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lips, waited, then took a sip.
    Human crews.
    Human crews flew atevi-made planes; atevi still didn’t often land in or take off from the capital of Mospheira. Mospheiran pilots were fiercely jealous of their few long routes, particularly in this day of space shuttles, nationalistically arguing that atevi pilots had a continent to fly in. These days, too, after doing in the aircraft industry, the legislature protected the handful of highly skilled Mospheiran pilots as a major national defense asset.
    The human pilots
ached
for a shot at the shuttle. He’d heard that. He’d talked to them, saw the hope they had, but that honor Tabini wouldn’t cede to humans, not yet, and for more than national pride. Tabini’s pilots, experienced in long transcontinental flights, were an asset in the negotiations for atevi rights in space, on the station… to the solar system.
    Politics, politics, politics. Everything, even that, was politics, depressing thought… it was the one matter in which he meant to make a change in favor of humans if there came a chance. Atevi had taken to the skies, but the same fluidity that they applied to the law they tended to apply to flight rules… hence the very conspicuous insignia and paint job on the aiji’s plane. The flight crew they had was superb. The backup was, too. When they got down into the ranks of the bush pilots, the prospect was less favorable.
    “Comfortable seats,” Tom said. “Over all. Chop’s not too bad.”
    “Not bad,” Shugart agreed, about the time the plane hit a pocket.
    The talk was like that, serious subjects exhausted. The rhythms and sounds of Mosphei’ hit his ears with idle chatter, good-bad, either-or, black-white, infelicitous two without a mitigating gesture.
    Mosphei’ was like that. His mind had been like that, before he acculturated.
    Fluent, but not instinctive. The spot-on atevi ability to see numerical sets was more than trained into children: it seemed to him atevi numeric perception might be co-equal with color perception, one of those things that just developed in infancy. It might be emotionally linked to recognition of parents, or safety, if atevi infants developed in any way like humans, and after centuries of sharing a planet without real contact, they just didn’t know. Whatever provoked aggression… maybe sexual response—that might be involved with pattern recognition in atevi. If it was sexual in any sense, it might be why, though children perceived the numbers, they were immune from responsibility, and spoke a number-neutral language. Again… no basis in research. His own observations were the leading edge of what humans did know; and atevi themselves hadn’t a clear notion of their linguistic past, by all he knew… archaeology was the province of hobbyists, not a well-defined science. Linguistics was something practiced by counters. Comparative biology was mostly practiced on the current paidhi, when an atevi physician had to patch him back together… and comparative psychology was what he and his bodyguard did on late winter evenings. He could only imagine what atevi did see, or what disagreeable visceral reaction certain nasty patterns evoked, as atevi had to imagine for themselves that humans somehow saw comfortable felicity and stability in pairs and twos…
    Twos in marriage; twos in yes-no; twos in left hand and right hand.
    The shuttle had had two hatches when they acquired the design. Atevi had changed very few things in the design they’d been handed, and the mathematicians had gone over it and over it trying to justify two hatches, even come to him in agonized inquiry whether he understood the logic of it… he didn’t. And with trepidations on all sides, there’d been a third hatch, with resultant structural changes. There had to be one exit, or three.
    And, God, the other questions they’d come asking… the changes in materials science over the last three years…
    He himself—with wise and capable advisors—had had