CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The Crossing of Borders

People talked, their conversation like a stream flowing around him. Numb, he stared at his hands.

He could not concentrate enough to understand the endless river of words.

"M. Sakhalin, are you listening?"

He jerked, startled out of his trance. "I beg your pardon," he said, not sure who had addressed him. Had the person spoken again, he could not have distinguished that voice from any of the others.

He looked around the oval table, marking the people who sat here: Charles Soerensen, Captain Emrys, Soerensen's assistants Maggie O'Neill and Suzanne Elia Arevalo, a diplomat whose name he had forgotten, another man whose importance he could not recall. Usually his memory was keen.

Now all he could think of was Diana's face, the way it had closed away from him, shutting him out, rejecting him, exiling him.

How could she have done this to him?

Why?

He had been a good husband to her, hadn't he? He had wanted another child. Maybe that was it.

Or she had found out about Ilyana's flower night and misunderstood it. These khaja misunderstood many things. What had she said? I've fallen in love with another man, Anatoly, a man whose life and interests are more suited to mine. What did that have to do with anything? Of course he felt a little hurt, but a man expected his wife to take lovers, as long as she was discreet about it. He expected her to respect him. And that was the problem. Diana didn't respect him. Say what she wanted, she was embarrassed of him, of where he had come from, of what he was.

But how could she be embarrassed now? How could there be any shame in being married to a prince of the Sakhalin who had been confirmed in his rank by the Chapalii emperor himself?

"I beg your pardon, M. Sakhalin. But we have a great deal to discuss."

Anatoly looked up at Charles Soerensen. Soerensen's face gave away nothing, but Anatoly had a damned good idea that Soerensen had arranged for Diana to confront him first, to give Soerensen the advantage after. He dug down into his reserves of strength and pushed her image aside. She had already left the planet Odys. A pain stabbed through him, thinking that he might never see her again.

How could it happen? How could this be? Then he reined himself in again. He had responsibilities now. Portia was still here, left with him until the hearings that would settle the schedule of parental care. She was asleep on a blanket in the corner made by the stairwell wall, her little mouth partly open, snoring softly because she had a cold. He had to concentrate. But, gods, it was hard.

"You understand," said Soerensen, "that this changes everything."

"You are no longer the most powerful human in daiga space," snapped Anatoly, and was at once sorry he had said it. It was Diana he was angry at, not Charles Soerensen.

"That is true. But I have been associated with Earth and League space for my whole life. I have risked much for them, and so they trust me, despite my position within the Empire. You're a wild card.

They don't know you, and therefore have no reason to trust you. You have nothing invested in League space."

"Except my home."

"Rhui does not properly lie within League space. In fact, it isn't even in the same prefecture, since Duke Naroshi controls Earth and the other systems that make up—"

Soerensen broke off. It was the first time that Anatoly had seen him make a misstep.

"No," agreed Anatoly. "You are right. They are all under my control now."

"How do you intend to assert that control?" asked the other man. Anatoly dredged up his name and title, forcing it past the morass where all his thoughts got stuck: Diana. Diana at their wedding, so beautiful that she had taken his breath away. Diana on stage, a Singer who seemed at those times to be in direct communication with the gods.

Tobias Black. Barrister. There, he had it.

"Please, M. Black, go on," he said politely, pleased at his little victory over his wife. Except she would no longer be his wife, she was leaving him, except how could that be when marriage lasted among the jaran for as long as the man lived or the mark of marriage scarred a woman's face, which was for her entire life? Except Diana was not jaran, and she had long since undergone cosmetic surgery to erase the mark from her face, because an actor must conceal such disfigurements. She had called it a flaw.

Portia sucked in a big, snoring breath and rolled half over, still asleep. Anatoly steadied himself with one hand on the table and leaned toward the barrister, fixing his gaze on him.

