It was almost dinner time. The craft had already spent hours preparing for the meal, but it scrutinized the arrangements with renewed fervor. Most of the passengers were eating in the many restaurants of the Medina, of course. There, low stone walls guided windy cobblestone roads onto unexpected tableaux— exquisite fountains, river walks, false desert vistas—all under an artificial sky that held a different drama each night. Subtle dramas, of course: a building storm, the slow rise of a comet, not the alien bombardments doubtless playing in its giant cousin's skies. The Queen Favor made slight changes in the Medina's layout every night. It generally knew where individual passengers intended to dine, through an overheard conversation or a request for advice, but the ship sometimes subverted its charges' desires. It enjoyed guiding like-minded parties into proximity through the shift of a wall here or a suggested table just there. When the waiters arrived at their stations, they might find their restaurant slightly larger or smaller, or perhaps hidden behind some new feature of the landscape to accomplish these ends.

It had been a good trip, so far. A late-evening brawl between two factions of NaPrin Intelligencers had seemed a disaster at first, but the passengers had buzzed with excitement about it for days. Several of the combatants had even become friends. That was the NaPrin for you. But a very few of the passengers seemed not to be enjoying themselves. Unavoidable, perhaps, among hundreds, but tonight the Queen Favor was not in the mood for rationalizations of scale.

A young woman traveling alone was usually not a difficult charge. The one in question spoke numerous languages, and the ship had introduced her (explicitly and through connivance) to artists, athletes, politicals, aristocrats, lottery winners, drug addicts, absconding criminals, mercenaries, and even a very deadly though civilized species of brain parasite whose legally dead host was quite handsome. She had impressed them all, but she herself had never seemed more than politely engaged; worse, she had never answered any of their requests to dine together. Not even to say no.

Her profile was odd, too. She was beyond rich. Economically Disjunct, to be exact. EDs were rare, but one encountered them often enough in the super-charged economy of humanity's four-hundred-year expansion. A patent on a universal application or a prospector's claim on a unique resource created individuals whose wealth was no longer worth keeping track of. Entities such as the ship (itself disinterested in money, a necessary fiction used by humans to organize themselves) simply allowed the Economically Disjunct to indulge themselves limitlessly, while quietly redistributing their real wealth as they saw fit. The informal agreements that sustained Economic Disjunction were not strictly legal, but being ED was a hard life to complain about. And it was certainly a more humane fate than the crushing burdens of absolute, planet-buying wealth. The life of an ED was without care, without limits on experience except those of the imagination.

And yet again she was dining alone.

The Queen Favor accessed, not for the first time, the woman's profile. The document was replete with the usual medical, financial, and personal data, the sort of preference file one accumulated over a few decades of high-end travel: the customs, temperature, and dominant color palette of one's home planet; the formality level that serving drones should use; the sleep patterns preferred when shifting gradually between the different day-lengths of planets of call. But the data for this woman seemed strangely flat. The usual surprises, contradictions, and rough edges of highly personal data were missing, as if her life were merely a textbook example composed with a deliberate lack of remarkable features. True, at the beginning of her life there was a fifteen-year gap in her personal history; a strange absence of data. Of course, even in the Expansion displaced orphans were not unknown, or perhaps the missing data had to do with the unusually high level of her security clearance. But she seemed to have emerged from this historical lacuna fully formed, without neuroses or physical trauma, and fantastically wealthy. There was an absence of interests, hobbies, phobias, and obsessions in the profile. No glaring request to be left alone, but equally no hooks or obvious pathways that would match her to suitable companions. Her habits, her social skills, even her brainwaves all gleamed as smooth and frictionless as a wall of glass.

Presumably, she was just the sort of passenger that a giant, barbarous passenger ship would leave to her own devices, expending no more effort than absolutely necessary. But for the Queen Favor, the woman posed an irresistible challenge. If nothing else, the ship would find her someone to have dinner with.

The Favor expanded its pursuit of a solution. Like a chess computer increasing the ply-depth of its analysis, the vessel cast aside current customs and plumbed its vast database. The search plunged into the great architecture of its memory core like the roots of some ancient tree searching for water, extending to sift the social rituals of other centuries, of alien species, of fictional realities. Finally, it discovered a solution in the annals of pre-Expansion Earth. It was simplicity itself, really. A purposeful mistake would be made, reservations erased and then reinstated. A shortage of tables, such as might have existed in the old days of scarcity and error, would be created. The woman would be forced to join another party's table. A heady breach of etiquette protocols, but surely that was the point of being a person as well as a spacecraft: one could bend the rules. Best of all, the plan relied on a measure of randomness so complete that the usual predictive modelling techniques were worthless. The scheme was complex and would require many more machinations tonight; perhaps several attempts to get it right. Its pursuit was almost an act of faith.

Preparations were made. Quiet messages sent to various restaurant staffs, with attached conversational avatars ready to answer any objections. And somewhere below a cerulean sky just now darkening enough to see the first flickers of a deliberately sparse meteor shower, a few stone walls rumbled tardily into place.

Gas particles, indeed!

Mira waited until the sky was dark before going out.

She prefered to wander the streets at times of the ship's day when she could be almost alone. During the height of dinner hours, the winding paths emptied of traffic; the restaurants, bistros, and cafes would be lit up and loud with talk and music, and she would share the thoroughfares with only a few intently hurrying latecomers. Looking into the light spaces from the darkness, cataloguing the modes and flavors of enjoyment without participating, like an observant foreigner travelling alone without any facility for the local languge: fascinated but removed.

When she became tired and hungry, and as the first diners began to finish and drift into the street looking for fresh entertainment, she settled on a place without thinking. For Mira's purposes, the restaurant had only to be dark and neither threateningly full nor revealingly empty.

She raised one finger as the maitre d' intercepted her, a signal she had minimized to a mere shadow of a gesture. It meant: alone. He seated her, as often happened, in a corner.

Mira wore a garment that looked formal and expensive, but was without a designer's imprint. Indeed, it had been costly only in the way of combat hardware. It generally appeared to be dark gray, but it contained a few terabytes of borrowed military code that gave it a subtle sort of camouflage ability. When she sat for a long time in one place, it gradually blended into the background, the ultimate wallflower's petals.