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his hands together, one atop the other.
    Marco echoed the folded hands. “The Tai-en accepts your thanks. Is there any news to report? Have you your manifest for the Rhui cargo?”
    Yakii produced a palm-thin slate and offered it to Marco, and bowed again to Charles, retreating a step.
    Marco studied it, puzzling out the letters of formal merchanter’s Chapalii. “Laboratory equipment,” he said in Anglais. “The usual kit for the good doctor. Forty boxes of bound paperbooks for dissemination. Silk bolts. Iron ingots. Spices. Some luxuries from home for the personnel. Pretty sparse for a cargo, I must say.” He glanced up. Charles rubbed his chin with his left forefinger. “Nothing missing that I can see,” Marco added in Ophiuchi-Sei, the only human language they were fairly sure the Chapalii had not learned, since its structure and cadences were decidedly and pointedly egalitarian.
    Charles returned his gaze to the monotonous gray-green flats and stared, as if he saw something out there Marco did not. Yakii waited with Chapaliian patience for the duke to acknowledge the manifest or dismiss him. Finally, Charles reached out and turned the globe again, and rested his right forefinger lightly in the middle of eastern Europe.
    “Is there also a message,” asked Marco in his painstaking but rather rough formal Chapalii, “from the Tai-endi Terese Soerensen?”
    Marco saw the faint flush, the quiet creep of blue onto Hao Yakii’s skin before it melted and blended back into white. Whether Charles could detect the color shift in the reflection of the glastic pane he could not be sure.
    “I received no message,” said Hao Yakii in a colorless voice, “from the Tai-endi Terese Soerensen to convey to the duke.”
    Charles’s eyes narrowed slightly, scarcely noticeable, unless one knew him as well as Marco did.
    “You may go, Hao Yakii,” said Marco.
    Yakii bowed to the correct degree and retreated out of the room. Charles stood up.
    “Get Suzanne,” he said. “I want her to take the next ship back to Earth.”
    “Aren’t you overreacting?”
    “Tess sends a message by every ship that comes through here via Earth. We agreed on that when she decided to study at Prague.”
    “Still, Charles.” Marco walked to the desk and laid his palms flat on the satiny surface. “Wasn’t she in the last throes of writing her thesis? Damned linguists. I’ve studied Chapalii since before she was born, and she still speaks it ten times better than I do.”
    Charles had pale blue eyes, deceptively mild eyes except when their full force was turned on an adversary. “When I have every reason to suspect that Chapalii Protocol officers arranged the accident that killed my parents? I don’t think I’m overreacting.”
    Marco shrugged. “I’ll go.”
    Charles considered. “No. Suzanne can handle this. I’ll have her send a bullet back to us from Earth once she’s there.”
    “That’s pretty damned expensive.”
    Charles laid a hand on the north pole of the Earth, gently, reverently. “Why the hell do you think I accepted this honor? She’s my only heir, and you know damned well we’re the only toehold humanity’s got to the chameleons’ power structure. Now.” He removed his hand from the globe, and his tone altered, softened, as he sat down again. “Is there anyone else from the Oshaki I am meant to see?”
    Marco pushed off the desk and went to the transparent wall. The tide was coming in, a low, steady swell that overtook islands of reeds and swallowed them. On the horizon, the towers of Odys Port winked in the light of the setting sun. “The merchant, Keinaba.”
    With a soft click, a door opened in the back wall. The woman came in and walked straight up to the desk.
    “Curiouser and curiouser,” she said. “Marco, haven’t I told you that turquoise blue is not your color?”
    “You’re welcome to undress me, my love,” said Marco with a grin, “and show me something more appropriate to wear.”
    “Fat