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was speaking and couldn’t understand why Ralassi couldn’t hear her. Perhaps ussissi were deafened by loud noises, like humans. She realized the snapping was the sound of her own quills, broken as she was thrown around the interior of the groundcar. Two goldstonebeads rolled across the floor of the vehicle as it lurched into a new position, and she could see clouds of smoke with particles roiling in them.
    â€œWhat is it?” she asked. “What is it?”
    Ralassi was barely audible now.
    â€œWe’re under attack, Minister. The Maritime Fringe has launched missiles.”

2
    He’s not the God of answers; he’s the God of questions. He uses the events of history to interrogate us and ask how we will live and deal with them.
    Franciscan monk
speaking after the earthquake that damaged
the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in 1997
    The Temporary City, Bezer’ej: Eqbas Vorhi ship 886–001–005–6, in disassembled mode
    Esganikan Gai liked the bulkhead of her cabin set to transparency, for the reassurance of the unspoiled wilderness of Bezer’ej a glance away. Watching the output from the Umeh observation remotes fifty million miles away was somehow uniquely claustrophobic.
    It was also disappointing: the isenj had started fighting again.
    She watched the live images on the screen set in the bulkhead like a waking nightmare intruding on a peaceful day, a portal into what the humans called Hell. At high magnification, the sprawl of construction from one coast of the Ebj continent to the other was peppered and illuminated by detonations. Smoke spread like blooms south of Jejeno, the Northern Assembly’s capital.
    Aitassi trotted into the cabin and paused to stare at the image of Umeh. “They still seem unable to make up their minds whether to fight or not.”
    â€œThey’re unaccustomed to civil war,” said Esganikan. “Their genetic memories are mainly of being a colonial power.”
    â€œWho did they fight?”
    â€œThe local wess’har. You know that.”
    â€œI meant who else. If they were a colonial power, if theyestablished instant communications relays across star systems, then do they have other colonies? Why haven’t we come across them before?”
    Esganikan considered the idea that there might be more isenj out there, breeding to destruction and pillaging environments. Eqbas had as good an idea as anyone could about the spread of species in this arm of the galaxy; but even after millennia, they hadn’t charted every world. Life wasn’t rare, and space was vast.
    â€œPerhaps, like humans, their colonial ambition is on a more domestic scale.” She couldn’t cover every eventuality. She fought to keep her focus. “But if they have colonies beyond Tasir Var, they haven’t ever come to their homeworld’s aid.”
    â€œUmeh makes you indecisive, doesn’t it?”
    Esganikan didn’t need reminding. “Except for their potential to threaten Wess’ej, it doesn’t matter if the isenj species survives or not. And that makes it difficult to evaluate the benefit of intervention.”
    It also didn’t matter which image of Umeh the orbiting remotes were relaying. Whichever of Umeh’s four island continents Esganikan observed, they looked the same except, at close quarters, in the detail of the architecture: coast-to-coast cityscapes and desperately overcrowded conditions. Umeh’s ecology was wholly artificial. The isenj had consumed and destroyed everything else that shared their planet except for microscopic life in the oceans. Left to its own devices, it was a dying world anyway.
    Does it matter if they kill each other? Does it matter if I help them do it? They’ll die sooner or later, along with their world.
    â€œI wish I’d never agreed to help the isenj restore the planet,” said Esganikan. “But I did agree, so I have to see this through somehow. Do you