"Day after tomorrow," Jago said, and sipped her tea. And hadn't, he realized a moment later, answered his question about Banichi's whereabouts at all.

Dammit, he thought. He got more information out of Cenedi and Tano than he did out of either of the two security personnel he counted closer to him.

But it wasn't the time or the place to insist. Banichi would turn up, probably as Jago disappeared somewhere, as they'd been doing. Jago'd mentioned a security station, and somehow Jago and Tabini andBanichi knew every move he made and every breath he took, which might indicate the nature of the security station they were occupying and the fact that the porcelains might be listening.

Which might indicate that, with a country at risk, or what passed for one in atevi reckoning, Tabini might not find it within his conscience to take him totally on his word.

Or dared not, with the amount of controversy he'd generated, and apparently a major crisis in the Assassins' Guild, leave him unwatched for a second.

Celebration might be in order. But solutions didn't fall into your hands, strangers didn't agree with you for no reason of advantage to themselves, and aijiin, presidents, and likely ship captains as well, when they had constituents at issue, didn't just do the logical, straightforward, economical — or trusting — thing. Not that he'd ever observed.

CHAPTER 13

" I've got a very little of a few languages," Graham said, on the phone patch-through. " I'm as close as we could come. I'm a history hobbyist. That's how I'm elected to the atevi side of this— I've got a background in history. The other of us, going to the human population— she's got all the technical background you want, but no study in languages at all. Nobody has, much. We don't have different languages. I just got into it because I was interested in history, and I got curious. And I teach, too. It was something I thought I ought to know."

"You're a teacher?" Bren asked, and poured a cup of tea from the pot on the office desk, with growing visions of a gentle, professorial young man, politically naive, dropping into political hell.

"Well, computers most of the time, but somebody's got to write the lessons for the kids. I gave them language study. I thought it was good for them. But not too many were interested."

"Know a noun from a verb?"

" Yes, sir. Conjugations, declensions, participles—"

" That'sgoing to be useful. I've prepped another data-load for you this morning, atevi-Mosphei' grammar notes with at least the basics — you're not going to understand half of it. A handful of phrases in the remote case you have to communicate with somebody other than me. We're not dealing with a human grammatical structure, as you'll find out. Good in math?"

"Up to a point, sir. Why?"

"Because you have to do some calculation constantly. The number of persons in a polite sentence isn't by head count, it's by calculations of rank plus real number, and there are forms you use to avoid jinxing somebody when you haveto use an infelicitous number of persons. You'll love it. I'm soglad to have somebody from the ship who's going to understand that this isn't a straightforward matter of word-for-word translation. I've been trying for years to make my department heads understand that answers one time aren't the answers the next time. If I haven't scared you by now, you may do."

"I'm at least daunted."

"Good judgment. Atevi and humans have deep but solvable conceptual differences, moderately significant psychological differences, and I'll tell you, we were just on the verge of important breakthroughs including space missions when you turned up in the sky scaring hell out of the children. Any background in negotiation? Politics?"

" History. Just— history."

He had an academic on his hands. God help them. Or a dilettante.

"Good vocabulary?"

"A pretty good one. Better than some."

"I've asked your captain to give you real authority to negotiate. And stand behind you. Will he?"

" I've heard what you said. He told me just— call if I had a question and I'm supposed to get a thorough briefing before I go down, on what we're going to need, on the lift vehicle and after. I'll need regular communications with the ship. I can get the technical details in download. "

Either the captain was naive — a possibility — or the captain was sending them somebody who didn't know enough to spill anything under,interrogation.

But Jason Graham wasn't stupid. A man who made a hobby out of history and languages wasn't stupid.

A fool, maybe. That was a different matter.

"You have any concept of politics, Graham? How do you make critical decisions up there? What's your procedure?"

"Guild vote, sir. The captains lay out what's to be done, or sometimes the technicians do, and then we all lay out what our choices are— it's not like a whole country, sir, it's a lot more like we've got information, and we've got what we don't know, and we've got to figure."

"How did you decide to come back, for example?"

A silence for a moment. " Well, we were always going to. And we decided it was a good time."

"Why was it a good time?"

"Well, because we've got another station, and linking up the two of them could give us a lot more options where we could go."

"Fueling, you mean."

"And supplies."

"What are you going to trade for?"

Another small silence. " I don't know, sir. I think that's something that's still pretty far off, the way the station looks right now."

Meaning the station needed population, the station needed workers, and the ship —

The ship, as it always had, wanted refueling. The ship wanted provisions. And the world was supposed to provide that, free of charge, one could guess, after one hell of a lot of man-hours of dangerous effort producing what the starship could drink down at one gulp and leave.

But as Jason Graham said, there were things to do first. They were stuck with the ship as a factor. They had a station decaying more rapidly by the year, the ship was a shortcut to saving it — which was worth something, damn sure.

And the ship — couldn't get anything off the planet. By everything he knew — it couldn't get anything that wasn't brought to it in space. That meant the world had leverage.

"Meaning they'll send down their figures as they develop them."

" Essentially, sir, but— can we talk very frankly?"

"Anything you want to talk about. Go ahead."

"I'm volunteering because I want to do something more with my life than push keys, which is the job I've got, but I don't want to get my throat cut, and I don't want to end up somebody's hostage. Neither does Yolanda. It won't work, for one thing. The captain says he won't deal there to get us back. If anything goes wrong we're on our own. So— how safe are we?"

"You'll have the protection of Tabini-aiji. That's very safe. I can't say about your companion, but Mospheira's quiet to the point of tedium under most circumstances. I'll make every effort to meet you when you arrive. Are you coming down at the same time?"

"That's what we plan. If we can get one of us a way to get to the other place."