Claire smiled.
"Am I funny?"
"No."
"Then why are you smiling?"
"I find your customs - Dahlia customs - antiquated. Charming, but antiquated."
"We're a very violent society," he said, turning the skewers. "We have to have customs and ceremonies, otherwise we'd constantly offend each other and soon none of us would be left. Some things are not done. Attacking a civilian is one of them."
"Were you worried?" She sipped the pink drink. It was sweet, tart, and refreshing, with a trace of alcohol. She realized it must be wine.
"Yes," Ven said. "I was worried. I didn't want you to be hurt because I was caught off-guard."
"I wasn't worried," she told him.
"I noticed. You handled the whole situation with the poise of a seasoned kinsman." He laughed. "A violent psycher paralyzes your mind, and when he lets you go, you calmly ask if you should alert the authorities. You kill me, Claire."
Kill. A dangerous word. "I considered screaming in blind panic, but I didn't want to break your concentration."
"Was that a joke?"
"Possibly."
He raised his glass. "Congratulations."
"Thank you." She grinned and drank her wine.
Ven frowned. "I don't know what Castilla has on Sangori, but I called a friend of mine in the Provinces, Celino Carvanna. The man is a financial shark, so if something is going on with Sangori, I will soon know about it."
Ven took a plate from the trolley, used a fork to slide the meat and vegetables off the skewer onto it, and passed it to her. Claire took a bite. The meat tasted smoky and tender and completely delicious.
"This is great."
"There is something about food cooked over the open flame," he said. "I don't know if it's a racial memory from the time we huddled around the fire in animal skins, but there are few things as flavorful."
He raised his glass. She raised hers and he clinked it against hers. "Do you like the wine?"
"I love it. This is my first taste."
"No wine on Uley?" he asked.
"No. Occasionally we would be issued grain alcohol, but no wine." She bit the meat and chewed, savoring the taste. "Do you and Castilla have some sort of prior history?"
Ven sighed. "Yes. Yes, we do. My father was an off-worlder. He came to Rada with nothing except the clothes on his back, but he was a very powerful psycher and my mother's family took him in. He became a client It's the next step up from the retainer. When you're a client, you are almost family. My father fell in love with my mother and she fell in love with him. They married. He took the Escana name, because our family had status and name recognition, while his surname meant nothing. They were both older at the time, so it was a surprise when I came along."
"Were they happy you were born?"
He nodded. "Yes. I had a happy childhood. The money was tight, but tight by kinsmen standards. We had a nice house. During summers, we'd go to the coast to swim in the ocean. It was beautiful. Endless water, brilliant blue, as far as you can see and under the surface fish in every color. The mountains thrust right out of the water, and I'd sit on the rocks and watch the shark dolphins play..."
She almost said, "You see the bionet as the ocean, don't you, Ven?" but caught herself. Claire Shannon, the secretary, wouldn't know that.
"My parents loved it so much, they live there now. I always wanted to live on the coast." Ven smiled.
"So why don't you?"
"There are very few businesses on the coast. The ocean storms six months out of the year, so little shipping is done by water. The ports are mostly for tourists. Besides, most of the family is here. Our business interests are here. My father and mother have little concern for Guardian. Neither one of them is really the business type. They have the ability, but not the ambition required to grow a business."
Ven shrugged, leaning back. His face seemed almost melancholic, and then he shook it off.
"Anyway, back to Castilla. As I grew up, the family realized that I was their most valuable asset. I'm a stronger psycher than my father, but we had very few resources to make use of my talents. De Solis is an old family. A lot of money, a lot of connections, and decades in the bionet business. So, my parents approached the de Solis with a marriage proposal. De Solis would get a powerful psycher and Escana's financial issues would be resolved through the alliance."
He seemed unperturbed by the idea of his family selling him. "How did you feel about it?"
Ven drank his wine. "Imagine that you're eighteen years old. On this world eighteen means you are a man, expected to support yourself and your family. You're the golden child; your family expects you to lift them out of misery and solve all their financial problems, and you have no idea how to do that. You have a lot of anxiety about it. Then your father comes to you and says, 'You don't have to go to college and you don't have to worry about finding a job. All you have to do is marry this beautiful girl, make her happy, and work for her family business. They'll train you, they'll teach you to develop your talents, and one day you'll inherit the whole enterprise. You'll never have to worry about a thing.'"
"Sounds great," she said.
"I was all about it," Ven said. "Ask any eighteen-year-old boy and he will tell you he'd jump on the chance. And Castilla was gorgeous. She had breasts the size of grapefruits."
Claire blinked.
"I'm trying to give you my eighteen-year-old perspective."
"So her breasts were a large factor in your calculations?"
"Yes. Sex with a beautiful girl on regular basis, I wasn't going to pass that up." Ven shook his head with self-mocking expression.
She laughed.
Ven refilled their glasses.
"What happened?" Claire asked.
