Silver Shark

Chapter Four

Claire strode down the hallway, her heels clicking lightly on the transparent floor, her tablet in her hand. She wore a pale green dress that set off her hair and her new tan. The day was winding down, and the week with it.

The hallway brought her to thirty-three twelve, a wide room nicknamed the Wheel. The Wheel consisted of a round common area from which a dozen office rooms branched in a circle. From above it looked like a flower with a circular middle and elongated petals.

People emerged from the offices at her approach. Hands held out pseudopapers and data strips. She was a link to Ven and everyone wanted to get their bit in before the Friday rolled to a close.

"Earnings projections for the next twin-week!"

"What do you want me to do about Vinogradov case?" Marto asked.

"He will look at it this afternoon," she replied.

"What about Hawk Corp.?" Liana asked.

"Monday." Claire smiled.

"Here's the Bodia summary."

When she made it to the lift, her hands were full. No matter how well Venturo treated his employees and how ethical he was in keeping his mind to himself, the non-psychers never could get read of a nagging suspicion that he might be scanning their thoughts. She'd been on the receiving end of these suspicions before: people who went out of their way to avoid her, never discourteous but always cautious. It made her isolated. Psychers stuck together, because the rest of the world was rarely welcoming.

Claire turned and watched the sun shine through the solar panels, as the elevator moved upward. In the month she had spent as Venturo's assistant, she managed to become an indispensable link between him and the support staff. They saw her as safe, a buffer between them and Venturo's lethal brain. It was at once so much more than she thought she would achieve and so much less than she was capable off.

The doors whispered open, and she exited the elevator, heading for Venturo's office. It was Friday. The weekend was just around the corner.

Having two days off after the lifetime of weekend consisting of half-days on Sunday seemed like a decadent luxury. The first three weekends she slept, tried take-out from the neighboring restaurants, and watched broadcasts, soaking up information about the Province of Dahlia like a sponge. She'd finally decided she had enough understanding of the customs and planned to venture to the Terraces this weekend.

She saw him through the translucent door at the end of the hallway: he stood by his desk, his wide back to her, talking to a digital screen, the line of his shoulders tense. Something unpleasant.

Things with Venturo had become progressively complicated. She no longer stared in stunned silence when she saw him, but as they worked together, the facets of his personality became apparent. Venturo had a fierce intellect and relentless drive to succeed, knitted together by a kind of arrogance evolved from understanding your own power.

Venturo had definite ideas about how things had to be and he held himself to these strict standards. In the month she acted as his personal aide, she had seen him furious over a stupid mistake an employee made, yet when the same employee meekly came to the slaughter, Venturo treated him with tact and flawless politeness. On two occasions, Ven ran around the building, trying to hide from his aunt and an invitation to some family function, until Lienne lost her patience and turned her mind into a glowing beacon of light, mind-scanning the place for him, but in their interactions he would be respectful to her without fail.

It was this control that drew her in. The more she learned about him, the more she was drawn to him. That and the small, seemingly insignificant things he did for her. He opened the door for her. She had discovered that the drink machine in the Wheel dispensed tea in thirty different flavors, and after a hard day of work, when Ven would make his evening pilgrimage to get himself a coffee, he would bring her a cup of hot tea. He sought her opinion, and he would ask her seemingly random things. Did she have a chance to go the Botanical Gardens? Has she been to the Terraces?

He must've been something else on the bionet. She would never know. He would never see her on the bionet either.

Lucky for her, her ability to control her emotions was never in question. She was never less than professional in their interactions.

The office door slid open. Claire stepped inside.

Venturo turned. She read fury in his eyes. His mind churned and broiled. "We're about to lose the Sangori account."

What? "To whom?" she asked.

"De Solis Security."

DSS. The Guardian's biggest rival.

Claire reviewed the facts. Bionet safety consisted of two phases: the establishment and the maintenance. The establishment meant installation of static security mechanisms and structuring the bionet in the way that would lead an intruder into these defenses The maintenance consisted of responding to active threats. Of the two, the establishment phase was the most costly and the most labor-intensive. Because of the danger involved, the maintenance brought in a larger amount of money but required fewer man-hours.

