Learning the World

9 — Red Sun Circle

14 365:05:12 11:17

It is now a year since I started this biolog. Happy birthday to Learning the World! Last night I stayed up all night reading it. Well, skimming it, to be honest. So much in it is self-absorbed and self-indulgent. Sometimes I gave you all too much information. Any fully adult reader must have found it painfully limited. I can see that now.

But, you know, it’s surprising. Seeing is seeing; reading is reading; and being able to see through everything and read anything is still seeing and reading. You can have the illusion that you’re thinking faster, but it’s not you who carries out the calculation, or the search, or the transformation — it’s the system doing it for you. So, now that I have more of my adult faculties, I will not be patronising toward those who have not. Which isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate the added richness, the texture, the depth that the virtuality genes (and, I suppose, in due course television and all the rest) give to the world. (Or do they? Is knowing (that you can know all that is known about) what you are looking at, is the labelling and tagging and indexing an impoverishment of experience? Does it carry the risk that we miss what might be new and unknown and fresh, even about familiar things? Whenever I test that seductive thought by turning off the virtual overlay, I seldom experience any enrichment: the world just loses a dimension, and looks flat.)

But I’ve told you all that already, in now embarrassing breathy excitement when the genes at last kicked in a couple of months ago. Enough.

To serious business. Life has become strange. It is not how I had expected it to be. I and everybody I know are working on their plans and proposals and trying to pull together a team or find one they’d like to join, just as we always expected to be doing. But overlaying all this — kind of like the virtual overlay, now that I come to think of it — is our preoccupation with Destiny II. In one sense it’s the most exciting thing that could have happened. In another it’s a big distraction from what we all thought was all we wanted in life.

The first probe images were distracting and fascinating enough. Since the probe returned to the orbiter with its atmosphere samples (high partial pressure of oxygen, which supposedly explains how the bat people fly and the megafauna are so, well, mega), and the analysers got busy sequencing the aerial bacteria (they have (yawn) a unique genetic code) and the orbiter started spraying out glass-beaded atmosphere-entry assembler packages to build microprobes with compatible chemistries and the little bugs started reporting back… well! You know what it’s like. You can get lost in exploring Destiny II.

I hesitate to say this, but the bat people are horrible.

The filthy roosts they live in are bad enough. What really disgusts me is that they keep slaves. It’s a word I’d only encountered before in the context of ants. I have since found out that originally this usage was a metaphor, and the term “slave” applied in the first instance to human beings — the prehistoric races used to do it to people. And the bat people do it to these poor mutilated drudges. But still, I suppose we should not be too sweeping in our condemnation: human beings used to keep human slaves almost up until the time of the Moon Caves. So our ancestors were just as disgusting when they only lived on the surface of the primary. It may become important to bear this in mind.

This morning at breakfast in the cafe with Grant and as usual talking about the big argument — is there really anything more to say? if so, I’ll find it — when I wondered what the Contract has to say about resolving disputes that divide the whole ship. (Notice how we all now think of it as the ship? And not the world?) So I looked it up. Part of my mind, I guess, must have been on the subject of contact, because I must have subvocalised the word, and that was what came up:

11378(b): Alien contact shall be treated as an emergency. “Alien contact” means the acquisition of information in any form direct or indirect which indicates or suggests the presence in any region within operational or communications range of the ship of any form of intelligence not of human or posthuman origin. “Emergency” means a situation as defined in Clause 59 paragraph (f) above; wherein it is declared, that the duly constituted Council at the time of the declaration or discovery of emergency may take any action internal or external which it deems fit with a view to resolving the emergency; such action to be answerable to the entire Complement and to the Civil Worlds in due course. In a situation of urgency (q.v.) within a state of emergency executive action may be taken by appropriate members of the Crew. Such urgent action shall be referred at once to the Council. A state of emergency may not be maintained for more than one calendar year as heretofore defined unless renewed by express permission of a poll of the entire Complement, normal canvassing procedures being available on a regular and non-emergency basis for the duration of the pre-poll discussion, which shall not be less than seven calendar days.

“Look at this!”

Grant was in a trance of his own, doubtless refining the design of his waterworld scheme (it now has a name, the Last Resort) or (hah!) his novel, but I overrode it with a zap. He came out blinking and shaking his head as if he’d really been swimming in his ludicrous ten-gravity water.

“What?”

“Look at this.” I patched him the link.

