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not personally have the nerve to get aboard the shuttle again. “If the shuttle has proved safe,” he said, “if the trip has gotten to be routine, as likely it has—” The space program itself had been new, the equipment still uncertain, even to the day they had launched. “If it has—and there is no reason to expect otherwise—much more likely they will.” He was absolutely freezing by this time, past slight shivers, the deep cold having penetrated his coat, his skin, his flesh. The warmth was leaving his bones by now, but young eyes were fixed on him, shimmering gold in the motion-lights. “Young aiji, I shall have frostbite if I linger here. I have to go quickly. But I promise I shall intercede with your father and your mother with every diplomatic skill I have, and we shall do everything possible to see your associates pay you visits.”
    “Yes!” Cajeiri said, that disconcerting atevi yes, absolute, expectant, and in this instance, exultant. The topic was closed, deal done. The paidhi and he had a small secret. God help him.
    “Young aiji,” Bren murmured by way of parting courtesy, ducked his head and escaped out the service access into the brighter light and comparative breath-strangling heat of the dowager’s foyer.
    There was frost on his coat sleeves. His fingers would not bend.
    “Bren-ji?” Jago was there, distressed for his condition, glowering at Ilisidi’s man, who quickly shut the door as the shivers seized him.
    “Perfectly fine,” Bren said, trying not to let the shivers reach his voice. “I had to delay to advise the heir his festivity may be deferred. There was negotiation.” A gasp for warm air, which seemed heavy as syrup, difficult to get into his lungs. He had dealt with Tabini-aiji, and marveled how often Tabini had had the better of them. The skill was evidently inheritable. He succeeded in drawing a whole breath. “I shall call on Gin-aiji, too, nadiin-ji. A matter of courtesy.”
    “Frozen through,” Banichi said, disapproving the staff that had not found a way to get him through the space-chilled corridor. Courtesy even yet would have fortified him with hot tea, if he asked, but he waved a disorganized protest, wishing no delays in his business. He had his thoughts collected, more or less, and staff’s energies were as short in supply as drinkable tea and candy, in these latter days of the voyage.
    But on his way out of the dowager’s domain, paying automatic courtesies to staff, he kept ticking off in his head the little list of necessary duties, the people who needed to know, in his small society aboard a ship with over five thousand humans, all of whom knew his face, but of whom he only knew a handful.
    Gin Kroger—Dr. Virginia Kroger—was their robotics expert, chief of robotics engineering, essential to their success, once upon a time, and glad to be completely useless on the way home. Gin-ji, as the Ragi language had it, nowadays spent her time at her computer, designing and tinkering, as she put it, like a teenager, enjoying a year of unprecedented leisure to create and hypothesize instead of supervise and shepherd scholarly grant requests through committees.
    She designed one hell of a race car, that was certain, and the design wars and the toy car races between her engineers and his atevi staff had drawn bets from ship crew as well as bets from her own staff and the two atevi households. If explosives had been part of the rules, no question Banichi and Cenedi would carry the day—but it was sheer speed and agility, involving an obstacle course through several blocked-off corridors, so it was even odds who would win this round. The trophy, an un-drunk bottle of brandy adorned with ribbons, had gone back and forth numerous times.
    And dared he recall that it was not alone Cajeiri’s birthday that was upset by this arrival? Bets were already laid. A great deal of planning had been done. The bottle had sat in Gin’s office for two weeks. There had to be