“Your wife’s on, sir.”

He’d called and told Judy he’d be doing an overnighter. He hadcalled.

Hadn’t he?

“Put her through.” Deep breath. He heard the click. “Judy?”

“Setha?”There was upset in that voice. “Setha, she’sblond!”

Their daughter’s hair. He dimly recalled an argument. Kathy’s desire for a new haircut. An appointment at Whispers, begged for by his wife.

All of which was a thousand k from current reality.

“Judy, have you looked at the news since yesterday? There’s a ship from Earth coming in.”

“It’s platinum blond!”

Kathy had gone blond. He couldn’t imagine Whispers doing something like that without consultation.

“Judy, just calm down. It’s just hair. It’s not a mod. It grows out.”

“I want your support in this! I don’t want you making any more excuses for her!”

“Not a single excuse. Didn’t the shop call you first, for God’s sake?”

“She didn’t go to Renee! She ducked her appointment and went to one of those walk-in places!”

Their daughter Kathy, blond. Olive skin, dark eyes, and the best shops—and blond. It was an appalling thought.

But not a thought on a scale that could engage his attention today.

“Judy, just calm down. Take her to Renee and get it fixed. Buy her a new outfit.” So his fifteen-year-old daughter bleached her hair. It was one more shot fired in a generational war. His wife, a queen of society whose conservative taste ran to pearls and gray suiting, hadn’t radically changed her hairstyle in twenty years. Now Judy ran up against a daughter who had her mother’s iron will and a dose of free spirit from God knew where. Kathy’s ideas came bubbling up in color combinations that—her mother’s words—belonged down on Blunt Street. Kathy thought that was a goodthing. Judy didn’t. The argument was loud. Judy’s demand for obedience in matters of reputation and appearance was inflexible.

Personally, he felt sorry for his daughter.

On an ordinary day.

“I can’t just take her to Renee! Renee has appointments! And I can’t take her into Whispers like this, in public!”

“Renee can come to the apartment, can’t she? Just explain the problem, pay the woman off—buy her theater tickets. It can be fixed, Judy. Just use your imagination. And don’t call me with the details. I have a serious problem here. We all could have a serious, career-ending problem if dealings with this ship blow up, and I can’t think with the two of you going at it. Just take care of this yourself. All right?” Calm, quiet voice, against Judy’s panic. It was a secure line. Security saw to that, constantly. “Take a deep breath. You have my complete support. Call Renee. It won’t take that long. It’ll all be fixed.”

“I don’t know why she does these things!”

“It can be fixed. It’s not an illicit. She’s not pregnant. Go do it, Judy. I love you.”

Click. Judy hung up, not happy. Judy was going to go have herself a cry and call Renee, and cry some more after that.

Trendy, too-tight clothes. Too much makeup. Kathy was fifteen-going-on-twenty, and Judy was trying to keep her socially respectable in a crowd Kathy had the brains and the family connections to rule with an iron hand, if she ever set her mind and her energies to it. Notably, Kathy could toss Ippoleta Nazrani and her little fuzzy-sweatered clique into social oblivion in another year, ifKathy didn’t squander the social capital she had before her taste caught up to her budget.

He relied on his wife to bring on that day. He detested Lyle Nazrani. He truly detested Lyle Nazrani, and particularly Lyle’s wife Katrione, without whose vitriol the whole arena scandal would never have existed. And he extended it to their social queen daughter, the bane of Kathy’s young life.

“Ernst?”

“Yes, sir. I do copy. I’ll try to handle anything she needs. Breakfast is here, sir.”

Well, something went right.

0915H. EARLY TO WORK. With a pile of diet wafers and a snack bar balanced on a saucer in one hand, a pot of caff in the other, and a notebook under his arm, Procyon navigated the door of his basement home office, elbowed the switch, and let the robot turn the lights on.

He let the door shut on auto, set down his load on the cabinet, and settled into the depths of his work chair without spilling anything, step one. The automatics had turned the room-ringing monitors on. The second of two transcript sticks dropped into a tray.

Step two, arrange his notebook and set spillable items into various holders. Step three, pour a cup, settle back, and take a sip, first good caffeine hit of the morning.

Step three, pop the sticks into the reader.

He flicked a finger to scroll the transcript past his view of the room, transparent mode, floating in air, so they seemed—so he could still see the relay monitors. He had implants—could see one thing in one eye, one thing in the other, and still see through both to account for what was going on in the screens, but he didn’t like that much input at once while he was still on his first cup of caff. He coordinated the transcript vision to both eyes…visual, because he wholly detested listening to audio acceleration. The jabber, even computer-sifted for significant bits in emphasis, gave him a headache. He preferred the civilized act of reading.

And reading, this morning, turned up an interesting discussion Marak and Hati had had with the caravan workers last night. He wasn’t sure whether the information in the discussion was new to the record, and thought probably it wasn’t—astronomical probability it wasn’t, in fact, in the long history of this post—but it very much interested him, to the point he conceived a notion of writing an official memo expanding on those remarks about preimpact wind patterns, relative to something else Marak had once said on hiswatch.

It might get more attention than his last effort, which had turned out not to be news to anyone else in the PO.

Second sip. Personal ritual as fixed as the station in its orbit.

He counted himself beyond lucky to get his assignment, letalone to have day shift. After midnight down on the world, when staid, scholarly Auguste was online, didn’t produce much activity—well, not the truly significant kind—except in the mornings. If there was any of the three shifts he had rather have, it was Drusus’s, whose watch was during the station and planetary evenings, when Marak often grew philosophical, or discussed plans with his companions and his wife. But his shift was certainly next-best, full of the midday’s activity.

And important, God, yes. His job, with his two associates’ effort, was the most important thing that went on in all of Concord, and not only in his own estimation. It might not be the most exciting, in the day-to-day conduct of things as certain people would see it, since they were watching—in the slow, day-to-day scale of mortal humans—the re-evolution of a planet, on a geologic scale. More to the point, they recorded and analyzed the day-to-day doings of the one living individual who mattered most in the Treaty, the one ongoing life that for some reason kept the ondatthemselves intrigued and watching. Marak had lived through the Hammerfall. He was still alive. Mountains rose and eroded away. Tectonic plates moved. And Marak went on living, and the ondatwent on sitting here at Concord, watching, and refraining from war.

Procyon Stafford was the latest of a long, long, longline of observers.

And the transcript that came to him said that things were routine, that Marak and Hati had reminisced during Drusus’s watch, slept through an uneventful night on Auguste’s, risen and ridden out with their companions in the tail end of Auguste’s, all this in intermittent contact with Ian, back at the Refuge…that absentminded flow of information passed between two men who had been sharing random remarks for all of time, and who long since had learned to finish each other’s sentences.