Breath indrawn through teeth. Trouble is, he was chewing at the time. (Yes, Grant, this is to embarrass you.)

He swallowed and came back into focus.

“Does this mean what I think it means?” I asked.

“If what you’re thinking is: ‘Has the ship been in a state of undeclared emergency for the past four months?’ and if ‘shall’ and ‘or discovery of emergency’ mean what they normally mean, yes,” he said.

“Oh good,” I said. “So the Council is a lawless dictatorship with only eight months to go before it has to put all its actions up for scrutiny.”

“I don’t see what’s good about that,” said Grant.

“The ‘only eight months to go’ part.”

“Do you think the Council is aware of this?”

“Of course it is,” I said. “It has to be. What amazes me is that the Contract has a clause about alien contact at all.”

“It has clauses for all sorts of unlikely events,” said Grant. “Fast burns inside or out, capture of ship, memetic plague, meteor strikes, you name it. Even war.”

I had to look the word up, but the internal dictionary is so fast it just looks like a blink, not a trance.

“You mean, something other than clade conflict with fast-burn spinoffs?”

“Yes,” said Grant. “Organised hostilities between relatively stable societal entities.”

“But there hasn’t been one of these for thousands of years!”

“Not in the Civil Worlds, sure. But some societies may have fallen out of them. Fast-burn survivors and so forth. And some ships go bad, we know that. So yeah, mad as it seems, the Contract has the appropriate provisions.” Grant grinned. “War is a state of emergency.”

I can’t really imagine war. I can imagine having to fight some swarm of zombie machines or snarling horde of posthuman fast-burn wreckage or whatever, but not two or more actual human societies actually fighting each other. I’m aware that people did that, before history, before the Moon, but it seems irrational. One side would have to believe they had something to gain from destroying or damaging the other, which just doesn’t make sense: it runs up against the law of association. And more to the point, each individual on any side would have to believe that they benefited from participating even if they died, which doesn’t make sense either. I suppose kin selection could make genes prevalent that made people vulnerable to that kind of illusion, but that only makes sense with animals that don’t have foresight. Even crows aren’t that stupid, at least not the ones that can talk. You have to get down to ants and such like before you see that kind of genetic mechanical mindlessness.

But this is a digression. I wrenched the conversation back on topic.

“All right,” I said. “And alien contact is, too.”

“The Council hasn’t behaved like we’re in a state of emergency,” Grant said. He waved a hand at the wall screens. “Everybody’s still arguing, there have been no decrees or anything.”

“That is not the point,” I said. “Everybody should know what the real situation is.”

Grant shrugged. “If you say so. The emergency looks more virtual than real at the moment.”

“To be honest, I’m not sure why this bugs me so much,” I said.

But it did. So I sent my message — you may have seen it — to every newsline I could reach: Are We in an Undeclared State of Emergency?

And I await an answer.

It was a place of blue tiled domes and white stone walls; of arches and arbours, orchards and courtyards, of narrow alleys and broad avenues and wide stairways, of aqueducts and fountains; of limes and oranges, figs and pomegranates. The fruit was eaten by birds and monkeys or rotted where it fell. (It had something to do with recycling.) White City was a haunt of the older generation. That made it a more happening place than the child-rearing suburbs or the teen-cohort towns. In that respect it reminded Horrocks of the free-fall cones. Some of the house prices that appeared in discreet virtual tags here and there showed higher numbers than any of his deals. He walked its streets with caution, taking care not to collide with even virtual presences. He took care, too, to keep his balance. Since his first adventure in walking he had become competent and confident, though here in White City the smoothness of the paving was as reassuring as the hardness of its stone was troubling.

The founder generation, the First Hundred Thousand as they sometimes styled themselves, dominated the streets and plazas. Salons discoursed in shaded sidewalk cafes, as much meaning carried in virtuality-freighted glances as was conveyed in speech. In other cafes business was done, under an aspect of leisure. Lovers strolled arm in arm, or entwined each other in nooks. Musicians of heartbreaking talent performed in small green patches of park. Sculpture and murals were displayed or in the process of creation, in processes that struck Horrocks as contrived in their difficulty. In the cones the subtle arts of the matter-composer were carried on with refinement and panache; what went on down here, he thought with some disdain as his sandals crunched marble chippings, was cutting edge stuff.

