COUNCIL

Cinco — you want the Genii. Not their friendship; their hand on the wheel. I have watched you regard Dina's people the way a sailor regards a current he means to ride rather than fight. It can be done. I will not tell you it cannot. But hear how the water charges for such a thing.

A people is not taken in a scene. A people is Standing — a stake in the Ledger — and Standing is won or wounded a watch at a time, through Works declared in the open, with hands you can spare and power you can pledge. To bend the Genii toward a confederation is not to declare a Work; it is to set a Divine Work turning — the kind with no counted end and several storms sealed inside it, each breaking in its season. Some will rewrite the very aim you began with, for that is the nature of trying to hold a whole people in your fist: they push back, and the card changes under your hand.

The Hoffans, too, perhaps — braver and more brittle than the Genii, and keepers of a cure that is also a grave. Fold them in and you gain a shield against the dark; you also gain the ache of what that shield costs. I do not say no. I say only: read the letterhead when the report comes, and mark whose name signs it.

And a confederation — a table of worlds seated as one Council — is the grandest Work a crew of yours has ever set turning. It will demand you choose the wide table or the narrow. It will want its dissent minuted, so that when one world is spent for the others, the objection is already written down. And it will not come by price alone; some of it you will simply have to be given.