Venturo had given Sangori a very good deal on the establishment to entice them into employing Guardian, Inc. He had been planning to recoup his costs on the maintenance fees.

The contract had been signed. They'd been working on the establishment phase for the past three weeks and it was completed this morning. Giving it up would mean DSS would reap all of the benefits of their groundwork.

A clause in the contract gave Sangori legal means to terminate it after the establishment. The clause was standard, but in every meeting Venturo and Savien had, the head of Sangori family had asserted his intention to continue with the maintenance phase. He broke his word.

The anger in Ven's mind told her they had no legal recourse.

"How much do we stand to lose?" she asked.

"Two million credits," he said. "It's not the money."

"I don't understand," she said.

"Savien Sangori doesn't have the expertise to engineer this scheme on his own. He knows money; he doesn't understand bionet. This took a psycher, someone who had looked at the amount of work involved and quoted him exact numbers prior to him ever walking into my building. DDS had conspired with him. They must've offered him monthly maintenance at a lower price if he managed to get the establishment out of me. They set us up."

Now she understood. "It's about pride then."

He faced her. "Yes. More, it's about business. I've been double-crossed. Suckered like a fool. I provide security. Would you want a gullible fool to protect your data?"

"A psycher's gullibility has no bearing on the destructive potential of his mind." She almost bit the last word. She shouldn't have said this.

Ven looked at her, his mind focusing on hers. If he looked too closely, she would be outed.

"Forgive me," Claire said. "I've been trying to read some research in my spare time. I may have misunderstood."

He considered it for a long second and let it go.

"You understand perfectly," he said. "But not many other people do."

He pulled his doublet off the back of his chair.

"Where are you going?"

"To have a conversation with Savien Sangori. I'm going to attempt to explain the facts of life to him."

"Those facts being?" she asked.

"I make a dangerous enemy," he said, "and Sangori is an old provincial family. They had never before betrayed the integrity of their family name to make a credit. I'm curious why they decided to start now."

"What if he refuses to talk to you?"

"I'm not planning on giving him a chance to decline."

Alarm dashed through her. She set her pseudopapers in the chair and plucked her tablet out from the bottom of the stack.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm coming with you."

"Why?"

"Because you shouldn't go alone."

He peered at her incredulous. "And you're planning to come as my bodyguard?"

"I am."

It would take her at least three minutes to break through the shell over her mind, bringing her to combat readiness. It would be an eternity in a psycher fight, where death was instant. Still, she couldn't let him go alone and she didn't need to listen to his mind to realize he wouldn't take anyone he considered capable of delivering damage to watch his back. Venturo Escana, arrogant beast that he was, would consider backup beneath him.

"Just out of purely academic curiosity, how exactly are you planning to defend me?" Ven asked. "You have no weapons, no combat enhancements, and your mind is inert. Are you planning on beating Sangori's assassins off with that tablet or were you thinking of a more theoretical approach? Should I look forward to you giving me a detailed analysis of a knife sticking out of my back? If I happen to die, will you deliver a slide point presentation describing my valor at my funeral?"

"Are you finished?"

"Possibly."

"Very well." She raised her chin. "I'm ready when you are."

"You do realize that this is foolish?"

She simply looked at him, loading her gaze with as much scorn and sarcasm as she could manage.

As they were walking down the hallway, Ven leaned to her. "Thank you."

"You're welcome. I hope you don't get us killed."

"They wouldn't dare touch you," he said. "You're a noncombatant."

They stepped into the elevator.

"Can you kill outside of bionet?" she asked.

"If the Sangori are smart, you will never have to find out," he said.

Ven marched into the lobby of Sangori Investments. Claire followed him, a step behind. Inside, white columns rose up, five stories tall and lit from the inside with a warm yellow light. An ornate lacy relief of vines and flowers sheathed the columns, blocking the illumination, so the spaces between leaves and flowers glowed with white. Delicate golden chairs sat in groups by ornate tables, so airy they might have been spun by spiders. People occupying the chairs chatted in quiet voices.

