Foreigner

From back cover Daw paperback February 1996: SECOND CONTACT Nearly two centuries after the starship Phoenix disappeared into the heavens, leaving an isolated colony of humans on the world of the atevi, it unexpectedly returns to orbit overhead, threatening the stability of both atevi and human governments. With the situation fast becoming critical, Bren Cameron, the brilliant, young paidhi to the court of the atevi is recalled from Mospheira where he has just undergone surgery. But his sudden and premature return to the mainland is cause for more then mere physical discomfort. For during his brief absence, his government has sent in his paidhi-successor, Deanna Hanks -- representative of a dangerous archconservative faction on Mospheira who hate the atevi. And though she should despair when Bren is once again able to fill his post, no recall order comes. Cut off from his government and haunted by the continuing threat of assassination, Bren realizes his only hope may be to communicate directly with the Phoenix as the spokesman of the atevi -- an action which may cut him off for good from his own species. Yet if he doesn't take this desperate and illegal action, he may be forced to helplessly bear witness to the final destruction of the already precarious balance of world power.

The plight of a man who can see both sides of a problem. He is Ben Cameron of Mospheira, a planet shared by humans and aliens, and he is the only one who speaks both languages. War threatens and as the official go-between Cameron's job is to find a compromise, but how to reconcile people who only talk one language? By the author of Invader.

From back cover Tor paperback June 1985: The ship was doomed. The host's body was dying. The only hope was to crashland on a nearby primitive planet which, unknown to its natives, hosted a galactic observation station; a station where he could find shelter and, ultimately, rescue. But with his host's last thread of consciousness, NK-2 saw that the city he expected lay in ruins. How could he find his fellow galactics in such chaos? How could an ancient being of pure energy survive, alone on such a world? Then salvation appeared in the form of a young boy, and NK-2 took his chance. Now slave and alien inhabit the same body, and the boy has become a spear, thrust at the very heart of the great Babylonian Empire. For NK-2's plan requires that he become a God.

Cajeiri, the young son of the powerful leader of the Western Association, has become a target for forces bent on destroying his father's rule. For Cajeiri is the first "ateva" youth to have lived in a human environment and the first of his people to ever truly understand the so similar--yet so dangerously different--aliens who share his home planet and threaten the hidebound customs of his race.

The story of humans stranded on an alienplanet where registered assassination is a way of life. They are the descendants of a space ship which lost itsway 500 years earlier. They live on an island and theonly contact they are allowed with the mainland isthrough one human, the foreigner of the novel.