"M. Sakhalin, there is a difference between authority and power. Before the Chapalii Empire swallowed up League space, humans had after millennia of experimentation with such forms of government as theocracy, tyranny, monarchy, and communalism settled on what we now call diocracy, self-rule and community-rule in opposition and in balance. M. Soerensen remains a leader within the human community because of the authority he has derived from many years of service to the League and many years of proving again and again that he has the best interests of the League and humanity uppermost in his mind. The only power he has is that conferred on him by the Chapalii. You have no authority. You have only power. Without authority to persuade the Parliament and the citizens of League space to follow you, you must resort to force or coercion. That force can only come from the Chapalii and from those human quislings who have chosen to throw their loyalty away for the sake of short-term gain. You have a great deal of power, there's no doubt about that. You can impose tyranny on humanity if you will. You can impose any kind of rule that you wish. In my capacity as an advocate, however, I would advise you not to take that course. You will alienate most of the human populations of your holdings, and those who flock to your side despite everything will probably prove to be untrustworthy allies. M. O'Neill, you mentioned comm traffic earlier?"

Maggie O'Neill tapped her finger on the table top and squinted at the numbers called up on the luminous surface. "In the last four days we have received eight thousand and ninety-four queries to the attention of one Anatoly Sakhalin. Ah, no, make that eight thousand and ninety-six."

Eight thousand messages. How could he possibly answer each of those petitions? Anatoly stared past M. O'Neill. This oval table sat in the center of a round chamber roofed by an onion dome molded of clear glass, a material melded with plastic to give it strength to withstand the occasional typhoon that blew in over the plateau. From where he sat, he saw the tule flats extending to a misty horizon, sea and sky blending together in a distant gray haze. Soerensen's palace extended behind him, but he would have to turn in his chair to see it.

"I have authority within my own tribe," he said, "because I earned it. I will gain a base of power there first."

"At what cost?" asked Soerensen quietly.

"At what cost?"

"If you go back, what will you tell them? Will you disrupt their way of life wholesale in order to bring them off planet? How will you get them off Rhui in any case? How many ships would you need?

Where will you house them? How will they adapt? If you only take some at first, then who will you take? How will you choose?"

Irritated by this lecture, Anatoly broke in. "Among the jaran, all adults have a say in decisions that affect the whole tribe, although of course the etsana and the council of elders make the final decision."

"Then what if no one wants to go? What if everyone wants to go? How will they communicate with the rest of us once they are off Rhui? Who or what will you use as interpreters?"

"There are slates—"

"You must get one for every person, then. Who will buy and distribute them? What will all these people do, who are accustomed to another life entirely? What about the khaja? What about the other continents, and the people who live there?"

"I wouldn't do it all at once! You think I'm a fool. I don't intend to act rashly. But how can I leave my people behind when I am here now?"

But perhaps it was true. Why should all of them necessarily want to travel to Earth? Valentin Arkhanov had not wanted it. Karolla Arkhanov had never adjusted; she lived by living a lie and by warping her family to match the image on her walls. Even he himself had not truly adjusted, not yet, maybe not ever. They all had such odd khaja ways out here, inexplicable to a civilized man, however primitive he might seem to them. They had it written down that all twenty-year-olds had to perform two years of community service in order to qualify for citizenship in the League. How barbaric to need a law for that, when among the tribes every child knew that she or he had responsibilities to the tribe, that every adult was needed for the tribe to survive.

But the tribes were small. There were so many humans in League space that the number was meaningless to him. And, of course, no one knew how many Chapalii there were ... although perhaps a prince could find out. Perhaps a prince could get a census of human and alien species.

He leaned over toward Branwen and whispered the idea in her ear, and she noted it down on her slate. Realizing that everyone else was watching him, he turned back to Soerensen.

"Are you suggesting," he said, "that I learn more about the League, about these worlds and the Empire itself, before I try to bring Rhui into it?"

Soerensen smiled, touched with irony, and Anatoly saw that while Charles Soerensen did not like relinquishing the power he had gained, that he was willing to, or at least, willing to share it. "That had been my intention all along," said Soerensen. "Rhui has valuable natural resources. The Chapalii cannot interfere on her because she is interdicted. Therefore, she makes a good base for planning a revolt against the empire."