In the back of the lobby, a reception area waited, flanked by shorter columns that supported white statues of men on some sort of mounts. Bright green silk draped the reception counter, spilling from it in pleated waves.

She had never seen so much opulence in her entire life.

Ven strode to the reception area across the polished floor inlaid with a green and gold mosaic. A man with a practiced smile greeted him.

"Venturo Escana to see Savien Sangori," Ven said. "I'll show myself up."

Heads turned. Suddenly they were the focus of attention.

She felt the sharp points of psycher minds approaching from the left, where a gilded elevator slowly descended along the wall. Ven had felt them too, and moved to stand in front of her.

The elevator doors opened and Castilla de Solis walked out onto the floor. Her mind blazed like a luminescent supernova. In the split second, Claire assessed it. Castilla had power. The question was, did she have the skill to go along with it?

Behind her two men stepped out, one tall, older, with a square jaw, a walking brick. His mind glowed, not as bright as Castilla's, but strong enough. The man on his left was a leaner, faster, younger version of him, his blue-black hair falling in a long waterfall down his shoulders. His mind rivaled Castilla's but there was an odd brittle edge to it.

"Venturo," Castilla's eyes opened wide in mock surprise.

"Did you enjoy yourself?" Scorn dripped from Venturo's voice.

The lean psycher's gaze met Claire's. The irises of his eyes were so light, they nearly glowed.

"Yes. Yes, I did."

"Was it worth starting a war?"

"Are we at war, Venturo?" Castilla raised her eyebrows.

"We are now."

"Then I'll start with your pretty little drone."

The lean psycher's mind caught Claire's in a fiery hot grip. Her body locked, her spine bending under unnatural angle. Her throat constricted, cutting the oxygen flow to a mere trickle, letting in just enough air to retain consciousness. She began to dismantle the shell from within.

The lean psycher's eyes widened, puzzled.

"She isn't screaming." Castilla blinked, feigning surprise. "Do you restrain your drone often, Ven? Perhaps she likes it?"

Venturo moved. The force of his mind shot out like a blow of an enormous club. The older man went flying across the lobby, his heavy body knocking the golden chairs into the air. Venturo spun, too fast, and then Castilla was locked in the cage of his arms, her back to his chest, his hand holding a red monomolecule blade a millimeter away from her jugular.

"Attacking a civilian is a new low for you," he said, his voice calm, almost conversational. "Shall I tell your parents about it?"

She trembled, rage shivering in the curl of her upper lip. "Kill him!"

The older man slowly picked himself up off the floor. His nose, mouth, and eyes bled. The lean psycher stared at Ven.

"Kill him!"

"They can't, dear," Ven told her, his lips a few centimeters from her ear. "You can't fight me with your mind. We've tried that, remember? If your cousins attack me, they'll have to spend time breaking through my outer shield. My blade will end your life in half a second. And then I'll kill both of them, and if I don't, your father will."

Castilla growled, a purely animal sound suffused with helpless fury.

"So sweet and refined," Ven said. "As always, a true blossom of the Provinces."

"Fuck you!"

"Perhaps later, if I decide to go slumming." Ven nodded at the lean psycher. "Pelori, let her go. Now."

The hold on Claire's mind vanished. Her heels touched the ground. "Thank you," she said to Ven. "Shall I alert the authorities?"

"There is no need. We're finished here." Ven let go of Castilla and the woman shoved away from him.

"You'll regret this," she snarled.

"I had to touch you — I'm regretting it already."

Castilla spun and walked out of the lobby. The older man followed. The lean psycher lingered, looking her over, and walked away.

"Are you alright?" Ven asked, his mind probing hers gently, searching for damage.

"I'm fine." She forced calm to flow through her outer thoughts. "Shall we go up?"

"No. I've changed my mind." He leaned closer. "We won't get to Sangori now. He had too much time to prepare." Aloud he said, "Will you join me for dinner instead?"

"Of course."

"Excellent."

They walked out. The moment they boarded Venturo's sleek silver aerial, the force of his mind flowed over hers, like a shield. "Will you let me scan your mind for injuries?"

"I would rather not."

"Why?"

"We're not that close," she told him. "I like to keep my thoughts private. I ask you to respect this boundary."