When they weren’t exerting themselves in primitive art and architecture or disporting themselves in courtly assignations or vexing their brains with hyperintelligent hyperchat, the founders indulged in likewise artificial risk-taking. Hang gliders and microlights soared above the town. Bicyclists and roller-skaters whizzed along the otherwise pedestrian streets. There was even a combat sport, a form of wrestling whose bouts consisted of long minutes of watchful poise followed by a move almost too swift to see, which in playback unpacked into a flurry of lethal-looking blows, grips, and throws, and ended always with one or both participants stretchered off.

The other thing the founders did was conspire in cliques. It had long been established in the Civil Worlds that public business was to be transparent, and personal business opaque; but it was as well recognised that the two would always have a turbulent interface, and that the clique, the caucus, and the conspiracy were as ineradicable features of civility as the council or the committee. The confabulation of elders to which Horrocks had been invited was known, where it was known at all, as the Red Sun Circle. He had been given to understand that the invitation was a privilege, but he was not much impressed. The politicking of the founders was not their only proclivity that struck him as adolescent. Only his respect for Awlin Halegap, who’d delivered the invitation, and an itch of curiosity, had brought him here.

Here, where the guidance ware in his head had led his feet. He stood in front of a plain green double door in a white wall. The paint and the whitewash had bubbled and flaked. The nailheads and fittings were of pitted black iron, as was a knob at waist level. Horrocks placed his palm against it and wrapped his fingers around it. Nothing happened. He thumped the door with the heel of his fist, in the time-honoured manner of dealing with a recalcitrant mechanism. A sliding noise and a click came from the door, and it swung open to reveal a woman holding something behind the door’s edge.

“Come in,” she said. “You’re expected.”

“Thank you,” said Horrocks. He stepped past her into a courtyard and watched as she pushed the door shut and turned another knob, this one on the inside. Again the sliding noise and the click. The woman looked somehow familiar, though Horrocks was sure he had never seen her. Small and sturdy, she had a mass of black curly hair, some of it caught by a clasp and piled on top of her head. Her shiny green shift was simple, as were her sandals, which showed underneath the hem. She pivoted and held out a hand.

“Synchronic Narrative Storm,” she said. Her grip was firm, her eyes amused.

“Horrocks Mathematical.” He hoped he didn’t look as embarrassed as he felt. No wonder he had almost recognised her. Atomic Discourse’s caremother had sent him a very sharp note when the girl had been training in his habitat, and something of her appearance and demeanour had accompanied it like a synaethesic scent.

“Ah, sorry about—”

She released his hand and waved in front of his face. “Forget it,” she said. “I was just being overprotective. Caremothers do, you know. Come on in and meet the gang.”

She led him past a long stone-walled pool in which fat, lazy mullets swam in salt water, to an area behind it at which a dozen or so people had gathered in the shade of orange trees. Some perched on the pool’s wall, others stood or sat around a few round white-painted wrought-iron tables. In a corner, chicken flesh sizzled on a barbecue. Horrocks recognised only Awlin Halegap, who sprang up to welcome him and introduce the rest. They were all founder generation, their skins deeply tanned, their teeth bright, their dress casual. Six men and seven women. Horrocks shook hands, filed names, tabbed faces, accepted a tall glass of clinking ice and flavoured dilute alcohol, and tuned his perceptions to the conversation.

As he’d expected, he couldn’t follow the buzz. It was not a question only of his elders’ higher bandwidth. Even in normal speech they carried more information than he could process. These people had known each other for centuries. Allusions zipped past his head like deflected meteors. He found himself missing jests, or laughing loud and alone. He began to wonder why he was there. It was only after the last gnawed chicken femur had been thrown on the coals and the last finger licked that Synchronic turned to him with an explanation.

“You’ve gambled in terrestrials,” she said. “So have we. Of course none of us expected such an interesting terrestrial, any more than you did. But unlike you, perhaps, we’ve leveraged some of our stakes into long futures — decades, even centuries in some cases.”

Horrocks nodded. “Wouldn’t be much use to me,” he said. “I expect to be out of here well before then.”

In ten or so years of normal development, the sun-line’s power supply would be switched over from the engine to a purpose-built power plant drawing on the Destiny Star system’s indigenous resources, most likely some combination of solar and fusion power. The cones would disengage from the great spinning cylinder, which would become an autonomous habitat and, in all probability, the hub of the system’s culture and commerce. The crew would construct a new cylinder, almost fill it with the right mix of asteroid rubble, metals, and organics, populate it with whoever wanted to be part of the next founder generation, fire up the engine to generate a new sunline, and away they would go, to repeat the whole process another few centuries hence.