"It turns out that I knew about the negotiations, but nobody bothered to tell Castilla. She was sixteen at the time and she was a kinsmen princess: expensive clothes, pricy jewelry, endless parties... Anything daddy's money could buy, she bought. She set the scene. She had a crowd of flunkies following her around, egging her on." Ven stirred the coals with a metal poker and set a few more skewers over the fire. "Somehow the rumors of the possible engagement leaked and one of the tabloids cornered her. She was at a party at the time, surrounded by her hangers-on. They asked her what she thought about the engagement."
He fell silent.
"What did she say?"
"She said, 'Well, of course every beggar boy wants to marry a princess, but princesses don't dream of marrying into panhandler families.'"
Even with her minimal knowledge of Rada, Claire knew the insult to the Escana family was monumental.
"The tabloid had her on vid, and they ran with it. Her father tried to quash it, but it was too late. The engagement was impossible after that. Castilla's parents were furious with her."
"Because of the insult to you?"
"That, but mostly because her conduct was vulgar. It made her seem stupid and spoiled and it was unbecoming of her family name. Kinsmen mothers would play the vid for their children as a demonstration of how not to behave in public. De Solis had been above reproach and now they were deeply shamed. Her father told her, 'You think you're a princess? Let's see how you will do without my money.' Everything stopped, all her parties, all her shopping sprees, all of it went away. Her crowd dumped her. She worked for the family company and was given just enough money to live on. To this day her spending is tightly controlled. She hates me. You saw her today, she was practically frothing at the mouth."
"You hate her, too."
Venturo stirred the coals again, the light of the fire playing on his face. "It took me eight years to scrape together enough funds to start Guardian. I took every job I could find. I remember two months after Guardian opened, a contract fell through. We couldn't pay the power bill. We got one terminal working, because we had to log in and patrol for our monthly maintenance. We had it running off the aerial's generator. I'd drained it dead. When I think where I could've been
if we had married... She set me back about fifteen years."
Fourteen years ago the Intelligence soldiers had led her away from her mother's apartment.
"Do you regret it?" Claire asked.
"No. If I went down that road, I wouldn't be the person I'm today. I'm not indebted to anyone. I own my business, I own this building, many people feed their families because I provide them with jobs. I got there on my own. Nobody tells me what to do."
"Except Lienne."
Ven grinned. "Except her. She never lets me forget that I have family obligations. The other day she actually sent a pulse through the building looking for me. It's a kind of psycher wake-up call."
Yes, I know, it gave me a headache. Claire bit her tongue.
"Besides, I'd have to be married to Castilla." He grimaced.
Claire sipped her wine, feeling the pleasant heat slide down her throat. "Why aren't you married, Ven?"
He shrugged. "I work. A lot. Psychers aren't exactly a common kinsman variant and dating non-psychers is difficult." His face slid into a suave expression. "Hello there," he said in a smooth bedroom voice. "My name is Venturo Escana. I can read your mind!"
Claire laughed.
"I can tell when you're lying and I can discover all your secrets. I'll know when you fake it in bed, I'll know when you cheat, I'll know when you spend too much. I'll know what you really think about me. Don't you want to marry me?"
She finished off her glass and squinted at him from above the rim. "Would you read your wife's mind? You don't read our minds at work."
"Probably not," he said. "But there is always the possibility that I could and that's enough. Your turn to tell me about yourself."
"It's not that interesting," she said.
"I'm interested. I'm dying to know how you ended up on that planet."
She sighed. "Very well. Melko and Brodwyn are actually large mining conglomerates. Both of them owned mining fleets and they strip-mined asteroids for years. It takes a lot of skilled workers to run mining operations on that scale. Mining fleets always attract weird people, individuals who don't fit anywhere else, and the employees of both conglomerates had pretty varied histories.
"Then Brodwyn scouts discovered Uley, which is basically a mineral treasure trove covered with a thin layer of rock. The scouts came back but somehow Melko found out about the find. The official Brodwyn version is that one of the scouts was captured and Melko tortured the information out of her, but official versions are usually untrustworthy. The Melko fleet was more mobile at the time, so they wrapped up their operation and landed on Uley, on the Eastern Continent. It took Brodwyn almost three years to untangle themselves from their trade agreements and then they landed on the Western Continent."
"And the arms race began," Ven said.
She nodded. "The resources were severely limited so both Melko and Brodwyn adopted no-waste policies and encouraged population growth to build their armies. There was only one city on each continent and they looked exactly the same: picture a hive of uniform rectangular buildings about half-kilometer tall. The buildings were so large, each one was like a village ran by a Building Association. You would be born, live, work, and die in the same building sometimes."
"It sounds bleak."
"It was. On most worlds when a war breaks out, both sides have access to prior culture, to art, to pre-war luxuries such as gardens, clothes, entertainment. We didn't. Most clothes were standard issue and un-dyed. We had one solid meal a day, usually a meat block and some sort of grain, the rest of the time we had nutrient paste." Claire hesitated, not sure how much to share. "When I fourteen, I was taken away from my mother."
"What do you mean, taken away?" He refilled her glass and emptied the rest of the wine into his.