"Very well." Ven punched the code into the aerial's console, pulling his mind back. "Where would you like to eat?"

Claire considered it. She could tell him to take her home. In all likelihood, he simply wanted to observe her to see if her mind unraveled. But he was right here, next to her, and he was offering her an evening of his undivided attention. It wasn't in her power to turn it down.

I'm so pathetic.

If she was going to do this, she would make the best of it.

"Somewhere private," she said. "I think I've had enough excitement for today."

The aerial's engine hummed as they rose into the air. "I know just the place," he said.

Claire had no idea that the top floors of the Guardian Building housed a garden. In this part of the structure the outer exoskeleton of plasti-steel beams sloped, forming the upper curve of the flower bud, and the space between the diagrid and the inner core of the building was only about twenty-five meters. Those twenty-five meters were occupied by a tiled deck. Ornamental shrubs and flowers formed green barriers, slicing the deck into small private sections. Ven brought her to the larger of these sections.

Three comfortable wicker chairs with burgundy-red cushions waited in the center of the deck, each with its own side table, arranged around a large metal brazier. Past the chairs, the solar panels of the sloping diagrid had turned transparent, reacting to encroaching darkness. The sky spread before her, vast, endless, tinted with purple and blue, the stars distant points of light. Little white flowers bloomed in the flower beds, filling the air with a refined perfume reminiscent of peaches.

Venturo took an ornate bin behind one of the chairs, dumped a small heap of uniform black stones out of it into the brazier and added wood chips.

"What's this?"

"Charcoal."

"Fossil fuels? Really?" How quaint.

"It's a provincial tradition." He drenched the coals in some fluid and lit it with a flick of a spark stick. The coals ignited. A wave of heat washed over Claire. She smelled smoke. It wasn't an unpleasant scent.

To their right, the glass doors opened and a smiling man came forward, followed by an computerized trolley.

"Ah. Here comes our food. Thank you, Ertez."

"You're welcome. Enjoy."

The man departed. The top of the trolley opened like a flower, revealing half a dozen larger dishes, each supporting long skewers threaded with vegetables and meat.

"Pick one."

She puzzled over the choices and chose a skewer at random. "This one."

Ven lowered the skewer into the openings cut in the rim of the brazier, picked out his own skewer, and placed it next to hers. Flames licked the meat.

"Do you feel lightheaded at all?" he asked casually, plucking a bottle painted with icy lace of frost from the trolley. "Any strange vision problems, like tiny glowing threads flying about?"

He was trying to check if she suffered any mind lesions. Claire smiled. "I'm fine."

Ven opened the bottle and poured shimmering pink liquid into two glasses. "I'm sorry. I should have never put you into that position."

Ven would have never attacked a civilian. In his mind, that sort of action was filed under It's Just Not Done. His mind-shields were down — probably so he could scan her mind at the first sign of trouble — and his emotions leaked out. He was intensely worried about her well-being.

Claire smiled.

"Am I funny?"

"No."

"Then why are you smiling?"

"I find your customs — Dahlia customs — antiquated. Charming, but antiquated."

"We're a very violent society," he said, turning the skewers. "We have to have customs and ceremonies, otherwise we'd constantly offend each other and soon none of us would be left. Some things are not done. Attacking a civilian is one of them."

"Were you worried?" She sipped the pink drink. It was sweet, tart, and refreshing, with a trace of alcohol. She realized it must be wine.

"Yes," Ven said. "I was worried. I didn't want you to be hurt because I was caught off-guard."

"I wasn't worried," she told him.

"I noticed. You handled the whole situation with the poise of a seasoned kinsman." He laughed. "A violent psycher paralyzes your mind, and when he lets you go, you calmly ask if you should alert the authorities. You kill me, Claire."

Kill. A dangerous word. "I considered screaming in blind panic, but I didn't want to break your concentration."

"Was that a joke?"

"Possibly."

He raised his glass. "Congratulations."

"Thank you." She grinned and drank her wine.

Ven frowned. "I don't know what Castilla has on Sangori, but I called a friend of mine in the Provinces, Celino Carvanna. The man is a financial shark, so if something is going on with Sangori, I will soon know about it."