“You don’t intend to stay?”

“No,” said Horrocks. “I’m crew, and that’s all there is to it.”

Synchronic gave him a teasing look. “You’re sure of that? Some of the crew always elect to stay.”

“And some of the founders always choose to go.”

She smiled at his riposte. “True enough. And it’s always a surprise, even for them, or so I’m told. But for now, you’re certain you don’t want to stick around here?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said, with a hint of regret. “That puts you in a good position to be objective. You see, our interests are potentially in conflict with those of the ship generation.”

Horrocks was shocked. The harmony of interests between the crew, the founder generation, and the ship generation was almost an axiom. He put down his empty glass and, without thinking, refilled it.

“I don’t understand,” he said. He looked around at the ancient faces and found no clue in them.

“You know the ship generation,” Synchronic said.

“Not as well, surely, as you,” he said.

She smiled, with a trace of impatience. “You’ve seen a lot more of them since they grew up than I have. You’ve trained scores of them.”

Horrocks nodded. “Hundreds. I’ve been favourably impressed. They’re enthusiastic, eager to learn, quick to pick up.”

“I should hope so,” said Synchronic. She glanced around the others. Something flashed between them, too fast for Horrocks to decode. “They were raised for this adventure; they were, in a sense, bred for it. That’s our problem.”

“I still don’t see the problem.”

Chandrasekhar Limit Lamont, a habitat-design entrepreneur in a blue skirt and a buzz cut, leaned forward, elbows on knees, spreading greasy fingers. “They’re eager to start colonising,” he said. “The ship is like a seedpod about to burst.”

Horrocks nodded. “Of course,” he said. He wondered if the man knew of his wonderment at the plant genetic machinery dispersal system. Unlikely — the image would be familiar to the flatfooter. “If I’d grown up in one of the small settlements, getting out would be the foremost thing on my mind. Apart from sex, I suppose.”

Synchronic laughed. “It’s the same thing.”

“Still,” said Horrocks. “The problem with that?”

“Is that we may have to delay colonisation,” said Chandrasekhar.

Horrocks had heard the option being bandied about, on the margins of the raging debates about whether or not to contact the aliens. Hearing it put forward as a serious possibility startled him.

“If you want to know how the ship generation will react to that,” he said, “you don’t need me to tell you. You already know the answer. They’ll not stand for it. They’ll be furious.”

Chandrasekhar nodded. “That’s what we expect, yes. We were curious as to whether you would confirm it. Nevertheless, it’s a step we may be forced to, in the… awkward circumstance.”

“Why?” Horrocks asked. “Everyone’s tooled up for the usual sky-down approach. We don’t have to go near the terrestrial for centuries. Or any of the planets, come to that. Apart from scooping helium 3 from the gas giant. The aliens don’t even have to notice us.”

“Oh, they’ll notice us,” said Armstrong Phillipic Natura, an artist. She regarded him over the rim of her glass. “Unless we stealth all our comms, which is impracticable. And as soon as we start doing things, they’ll see the industry.”

“What if they do?” Horrocks asked. “It still doesn’t affect them. Not until they get space travel, anyway. And when they come out, we’ll have plenty to offer them, and no doubt they us.”

“It’ll affect them long before they get space travel,” said Chandrasekhar Limit.

“We know this?” Horrocks asked.

The three who had just spoken to him exchanged looks.

“How much,” asked Synchronic, “do you know about what people did before they lived in caves?”

The shade had covered the sunline. A few lights had come on in the courtyard. Small insects had become bothersome. Horrocks stood staring into the pool. Mullets nibbled at what he had spewed in it. The sight failed to disgust him. He felt cold. He did not look again at the pictures that Armstrong Phillipic had conjured in his head, but their images remained in his memory. It wasn’t that they were news to him. He’d known, in the abstract, that terrible things had happened in the deep past. Everybody did. It was part of education. But — wisely, he now thought — the teachers and careparents and even the history texts had never brought it home to him; never rubbed his nose in it; never given him the full picture.

The pictures were bad enough, but it was the mentality that had produced the reality they depicted that had shocked him. His prehistoric ancestors seemed more alien than anything down on Destiny II. No, that wasn’t it: they were precisely as alien, and the aliens as prehistoric.

