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  Mostly there was no choice: there were few runways long enough to accommodate Shai-shan if something went wrong.

  “No time for drinks, nand’ paidhi,” the attendant said, pausing by his row. “I’m very sorry.”

  “I’ll have a fruit juice and vodka when we get up.” Launch usually had him a mass of nerves, and he liked to have a vodka beforehand to calm down, but he discovered he had no need for that, today. Sitting in his own seat was a victory. “Made it in time,” he said to Ginny, and heaved a sigh, telling himself it was, after all, true, and he was safe. “That’s all I ask.”

  “We did hold count a little,” Ginny asked, looking at her watch. “But we’re rolling on schedule.”

  “We hurried. The fortunate hours.” A Mospheiran might take a shuttle launch countdown as overriding everything else, but the exigencies of a shuttle launch had nothing against the atevi sense of timing and fortunate numbers, and Ginny did understand that. There were times things were done, as there were days and hours when nothing began. A memorial service and a shuttle flight weren’t remotely in each other’s consideration—except that neither would take place at an infelicitous moment.

  Shai-shan moved out, and made a ponderous slow correction onto her runway—she was not agile on the pavement.

  Above the entry to the cockpit, the bulkhead had the black and white baji-naji emblem, that tribute to Chance and Fortune, the devil in the otherwise fortunate numbers. Below it was a screen that showed them the runway.

  It trued up in the view.

  “Baji-naji,” Gin said, meaning, in human terms here goes nothing.

  And in atevi—here goes everything.

  The engines roared and the acceleration pushed them back. The thumping of the wheels grew thunderous, and abruptly stopped as the screen showed them blue sky.

  A split-screen showed the gear retracting safely below, and the ground and all the city falling away under them.

  Well, another few roof tiles would fall in Shejidan. The planners had thought they could cease using the public airport once the new dedicated spaceport went into operation, but this one, the old runway—crazy as it sounded to call it that, as if anything was old in this frantic, less-than-a decade push toward space—still was in use, if only for Shai-shan, Shai-shan was Shejidan’s shuttle. The citizens of Shejidan, even after so much inconvenience, prized their broken roof-tiles, gathered them up when they fell, patched their roofs and took pride in their personal sacrifices for the greatness of their city.

  Their shuttle. Their station was up there, too, available for anyone with average eyesight, if that person went aside from city lights, as atevi loved to do. Just ask them whose it was.

  Their starship, too, was assembling in parts and pieces up there. It seemed mad to say, sometimes, but by agreement it was their starship when, a decade ago, rail transport had been a matter of fierce debate.

  The wider universe, the universe humans had opened to them, had caught on with a vengeance in atevi popular culture. A passion for the stars and the new discoveries burgeoned in the very capital of the atevi world. Shejidan was mad for space.

  And maybe, thinking of that, it was a good thing Tabini had held that remembrance of things traditional. Remember the old ways, before all that was atevi changed, shifted—abruptly.

  They’d already had several dangerous moments in atevi-human relations. For a second time, atevi had become fascinated with humans and humans had become equally fascinated with atevi. Once before this, they had worked together, lived together. Humans had failed to grasp what was emotionally critical to atevi, and vice versa, and the whole system had fractured, catastrophically, with enormous loss of life—which was why humans were living on an island as far out of reach of atevi as they could manage at the time. The social disaster they called the War of the Landing had started on a critical handful of mistaken assumptions—because humans and atevi had gotten along just too well at first meeting, loved, associated, and nearly ruined each other.

  Maybe remembering a little history was a very good thing, as fast as things were moving.

  Or maybe Tabini just wanted his son to see the human paidhi, if not meet him.

  Maybe Tabini had wanted the boy to understand the history behind the aishidi’tat, and to appreciate the official, paternal, national, even space-faring approval behind the hard, uncivilized lessons Ilisidi was about to teach him. It was too easy for a highborn youngster to think the whole world was what he saw around him.

