“That’s not true,” Honor scolded primly while the cream-and-gray treecat stretched across the back of her seat raised his head to twitch his whiskers insufferably at his person’s guest. “You know perfectly well that they still play baseball on Old Earth and at least five other planets.”

“All right, on seven planets out of the—what? Isn’t it something like seventeen hundred total inhabited worlds now?”

“As a trained astrogator, you should appreciate the need for precision,” Honor said with a crooked grin, just as the pitcher uncorked a nasty, sharp-breaking slider. The wooden bat cracked explosively as it made contact and sent the ball slicing back out over the field. It crossed the short, inner perimeter wall which divided the playing field from the rest of the stadium, and Henke jumped to her feet and opened her mouth to cheer. Then she realized that Honor hadn’t moved, and she turned to prop her hands on her hips with an expression halfway between martyred and exasperated.

“I take it that there’s some reason that wasn’t a—whatchamacallit? A ‘homerun’?”

“It’s not a homerun unless it stays between the foul poles when it crosses the outfield wall, Mike,” Honor told her, pointing at the yellow and white striped pylons. “That one went foul by at least ten or fifteen feet.”

“Feet? Feet?” Henke shot back. “My God, woman! Can’t you at least keep track of the distances in this silly sport using measurement units civilized people can recognize?”

“Michelle!” Honor looked at her with the horror normally reserved for someone who stood up in church to announce she’d decided to take up devil worship and that the entire congregation was invited out to her house for a Black Mass and lemonade.

“What?” Henke demanded in a voice whose severity was only slightly undermined by the twinkle in her eyes.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have been as shocked as I was,” Honor said, more in sorrow than in anger. “After all, I, too, was once even as you, an infidel lost and unaware of how barren my prebaseball existence had truly been. Fortunately, one who had already seen the truth was there to bring me to the light,” she added, and waved to the short, wiry auburn-haired man who stood in his green-on-green uniform directly behind her. “Andrew,” she said, “would you be kind enough to tell the Commodore what you said to me when I asked you why it was ninety feet between bases instead of twenty-seven and a half meters?”

“What you actually asked, My Lady,” Lieutenant Colonel Andrew LaFollett replied in a gravely meticulous tone, “was why we hadn’t converted to meters and rounded up to twenty-eight of them between each pair of bases. Actually, you sounded just a bit put out over it, if I recall correctly.”

“Whatever,” Honor said with a lordly, dismissive wave. “Just tell her what you told me.”

“Of course, My Lady,” the commander of her personal security detachment agreed, and turned courteously to Henke. “What I said to the Steadholder, Countess Gold Peak,” he said, “was ‘This is baseball, My Lady!’ ”