The clique had long dispersed, but for Synchronic. He heard her light footsteps, felt her arm across his back and her hand on his shoulder, her head against his upper arm. He took a deep breath. Her scent was motherly, with a faint erotic tang.

“Feeling better?” she asked.

“Not really,” he said.

“I can tell by your tone that you are,” she said.

He shrugged away from her and paced around the pool, all the way around and back. She had sat down on the wall. He sat beside her. “I am better.”

“And you know what we would like you to do?”

He could see her register her mistake as soon as the words were out of her mouth. His flare of anger subsided. Anxiety had driven over her tact.

“No,” he said. “I don’t. And even if I did, I’m not sure I’d agree to do it.”

“That’s fair,” she said.

“It’s knowing that their just knowing that we’re here will drive them to — all that.” He clenched his fists. “It makes me want to go down there and tell them to stop — make them stop — teach them the law of association — make them see it—”

Synchronic laughed. “That’s one option, yes. Only the most dangerous one. The reaction we most want to avoid.”

“ ‘We’?”

“The Red Sun Circle. And others of our generation, of course. But the first priority is to have a moratorium on colonization. At least in the inner system. We might get away with starting in the cometary cloud. They might not be so worried about us there, even if they detect us, which they will.”

Horrock snorted. “Ask people to wait fifty years while we trundle back out there? No way. And the crew wouldn’t be too happy either, I can tell you that.”

The cometary cloud was usually the last of a system’s resources to be exploited. Though vast, it was far too thin a gruel to satisfy a ship generation keyed up for asteroids and moons and planets. Horrocks doubted even that it would be practicable to colonize it, without the power and resources of an inner system at one’s back.

“All right,” said Synchronic. “Scratch that. So — shall I tell you what we want you to do?”

Horrocks felt a momentary combination of dismay, at what he might be enjoined to do, and self-importance, that these ancient and powerful people should need his help. It faded as he reflected that he was, in all likelihood, far from the only one of his generation who would be thus approached.

“Please do,” he said.

“As a microgravity trainer,” Synchronic said, “you have some influence and respect among the ship generation. You have credibility. Especially because your speculation on terrestrials was so profitable to you. It gives you some glamour.”

“That was Awlin’s doing.”

“Nevertheless, it exists. Call it a halo effect. We would be very grateful if you would use what influence you have to ask the ship generation to be patient, to forgo colonization for as long as it takes for us to work out some solution. Bear in mind, we expect some good informed and considered advice to come from the Red Sun system in less than eight years.”

“And how long would it take to implement this expected advice?”

“We don’t know.”

“It could be decades,” said Horrocks. “Frankly, even asking them to wait eight years would be like — well, as your friend said, like telling a seedpod not to pop.”

“It has to be done.”

Living half a millennium, Horrocks thought, could put a lot of steel in a voice.

“All right,” he said, “but even if I did try to do that, I have no way of using my influence. Except talking to people I know. I’m no public writer or speaker.”

“You can start by talking to someone who is,” said Synchronic. “Atomic Discourse Gale.”

He stared at her, feeling he was either being teased, or had been caught in a wile. “She detests me!”

Synchronic’s gaze was unfathomable. “I know. It’s only to be expected… at her age.”

Now what did she mean by that? He chose not to inquire.

“She’s very likely to argue against anything I say, take the opposite position just because it’s me who’s—”

“Yes, yes,” said Synchronic. “Let us worry about that. You do your bit, make your case, and let the law of unintended consequences take care of the rest.”

“All right,” said Horrocks. He rose to his feet. Synchronic remained seated.

“Don’t go yet,” she said. She smiled, looked down, and looked up. “All this talk about seeds popping.”

14 365:05:14 20:10

“Your thinking is metaphysical.”

Thus Grant, this morning. I stared at him. That’s the first thing he’s said that I couldn’t understand. We had met, as usual, by the newsline hotspot on the corner of Fourth and Curved, and were walking, as usual, to the Yellow Wall Cafe, reading our grabs as we went. I blinked away columns. “What?”

“Abstract, not rooted in experience.”

“Oh, you mean about the contact clause?”

I’d concede that: my query, though published in several significant outlets, hadn’t drawn so much as a comment.

“No,” he said. He shoved his hands in his shorts pockets and walked on along Fourth. “In ‘Learning the World.’ ”

“You’ve read it?” I said, with what I hoped was the right mix of appreciation and sarcasm.