  Shai-shan reached her stage one altitude. Wings reconfigured themselves. Hydraulics whined. And Shai-shan kept going.

  No word for friend among atevi, no word for love… no word for man’chi among humans, no word for aishi, either.

  But maybe both species were wise enough now in dealing with one another.

  Maybe this generation figured out how to treat the changes that ran amok through everything they touched.

  Maybe kids like Cajeiri would figure out how to deal with situations that shoved biologically different instincts up against one another in what had been, once before this, a dangerous, dangerous intimacy.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Ginny said to him.

  And what was he thinking? That atevi were clearly feeling stressed? That the aiji, who ordinarily backed every change proposed to him, held a ceremony in tribute to the old ways?

  “The ceremony,” he said. “Just before I took off. Whole reason for the trip down, it seems. Pace of change. Atevi want to catch their balance. Remember the traditional things.”

  “Maybe Mospheira should have a ceremony like that.”

  Ginny surprised him with that sentiment. She wasn’t the philosophical sort.

  “Why so?”

  “Kids,” Ginny said. “Kids. This generation thinks it’s all a given.”

  “My generation?”

  Ginny gave one of those rare laughs. “There’s kids tall as I am who were born during your tenure, paidhi-aiji. You’ve been too busy way too long. There are kids just about to vote who think there’ve always been jobs in space, who think the War of the Landing is a dull chapter in a big book.”

  “That’s scary.”

  “Oh, damn right it’s scary.”

  Appalling thought. Six years since he’d been on Mospheira. The better part of a decade. And she was right. A ten-year-old kid who didn’t care that much about history so easily became a twenty-year-old who didn’t think it was important, either.

  “That’s incredible,” he said.

  “Kids think there’ll always be a new invention every week. That there’s a magic fix for every problem.”

  “That’s good and bad,” he said. “Bad, if they think someone else is always going to solve it. I’m sorry—I plan to retire someday and leave the mess to them. I expect them to do their homework.”

  “Oh, but you haven’t been there. We Mospheirans—we do love our holidays. We love our leisure time. We’re too damn convinced it’s all going to work, so if we choose as a nation not to have aeronautics, it doesn’t matter. We need a new swimming center in Jackson. If we choose not to develop our own security, it doesn’t matter. The threat from space, that’s always been there. Just ask any sixteen-year-old.”

  “Damn scary.”

  Shai-shan roared on, climbing, still climbing, headed for that queasy moment when, far above the earth, perilously riding her momentum and betting their lives in the process—she would shut down one set of engines, switch on another, and transit to space.

  “And damn labor,” Ginny said. “And damn unions. They don’t think the crisis is that urgent either. The aliens out there aren’t coming tomorrow. They might never come. What does the average factory worker care, except they want their televisions, their beach-front homes, their boats and their retirement plans?”

  Atevi and humans were reaching a kind of engine-switchover, too: that was what Tabini’s ceremony said. That was what Mospheirans weren’t commemorating. Having gone as far as they could on the old arrangement o
f separatism, atevi were working directly with humans again, this time in orbit, where it made no sense to build two segregated space stations. On mutually uncommon ground, isolated from everything familiar and historically contested, they tried to adapt.

  And that meant the carefully channeled interface was flung wide open, everyone exposed to the same stresses that had brought them to war before. Now with more lethal weapons, more power at their disposal—but with strangers supposedly looming on the horizon, strangers with a grudge, a grievance, or pure native aggression: no one was sure, least of all the human crew of Phoenix, who had seen their handiwork—they waited desperately to be invaded, and their children lost faith that the invaders would come.

  The cultural differences, the biological differences that had led atevi to attack the early settlers were continually with them… now known and laughed at, on both sides, but those differences still tweaked live nerves in moments of frustration.

  A worker, human or atevi, who couldn’t overcome his own biologically-generated anger and laugh at a situation, had to ship out—he got a quit-bonus for his honesty, but all the same, he had to ship out.

