Bron looked up, blinking, because the man had dropped his hand, was walking past her, was ambling off.

She watched him, tears suddenly banking her lids. The thought came, insistent as certain knowledge: What I want to do is just ... She clamped her eyes and mind against it.

Two tears spilled one cheek.

She blinked.

A feeble kaleidoscope of dim lights and massive sculptures cleared and flashed; she blinked again; it cleared, it flashed. What she knew was that she just must never come to a place like this again. Yes, he may be here, he may even be searching for her, here; but there was just no way in which, here, he could find her, she could find him. She must never come here; she must not be here now. She must get up, she must get up now, and go.

Half a dozen more men (and two women; yes, the place did have informal rules) came and stood near her, signaled or did not signal, and walked away. Hours passed—had already passed. And far less people had stopped near her during the last few. Was the rumor of her indifference being whispered to all and sundry about the place? Or—she looked up, having momentarily drifted off—were there simply fewer people?

She could see less than a dozen about the whole arena. The cleaning crew had turned on harsh lights along the far side; coils of cable dragged the gold carpet, behind the humming machines ...

Before she went home, she stopped in the all-night cafeteria two blocks away, which, while she was there, began to clean up too. Sitting in a back booth (after the little table-speaker had politely asked her to leave the front so they could mop), she drank two bulbs of coffee, the first with lots of sugar, the second black. Nobody bothered her at all.

On her desk, when she woke, was the red—and silver-edged envelope of an inter-satellite letter. The return box said D. R. Lawrence, beneath which was a twenty-two-digit number. Under that, in parentheses: Neriad. Bron frowned. Standing naked on the warming carpet—one of the balloon chairs beside her heel kept pulsing in its collar, trying to decide if it should inflate—Bron fingered open the flimsy:

Bron better put a semicolon no a comma I’ve been meaning to come see you for months italicize months but then suddenly there was all this and as you no doubt have already noticed I’m not even at the old snake pit anymore or even on Triton but on Neriad and so I thought the least I could do was write. Guess what. Twenty-year’s interest in aleotorics has paid off. Have been swept up by a traveling music commune and would you believe that all of us one night after how many hundreds of hours’ meditation and rehearsal simultaneously had a religious revelation that it was time to bring our music to others and so now we are singing for real people practically every night can you imagine with my voice but they seem to like it. Mostly I’m A-and-R man really but I’m desparately happy at it. And I think we are bringing a lot of people joy. Last night’s audience was twenty-six thousand. They went wild comma but I’m recovering nicely thank you this morning under the ministrations of a lovely friend who simply atatched himself to me right out of the audience just like that and who has just this minute brought me breakfast in bed. It’s so nice to learn at my age that there are even more complex and elegant games than vlet dash though I will warmly welcome a game with you should the music of the spheres once again suspend us in the same chord. We head off next to that nasty little moon of Pluto’s parenthesis where there aren’t even twenty-six thousand people all together but that’s religion for you I guess parenthesis and anyway this is just a note to let you know there’s life in the old boy yet as if you cared heartless beauty that you’ve become but I’m Wiffles what are you doing oh really now stop it Wiffles stop it I’m try—

ing to dictate a letter oh that tickles oh come on you dear creature I simply won’t let

That was all there was.

Smiling, she put the letter down. But there was also, wheedling at the back of the smile, regret. As she looked through the cupboard for clothes, it grew until the smile flaked away before it. She was already late anyway and still exhausted from the previous night; she closed the cupboard and decided to take the day off from work.

And the day after that, back at the hegemony, she threw herself into the three new accounts that had come in, with a vengeance. (What else was there to do while she waited?) For the next week she kept up the pace, occasionally wondering what this must be doing to her efficiency index but, at the least glimmer of pleasure, damping the thought—with more work. Work now was not for pleasure or pride or reward; all those had been abnegated. What was left was merely a frantic, nearly religious gesture of respect toward time; no more.

A week later, one morning when she had been in her office perhaps an hour, Philip paused at the door, looked in, stepped in: “Audri asked me to stop by and take a look in on you. About eight months ago you were making noises about needing an assistant—at which point, if I remember, we sent you about six in succession that, for one reason or another, were pretty poor: wrong field, wrong temperament—you name it, we sent it to you.” Philip looked at the floor, looked at Bron. “Not that we have anyone on tap now, but I was just wondering—well, Audri was wondering; but since things have loosened up around here in the past few months, if you still wanted one ... ?”

“Nope.” Bron went rummaging through a drawer for another folder—and noticed that Philip had stopped to look through the flimsys she’d left on top of the wall-console; “Don’t get those out of order please,” Bron said. She found the folder.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Philip said. And then, to Bron’s growing surprise and distress, hung around for the next quarter-hour, making the sort of pleasant small talk you couldn’t really take exception to, especially from your boss.

He left.

She sighed with relief.

Ten minutes before lunch he was back: “Hey, let me take you out on my credit this afternoon—no, don’t say you’ve got another appointment. I know it’s not true. Look—” Philip’s bearded smile brought back Sam’s black one at the bar, a layer of it friendly, another layer of it mocking, and something that was totally Philip and wholly unpleasant, beaming through—“I know we grate on each other’s nerves from time to time. But, really, I would like to talk to you this afternoon,” which, from your boss, was another thing you didn’t refuse.

Philip took her not to the company dining room, but to a place across the Plaza where they sat in an enclosed bubble of opalescent glass, the table between them rimmed with black and gold, for all the world like an interplanetary letter-form; and over a remarkably good, if somewhat lichenous, lunch, Philip launched into endless gossipy speculations about two of the junior programmers, about Audri, about himself—his commune was thinking of moving further along the Ring, which would leave their place opened; Audri was due for a credit reslotting, and really she was much better at this job than he was and, maybe, ought to think about taking their place over, if she could find some compatible people to get a family going again and to furnish the other necessary credit levels. When was his group vacating? Well, he wasn’t really sure, but ...

Then they were leaving, Philip was still talking, and by now Bron, having become tired of her own annoyance and exhausted with pretending it wasn’t there, was morosely wondering if perhaps this wasn’t all some ineffably gentle prologue to getting fired—or at least a serious reprimand. She remembered Audri’s warning two weeks ago. In all her new zeal, she might have committed some really amazing blunder that had just come to light. Was that possible? In the general confusion of her current life, she found herself thinking she could have done anything. Well, then, she was ready—