“All of it,” he said. “Last night.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, thank you. So what’s metaphysical about it?”

“Your arguments about what the existence of aliens tells us about the universe. You start with the principle of mediocrity — that we are in no unusual situation, not privileged observers — and conclude from that that if there are aliens with an origin and level of development so close to ours, the galaxy is about to light up with alien transmitters.”

“Nothing metaphysical about that. Two close together is unlikely unless there are lots all over the place.”

I held the cafe door open for him.

“Oh, but it is,” he said, breezing through and barging for the counter. “Metaphysical.”

“I still don’t understand what you mean by that.”

“You start from some point of logic and try to deduce something about the nature of the world.”

“As in, one plus one makes two?” I put the corresponding pieces of berrybread on my plate, one by one, under his nose.

“One and a half, now,” he said, chomping.

We got our coffees and sat down.

“Let me give you an example I trawled up,” he said, half a cup and several rounds of argument later. “ ‘From the principle of plenitude, we conclude that God would have created aliens. From the Fermi Paradox, we conclude that if there are aliens, they would be here. But there are no aliens. Therefore God does not exist. Discuss.’ ”

I nearly choked on a mouthful. “That isn’t a metaphysical argument! It isn’t any kind of argument! It’s a rocking string of non sequiturs!”

“So it is,” he said. “And so’s yours.”

“Where did you drag that up from anyway?”

“Prehistory,” he said. “Early decades AG, anyway. And it was, I suspect, a parody of arguments even older than that. Or perhaps contemporary. Consider this one. If humanity is to fill the galaxy, the human population at that time in the future will be many orders of magnitude greater than the present human population. Agreed?”

“OK.”

“Therefore the probability of being alive in a future galactic human community is billions or trillions to one greater than being born now, when humanity only fills a tiny fraction of the galaxy. But we are alive now, which is very unlikely unless there is no vastly greater future human population. Therefore humanity will soon become extinct.”

I pounced on a too obvious flaw. “It might just stop expanding.”

Grant shook his head. “You still get far more future humans than present humans, even if we stay with same population for say the ten million years it would take to fill the galaxy. And thus, the same desperate improbability of our existence among the first, unless we’re also among the last.” He looked around, shoulders hunched. “Doom lurks unseen.”

“That’s even more stupid than the last one!” I said. “Somebody has to be among the first. It’s just a brute fact.”

Grant leaned back, patted his belly, and smiled. “Exactly.”

If he’d made a point I didn’t see it.

“I mean, somebody could have made that argument when they were in the caves.”

“It was made before the caves, actually,” said Grant. “But don’t you see? Your argument is of the same type.”

“No, it is not,” I said. “That argument starts with a completely arbitrary notion, the ‘probability of being born,’ which is probably meaningless in the first place, and tries to deduce without any additional facts…”

At that point I ran out of road. I could see where I was going. “All right,” I said, with ill grace. “Point taken. So how do you explain it?”

A serving machine beeped. Grant took the coffee pot from its top and refilled our cups. He finger-tipped the machine and it wheeled on.

“Maybe it doesn’t have an explanation,” he said. “It doesn’t have to. We can in principle explain how life arose and developed and so on on both planets of origin. What else do we need to do? Do we need a separate explanation of why it arose on two so close together? Why? It’s just a brute fact. It happened. Things do. Events.”

“It’s still a big coincidence.”

“Yes,” he said. He gazed at me with a serious expression, unlike his habitual flippancy. “It’s a big coincidence. It’s something we can’t explain. But as far as we know that’s all it is. And if it isn’t, we’ll only find out by discovering more facts, not speculating, no matter how logical that speculation might seem. The way to learn the world is to look at the world.”

I could hear some criticism there, some tone of disappointment and reproof. And (sorry, Grant, if you’re reading this) I did not take it well, and I had no intention of letting him take it further. So I resorted to saying: “You’re a bit intense this morning, Grant Cornforth.”

“Yes,” he said. He sipped his coffee. “Sorry.”

I took this undeserved apology with a gracious wave of the hand. “That’s all right. Well, I have work to get on with. Same time tomorrow?”

“Of course,” he said. As I stood up he added: “Nice dress, by the way.”

I looked down at the rippling emerald satin shift. “Thank you,” I said, stepping away.

“Good choice,” he called after me.

“Yes, but the choice wasn’t mine,” honesty made me admit, over my shoulder. “My caremother sent it to me.”