  And thus far, years into the project, they’d only had to ship out—what, fourteen, fifteen, out of hundreds? Not too bad a record… thus far. The two species had changed their cultures to fit—somewhat.

  They’d developed a stationside culture of interspecies jokes, that was one thing—some bawdy and some stupid. Mospheiran experts had wanted to silence them, but atevi had let them run, and the ship humans had contributed the framework and Mospheirans took to it. A human team and an atevi team had a contest, one such joke began…

  There was a whole series of those, that usefully illustrated species differences, cultural differences, and made two species laugh. That was the good news. No one had gotten mad. That was the other good news.

  We have to get along had become the common sentiment between humans and atevi aloft, at least.

  Aloft, and being over sixteen, they still believed in the invaders.

  They just tended to forget about them, for long, long stretches in which the company contests or the prospect of a machimi play took precedence.

  The flight, bumpy for a while, smoothed out. The vodka and fruit juice arrived. Bren sipped it and drew a long, long breath. The screen showed nothing but darkening blue ahead of them.

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  « ^ »

  The vodka was down to icemelt, they were on their way in deep vacuum, and take-off nerves were quieter. Banichi and Jago, in the seats opposite, were reading manuals.

  With Ginny, there was at least a wealth of small talk— island gossip, some of it hilarious, some of it union spats, political maneuvers that only elevated Bren’s blood pressure and tempted him to have a second vodka.

  But he didn’t have to go to the island and deal with the problems, these days, and given the rare opportunity of a trip to earth, he didn’t go there, not even with family to consider. He left island politics to Ginny and Shawn and all the brave souls who had no cultural choice.

  And it didn’t damned well matter to the space effort if the island politicked about the shuttle port, and took forever getting its own shuttle off the ground. Four atevi shuttles were flying—well, count Baushi, which was simply a lift engine for heavy modules: a freighter, a simple freighter, that carried passengers in a small afterthought of a module… a lot like the aircraft arrangement that had once, in simpler days, squeezed the paidhi into the regular island flight, ahead of dried fruit and pottery.

  He supposed if he had missed the flight, he might possibly have caught a ride on Baushi in a few days. He tended to discount it as a passenger option, but it was. Using both spaceports, servicing two shuttles at once, one on the early and one on the late phase of mission prep while a third underwent systems-checks and cargo loading, they had a flight newly landed or about to go nearly once a week, with rare exceptions, and if Mospheira ever got it completed, Mospheira was building a runway out beyond Jackson limits to improve their narrow choice of weather.

  That runway construction was a major victory for the pro-spacers like Ginny Kroger. Jackson Aerospace, moreover, was finally breaking ground for its new cargo-launch facility on Crescent Island, to the south of Mospheira.

  And that, Ginny opined, meant it was really going to happen. Businesses were moving onto Crescent—not only aerospace suppliers, but companies like SunDrink and Peterson’s, intending to feed and clothe the workers. Jackson Aerospace was starting up in place of defunct Mospheiran Air… still buying its necessary aircraft from atevi Patinandi Aerospace and concentrating its own manufacturing in narrow but profitable niches—

  “But over all,” Ginny said, “good news. If the aiji in Shejidan gives them formal permission.”

  Permission to expand out of their enclave and Crescent Island, that they had. There were other proposals for humans moving onto air-reached islands no atevi interest was ready to claim. For political reasons going back to the War of the Landing, that was a major, major concession that hadn’t happened yet.

  “I favor it,” Bren said earnestly. “I think it will pass. I don’t, honestly, know whether it’s going to pass this year—” More difficult, if the legislative session in the offing now blew up. Or faster, if it didn’t. “It’s still on the table. It could move soon, if things go as well as possible.”

  Better news from Ginny, the Heritage Party was still fragmenting, its idealists taking off to space and its hidebound bigots still scheming and planning a human takeover, but now a national joke, with less and less real power in their hands. In recent memory, the Heritage Party had won the Mospheiran Presidency. Now they struggled to maintain membership.

