"It will be worth it," she said to Br'sei, knowing they would be her last free words. "It will."

A voice nibbled at the edge of Helen's hearing and tugged at he comfortable blanket of darkness. She did not want to hear and she did not want to wake up. There was nothing to wake up to.

"Helen, come on, Helen, you can't leave it like this, Helen..."

Can't leave it like this? Can't leave what like this? She'd have to wake up to find out. Helen strained for a moment, but, gradually, her eyelids fluttered open.

At the sight of Ben's frantic face, memory flooded back, the New People, the threat to Earth, to them all...

"What's-" she croaked.

"It's okay, Helen." Ben smoothed her hand. "You're in the infirmary. It's going to be okay."

Another voice. "The New People have given in. They're not going to kill Earth." Veronica Hatch, that's who that was. "They sent up a balloon to tell us so."

Helen coughed. "Get to the shuttles. Tell Michael, tell the yewners." She squeezed Ben's hand as if to drain his strength into her. "Tell them we give in too. Get them back here."

"No, Helen, it's all right," whispered Ben anxiously. "The New People relented. There's no need-""Do it." Her head fell back against something soft that had been placed there.

Don't you see? she wanted to tell him. We were wrong. We were seeing only in terms of ourselves, our futures, our pasts. We didn't see in terms of worlds, in terms of time and all the lives that are connected to ours. We thought, I thought, Venera was all there was, all I was. I was wrong, I was so wrong, and Michael was right. We have to make peace now. We have to re-member how much more there is to us than just what we've done here.

"He'll do it," said Veronica firmly. "Trust me."

I do, Helen closed her eyes. It would be all right. She'd get better. There was work to do, for Venera, for herself, and for all the human beings for whom this would now be a point of new beginning as they reached out to the People, came to under-stand them, taught the People about the breadth of humanity so both sides could truly understand their neighbors.

It all began now.

Epilogue.

Yan Su's apartment was two stories above the main deck of U.N. city.

Her small balcony faced west and let in the magnifi-cent colors of the sunset over the waters. Standing by its rail, she could even see Venus shining peacefully in the darkening sky. No matter how hard she looked, she couldn't see any sign of the chaos going on up there.

When she had received Rosa Cristobal's call telling her about what the aliens had decided, she had stood frozen in place for several long seconds.

Then she called the Secretaries-General. They in turn had put every single satellite on high alert to try to detect whatever missile the aliens would hurl at Earth to launch the virus, carefully ignoring the fact that the aliens could probably just make it appear anywhere they pleased. They spread the word to every major disease-control center on the planet. Every doctor who could be reached by the long arms of government bureaucracy wasawake and on alert.

They waited, Su waited, in the darkness of her own apartment, frightened both by the magnitude of what was happening, and her own inability to do anything at all about it.

Then nothing happened.

Su looked down from the stars. Below her balcony, she could see a familiar figure crossing the deck.

She gripped the wrought-iron railing and watched Sadiq Hourani present himself to the door of her building for identification and admittance. The swish of the door was lost under the roar of the ocean waves, but she did see him enter.

Be here any moment.

She felt strangely calm. She had a fair idea what had brought him to her door this late at night without calling ahead, but somehow she could not get herself to fear it.

Perhaps I believe I deserve whatever comes.

She walked back into her living room. The room was com-fortable, even a little luxurious with its thick, Persian carpet, the carved tables, and vases of fresh flowers. The balcony's etched glass doors glided shut behind her. As they did, the front door chimed, and its panel showed her Sadiq waiting in the hallway with his endless patience.

Su took a deep breath. "Door. Open."

The door did as it was told, and Sadiq walked into the foyer. He looked tired, she thought, and a little sad.

Well, they had been friends for a long time, and this had to be something of a disappointment for him.

"Good evening, Su," he said, walking forward. "I'm sorry for calling so late-"

"There's no need for you to apologize to me." She waved his words away. "Won't you sit down?" Su gestured toward one of her low, fauxleather sofas. "I don't see why we should stand on ceremony after all this time. Can I send for some coffee?" It was astonishing how easily she fell into the hostess role. Then again, she'd had a great deal of practice at play acting.

"No, thank you." Sadiq remained standing. Su smoothed the hem of her long, rose tunic under her as she sat. She looked up at him, not weighing, calculating, or judging, just waiting to see what he had to say. She always tried to avoid planning her next move until she had all the required facts in her hands. That was one of the things that had made her so good at what she did and helped keep her at her post for so long.

Sadiq sighed, and she saw actual indecision on his face. She imagined he wanted to be angry, to let righteous rage fill him up and carry him through this, but it wouldn't come.

"Why did you do it, Su?"

She raised her eyebrows and curled up the corner of her mouth. "I have a busy schedule, Sadiq. Which 'it' are you talking about?" She thought she knew, but she wanted to be certain.

Sadiq bowed his head and folded his hands behind his back. He looked at the pattern of the carpet, burgundy and gold, so many knots all tied together to make their own pattern. A nice metaphor. "I've been having an extremely interesting chat with a feeder named Frezia Cheney, who let slip some facts about a conversation she had with your son, Quai. Quai, in turn, told me you asked him to set up a stream corporation called Biotech 24 so it could donate money to Grace Meyer, who, we now know, was the brains and funding behind the falsified Discovery on Venus." He looked at her. She sat very still, trying to keep her face impassive. She mostly succeeded, but she felt her eyes widen slightly.

