but in the discreet way information flowed in a well-put-together staff, he had absolute faith they would have begun to set things in order once they knew the party in the aiji’s residence was ebbing down. He was sure that nothing now was out of order, and that he would find all the preparations for Geigi’s trip were on schedule.

He thanked Narani and Jeladi, who had stayed awake and dressed to let them in, and he dismissed Geigi and his bodyguard to two servants who turned up quietly in the inner hall—Geigi’s valets appeared; and his own valets, Supani and Koharu, had not gone to bed yet either.

“Koharu, if you will attend my aishid,” he said. His bodyguard was perfectly capable of seeing to their own persons, and usually did so, but they had a short turnaround before them, with breakfast scheduled for daybreak, and that train trip to make to the spaceport. Anything that would aid his bodyguard to get a little more sleep tonight was to the good, and Koharu went off in that direction.

Geigi, however had not gone to his room. Geigi quietly dismissed his own bodyguard, with his servants, and cast him a significant look.

“A moment, nadi-ji,” Bren said to Supani and Supani bowed and stood aside.

Geigi said quietly, “A moment of conversation, Bren-ji.”

“My office,” Bren said, and weary as he was, came quite, quite awake. It was nothing casual that brought a request to talk at this hour. He was sure of that.

He led the way into his small office and shut the door when they were inside. “Is it a one-pot problem, Geigi-ji? Or would you wish another brandy?”

“Tea would not help my sleep and the other would hasten it too much, Bren-ji. What I have to say is fairly brief. But you should hear it.”

“Indeed.” He gestured Geigi to a sturdy chair, and took its mate, at the side of the office. “I am listening.”

“The children. The young gentleman’s guests. And station politics,” Geigi said. “I have attempted twice to explain to the aiji. I have postponed saying anything to trouble you, in the notion that I would have the chance to speak to the aiji tonight. I did so. He has promised the young gentleman his festivity. You should know I argued against it.”

“Againstit,” Bren said. Geigi was the one who had conveyed the children’s messages, who had acted as intermediary in setting up the forthcoming encounter.

“The children the young gentleman knew on the ship,” Geigi said, “are, you recall, from Reunion.” Geigi cast a look at the side table, where a brandy service did reside. “I think I will have that brandy, if you will. But none of the staff to serve it, Bren-ji.”

“No need to trouble them,” Bren said, and got up and poured a small dose apiece, not that they either one had much capacity left.

Geigi took a sip, shut his eyes—composing his thoughts. Bren waited, not expecting good news.

The station’s politics—and mention of Reunion in connection with Cajeiri’s birthday guests—was not a well-omened beginning.

There resided an infelicitous fourdistinct populations currently on the space station. There were the ones atevi called the ship-humans, who had lived their whole lives aboard Phoenix.The ship had been absent from the world for centuries, and on its return had opened up the mothballed station and made contact with the planet.

The human enclave, centuries settled on the isle of Mospheira, were descendants of colonists who had come down from the space station, some to get freedom from the station authority, and the rest because the ship had left them and the station had lost so much population it could no longer sustain its operations. With the ship’s return, humans from Mospheira had reoccupied the station. That was the secondpopulation aboard.

But humans had not come up to the station alone. Atevi had come with them, the thirdpopulation, thanks to Tabini-aiji’s insistence on an atevi space program—and the fact that most of the necessary resources to build a shuttle operation were on the continent, and not on Mospheira. In return for materials and items the ship-humans sorely wanted from the world, which the vast continent could supply, Tabini had demanded an atevi share of the station, the building of an atevi starship and the training of atevi crew . . . in short, a piece of everything going—an instant leap from an earthbound civilization that believed shuttles would puncture the atmospheric envelope and let all the air escape—to awareness of the whole solar system and the galaxy beyond it. Starflight. Operation translight.

It had all come as a shock to traditional beliefs on the continent—and a shock to human perceptions of their situation as an earthly island expecting invasion from the mainland. The aftershocks were still rumbling through the world. But the agreement had worked for everyone—until the ship-humans finally decided to contact the colonists theyhad left at their former base of operations, at Reunion Station, light years removed from Alpha Station and the world of the atevi.