  “Nand’ paidhi.” The steward brought sandwiches—a human notion long popular on the mainland—and melon, an atevi institution. “Nandi.” The latter to Ginny Kroger, with the same offering.

  “Thank you,” she said, without Bren’s having to interpose a special courtesy to cover for her. She’d learned—so much. “Very fine, very fine and much appreciated.”

  “Indeed,” Bren said on his own behalf. “I do favor these. Well-chosen.”

  The steward was pleased.

  So there was harmony in the heavens. Talk with Ginny drifted off to their former partner Tom Lund, who had been downworld and office-bound for the last two months on the Jackson heavy-lift project.

  “Tom has a real gift for persuading the corporations out of their funds,” Ginny said. “He’s frustrated, but they’re moving.”

  “They’re making money.”

  “Everyone’s making money,” Ginny said—then added the ultimate islander objection to travel anywhere: “You can make money on the island, too, and still be home for supper.”

  “You can make far more money running Crescent operations.” The other Mospheiran passion: finance, and the beacon of a new colonial effort.

  “Try getting low-level personnel who want to live out there. That’s the thing. They’ve poured foundations. Getting the houses, getting the facilities—it’s all chasing its own tail. Mospheirans won’t go until there’s advanced plumbing and phone service.”

  “Atevi would do it. Will build it, if Mospheirans want to sit in front of their televisions and watch it all pass.”

  “Mospheira knows that. The legislature knows it. But it’s the old story: the heads of corporations don’t trust the very ones that are willing to go out there and take charge. The psychological profile of any administrator who’ll leave Mospheira worries the corporations immensely.”

  “Micromanaging from remote-control,” he said. “Bad enough from one end of the island to the other. On Crescent, it’ll be a disaster, mark my words.”

  “I think Crescent operations can get possibly toilet paper right now without a corporate requisition, but maybe not.”

  “SunDrink’s smarter than Jackson Aerospace. They just move.”

  “Oh, but now Harbor Foods wants to buy SunDrink.” r />
  “Good God.”

  “Exactly.”

  A SunDrink concession on the station had become a wildly popular and successful venture, patronized by Mospheirans and atevi who had a thirst for their traditional fruit drinks—wildly popular, too, among ship-folk who had never tasted non-synthetic food in their lives.

  But Harbor wouldn’t trust the zealots who’d sell their souls for a ticket to work on-station… oh, no, no one who wanted to be up there could be trusted. More pointedly, they wouldn’t trust workers to make a decision, a guaranteed collision course for labor and upper-tier management.

  Well, Shawn would know it was in the offing. Shawn would see the collision of interests coming. Strikes were a sacred institution on Mospheira. So was corporate pigheadedness.

  Ah, well, it wasn’t the paidhi’s job any more. The paidhi-aiji, who’d used to mediate trade between the island and the mainland, rescuing fishing boats caught in border disputes, couldn’t prevent Mospheiran companies making bad decisions these days.

  “Anyone mediating?”

  “Oh, Tom’s on it. Bet he is.”

  Tom Lund, however, who’d ridden out the stationside fracas that attended the Tamun coup… Tom knew. Tom was a Commerce man, and had the power, moreover, to seize Harbor executives by the lapels and get their attention.

  “I’ll say one thing: there’s not going to be a station strike in SunDrink. I’ll support an atevi industry up there in competition if Harbor starts playing tough games with Sun on the station. There’ll be no strikes. No strikes anywhere humans are in cooperative agreements with atevi. It’s this lovely agreement we have: atevi workers don’t hire the Assassins’ Guild to settle with management and human workers don’t strike.”

  “Watch Tom declare Sun a Critical Industry…”

  “Where they are, damn right it’s critical, if atevi are in the interface. When did this piece of silliness with Harbor blow up?”

  “Hit the rumor mill this week.”

  “Oh, good. I’m out of touch for a few days and the next War of the Landing is in the works.” He didn’t want another emergency. “I’ve got to call Tom.”