“Milly,” he whispered. “I don’t feel so good …”

Milly Grant turned to give him the glare of a woman handling an important task. “I told you, if you want to be in here you have to keep quiet.” She gestured to the blank monitors. “I’ve got work to do.”

“I’m sorry. I was just wondering how long we have before it starts. I was thinking maybe I might go to the bathroom and—”

“It’s starting now, you wasted imbecile. Are you blind as well as ignorant? Use your eyes!”

And now he could see it. The monitors provided a clear view of one hemisphere of the Star Chamber’s central atrium. The front of the room was empty, except for Chan Dalton slumped black-clad and scowling in an easy chair. Dougal MacDougal sat far off to the rear, on the observers’ bench. Now three oval patterns of light were flickering into existence close to Dalton. The lights gradually solidified to become three-dimensional images of the Stellar Group Ambassadors.

On the far left hung a shrouded, pulsing mass of dark purple. As the image steadied, the shape became the swarming aggregate of a Tinker Composite, imaging in from Mercantor in the Fomalhaut system. The Tinkers had clustered to form a symmetrical ovoid with appendages of roughly human proportions. Next to the Tinker Composite, still showing the margin of rainbow fringes that marked signal transients, hovered the lanky tubular assembly of a Pipe-Rilla. It was linking in from its home planet around Eta Cassiopeiae, a mere eighteen lightyears away. And far off to the right, beyond a vacant spot in the Assembly (but fifty-plus lightyears away in real space, halfway across the domain of the Stellar Group) loomed the dark green bulk of an Angel.