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end, to her visible relief, he’d sought sati s faction elsewhere. They hadn’t slept in the same room since their first child, Gibson Junior, had been conceived; a rare exception had allowed the delighted tabloids to show her, eight months into a second pregnancy, at the height of the scandal which had destroyed him. True to her u p bringing—for Gwen life imitated the art of the possible—she blamed him less for extramarital adventuring than for getting caught at it. She mon i tored her blood chemistry and made appointments with him by the c a lendar, a monthly chore he relished less and less.
    “I thank y’very kindly, ma’am.” Cane between his knees, Brody folded his hands atop the crook as she refilled his wineglass. “’Tis an honorary title, dear lady.”
    The kitchen door swung aside, temporarily stopping conversation. Once the cook and her helpers, colonists like Alice, had served them and departed, Gwen raised her eyebrows prettily. “You’re not really a judge, then, Mr. Brody?”
    Altman watched with amusement and sympathy—for Brody. Gwen had lusty instincts for a few things, power being highest on the list. Had she been convinced that Brody was a nobody—were she to become convinced even now—she’d drop out of the conversation and let her husband carry on. He’d seen the same thing happen thousands of times and was convinced she was unaware she did it.
    The man grinned, turning up the Santa effect. “I’m after adjudicatin’ the occasional dispute. Mostly I’m no more than the humble innkeeper y’see before ye—thank y’kindly, I will have another. Y’wouldn’t be r e lated t’Dad Hathaway, now?”
    “I’m his daughter.” She smiled, her eyes downcast modestly on her plate. Her own enthusiasm tonight for the wine they made themselves here was unusual. Ordinarily she’d let her first glass sit through a meal, hardly condescending to touch it.
    Alden “Dad” Hathaway had been the last Democratic governor of California. He’d wanted to be the first President from the newly formed Democratic Union Party, but fate—at 9.5 on the Richter Scale— had i n tervened. The party, large and diverse as it was, solidly rooted in Ame r ican political tradition, had so far failed to put a candidate in the White House. There were reasons for that—Altman himself was presently foremost among them—but there were other reasons, as well.
    Reluctantly on the couple’s part, they talked about it over dinner. The Outsider seemed more interested in discussing events on Earth, which he hadn’t seen for years, than business. In a buyer’s market he felt free to antagonize them with his peculiar ideas, whereas they—Gwen was aware of the Project’s desperate need for customers—couldn’t afford to ant a gonize him by telling him how peculiar his ideas were.
    In the ancient Chinese sense, the opening years of the twenty-first century had proven “interesting.” Sweeping changes—welcome and long overdue, in Brody’s opinion—had imposed themselves on an incre a singly confused and confusing world.
    Most notable was a shift in the century-old balance of political and military power. Prodigious, domestically unpopular amounts of Amer i can aid had failed to keep the Soviet Empire from crumbling after decades of wildly swinging temperament, liberal reforms alternating with brutal strictures often tightened overnight. Those subsidies, along with a last hysterical flurry of foreign military adventures, had only helped cripple that once-great Western nation’s own economy and had eventually d e stroyed both the Democratic and Republican parties.
    “Not t’mention their old management, so proud of their bipartisan aid programs,” Brody declared, “at least as far as runnin’ under the old labels was concerned.”
    At about the same time, reacting as it had over two millennia to outside influence, split by linguistic and cultural differences little appreciated in the West, China had divided