The unspoken, two hundred-year-agenda, the one every human knew and the paidhi walked about scared out of his mind because he knew—because even if atevi guessed by now that getting themselves a space program meant developing materials as useful to humans as to themselves, even if he could sit in the space council meetings and surmise that every atevi in the room knew what they developed had that potential, it was a question he never brought up, not with them, not with atevi he knew the best—because it was one of those impenetrable thickets in atevi mindset, how they’d take the knowledge if it became impossible to ignore it. He’d certainly no idea at all how it would play outside Tabini’s court, out across the country—when popular novels still cast human villains, and they appeared in shadow, in nebai, in the machimi plays— nebai, because they couldn’t get human actors…

Humans were the monsters in the closet, the creatures under the bed… in a culture constantly on its guard against real dangers from real assassins, in a culture where children learned from television a paranoid fear of strangers.

What were humans really up to on Mospheira? What dark technological secrets was Tabini-aiji keeping for himself? What wasin the telemetry that flowed between the station in space and the island an hour by air off Tabini’s shores?

And why did some loon want to kill the paidhi?

He had a space council meeting tomorrow—nothing he considered controversial, a small paper with technical information the council had asked and he’d translated out of the library on Mospheira.

No controversy in that. None in the satellite launch upcoming, either. Communications weren’t controversial. Weather forecast wasn’t controversial.

There wasthe finance question, whether to add or subtract a million from the appropriation to make the unmanned launch budget add up to an auspicious number—but a million didn’t seem, against six billion already committed to the program, to be a critical or acerbic issue, over which assassins would swarm to his bedroom.

There was, occasionally smoldering, the whole, sensitive manned versus unmanned debate—whether atevi should attempt to recover the human space station, which was in increasing disrepair, with its tanks empty now, in its slow drift out of stable orbit.

The human policy wasn’t to scare anyone by bringing up the remote possibility of infall in a populated area. Officially, statistically, the station debris would come down in the vast open oceans, in, oh, another five hundred years, give or take a solar storm or so—he couldn’t personally swear to any of it, since astrophysics wasn’t his forte, but the experts said that was what he should say, and he’d said it.

He’d advanced his modest paper on the topic of mission goals at his inaugural meeting with the space council, proposing the far from astonishing concept that lifting metal to orbit was expensive, and that letting what was already orbiting burn up was not economical, and that they should do something with the dead, abandoned station before they sank large resources into unmanned missions.

Manned space advocates of course agreed immediately, with celebration. Astronomers and certain anti-human lobbies disagreed passionately. Which put the question into the background, while council members consulted numerologists on truly important issues such as (the currently raging question) whether the launch dates were auspicious or not, and how many dates it was auspicious to approve in reserve—which got into another debate between several competing (and ethnically significant) schools of numerology, on whether the current date should be in the calculation or whether one counted the birthdate of the whole program or of the project or of the date the launch table was devised.

Never mind the debate over whether the fuel chamber baffle in the heavy lift booster could be four-partitioned without affecting the carefully chosen harmonious numbers of the tank design.

The truly dangerous issues that he could think of, lying here flat on his back, waiting for assassins, were all the quiet ones—the utilization of the station as an atevi mission goal was one item of some controversy he’d strenuously advocated, now that he began to add up the supporters, some of them less reasonable, behind the genteel voices of the council.

And always factor into any space debate the continual exchange of telemetry and instructions between Mospheira and the station, which had gone on for two hundred years and was still going.

A certain radical element among atevi maintained there were weapons hidden aboard the abandoned station. The devoted lunatics of the radical fringe were convinced the station’s slow infall was no accident of physics, but a carefully calculated approach, perhaps in the hands of humans secretly left aboard, or instructions secretly relayed from Mospheira, now that they knew about computer controls, which would end with the station descending in a blazing course across the skies, ‘disturbing the ethers to disharmony and violence,’ and creating hurricanes and tidal waves, as its weapons rained fire down on atevi civilization and placed atevi forever under human domination.

Forgive them, Tabini was wont to say dryly. They also anticipate the moon to influence their financial ventures and the space launches to disturb the weather.

Foreign aijiin from outside Tabini’s Association actually funded offices in Shejidan to analyze those telemetry transcripts on which Shejidan eavesdropped—the numerologists these foreign aijiin employed suspecting secret assignments of infelicitous codes, affecting the weather, or agriculture, or the fortunes of Tabini’s rivals… and one daren’t call such beliefs silly.

Actually Tabini did call them exactly that, to his intimates, but in public he was very kabiu, very observant, and employed batteries of number-counters and geometricians of various persuasions to study every utterance and every bit of intercepted transmission, just as seriously—to refute what the conservatives came up with, to be sure.

From time to time—it was worth a grin, even in the dark—Tabini would come to the paidhi and say, Transmit this. And he would phone Mospheira with a segment of code that, transmitted to the station, would be complete nonsense to the computers, so the technicians assured him—they just dropped it into some Remark string, and transmitted it solely for the benefit of the eavesdroppers, and that fixed that, as Barb would say. Numbers would then turn up in the transmission sequences that burst some doomsayer’s bubble before he could go public with his theory.

That, God help them all, was the space program. And that was not worth a grin. That was everyprogram they promoted. That was the operation of the council and the hasdrawad and the tashrid and the special interests that operated in the shadows—radical groups among those special interests, groups that called the Treaty of Mospheira a mistake, that called for those things the most radical humans—and God knew there were those—suspected as existing in extensive plans and Tabini dismissed as stupid, like another attack on Mospheira.

Humans might have no illusion of welcome in the world—but there were certainly the serious and the non-serious threats. Serious, were the human-haters who focussed on the highway dispute as a human plot to keep the economy under Tabini’s thumb—which cut much too close to the truth neither the paidhi nor the aiji wanted in public awareness.

There was, thank God, the moonbeam fringe—with a slippery grip on history, the laws of physics, and reality. The fringe went straight for the space program (one supposed because it was the highest and least conceivable technology) as the focus of all dire possibility, ideas ranging from the notion that rocket launches let the atmosphere leak out into the ether… to his personal favorite, the space station cruising at ground level causing hurricanes and blasting cities with death rays. Atevi could laugh at it. Humans could. Humor at the most outrageous hate-mongering did everyone good, and poked holes in assumptions that otherwise would lie unventilated.