Statesman by Piers Anthony Page A

speak with an accent, but intelligibly.
    She could make herself understood, and she could understand anything spoken to her in that language, provided she was prepared for it with the appropriate capsule. She had the dialects, too.
    I don't want to oversimplify this. Language is more than a collection of words, and the syntax of a language may be the essence of it rather than the vocabulary. But Forta had made a study of the fundamental patterns of the major language trunks, and researched constantly to improve her skill, so that the actual words were most of what she needed to make sense of other tongues. It was an accomplishment that was on a par with her ability to do emulations.
    I had occasion to meet with others who used unfamiliar languages, even within the Saturnine Union, as I had discovered in Kraine. Yes, Forta would be useful to my work here!
    The heat did not let up; the nomenklatura remained determined to eliminate me. Khukov reluctantly concluded that I could not safely remain on the planet. If I showed my face in public, one of their assassins would go for me first, then if caught would commit suicide, and the body would have no ties to the employer. If I remained in hiding, eventually they would ferret out my location, and send in a bomb.
    They were no longer interested in being careful; I had to be eliminated, for it was obvious that they were otherwise doomed.
    “But you have proven yourself,” Khukov said on the private holophone. It looked just as if he were sitting in our chamber. “The procedures you have instituted will carry through to their completion, perhaps more slowly without you, but inevitably. You can now be spared for greater things.”
    I smiled wryly. What could be greater than the renovation of the planetary industrial base?
    But he wasn't joking. “I want you to negotiate with Rising Sun.”
    “With who?”
    “In your terms, Titan, our greatest moon. In the Solar System, Titan is a satellite of Saturn, and this does not accord with their social perspective, any more than their ancestors considered Japan to be an island satellite of the continent of Asia. So they prefer to call themselves the Empire of the Rising Sun. It would be well for a diplomat to remember that.”
    “Rising Sun,” I agreed. “But can the occidental Tyrant speak for the oriental aspect of Saturn?”
    “In many respects, that moon is closer to your planet than to mine,” he reminded me. “Remember, it was Jupiter who occupied it, after System War Two, not Saturn. Now it is an industrial giant in its own right, and we would like to establish better trade relations.”
    “I'm sure Titan will trade,” I said. "But it sells finished products, and your interplanetary credit is weak.
    What can you offer?"
    He told me what the USR had to offer. I nodded. “I believe I can handle that.”
    “And it will keep you safely off-planet, while the disturbance here dies down,” he concluded.
    Thus we undertook our mission as liaison between Saturn and Titan. It promised to be an intriguing challenge.
    Titan bore a certain resemblance to my planet of origin, Callisto. Khukov had termed it moon, but as he had noted, we of the satellites prefer to call them planets in their own right. Indeed, it was never more than a convention of convenience to call them moons; any such pair is actually a set of bodies in space orbiting each other. When one is larger, the perturbations of its orbit tend to be less, and so it is deemed to be the primary, but one might as readily term it the secondary mass. Certainly to us of Callisto, Jupiter seemed like a giant satellite.
    Callisto was somewhat under two million kilometers out from Jupiter; Titan was somewhat over one million out from Saturn. As interplanetary distances go, that's a similar league, and it made Saturn appear larger from Titan than Jupiter did from Callisto. Callisto completed an orbit in under seventeen days; Titan in just under sixteen. Callisto had a diameter of just