“I’ve been studying. That’s all.”

“Yes, but you won’t tell me what you’ve been studying. Whatever it is, it’s changing you.”

“I’m just looking ahead.”

“You don’t know something I’m not privy to, do you? Coming out of retirement? The trip to Earth—”

He said nothing and she pulled back, lips tightly pressed together. “All right. Something secret. Something to do with the re-opening.”

“Nobody seriously plans that,” Olmy said, an edge of petulance in his voice unseemly in a man over five centuries old. Only Ram Kikura could get through his armor and provoke such a response.

“Not even Korzenowski agrees with you.”

“With me? I’ve never said I support re-opening.”

“It is absurd,” she said. Now they had both probed beneath armor. “Whatever our problems, or shortages, to abandon the Earth—”

“That’s even less likely,” he said softly.

“—And re-open the Way…. That goes against everything we’ve worked for the past forty years.”

“I’ve never said I wanted it,” he reiterated.

Her look of scorn was a shock to him. Never had their distance been so great that either could have felt intellectual contempt for the other. Their relationship had always been a mix of passion and dignity, even in the years of their worst dispute…which this showed signs of equaling or surpassing, though he refused to admit disagreement.

“Nobody wants it, but it sure would be exciting, wouldn’t it? To be gainfully employed again, to have a mission, to return to our youth and years of greatest power. To open commerce with the Talsit again. Such wonders in store!”

Olmy lifted one shoulder slightly, a bare admission that there was some truth in what she said.

“Our job here isn’t finished. We have our entire history to reclaim. Surely that’s labor enough.”

“I’ve never known our kind to be moderate,” Olmy said.

“You feel the call of duty, don’t you? You’re preparing for what you think will happen.” Suli Ram Kikura uncurled and stood, taking him by the arm more in anger than affection. “Have we never truly thought alike? Has our love always been just an attraction of opposites? You opposed me on the Old Natives’ rights to individuality—”

“Anything else would have damaged the Recovery.” Her bringing the subject up after thirty-eight years, and his quick response, showed clearly that the embers of that dispute had not died.

“We agreed to differ,” she said, facing him.

As Earth’s advocate in the years after the Sundering and in the early stages of the Recovery, Ram Kikura had opposed Hexamon efforts to use Talsit and other mental therapies on Old Natives. She had cited contemporary Terrestrial law and taken the issue to the Hexamon courts, arguing that Old Natives had the right to avoid mental health checkups and corrective therapy.

Eventually, her court challenge had been denied under special Recovery Act legislation.