He moved closer to her and started kissing a particularly sensitive spot behind her ear.
“Well, somewhat pissed off, anyway,” she said, burying her fingers in his hair.
“So let me kiss it away,” he breathed against her neck, lifting a hand to her collar to begin undoing the snaps on the childish pajamas. “Let me wipe it away and wipe away the memories of all the jerks the job keeps hitting you with. Nobody here but us two,” he was kissing downward, between her breasts, when she stiffened.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” She shifted out from under him and sat up, staring at him.
“Just that they don’t matter. They don’t matter a damn.” He stroked her hair. “I don’t blame you. I don’t like your job, but I knew about it when I married you and I don’t blame you at all, love.”
“That’s nice. What ‘they’ are we talking about, exactly?” she asked icily.
“Hey, calm down, Cally. Nobody in particular, just, well, anybody you have to… encounter… in your work. It’s a tough job, and you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of,” he reassured. “That’s why I never, ever ask. And I won’t.”
“You mean—” she broke off, pitching him aside and storming across the room, turning to face him. “I don’t fucking believe this!” She ran a hand through her hair, breathing heavily, voice rising to just short of a screech. “I just don’t — the whole time we’ve been married, you think I’ve been fucking other guys? You do, don’t you? Oh, my God.” She sank down into the plastic desk-chair and stared off at the wall, unseeing. “I don’t believe this.”
“What?” Stewart’s face was a sickly ashen-gray. Aware that he had screwed up, badly, he hesitated. His normally quick mind felt like it had been stuffed full of fog. “Of course I—” he began, tapering off to silence. He held a hand out to her, but let it drop when she didn’t respond. “You didn’t — I didn’t — oh, hell.”
When he would have walked over to her, she flinched away.
“Oh, my God, Cally, I’m so sorry. I thought — I guess I didn’t think.” He tried to think of something else, anything else he could say that might make things better instead of worse. In the end, he just sat. After an eternity of her staring like that, refusing to talk to him, he stood and stuck his feet into his shoes. At the door he turned back. “I’d like to have breakfast with you,” he said.
“Fine.” She didn’t even look up as he stepped out and closed the door.
In the morning, over breakfast, they made up. Then they proved the old adage that make up sex is some of the best sex of all. It was good, but there was something hollow in the pit of James Stewart’s stomach as he saw her to her shuttle and watched it take off, saying goodbye to her for the umpteenth time in their marriage. Damn the risks that had kept them from being together.
Gray cubicle walls didn’t look any better when they were made from Galplas instead of fabric, steel, and plastic. In fact, it was worse. The entire cube and desk had been extruded in place, defeating most of the purpose of modularity in the original design. The whole thing was the gray of cinder-blocks, rendered even more dismal by the absolute lack of texture — a feature of working directly for a subsidiary of a Galactic group.
Most of the workers in Human Welfare’s personnel department did what they could within the company’s policy of one plant, one still holo — usually of a spouse or partner, one dynamic wall image of dimensions less than point seven five square meters. There was scarcely room for more. It hadn’t taken long after the advent of really efficient buckleys before some wonk had noted that no paper and no phone meant none of the files and office supplies that typically went to serve paperwork and phones. The modern worker needed little more than a chair, enough space for his buckley to project his current work, a place to rest his coffee cup, and a small drawer to hold data cubes. The time and motion study that followed ensured that there would be little more than that inside an individual’s cubicle. The name had stuck, even though the shape was now more like a rectangular box stood upright than an actual cube. The divider walls were two meters high, to prevent each person’s coworkers from presenting a visual distraction that could reduce productivity.
The tiny desk areas had a single, unintentional benefit. A worker had only to slide back his chair to talk to the guy next to him. Samuel Hutchins now did so.
“Hey, Juice. Do you have a couple of people who maybe came in with some… new friends and family… and are open to returning the favor?”
“What, got some people you’re trying to get on? Didn’t know you were low on cash.”
“If I can.” He shrugged. “You know how it is.”
“Sure,” she said, scribbling down a couple of names. “You’re always good about returning your favors.”
“I try to be,” he said. Hutchins had been most particular about returning his favors all his life, which was mostly over now. At fourteen, he had been right at the upper age limit of children considered for shipment to Indowy worlds. If his father hadn’t been the leader of the loyal opposition in Parliament, he wouldn’t have been sent at all. On Adenast, he had frequently wondered whether that wouldn’t have been for the best. He was just too old to adapt. He had no talent for languages, and so never became fluent in any Indowy dialects. He had taken sedatives for claustrophobia every day of his time living among the Indowy. Ordinarily, that would simply have been his lot in life. Nobody paid to ship humans from some other world back to Earth, and he had no talents for jobs that would have made enough FedCreds to pay for passage — and would have been constrained by contracted debts to remain on Adenast if he had. Michelle O’Neal, bless her soul, had somehow managed to obtain him a cabin job on a freighter leaving Adenast for Earth thirty years ago. The job was another he had no talent for, resulting, as she had no doubt intended, in his employment being terminated and him being booted out the door on Titan Base. Earning further passage to Earth, part paid in cash, and part paid in the most disagreeable of ship chores, he had found difficult, but possible.
His debts, of course, had dictated that he seek his employment through Darhel firms. Nothing else paid enough to service the interest. Hence his present situation, at long last, in a position to return the single biggest favor he’d ever owed a living soul.
So here he was in his sixties, not juved and never likely to be a candidate for such, working in a position where, until now, the greatest job benefit was the blessed, however fake, solitude of his workspace. Handsome and agile in his youth, Sam now sported arthritic knees, a large bald patch, and a bad comb-over. His own grandfather, who Sam knew he resembled, had worn his hair just the same. The younger generations would never understand loss the way the war babies did. It could make you do funny things, sometimes. Maybe his near-fanatical dedication to paying debts, monetary or favors, somehow came out of his shuffled teen years. Maybe the repayment of favors was just the one bit of Indowy culture that took. His common sense, however, was all wisdom acquired from age.
When Miss O’Neal asked her favor, that common sense had made him sit on any personal curiosity, or any heroic tendency to volunteer for more than she asked. He had a feeling that whatever she was planning, if he stuck his nose in it, the only place he’d be was in the way.
This part of the favor was simple enough. In personnel, they did it all the time. The boss was Indowy raised. The Darhel were more used to employing Indowy laborers than human. Indowy always placed great emphasis on clan connections in hiring. The idea that nepotism could be a bad thing was totally alien to their species’ nature. Humans applying for jobs in facilities like this one sometimes had relatives on the job already. When they didn’t, friends on the job were the next best thing. The bosses liked everybody’s relationships interlinked — it bought organizational loyalty when many of the acts that the organization perpetrated were grossly illegal. That, along with very large salaries. Personnel grunts like himself, faced with the impossible requirement of finding employees connected with other employees in a disorganized postwar world, managed by “people” whose understanding of human nature was sketchy, did what any good paper pushers would have done. They made friendships and kinships up wholesale and greased the palm of the right employee to make the “relationship” pass casual inspection. Employees who had gotten their job by this process were universally willing to supplement their salaries in exchange for passing on the favor to someone else. As a system, it was a bit nuts, but it kept everybody happy. He now had enough names in hand to make all his target applicants look desirable to the bosses, and would owe Juice a return favor.