"Why do you want to revolt against the empire? I always meant to ask that. The Chapalii do not rule you harshly. They leave you your own parliament for local matters, your lives are stable, and you go about your business much as you did before. What is wrong with that?"

Soerensen stood up, speaking down toward the table. "Call up a two-dimensional map of Rhui, continent A. Blush all territories known to be in the control of the jaran."

Anatoly knew the map well, the great gulf that marked the northern sea, the spine of mountains that girdled the central mass of the continent, two delicate peninsulas to the southeast, and the large island in the southern sea that was home to the mysterious Byblos civilization, known only through the ancient scrolls and occasional merchant. He had met one, once, many years ago when he was hunting down the king of Habakar. He had bought an old scroll off him, but later lost it.

The red blush marking the territories of the jaran consumed about one fifth of the continent, nestled in the central territories and advancing toward the periphery.

"Do you suppose," asked Soerensen conversationally, "that the khaja princes overrun by the jaran will give up their power willingly and happily? Do you suppose that their sons and daughters, however justly ruled they might be, will not listen to an old nurse's story of how once they ruled themselves, and think that they could again? When you first came off Rhui, M. Sakhalin, you fell in with our plans swiftly enough. You did not want to be subject to the Chapalii Empire, nor have your people be subject to it. What has changed?"

The barrister Tobias Black was wrong about one thing: Charles Soerensen knew he had power, and he had come to like having it. Yet, at the same time, he might genuinely want only to further the interest of the human race rather than his own. Self and community, opposed and yet balanced.

"I have changed," said Anatoly. "I have what Bakhtiian wanted all along. I have achieved his vision, that which he began, that the jaran rule over all the khaja lands. Why should I not lift my people up to meet their destiny?"

"At the expense of all the others?"

"Why should I care about them?" Anatoly asked bitterly. "They are only khaja. They have only caused me pain."

"I told you it was a mistake," muttered Maggie O'Neill. "You should have had the conference first and let him meet his wife afterward."

His wife. Not to be his wife any longer.

"At the expense of Bakhtiian?" asked Soerensen.

"Bakhtiian?" The question startled him, but as soon as he faced it squarely he knew that Soerensen spoke the truth. Even if the emperor would recognize Bakhtiian as a prince—and if any man had the power of a great prince, that man was Bakhtiian—there were only ten princes in the Empire, and all ten now had names again, since he had come into the inheritance of the missing prince. "It is true," he said slowly, "that despite my great respect for Bakhtiian, I do not intend to give him what I now have, nor will I relinquish my position in his favor. Why should I? Giving it would be insulting to him in any case. And while it is true that, like a Singer, the gods granted him a vision, they did not promise that he would be the one to achieve it. Anyway," he added thoughtfully, looking Soerensen straight in the eye,

"if Bakhtiian came to space, to these worlds beyond, he would want to become emperor. He would die before he admitted it could not be done."

"You think he could not do it?"

"With what army? With what tools? This place is very different from the plains, as you yourself also know. Horses cannot ride the oceans between the worlds. Sabers cannot defeat..." But there he halted. "It is true that in everything I have read, all the images I have scrolled through, that you know very little about the Chapalii army."

"We're not sure they have an army, as we know of one. Only that when they use force, they use it sparingly and ruthlessly, and that their weapons are more powerful than those we brought to bear on them."

Anatoly looked at Branwen. "Note that down. That is something else we will have to investigate."

He stood up and walked to the wall, splaying his hands on the cool glass, slightly moist inside from the humidity of their breathing.

"Papa?" Portia appeared from behind the stairwell wall, sleepy-eyed, and padded over to him. He gathered her up into his arms and turned to survey the people seated at the table. Soerensen still stood. "You are right," he said finally, reluctantly. "I can't go to Rhui yet. I have to consolidate my position here first. I have to understand what I have, what I don't have, and what I can do with it. So I leave you, Charles Soerensen, with your lands and your authority intact, and I trust you will continue to advise me without concern for whether I care to hear what you have to say. As for the rest of you, I mean that as well." Portia tucked her head into the crook of his neck and stuck two fingers in her mouth to suck on, eyes open, watchful. She was warm and solid. He wrapped her a little closer into his embrace. Be damned to jaran tradition, he thought suddenly, where the child always stayed with its mother. He would keep her beside him and raise her—let her see her mother, of course, that was only fair—but he would not give her up.