"How did you get Quai to talk to you?" she asked softly.

"I told him about your surveillance on his private mail."

"Oh." Su dropped her gaze. So here was the payment for that. Her heart swelled with love and sorrow until her entire chest tightened, but she couldn't blame her son. No, she could not blame him at all.

"There is even an implication"-Sadiq moved just a little closer-"thatyou and some of the Venerans have known about the aliens for years." He spread his hands, appealing to her. "Why, Su? What were you doing?"

Su smoothed the fabric of her tunic across her knees. She reached out and minutely adjusted the small jade-dragon carv-ing on her coffee table.

"I thought," she said, drawing her hand back but not lifting her gaze from the sinuous reptile, "that I was creating an un-precedented opportunity for the colonies to gain political capital."

Sadiq sank onto the sofa, facing her. "Tell me," he said.

She touched the spines on the dragon's back, gingerly, feel-ing their needle sharp tips dent the skin of her fingertips.

"Grace Meyer sent me an agitated message three years ago. It seems that while searching for her UV absorber, she found a satellite photo of what looked like an alien artifact. She was telling me rather than Helen Failia, because she did not like Dr. Failia and wanted to go over her head."

"Do you know the source of this feud?"

Su smiled thinly. "It seems Dr. Failia was unwilling to ac-tively seek funding for Dr. Meyer's projects. Dr. Failia was afraid that searching for life, which had failed so many times before in so many more likely places, would make Venera look silly and spoil its ability to get serious funding and serious at-tention. Dr. Meyer never forgave her." Su shook her head.

"And we think the in-fighting in the legislature is bad."

"So, she gave you this photo and told you her theories-" Sadiq prompted.

"And I asked her to keep them both quiet for a while." Su pushed at the dragon so that its focus shifted from looking directly at her to looking at the wall past her right shoulder. "At first, I didn't believe it could possibly be what it looked like, and I also did not want public ridicule to fall on Venera."

"Grace said she would do no such thing, however. She was tired of having her work suppressed, she said. She was ready to sign off in a huff, when the idea struck me." She rubbed her palms together."Suppose there were aliens on Venus. Suppose they made contact, not with the government of Earth, but with Venera base. Venera would have the chance to do what no one had ever done. It would have a first that could not be taken away from it. A colony with a contact that not even the C.A.C. could take away, no matter how hard they tried. It might even lead to a successful independence bid. One without bloodshed this time." She looked up at him. The sadness had deepened on his face. "The C.A.C. is never going to let the colonists go. Their status as second-class citizens has become too ingrained and in some ways too convenient. I came to believe that to get full civil and human rights restored would take a revolution, but not a bloody one, not like Fuller's." She smiled softly. "If any-one could make it work, it would be Helen Failia, I was sure. Her people were so loyal to her."

"I added in the fact that Grace wasn't going to keep quiet. She wanted her recognition, and she wanted it now, and I started getting ideas."

"I suggested we create what became the Discovery." She turned her hands this way and that, examining the backs, the nails, the deeply lined palms. "It was brilliant, actually. I was very proud. It served to focus public attention on the colonies. It raised all sorts of questions about Terran rule from places other than Bradbury, and it got the scientific world to take Grace Meyer seriously. Grace found help from some of Venera's many underfunded departments, and I found there were plenty of places between Earth and Venus to hide the money they used for the construction." She smiled at her hands. "Actually, except for gold for the laser, it was quite an economical operation."

"I see," said Sadiq.

"It also got the Venerans actually looking for aliens. I felt if the news came from anybody on the base other than Grace Meyer, Helen would have an easier time of things."

Sadiq turned away. He paced slowly over to her balcony doors and looked out onto the night.

"Tell me what you're thinking," asked Su.

He shook his head slowly. "So many years of fighting. So many years of a single goal in mind-equal rights for the colonies. It blotted out everything else, even the stunning won-der of meeting another form of life,other minds from other worlds. Everything was just there to be used.

Nothing could be left alone to just happen." He turned around and his eyes were shining a little too brightly. "I'd hoped you were above that."

"I'm sorry." Su clasped her hands together. "What do we do about this?"

"I don't think there's anything else to do." Sadiq turned back toward her. "The story will be breaking soon, and your attempt at a bloodless coup killed two men. I'm sure that will keep you busy enough."

Su bowed her head. "I am sorry, Sadiq. It looked like the only way to break the C.A.C.'s hold on the colonies."

"I'm sure it did." He paused. "Do you know, Veronica Hatch tells me that one of the People's ambassadors sold herself into slavery to save us all."

"Did she?" murmured Yan Su. "What a fine thing to do for strangers."

"Yes." He looked down at her. "I wonder if we'll ever be able to show such a fine thing to them."

He left her there and walked out the door. Su sat where she was for a while. Then she rose and walked back onto the bal-cony to breathe the salty night air and look up at the sky. She did not know, after all, how much longer these privileges would be hers.

Daylight had dwindled to a patch of gray on the horizon. The gentle yellow streetlights had come out, lighting the deck and dimming the stars overhead.

Su turned her face to the evening star.

"Thank you," she whispered, hoping somehow her words would touch the stranger who had saved them all. "Thank you."