The Sea is Full of Stars

“Here is a commons chamber not being used,” Kzu said, pointing to a bare area flanked by curtains on three sides. “Get whatever you wish to personalize it and make it comfortable from the storerooms to the right. After that, eat, sleep, relax, and try and fit in with the others and await His Highness’s summons.”

Tann Nakitt looked around the place. That summons couldn’t come soon enough.

In four days and three nights Tann Nakitt had almost become accustomed to sleeping with the constant chatter and din reflected off the smooth walls, and learned how to sit on eggs, and already been lectured for being less than diplomatic with some very young brats who bit. She didn’t, however, make friends in the place, since, after all, she was another outsider coming in, and thus the current novelty of the big man and a new rival for diluted favors. She did get the impression that this would last until yet another new one was brought in, which could be any time or could be months or years. When it happened, though, she’d be one of the girls.

On the fourth night the Baron summoned her. The summons was delivered by a female chamberlain who suggested that she make herself as attractive as possible. This was not something Tann Nakitt had any experience in, and she decided that clean and neat and maybe a wee bit of fragrance was the best route. Anything more and she risked looking like an abstract painting.

The Baron was quite as handsome and, well, big, as she’d remembered him, and there were those come-hither hormones he seemed to ooze that made it hard to concentrate on what he was saying.

His chambers were simpler than she’d expected, although still the lap of lavish luxury. What surprised and pleased her most was that he seemed to have walls of books! Real books, bound in leather and carefully shelved. She couldn’t read any of it, but the idea that he could, and did, made him go up a notch in her respect. The Realm had abolished books so long ago that few even knew what they were; you didn’t need them when any terminal could answer any question or create a small cube that would have your own hologram spouting your lousy love poetry. But Ghomans still had books on their world, and had carefully preserved and respected them. Ghoman books were not treated as objects, but as the collective spirits of the brightest of their ancestors.

He had ordered what was, for Ochoa, a gourmet meal, including several delicacies rarely seen by the common folks and some exceptional wines. She found she didn’t have much of an appetite, though, but she did take and enjoy a few things, a light snack as it were, and very much enjoyed the wines.

“Well, Nakitti, what do you think of my castle?” he asked her at last.

She still hadn’t defined him, and might not for many more sessions. That made any conversation tricky, because he might be the greatest conversationalist around and wonderful to her, yet if she said something that touched a button in him, probably something illogical and unforeseeable, it might turn him into a raging maniac.

“It is most grand, Highness. I did not dream that such opulence and high art were so close.”

He seemed to like that. “I saw you eyeing my books. The ones over there are the finest histories of my people, going back as far as we have records—and that is very far indeed. Others involve the sciences, mathematics, architecture, astronomy, and so on. These are local books, Ochoan books. I feel a link with them. There are at least seven ages of our written language, and it has taken time but I have mastered them all. Twenty- five volumes devoted there to trade and commercial law and customs, and another forty on diplomacy. But concerning war—there’s almost nothing. We are in the middle of an ocean surrounded by nations whose denizens can breathe only water, and most of them only water under heavy pressure. Our land is rich in those things that are of true importance, but we have nothing here worth mounting a massive expedition that cannot be gotten more cheaply and easily elsewhere. So, we simply haven’t ever had the need to learn how to fight. Oh, we have the trappings of it—little more than show officers and a customs police, really. That leaves me with nothing but logic. Kzu tells me that you were asking about the guns and forces. That may not be diplomatic as a newcomer here, but your implications match my own logical study. If we actually had to defend this place, we wouldn’t know how. Would you?”

Uh-oh! Nice trap, Baron and Kzu. Play dumb to stay out of trouble or be smart and show up the locals. And, damn it, the way he’s pumping the hormones out, I can’t think straight!

“Highness, I was never a soldier, and this kind of war is as far in the past to my old life as it is now to this one.”

“Spare me the humble act, Nakitti! Can this place be defended?”

She thought a moment and decided to drop the evasions. “Highness, it can, but only if the guns all work, there are competent trained people present to use them if and when required, and sufficient fresh supplies for both the weapons and for a siege. It would not guarantee a result, but it could make a positive result possible.”

“Excellent! That is what I wanted to hear! I will need you here, Nakitti. I have some problems that must be worked around. Those who are in the military command do not know anything about their jobs, but they love the titles and all the festooned ornamental sashes and ribbons and body markings and all that. I cannot remove them. Most of them are my sisters and aunts and nieces. My nephews believe they are generals, although they have never fought anything more than using their swords to spear fish. I can order things to get done, but I must do it through them. What I need is knowledge behind the orders.”

She liked the idea of being a power behind the throne but was appalled at his evident belief that attack was inevitable. “Highness, do you really believe that an attack will come here?”

“I consider it only a matter of guessing the month and the day.”

“But—Highness! You just finished telling me about the isolation, the lack of immediate enemies…”

“And yet it is precisely for that reason that we are the center of the target! The only land, the only harbors, for a thousand kilometers. Control Ochoa with a true combined force and you control the commerce of the Overdark. Control it, and you have bases from which to provision and shelter a powerful group that can then use a naval force to go almost anywhere it wills against a mainland target. You can raid, pick, weaken, force a potential enemy to shift his forces hundreds or thousands of kilometers up and down a coastline, exhausting them, straining and confusing their supply lines, all that. Our enemy—it knows the military way. If I can see this, then it has seen it long before. Will you help me?”

“Highness, you have been studying military thinking somewhere, or you are a genius coming into his calling, as we all hope and pray. As I swore to you before, all that I have and all that I am I pledge to you to use as you wish.”

He moved from the table and came around toward her, and as he got close he towered over her, then put his great wings around her.

“You know,” he said softly, “I was afraid you would be a sexless creature, or an ugly one, but you are neither. I wish us to work together on all levels.”

Her initiation into the household was completed with the rather joyous discovery that not only was he large in a lot of ways, when it emerged from within him it proved to be sheathed in bone…

Chemistry, as any Ghoman would say, won out. Okay, Tann knew it wasn’t very romantic, but she had never been very romantic, either. Besides, Ghoman sex was never like this! Exit Tann Nakitt, now placed on the shelf from this point on with the other dusty memories; enter Nakitti a Oriamin, and, for now at least, she liked that just fine…

Jinkinar, Kalinda

The journey from Mahakor to Jinkinar had been a very long time in coming, but it had finally come, the nervous government’s hand forced by the forthcoming international conference, at which the Powers That Were wanted everybody who wasn’t with Chalidang to be present, possibly on the theory that if you weren’t with them, you might be convinced to be against them.

They traveled with Inspector Shissik, but free and as companion, not as a prisoner. They still didn’t have official status, but then, nobody in authority in Kalinda had the slightest idea what you did with two different people sharing one body. They had gone so far as to consult with the ambassadors of three races that knew something