Branwen and the barrister closed their slates. They all rose, made small talk, and one by one left the room, bodies and then heads receding down the curved staircase. Soerensen lingered, staying beside the table.

"There is one other question I'd like to ask," he said.

"What is that?" Anatoly shifted Portia on his hip.

She turned her head to look out over the tule flats. "Look, Papa. Look. There's a boat."

"Why did the emperor make you a prince?"

"And you only a duke?" Anatoly smiled, to take the sting out of the words. "I don't know. Wasn't it after you became a duke that the tenth princely house was ... what do they call it? It was erased?"

"Made extinct."

"Yes. But in any case, you weren't brought before the emperor."

"But I was. I was brought into a great hall, lined with columns and floored with white tile. There were many Chapalii there, nobles, I supposed at the time, and I believed I supposed rightly. At one end of the hall rested a gilded throne, and when the emperor appeared on this throne, they knelt, and so I followed suit. After that, I was named a duke."

"Ah." Anatoly walked around the curve of the room toward the stairwell, and Soerensen turned slowly to keep facing him. "That is why you are only a duke. Women and princes need bow before no man, nor Singers before anyone but the gods."

"When is Mama coming back?" asked Portia while they were eating dinner, and he didn't know what to say to her. Nothing in his life had trained him for this. She is never coming back. That was what he wanted to say, spitefully, but he could not say it to Portia, who would not understand.

He tucked her into the bed next to which he had set up a cot for himself and told her a story about the jaran, how a hawk had warned a little girl and boy, a brother and sister, of an avalanche, and so saved their tribe.

"Can birds talk? Birds can't talk."

"Singers can understand the speech of birds because they are touched by the gods. That little girl and boy became Singers, and birds became sacred to the jaran."

"Mama taught me how to sing," she said brightly.

He had to turn away, so she wouldn't see the tears that came to his eyes. "Yes. Would you like to hear another story?" Knowing she would. "A long time ago, when I was a boy, my sister Shura was just the same age as you are now. One morning she wanted to go riding with me and the older boys, but we didn't want her along with us. So she—" So she had somehow gotten up onto a pony and ridden out after them, and when it had been discovered that she was missing, there had been such a wild clamor and he and his friends had gotten into such trouble for not watching over her and the whole tribe had searched frantically for the whole day only to find her at sunset sitting by a stream contentedly eating from a berry patch while her pony grazed faithfully beside her....

But Portia was asleep.

He sat beside her for a long while, a hand resting lightly on her hair, watching the rise and fall of her breathing, studying the curve of her face, her lashes, the simple beauty of a child peacefully sleeping.

A child needs a mother. A man needs a wife or a sister or a mother or aunt, to whose tent he returns. Now he had nothing, only borrowed rooms, no tent, no home. Repose deserted him. He stood up, stroked up a faint illumination from the door panel, in case she woke up, and left the room.

At the outer edge of the palace, a promenade overlooked the tule flats. Clouds covered the stars. The barest mist spattered the deck, and he held onto a railing and stared out into the last remains of daylight, the gray flats receding on and on until they were lost in sea and horizon and the gathering darkness.

It had been a mistake to marry a khaja woman. His grandmother had told him that all along. But she had wanted him to marry Baron Santer's daughter, in Jeds, so perhaps it was only Diana she had disliked. It was true that it was dangerous to marry a Singer. They had their own ways, their own calling, and the gods might lure them away at any moment.

I've fallen in love with another man whose life and interests ... That was not a calling from the gods. That was just selfishness.

The wind turned and hit him in the face, bringing with it the smell of salt and of things left rotting, untended among the reeds.