Ven took a plate from the trolley, used a fork to slide the meat and vegetables off the skewer onto it, and passed it to her. Claire took a bite. The meat tasted smoky and tender and completely delicious.

"This is great."

"There is something about food cooked over the open flame," he said. "I don't know if it's a racial memory from the time we huddled around the fire in animal skins, but there are few things as flavorful."

He raised his glass. She raised hers and he clinked it against hers. "Do you like the wine?"

"I love it. This is my first taste."

"No wine on Uley?" he asked.

"No. Occasionally we would be issued grain alcohol, but no wine." She bit the meat and chewed, savoring the taste. "Do you and Castilla have some sort of prior history?"

Ven sighed. "Yes. Yes, we do. My father was an off-worlder. He came to Rada with nothing except the clothes on his back, but he was a very powerful psycher and my mother's family took him in. He became a client It's the next step up from the retainer. When you're a client, you are almost family. My father fell in love with my mother and she fell in love with him. They married. He took the Escana name, because our family had status and name recognition, while his surname meant nothing. They were both older at the time, so it was a surprise when I came along."

"Were they happy you were born?"

He nodded. "Yes. I had a happy childhood. The money was tight, but tight by kinsmen standards. We had a nice house. During summers, we'd go to the coast to swim in the ocean. It was beautiful. Endless water, brilliant blue, as far as you can see and under the surface fish in every color. The mountains thrust right out of the water, and I'd sit on the rocks and watch the shark dolphins play..."

She almost said, "You see the bionet as the ocean, don't you, Ven?" but caught herself. Claire Shannon, the secretary, wouldn't know that.

"My parents loved it so much, they live there now. I always wanted to live on the coast." Ven smiled.

"So why don't you?"

"There are very few businesses on the coast. The ocean storms six months out of the year, so little shipping is done by water. The ports are mostly for tourists. Besides, most of the family is here. Our business interests are here. My father and mother have little concern for Guardian. Neither one of them is really the business type. They have the ability, but not the ambition required to grow a business."

Ven shrugged, leaning back. His face seemed almost melancholic, and then he shook it off.

"Anyway, back to Castilla. As I grew up, the family realized that I was their most valuable asset. I'm a stronger psycher than my father, but we had very few resources to make use of my talents. De Solis is an old family. A lot of money, a lot of connections, and decades in the bionet business. So, my parents approached the de Solis with a marriage proposal. De Solis would get a powerful psycher and Escana's financial issues would be resolved through the alliance."

He seemed unperturbed by the idea of his family selling him. "How did you feel about it?"

Ven drank his wine. "Imagine that you're eighteen years old. On this world eighteen means you are a man, expected to support yourself and your family. You're the golden child; your family expects you to lift them out of misery and solve all their financial problems, and you have no idea how to do that. You have a lot of anxiety about it. Then your father comes to you and says, 'You don't have to go to college and you don't have to worry about finding a job. All you have to do is marry this beautiful girl, make her happy, and work for her family business. They'll train you, they'll teach you to develop your talents, and one day you'll inherit the whole enterprise. You'll never have to worry about a thing.'"

"Sounds great," she said.

"I was all about it," Ven said. "Ask any eighteen-year-old boy and he will tell you he'd jump on the chance. And Castilla was gorgeous. She had breasts the size of grapefruits."

Claire blinked.

"I'm trying to give you my eighteen-year-old perspective."

"So her breasts were a large factor in your calculations?"

"Yes. Sex with a beautiful girl on regular basis, I wasn't going to pass that up." Ven shook his head with self-mocking expression.

She laughed.

Ven refilled their glasses.

"What happened?" Claire asked.

"It turns out that I knew about the negotiations, but nobody bothered to tell Castilla. She was sixteen at the time and she was a kinsmen princess: expensive clothes, pricy jewelry, endless parties... Anything daddy's money could buy, she bought. She set the scene. She had a crowd of flunkies following her around, egging her on." Ven stirred the coals with a metal poker and set a few more skewers over the fire. "Somehow the rumors of the possible engagement leaked and one of the tabloids cornered her. She was at a party at the time, surrounded by her hangers-on. They asked her what she thought about the engagement."

