I opened my mouth, came up with nothing, and found myself needing to address a certain burning sensation in my eyes.
Skye gave me a squeeze on the shoulder. “Apology accepted.”
“Love, I—”
“Again: apology accepted. No need dwelling on it. I’ll jump your bones with special enthusiasm later. But what brought this on, anyway? Something Pescziuwicz said?”
I muttered a curse, and dabbed at my eye with the napkin Colette had provided with my drink. “No. Our bosses.”
“Our Dip Corps bosses or our other bosses?”
“Our other bosses.”
She turned wary. “I should have known. Ten minutes fighting that conversational rip current would make anybody cranky.”
“Tell me about it.”
“If it’s any consolation, the Pearlmans have spent the last ten minutes dominating the conversation with cute stories about their pets and office politics, and they’re still going even as we speak. Poor Jelaine’s eyes are crossing.”
Small talk. I’ve never been good at it, either making or enduring, but I sometimes envy those who have the capacity. “Just tell me. Yes or no. No details. Is there anything you’ve felt the need to withhold about this trip?”
Only somebody as close to them as myself would have noticed the hesitation. “Yes. Just an epiphany about a couple of these people that you might have missed. Nothing important at this time. What about you? Did our employers give you anything I should know?”
I rubbed my forehead. “Hints. Augurs. Dire warnings of imminent doom. Assurance that I have an inflated sense of my own importance. Fresh responsibilities that directly contradict that reality check. The entire fate of humanity at stake. Revelations that change everything I ever thought I knew.”
Skye nodded. “The usual, then.”
“Most pressing right now: advance warning that somebody in this room is about to be murdered.”
Nothing in Skye’s expression changed. There was no fear, no obvious alert. But something ineffable altered within her, something that would remain hidden to everybody but myself.
We were both thinking the same thing. The AIsource were nothing if not precise, and they hadn’t said a damn thing about a murder attempt. They’d said a murder. It was going to happen even if I moved heaven and Earth to stop it.
And what, precisely, could I do to stop it anyway? Warn everybody, citing a hidden source I could not divulge? The second the murder took place anyway, the Bettelhines would demand to know where I’d gotten the information. The blocks in my head would keep me from explaining my special relationship with the AIsource, I’d look like I was refusing to answer, and the Porrinyards and I would find ourselves in a Bettelhine prison before the corpse had a chance to cool.
The most we could do was keep our eyes open and hope we could make a difference to whatever was coming.
I turned to Colette and did something that has always been very difficult, almost impossible, for me. “I’m sorry. I was a pig.”
The bartender’s eyes were as bright as the shimmery arcs flowing down the side of her head in sine waves. “Don’t worry, Counselor. I didn’t notice.”
For some reason I felt diminished by that.
We returned to the table just after Arturo Mendez set down the main course, a pastry leaking a mixture of something red that I supposed to be meat, and a sauce that resembled molten gold. Greenery of some species I didn’t recognize framed that concoction in a delicate spiral that turned orange at the interior vanishing point. Our arrival coincided with several of the diners, including Dejah Shapiro and Dina Pearlman, declaring it the unseen chef’s greatest accomplishment yet. Though Oscin had taken a few bites himself, and seemed likely to survive, I regarded it with a marked lack of enthusiasm. It wasn’t just my lifelong preference for synthesized foods, unconnected with all the messy organic factors I associate with planets. But the blue liqueur had deadened any appetite I might have been able to summon.
Monday Brown asked, “How did it go, Counselor? Was Mr. Pescziuwicz able to answer all your questions?”
I picked at the thing with a fork. “Precious few, sir, but he assures me he’s still working on it.”
“He will,” Philip Bettelhine said. “The man has the work ethic of a machine. We’re lucky to have him.”
Dejah sipped her wine. “Yes, but is he lucky to be had by you?”
“He can already afford a luxurious retirement, if that’s what you mean.”
“But only on Xana,” she pointed out.
“Yes, well, that goes without saying. We can’t have him flitting off to some competitor, or unfriendly government, and spilling everything he knows about our security systems. He knew that when he took the job. But Xana’s a big world, with a fine variety of climates and communities for somebody in his position. He can have everything he wants.”
“Except freedom,” Dejah said.
That annoyed him. “What’s freedom, though? Put any animal in a cage larger than its natural range, feed it well, make sure that all its needs are met, and it may never encounter, or recognize, the walls that keep it hemmed in. Put a man on a garden planet with unlimited opportunities for recreation, for companionship, and for his choice of lifestyles, and why would he ever long for faraway systems that can’t possibly offer him any more?”
“Human beings are not animals,” Dejah said.
“I know I have everything I want here,” Farley Pearlman volunteered, a shy glance at the Bettelhines establishing to his satisfaction that he had not spoken out of turn. “We have the same deal, you know. We have to, with all the sensitive projects we’ve worked on.”
“As do I,” Monday Brown said.
Vernon Wethers raised his hand. “Me too. I don’t mind.”
Farley Pearlman said, “Temet’s weather is perfect, most of the year. Why would I want to suck bluegel for half a year in Intersleep, just to visit somewhere that’s not going to be any better?”
Dina Pearlman said, “My best friend, Joy? She was part of a trade delegation to New London once. She said the food there was poison, and the people—”
Jason Bettelhine coughed once, seizing the conversation without having to raise his voice a single decibel. “In the first case, the counselor and her companions hail from New London. I assume they’d have something to say about the ‘poison’ food.”
Dina glanced at me, her eyes stricken less with the awareness that she’d just insulted the Porrinyards and myself than with the knowledge she’d done it before the local equivalent of royalty. “Oh, I’m sorry, dear, I didn’t mean—”
Jason rode out her apology before she could find a way to make it worse than the original offense. “In the second place, I believe I know as much about cages, and leaving comfortable places to travel through distant ones, as anybody here.”
A cloud passed over Philip’s features. “Yes. And just look how well that worked out for you.”
Farley, assuming that humor, exploded with forced laughter that trailed off into silence as he registered that he was the only one treating the line as funny.
The Khaajiir put aside his own entree (which, as per the usual Bocaian preference, had been seared to a blackened crisp) long enough to clutch his staff and assure him, “Don’t worry, sir. Laughing in the face of irony is just one of life’s perks.”