But Diana had already left him once. She had told him plainly enough that she had her world, and he his. He had written to her, finally, unable to endure without her company-—or perhaps it would be fairer to say that although he did truly miss her he wanted to prove to his grandmother, to the tribes, that it had not been a mistake for him to marry her. He had written, asking her to make a final judgment,

that if she wanted him to, he would willingly leave the tribes, the army, to come to her.

But he had left the tribes, he had left Rhui, before he had received her answer. Now, finally, staring into the lowering night, he wondered what that answer would have been.

A door soughed open, blending with the murmur of gentle waves on the pilings below. He turned to see Branwen come out onto the promenade.

"Want company?" she asked.

He regarded her for a few moments, silent. She was an attractive woman, competent, smart, and a good companion. But she was not Diana. He respected her, but he could not love her. Nor did she expect him to. "No, thank you," he replied politely.

She smiled slightly, lifted a hand in acknowledgment, and retreated back through the door.

Ah, gods, how he wanted a family. He liked the crew of the Gray Raven, but they were his jahar, not his family; they might in time become friends, comrades, but that was not the same. If only Shura was here... .

Why not? He had not yet heard, in the twice-yearly letter she sent him through convoluted channels, that she had married. She had stayed with the army all this time, as a scribe and interpreter.

Why shouldn't she leave Rhui and come to him? One person would make no difference.

But Charles Soerensen was right, too. Shura would be alone out here, with a brother but no sisters or female cousins or aunts. Was that fair to her?

Then, like a flare in the heavens, a sudden, piercing image of Ilyana Arkhanov burned before him and vanished. A jaran girl. Sixteen, or perhaps she was seventeen by now. That was a proper age for a girl to get married. She loved Portia already, and she could bring Evdokia with her, to be Portia's companion. Diana had abandoned him. It would serve her right if he turned around and took a new wife. A beautiful wife. Young, one who would want children.

"Damn it," he muttered, knowing it was unfair, and just plain mean, to marry Ilyana only to spite Diana. But he could travel to Naroshi's planet, to see her. Who would stop him?

He could send a message to Rhui, asking Shura to come to him. He could do anything he damned well pleased.

Fortified by this thought, he went back inside, stopped beside a wall panel, and called up a route to the communications center. It lay in the south wing, perpendicular to the massive greenhouse wing, buried under an astonishingly ugly rococo hall that Soerensen used for receptions of his least favored guests.

Maggie O'Neill and three techs sat in stylish chairs, scattered around the room like islands in a sea of muted gray consoles and several tables which displayed above their flat black surfaces rotating three-dimensional images of Rhui, of Odys, and of the Delta Pavonis solar system. Two long screens on opposite walls displayed two-dee images of landscapes, one from Earth that Anatoly recognized, a mountain-scape of the Alps, and another from the sand pillar swamp of Tao Ceti Tierce. On a third wall a stellar chart glittered, seeming to sink three dimensionally into the emptiness beyond, even though Anatoly knew it was a trick of the projection itself.

Maggie jumped up and hurried over to him. "Heyo. What can I do for you? Are you here to start through that backlog of messages? If you turned each one into scroll and stacked them up around you, you'd have to wade hip-deep to get out of here. But you'll get used to it." She grinned.

He nodded politely. "No. That can wait. I want to put a call through to Jeds and Sarai. I want Tess Soerensen to locate my sister Shura."

She raised her eyebrows but did not respond. Instead, she negotiated the maze of consoles and came to a halt before one that looked exactly like all the others except for a saffron-colored jacket thrown carelessly over the chair wheeled up in front of it. Maggie hitched it out of the way. "Suzanne may have the complexion to wear this color. I sure as hell don't. I get jaundiced just standing near enough to squint at it. Here, put it over there."

Dutifully, he did as he was told, draping the jacket carefully over a nearby chair. Maggie sat down and began keying numbers into the console, interspersed with terse vocal commands.

"No one's home at Jeds," she said. "Odd: I'll leave a callback for when Cara catches up to us. Or wait, I think she was headed for Sarai last I heard. We can almost always at least get the ke at Sarai.