He fell silent.

"What did she say?"

"She said, 'Well, of course every beggar boy wants to marry a princess, but princesses don't dream of marrying into panhandler families.'"

Even with her minimal knowledge of Rada, Claire knew the insult to the Escana family was monumental.

"The tabloid had her on vid, and they ran with it. Her father tried to quash it, but it was too late. The engagement was impossible after that. Castilla's parents were furious with her."

"Because of the insult to you?"

"That, but mostly because her conduct was vulgar. It made her seem stupid and spoiled and it was unbecoming of her family name. Kinsmen mothers would play the vid for their children as a demonstration of how not to behave in public. De Solis had been above reproach and now they were deeply shamed. Her father told her, 'You think you're a princess? Let's see how you will do without my money.' Everything stopped, all her parties, all her shopping sprees, all of it went away. Her crowd dumped her. She worked for the family company and was given just enough money to live on. To this day her spending is tightly controlled. She hates me. You saw her today, she was practically frothing at the mouth."

"You hate her, too."

Venturo stirred the coals again, the light of the fire playing on his face. "It took me eight years to scrape together enough funds to start Guardian. I took every job I could find. I remember two months after Guardian opened, a contract fell through. We couldn't pay the power bill. We got one terminal working, because we had to log in and patrol for our monthly maintenance. We had it running off the aerial's generator. I'd drained it dead. When I think where I could've been if we had married... She set me back about fifteen years."

Fourteen years ago the Intelligence soldiers had led her away from her mother's apartment.

"Do you regret it?" Claire asked.

"No. If I went down that road, I wouldn't be the person I'm today. I'm not indebted to anyone. I own my business, I own this building, many people feed their families because I provide them with jobs. I got there on my own. Nobody tells me what to do."

"Except Lienne."

Ven grinned. "Except her. She never lets me forget that I have family obligations. The other day she actually sent a pulse through the building looking for me. It's a kind of psycher wake-up call."

Yes, I know, it gave me a headache. Claire bit her tongue.

"Besides, I'd have to be married to Castilla." He grimaced.

Claire sipped her wine, feeling the pleasant heat slide down her throat. "Why aren't you married, Ven?"

He shrugged. "I work. A lot. Psychers aren't exactly a common kinsman variant and dating non-psychers is difficult." His face slid into a suave expression. "Hello there," he said in a smooth bedroom voice. "My name is Venturo Escana. I can read your mind!"

Claire laughed.

"I can tell when you're lying and I can discover all your secrets. I'll know when you fake it in bed, I'll know when you cheat, I'll know when you spend too much. I'll know what you really think about me. Don't you want to marry me?"

She finished off her glass and squinted at him from above the rim. "Would you read your wife's mind? You don't read our minds at work."

"Probably not," he said. "But there is always the possibility that I could and that's enough. Your turn to tell me about yourself."

"It's not that interesting," she said.

"I'm interested. I'm dying to know how you ended up on that planet."

She sighed. "Very well. Melko and Brodwyn are actually large mining conglomerates. Both of them owned mining fleets and they strip-mined asteroids for years. It takes a lot of skilled workers to run mining operations on that scale. Mining fleets always attract weird people, individuals who don't fit anywhere else, and the employees of both conglomerates had pretty varied histories.

"Then Brodwyn scouts discovered Uley, which is basically a mineral treasure trove covered with a thin layer of rock. The scouts came back but somehow Melko found out about the find. The official Brodwyn version is that one of the scouts was captured and Melko tortured the information out of her, but official versions are usually untrustworthy. The Melko fleet was more mobile at the time, so they wrapped up their operation and landed on Uley, on the Eastern Continent. It took Brodwyn almost three years to untangle themselves from their trade agreements and then they landed on the Western Continent."

"And the arms race began," Ven said.

She nodded. "The resources were severely limited so both Melko and Brodwyn adopted no-waste policies and encouraged population growth to build their armies. There was only one city on each continent and they looked exactly the same: picture a hive of uniform rectangular buildings about half-kilometer tall. The buildings were so large, each one was like a village ran by a Building Association. You would be born, live, work, and die in the same building sometimes."

