Damn it to bloody hell, he'd danced into it blindly surehe had a good gift to give in that paper. And it had probably nailed the lid on the coffin, so far as Ilisidi's confidence he wasn't stupidly playing the same game her associates had accused humans of playing for centuries: undermining atevi belief, atevi institutions, all at the same time reserving supplies and fostering an atevi manufacturing program not for atevi's sake but only to get those supplies they needed for themselves.

For a ship maybe some humans had believed more strongly than others was going to return.

His eyes hurt. He pinched his nose. And the arm hurt, lying inert in his lap, perhaps objecting to two-handed keyboard work, perhaps objecting to how he'd slept on it — he'd no idea, but it ached.

From frenetic, the place had grown too quiet. He wanted company. But Banichi and Jago were off about various business, Tabini was probably dealing with the matter he'd dropped in Tabini's lap, Tabini was probably too angry to speak to him, or even preparing orders for his arrest, as he'd invited, who knew?

The very changes he'd taken office to moderate and conduct slowly and without damage were all let loose from Pandora's fabled box, without review, without committee approval, without advice — just fling open the lid and stand back, maybe with one final choice of intervening to try to moderate the effects —

But that choice, even to make it now, entailed human values, human decisions, human ethics; or, perhaps the wiser course — to stand back until atevi action made it clear what was likely to result from atevi values, atevi decisions, atevi ethics — and then decide again whether to interpose human wisdom, at least as the older of two species experiences, the one of the two species who'd been down the technological path far enough to see the flex and flux of their own cultural responses to the dawning of awareness of the universe. Human beings had surely had certain investments in their planetary boundaries, once upon a time. Humans had had to realize the sun was a star among other stars. The paidhi didn't happen to know with any great accuracy how humans had reacted to that knowledge, but he'd a troubled suspicion it could have set certain human beliefs on end.

Though that they couldn't work the numbers out exactly wouldn't have broken up associations, re-sorted personal loyalties, cast into doubt a way of looking at the universe — had it?

For all he knew, the way atevi handled the universe was hardwired into atevi brains, and that was what he was playing games with.

He didn't want to think about that.

He got up and wandered finally as far as the library, and took down delicate watercolored books of horticulture, one after the other, to find whether he knew the names.

Of a book of water plants he was mostly ignorant. It was stupid, in the midst of such desperate events, to go back to his computer and enter words, but he was incapable of more esoteric operations.

Saidin came in to ask whether the paidhi would care for supper in, and whether the paidhi's personal staff would eat at the same time or at some later time.

The paidhi didn't know. The paidhi's staff didn't fill him in. He didn't know whether he'd be here for supper or whether he'd be hauled off to confinement.

But that wasn't Saidin's question.

"I can only hope your surmise is more effective than mine," he said. "Nand' Saidin, I have not been a regular or prompt guest. I apologize for myself and my staff."

"Nandi," Saidin said with a bow, "you are no trouble. Do you admire water gardens?"

The book. Of course. "I find the book beautifully drawn."

"I think so. Have you seen the Terraces?"

"On the Saisuran?" The book held a major number of plates of water plants, delicately rendered in pastel tones. "No, I fear the paidhi has very few chances. Malguri was an unusual excursion."

"If you have the chance, nand' paidhi, I recommend them. They're quite near Isgrai'the. Which is very popular."

He was intrigued — by the idea of the famous water gardens, and the Preservation Reserve at Isgrai'the. By the notion he might someday have such a chance.

But most of all he was intrigued by madam Saidin's unprecedented personal conversation. The book, almost certainly a favorite. One was glad to discover a mutual, noncontroversial interest in a subject; a source of ordinary, mundane conversation.

She'd felt the tension in the house and in the guest — and the protector of the house had followed her inquisitorial duty, perhaps; or just — counting that word of doings in the house hadonce found their way to Ilisidi —

He was too damn critical. Too damn suspicious. Wilson's fate beckoned: the man who never laughed, never smiled.

"Nand' Saidin, thank you. Thankyou for recommending Saisuran. I'll hope for it, that I will be able to see it. I'd like that. I truly would."

"One hopes for you, also, nand' paidhi," Saidin said, and left the room, with the paidhi wondering where that had come from, or what Saidin had really meant, what she'd heard from what source inside Tabini's apartments — or whether he'd simply presented her a dejected picture, sitting there staring at the curtains, so morose that the provider of hospitality had simply done her duty for the lady who wanted her guest taken care of.

He knew the mental maze he'd wandered into, wild swings between atevi and human feeling, making only half-translations of concepts in that strange doppelganger language his brain began to contrive in his unprecedented back-and-forth translation, in his real-time listening to one language and rendering it into the other, no time for refinement, no time for precision — leaping desperately from slippery stone to slippery stone, to borrow the image of the book open on the footstool — the water flowers, the stones, half obscured in sun on water —

A visitor would be very foolish to try that pictured crossing. He knew the treachery of it, from Mospheiran streams — which Saidin, in their crazed, divided world, couldn't visit, either.

There was a place like that once and long ago — a stream set well off the road most took up from a remembered highway, a dirt road he'd hiked up from the ranger station, stones over which water lapped in summertime —

But if one went far, far from that pool, farther up, they'd said in a youngster's hearing, a waterfall poured from high up the side of the mountain. One couldn't hear anything but thundering water from the foot of that waterfall, one just stood there, feeling the mist, enveloped by blowing curtains of it —

Wind-borne, the gray sky above him, and the wind racing off the height: the gale-force winds bent down the trees and swept down deluges on the young and very foolish hiker. He'd been soaked to the skin. He'd had to walk down toward that ranger station to keep from freezing.

There were so, so many half-thought experiences that had brought him to what he was, where he was. He remembered walking long after he thought his knees couldn't stop shaking. He'd known he'd been stupid. He'd known he could freeze to death — at least he'd known that people did, in the mountains; but twelve-year-old boys didn't — he wouldn't, he couldn't, it didn't happen to him.

In fact it hadn't. A ranger had come out looking for him on that trail and brought an insulated poncho. The ranger had said he was a stupid kid and he ought to know better.

Yes, sir, he'd said meekly enough, and he'd known then that even if he might have made it, he'd come close to not making it, and he was aware hiking up there with no glance at the sky hadn't been the smartest act of his life.

But he'd never forgotten, either, the storm sweeping sheets of water off the top of the falls. He'd never forgotten being part of the water, the storm, the sound and the elements up there. He'd felt something he knew he'd never forget. He'd wondered on that shaky-kneed, aching way down if the ranger ever had.