Let me see ..."

Anatoly leaned on the edge of the console. The thin line scored itself into the gray surface, forming a large square.

Mist coalesced up from that square, pulsing to an unheard heartbeat.

"Ah! I've got an acknowledge. On screen." The mist dissipated to reveal a woman's head and shoulders, peering keenly and with a somewhat perplexed expression at them. She narrowed her eyes, registered Maggie, and twined a finger through one of her braids and shifted her vision to the left. Seeing Anatoly, her eyes widened. "Anatoly Sakhalin! What are you doing there?" For an instant he could not reply, he was so surprised to see a jaran woman using interdicted equipment. Finally he found his voice.

"I give you greetings, Sonia Orzhekov," he said.

Daiga transmissions are like a form of blindness to the ke's eyes, which are not like daiga eyes, seeing only in the spectrum of visible light. The daiga whose appearance startles Sonia, the name which classifies the daiga of flowers, is simply a primitive collection of impulses, not the complex ever-flowing pattern that informs the person of a biologically-present daiga. The ke cannot even tell if the daiga is male or female, the identifying marker by which the daiga put greatest store.

The two daiga speak in a daiga language. The ke does not know this language, it is not the language named Rhuian by the daiga Tess, but all daiga languages have primitive characteristics in common, in the way their structure has grown up as time and generations of daiga have passed. The ke shifts to the intermediate brain, seeking correspondences, similarities, alliances. Meaning emerges.

"But of course you're a prince of the Sakhalin," Sonia says, labeling this daiga. "Why shouldn't you go before the khepelli emperor? Except that Dr. Hierakis told me that Charles Soerensen does not want the khepelli to know where his people are hiding. That is why they have this ... what is it they call it? ... this interdiction."

Prince of the Sakhalin replies. "I am now a prince in the Chapalii Empire. That means that the jaran have a place within the Empire, one without recourse to the khaja who have come down to Rhui and made their own rules for us. That means that we are now the guardians of all khaja space."

"I am new to this. I don't really understand what you are saying."

The ke sees that, without patterns to read, without the ability to read patterns, names might prove useful to daiga. Otherwise, needing to order the universe so that they can grow out of their half animal state, they could only see the universe as an undifferentiated mass of light and dark and color, edged with borders. To cross those borders, the daiga name things. By naming the universe, they bring it into existence.

"Who is that with you?" asks the prince of the Sakhalin.

Sonia says: "This is the ke." Thus does the daiga of flowers make namelessness into a name, bringing the ke into existence.

Able to see and sense in limited spectra, the daiga struggle to expand their sight and thus their interaction with the universe. Naming becomes both their prison and their key.

"How do I use this tool to speak to Tess?" asks Sonia after the daiga transmission ends.

"On this world," explains the ke, "daiga can only speak through tools, through consoles. Such are the rules of the interdiction. A call may be placed to Jeds. The daiga Tess journeys toward Jeds. The message will wait there until it is answered."

"How can a message wait when it is made of nothing permanent?" Sonia asks. Sonia is full of questions. "Even the speech with Anatoly Sakhalin vanished as soon as it was over."

"The message remains, recorded into memory." The ke touches several bars on the console. "By this means, the message plays back."

The patternless daiga rises about the console again, and the entire conversation plays out while Sonia watches.

"But how does it do that?" she demands, and the ke realizes with surprise— surprise! —that part of the daiga pattern of voice and physical body includes the force daiga name as emotion. To learn to recognize the patterns of emotion is to learn to read daiga patterns correctly. Then, as swift as a gust of wind, Sonia speaks again, casting off the last question. "But I must send a message to Tess. Or to Cara Hierakis. She left twenty days ago. Could her machines have gotten her to Jeds so quickly?

Well, of course they could. There was that, what did you call it? She sent a brief signal to say she got there, but nothing spoken or written. It's just hard to ... imagine. Even the swiftest, untiring messenger changing horses at every station would take forty days to ride from Sarai to Jeds. Yet words spoken into this tool can reach Jeds as quickly as I can speak them! I must call Cara Hierakis. Can you show me how to speak to Jeds?"

