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"When oh when can I expect you in my stateroom, Ancient One?"

"When I've transmitted this essay"

"And how long will that be?"

"Soo away and leave me alone"

With a deep sigh that was enuine misery, he padded off down the carpeted corridor After asound and she heard him yelp in pain In mock pain, of course; he had accidentally hit the e, but ever since then his collisions had been deliberate, for cohed out loud, of course--that was a fah when Jakt pulled one of his physical gags--but then Jakt was not the sort of ement from others He was his own best audience; a man couldn't be a sailor and a leader ofquite self-contained As far as Valentine knew, she and the children were the only people he had ever allowed himself to need

Even then, he had not needed theo on with his life as a sailor and fisherman, away from home for days, often weeks, sometimes months at a time Valentine ith hiry for each other that they could never be satisfied But within a few years their hunger had given way to patience and trust; when he ay, she did her research and wrote her books, and then gave her entire attention to him and the children when he returned

r /> The children used to coet hoain" I was not a very good ht It's pure luck that the children turned out so well

The essay remained in the air over the teriven At the bottom, she centered the cursor and typed the nas were published:

DEMOSTHENES

It was a naiven to her by her older brother, Peter, when they were children together fifty--no, three thousand years ago

The ht of Peter still had the power to upset her, to o hot and cold inside Peter, the cruel one, the violent one, the one whoseher by the age of two and the world by the age of twenty When they were still children on Earth in the twenty-second century, he studied the political writings of greatand dead, not to learn their ideas--those he grasped instantly--but to learn how they said them To learn, in practical terms, how to sound like an adult When he had ht Valentine, and forced her to write low political deuery under the name Demosthenes while he wrote elevated statesmanlike essays under the name Locke Then they submitted them to the computer networks and within a few years were at the heart of the greatest political issues of the day

What galled Valentine then--and still stung a bit today, since it had never been resolved before Peter died--was that he, consumed by the lust for power, had forced her to write the sort of thing that expressed his character, while he got to write the peace-loving, elevated sentiments that were hers by nature In those days the name "De she wrote under that name was a lie; and not even her lie--Peter's lie A lie within a lie

Not now Not for three thousand years I've raphies that have shaped the thinking of millions of scholars on the Hundred Worlds and helped to shape the identities of dozens of nations So much for you, Peter So much for what you tried to make of me

Except that now, looking at the essay she had just written, she realized that even though she had freed herself from Peter's suzerainty, she was still his pupil All she knew of rhetoric, poleuery--she had learned froh she was using it in a noble cause, she was nevertheless doing exactly the sort of political manipulation that Peter had loved so much

Peter had gone on to becoinning of the Great Expansion He was the one who united all the quarreling co starships out to every world where the buggers had once dwelt, and then on to discover more habitable worlds until, by the time he died, all the Hundred Worlds had either been settled or had colony ships on the way It was almost a thousand years after that, of course, before Starways Congress once again united all of huovernemon--was at the heart of the story that made human unity possible