"It was decided that I should become a part of the military support staff, so some soldiers came and took me away from my mother. I was given new rooms in a Military building and I had to live there. My father had died years ago, and my mother was sick with Meteor Shower Virus. A lot of mining people get it - it looks like black burn marks on your skin. Nobody knows why it flares up, but the outbreaks will spark and die out on their own. The MSV is incurable. It attacks the nervous system and it's a very slow killer. The victim becomes weaker and weaker, until they lose the ability to walk and then fade into death. All you can do is make the person comfortable."
She took a swallow of her wine.
"Normally a child of my age would be working and would be expected to take care of their parent, but I wasn't allowed to do that. The Building Association stepped forward. The Elder, Doreem Nagi, apparently said that nobody in his building would die a slow death alone. The Elder has the legal powers of magistrate: he can marry people, divorce them, he acts as civil judge and so when he made that decision, people listened, and the building collectively took care of her. There were about three thousand people signed in the building, but toward the end with the war and all only about seven hundred residents remained and every day someone watched my mother and made sure that she had food, was clean, and took her pain killers. I owe them a debt I may never get an opportunity to repay."
"I take back my sad story," Ven said. "Yours is worse."
She shrugged. "There isn't much more to tell. I would wake up, go to work, come home, fall asleep. I did this for fourteen years. And then suddenly the war was over. We didn't even know. They told us we were winning until the very end."
She sensed discomfort emanating from him. Her story affected him, but he wasn't sure how to respond without offending her. Mighty Venturo Escana, lost for words.
"Well, that part of my life is over. Now I'm here," Claire said. "Drinking pink wine and enjoying good company.
"And eating meat cooked by a barbaric user of fossil fuels," Ven said.
"I love the food here," she confessed. "I don't know what most of things are, so I just order at random."
"New Delphi is the culinary capital of the South. Or it claims to be. Truth is, everyone in the Provinces is expected to learn to cook whether we like it or not."
"Oh?"
"Oh yes. In the Provinces, if a woman is a bad cook, people make jokes." He leaned closer. "Mina, Lienne's daughter? Can't cook at all. Everything she makes tastes awful."
Claire smiled. "I'm sure anything I made would be awful as well. Sometimes when I taste food, my mouth feels overwhelmed. This whole planet is overwhelming: the clothes, the colors, the people..."
He leaned toward her. "You're the most disciplined, grounded person I know, Claire. I've never seen anyone hit the ground running the way you did. Nothing rattles you. If you had a psycher mind, you would be something else on the bionet."
She could tell him. He wouldn't betray her. She could "I feel at ease with you," he said. "Your mind is so calm. Every day I deal with people whose minds are a source of constant noise. When we work together, I can finally relax."
She almost screamed in frustration.
"You understand the way I think. I want you to know that I value that greatly. I promise, I won't put you into a harm's way again. It took courage to handle it the way you've done. You stood by me. Not many employees would in your place. I won't ever forget that."
Employee... That's what she was, an employee. She shouldn't have deluded herself.
"Did I say something unpleasant?" he asked.
"Not at all. I just realized it's late. I should be getting home." He would never see her anything else. She was Claire with a quiet mind. That was her value to him. She had mistaken his friendliness and concern for something deeper.
"I'll walk you to the ground floor."
She rose. "It's alright. I know the way."
Ven got up. "Let me walk you down."
She turned and looked at him, keeping her voice flat. "It's not necessary. Thank you for the meal."
Claire turned and walked away.
Chapter Five
"One blue pepper, cut into strips," the Artificial Intelligence announced.
Claire
surveyed the small heap of ingredients on her kitchen island. "Define blue pepper."
"Blue pepper: pungent fruit of a Moloccy species rich in lycopene and Vitamin C. Flavor: sweet, slightly bitter. Appearance: dark blue, cylindrical shape tapering toward the tip."
The picture of a blue pepper ignited on the kitchen's digital screen. Claire plucked the pepper from the bunch and placed it on her cutting board. "Demonstrate."
The AI opened a frame showing a woman deftly chopping the pepper into five millimeter wide rings.
Claire watched it for a few seconds, picked up the knife, and chopped the pepper.
It was Saturday morning and she had woken up with a sudden need to prove to herself that she could cook. Immigration had fully stocked her refrigerator with raw ingredients, so she set them out on the counter and had the AI run a comprehensive analysis finding a combination that would result in a beginner-level recipe.
"One peeled compa, cut into strips."
"Define compa."
"Compa: fleshy fruit of Karlovskaya species, rich in Vitamin A. Flavor: sour, with sweet aftertaste. Appearance: red tetrahedron with rounded corners."
Claire picked out a rough pyramid-looking red fruit. "Demonstrate peeling."
The woman on the screen scraped the compa with some sort of implement that did not look like a knife. Claire pulled open the kitchen drawers, rummaging through until she found a similar looking tool.
A soft chime rang through her apartment.
"You have visitors," the AI announced dutifully.
Venturo. Her heart hammered. Her mouth went dry.
"Visual," she said.
The screen ignited. Claire's heart sank. Tonya stood at the door, accompanied by an old man and another that looked in his early forties.
She clenched her teeth, furious with herself. This obsession with Ven had to end. It was turning her into an nervous wreck, catapulting her from one emotional extreme to the next. Enough was enough. Claire exhaled, finding calm.
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