The ke considers, but neither the daiga Tess nor the daiga who had hidden the ke in the laboratory in Jeds for five orbits of the planet—for five years—have forbidden the daiga Sonia from learning whatever Sonia asks to learn. Nothing is interdicted from this daiga, now that the concealing curtain has been drawn aside. It is a daiga metaphor, a way of naming that classifies one object because it acts similarly to another. Or is that a simile? No wonder the daiga remain primitive. Language has taken the place of physical evolution. Naming and seeing have become synonymous.

"This gold bar seems to trigger the appearance of an image," says Sonia, trying to manipulate the console without instruction in order to discover the correct sequence.

The ke shows Sonia how to put a call through to Jeds.

The daiga named by the others Cara Hierakis answers. The two daiga converse. The ke follows the conversation intermittently, distracted by other questions.

"No, I've heard nothing from Tess, but she only had an emergency transmitter. Anatoly Sakhalin says he did what? That he was named a prince ... in the Empire? That he saw a female Chapalii? But males can't cross into female territory, or at least ... that just doesn't make sense. I've heard nothing from Charles. Oh, wait. I've got an incoming coded message, a download, from Odys. Let me call you back."

The visual image of Cara Hierakis vanishes. Sonia waits at the console, calling back old messages, watching the replay, even those in a language that evidently is incomprehensible.

"Is there an interpreter tool?" Sonia asks. "So I might understand what this woman is saying? She says Tess's name, so she must know Tess."

An image of a daiga speaks over the console, a daiga like all the rest, indistinguishable without a pattern to read. Daiga can discern subtleties in daiga morphology that allow each daiga to discriminate any one daiga from the others. Ke have no need for such fine discriminative control, brought on in the daiga, perhaps, by territorial instincts or the need to have and keep a name, which then grants existence.

"Is there no means within the daiga brain to translate words?" the ke asks.

"If I know another language, then I can understand it, or at least if I don't know it very well, I can think of what the meaning is in a language I do know well. But if I don't know the language at all, then I don't have any way to figure out what it means except through an interpreter."

"A daiga program exists," replies the ke, "which translates one daiga language into another. Tess, has written such a program. Others exist."

Sonia makes a movement with the mouth that the ke translates as a smile, a daiga way of showing pleasure.

"You are my interpreter," Sonia says.

The ke pauses, startled by this new name, this new designation. What is an interpreter? An interpreter is someone who crosses borders for others, making one language intelligible to a second, making the outer world intelligible to a daiga who has lived confined to this inner one.

If it is true that this Prince of the Sakhalin has become a prince in the Empire, then the daiga naming their selves as jaran will need to understand how the Empire works. They must learn to name and to see the Empire. How can they learn to see it? Only through names.

The ke shows Sonia how to work the translation program, but then the ke retreats to a corner of the room and broods. The ke is not used to brooding. Ke do not brood, but this ke has crossed the border into daiga lands and can no longer go back to being a true ke.

This ke has been thinking about daiga.

Lacking deep brains, possessing only partially-formed intermediate brains, the daiga have constructed an interlocking web of names, like the great web that binds together the universe. Like a true building, this web is still in the process of growth. It is living, not dead.

Perhaps the daiga are civilized, but not as Chapalii recognize civilization. Civilization can manifest through more than one phylogeny.

"I am glad you are here to explain this all to me," Sonia adds. The pattern that distinguishes her to the ke's sight is bright, hectic with excitement.

The ke creeps closer to the daiga Sonia, as to warmth and light. Sonia shows neither fear nor shrinking, as many daiga do when confronted with a robed, veiled figure. The ke no longer needs veils, in front of Sonia.

"I hope you will stay with me for a while," says Sonia. The daiga reaches out and touches the ke lightly on the arm. Two patterns swirl together briefly. It is a daiga way of connecting. The ke knows this now.

This ke has become an interpreter. This ke is no longer truly nameless.