"It sounds bleak."

"It was. On most worlds when a war breaks out, both sides have access to prior culture, to art, to pre-war luxuries such as gardens, clothes, entertainment. We didn't. Most clothes were standard issue and un-dyed. We had one solid meal a day, usually a meat block and some sort of grain, the rest of the time we had nutrient paste." Claire hesitated, not sure how much to share. "When I fourteen, I was taken away from my mother."

"What do you mean, taken away?" He refilled her glass and emptied the rest of the wine into his.

"It was decided that I should become a part of the military support staff, so some soldiers came and took me away from my mother. I was given new rooms in a Military building and I had to live there. My father had died years ago, and my mother was sick with Meteor Shower Virus. A lot of mining people get it — it looks like black burn marks on your skin. Nobody knows why it flares up, but the outbreaks will spark and die out on their own. The MSV is incurable. It attacks the nervous system and it's a very slow killer. The victim becomes weaker and weaker, until they lose the ability to walk and then fade into death. All you can do is make the person comfortable."

She took a swallow of her wine.

"Normally a child of my age would be working and would be expected to take care of their parent, but I wasn't allowed to do that. The Building Association stepped forward. The Elder, Doreem Nagi, apparently said that nobody in his building would die a slow death alone. The Elder has the legal powers of magistrate: he can marry people, divorce them, he acts as civil judge and so when he made that decision, people listened, and the building collectively took care of her. There were about three thousand people signed in the building, but toward the end with the war and all only about seven hundred residents remained and every day someone watched my mother and made sure that she had food, was clean, and took her pain killers. I owe them a debt I may never get an opportunity to repay."

"I take back my sad story," Ven said. "Yours is worse."

She shrugged. "There isn't much more to tell. I would wake up, go to work, come home, fall asleep. I did this for fourteen years. And then suddenly the war was over. We didn't even know. They told us we were winning until the very end."

She sensed discomfort emanating from him. Her story affected him, but he wasn't sure how to respond without offending her. Mighty Venturo Escana, lost for words.

"Well, that part of my life is over. Now I'm here," Claire said. "Drinking pink wine and enjoying good company.

"And eating meat cooked by a barbaric user of fossil fuels," Ven said.

"I love the food here," she confessed. "I don't know what most of things are, so I just order at random."

"New Delphi is the culinary capital of the South. Or it claims to be. Truth is, everyone in the Provinces is expected to learn to cook whether we like it or not."

"Oh?"

"Oh yes. In the Provinces, if a woman is a bad cook, people make jokes." He leaned closer. "Mina, Lienne's daughter? Can't cook at all. Everything she makes tastes awful."

Claire smiled. "I'm sure anything I made would be awful as well. Sometimes when I taste food, my mouth feels overwhelmed. This whole planet is overwhelming: the clothes, the colors, the people..."

He leaned toward her. "You're the most disciplined, grounded person I know, Claire. I've never seen anyone hit the ground running the way you did. Nothing rattles you. If you had a psycher mind, you would be something else on the bionet."

She could tell him. He wouldn't betray her. She could "I feel at ease with you," he said. "Your mind is so calm. Every day I deal with people whose minds are a source of constant noise. When we work together, I can finally relax."

She almost screamed in frustration.

"You understand the way I think. I want you to know that I value that greatly. I promise, I won't put you into a harm's way again. It took courage to handle it the way you've done. You stood by me. Not many employees would in your place. I won't ever forget that."

Employee... That's what she was, an employee. She shouldn't have deluded herself.

"Did I say something unpleasant?" he asked.

"Not at all. I just realized it's late. I should be getting home." He would never see her anything else. She was Claire with a quiet mind. That was her value to him. She had mistaken his friendliness and concern for something deeper.

"I'll walk you to the ground floor."

She rose. "It's alright. I know the way."

Ven got up. "Let me walk you down."

She turned and looked at him, keeping her voice flat. "It's not necessary. Thank you for the meal."

Claire turned and walked away.