"Thank you."

He sipped at his drink and closed his eyes. She watched the glass on his chest where his hands held it, and watched the liquid swill this way, that way, lethargic and eye-brown. She moved her gaze to his face and saw he had not changed; hair a bit darker than she remembered; swept away from his broad, tanned forehead and tied in a pony-tail behind. Fit-looking as ever. No older-looking, of course, because they'd stabilised his age as part of his payment for the last job.

His eyes opened slowly, heavy-lidded, and he looked back at her, smiling slowly. The eyes look older, she thought. But she could have been wrong.

"So," she said, "we playing games here, Zakalwe?"

"What do you mean, Dizzy?"

"I've been sent to get you back again. They want you to do another job. You must have guessed that, so tell me now whether I'm wasting my time here or not. I'm in no mood to try and argue you…"

"Dizzy!" he exclaimed, sounding hurt, pivoting his legs off the hammock and onto the floor, then smiling persuasively, "Don't be like that; of course you're not wasting your time. I've already packed."

He beamed at her like a happy child, his tanned face open and smiling. She looked at him with relief and disbelief.

"So what was all the run-around for?"

"What run-around?" he said innocently, sitting back in the hammock again. "I had to come here to say goodbye to a close friend, that was all. But I'm ready to go. What's the scam?"

Sma stared, open-mouthed. Then she turned to the drone. "Do we just go now?"

"No point," Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. "The course the GSV's on, you can have two hours here, then go back to the Xenophobe; it can match with the What in about thirty hours." It swivelled to look at the man. "But we need a definite word. There's a teratonne of GSV with twenty-eight million people on board charging in this direction; if it's to wait here it has to slow down first, so it needs to know for sure. You really are coming? This afternoon?"

"Drone, I just told you. I'll do it." He leaned towards Sma. "What is the job again?"

"Voerenhutz," she told him. "Tsoldrin Beychae."

He beamed, teeth gleaming. "Old Tsoldrin still above ground? Well, it'll be good to see him again."

"You have to talk him back into his working clothes again."

He waved one hand airily. "Easy," he said, drinking.

Sma watched him drink. She shook her head.

"Don't you want to know why, Cheradenine?" she asked.

He started to make a gesture with one hand that meant the same as a shrug, then thought better of it. "Umm; sure. Why, Diziet?" he sighed.

"Voerenhutz is coalescing into two groups; the people gaining the upper hand at the moment want to pursue aggressive terraforming policies…"

"That's sort of…" he burped, "re-decorating a planet, right?"

Sma closed her eyes briefly. "Yes. Sort of. Whatever you choose to call it, it's ecologically insensitive, to put it mildly. These people — they call themselves the Humanists — also want a sliding scale of sentient rights which will have the effect of letting them take over whatever even intelligently inhabited worlds they're militarily able to. There are a dozen brush-fire wars going on right now. Any one of them could spark the big one, and to an extent the Humanists encourage these wars because they appear to prove their case that the Cluster is too crowded and needs to find new planetary habitats."

"They also," Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, "refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value; carbon fascists."

"I see," he nodded, and looked very serious. "And you want old Beychae to get into harness with these Humanist guys, right?"

"Cheradenine!" Sma scolded, as Skaffen-Amtiskaw's fields went frosty.

He looked hurt. "But they're called the Humanists!"

"That's just their name, Zakalwe."

"Names are important," he said, apparently serious.

"It's still just what they call themselves; it doesn't make them the good guys."

"Okay." He grinned at Sma. "Sorry." He tried to look more business-like. "You want him pulling in the other direction, like last time."

"Yes," Sma said.

"Fine. Sounds almost easy. No soldiering?"

"No soldiering."

"I'll do it." He nodded.

"Do I hear the sound of a barrel-bottom being scraped?" Skaffen-Amtiskaw muttered.

"Just send the signal." Sma told it.

"Okay," said the drone. "Signal sent." It made a good impression of glowering at the man with its fields. "But you'd better not change your mind."

"Only the thought of having to spend any time in your company, Skaffen-Amtiskaw, could possibly disinduce me from accompanying the delightful Ms Sma here to Voerenhutz." He glanced concernedly at the woman. "You are coming, I hope."

Sma nodded. She sipped at her drink, while the servant laid some small dishes on the table between the hammocks.

"Just like that, Zakalwe?" she said, once the servant had gone again.

"Just like what, Diziet?" He smiled over his glass.

"You're leaving. After, what… five years? Building up your empire, sorting out your scheme to make the world a safer place, using our technology, trying to use our methods… you're prepared just to walk away from it all, for however long it takes? Dammit, even before you knew it was Voerenhutz you'd said yes; could have been on the other side of the galaxy, for all you knew; could have been the Clouds. You might have been saying yes to a four-year trip."

He shrugged. "I like long voyages."

Sma looked into the man's face for a while. He looked unworried, full of life. Pep and vim were the words that came to mind. She felt vaguely disgusted.

He shrugged, eating some fruit from one of the little dishes, "Besides, I have a trust arrangement set up. It'll all be looked after until I come back."

"If there's anything to come back to," Skaffen-Amtiskaw observed.

"Of course there will be," he said, spitting a pip over the edge of the veranda wall. "These people like to talk about war, but they aren't suicidal."

"Oh, that's all right then," the drone said, turning away.

The man just smiled at it. He nodded at Sma's untouched plate. "You not hungry, Diziet?"

"Lost my appetite," she said.

He swung out of the hammock, brushing his hand together. "Come on," he said, "let's go for a swim."

She watched him trying to catch fish in a small rock pool; paddling around in his long trunks. She had swum in her briefs.

He bent down, engrossed, his earnest face peering into the water, his face reflected there. He seemed to speak to it.

"You still look very good, you know. I hope you feel suitably flattered."

She went on drying herself. "I'm too old for flattery, Zakalwe."

"Rubbish." He laughed, and the water rippled under his mouth. He frowned hard and dipped his hands under, slowly.

She watched the concentration on his face as his arms slid deeper under the water, mirroring themselves.

He smiled again, his eyes narrowing as his hands steadied; his arms were in deep now, and he licked his lips.

He lunged forward, yelled excitedly, then cupped his hands out of the water and came over to her where she sat against some rocks. He was grinning hugely. He held his hands out for her to see. She looked in and saw a small fish, brilliant shimmering blue and green and red and gold, a gaudy splash of rippling light squirming inside the man's cupped hands. She frowned as he leant back against the rock again.

"Now just you put that back where you found it, Cheradenine, and the way you found it."

His face fell and she was about to say something else, kinder, when he grinned again and threw the fish back into the pool.

"As if I'd do anything else." He came and sat beside her on the rock.