"Great!" I said, too heartily, to conceal my confusion, and reached for my purse. "Gosh, that was quick, too; I thought you said this would take all day, Steph, and it's only been three hours." Three interminable hours. Three hours that would have been more pleasantly spent staked out on an anthill. But who's complaining. After all, Stephanie was doing me a favor; showing me how to present myself in the World of the Paper-Pushers, a skill I'd never quite mastered on my own. If I wanted to work here instead of on Dazau-

"Where do you think you're going?" Stephanie and the hairdresser said simultaneously as I reached for a hip pocket I no longer had. Oops. No jeans. Pencil-slim gray skirt that not only hobbled my knees, but wouldn't hang right if you dared put anything in the token pockets. Where was that purse?

"Well, I thought-"

"Sit," Stephanie said, sounding as if she were talking to a recalcitrant dog. "Sit. The cosmetologist is going to show you how to do your face."

I sat.

Did you realize some people can spend two hours putting on eye makeup alone?

"I won't have time to do this every day and work too," I pointed out to Stephanie. "Oh, you won't need to," she assured me. "You'll learn how to do the makeup real fast, and then all you'll have to do is get up a couple of hours early to wash and blow-dry your hair."

I took a deep breath and thought about those pre-dawn training runs – up Black Saddle Peak and down again – when I was an apprentice in the BBG. I hadn't given up then, even though the downhill jog had been really punishing for a nursing mother who hadn't been issued her bronze bra yet. I certainly wasn't going to wimp out just because Paper-Pushers' apprenticeship rituals were harder than I'd expected.

I will admit, though, that for the second day in a row I reached home and collapsed without much energy for bugging Salla about her homework. Dennis was working late that night, meeting with a series of parents who couldn't understand why their darlings were flunking Algebra II. If Salla wanted to spend the evening in a chat room, munching on pizza, that was fine with me.

"As long as you give me a piece of the pizza," I stipulated. "From the side without anchovies."

She forked over the pizza and assured me that her Egyptian Studies project was practically done, and I left it at that. I was in bed before Dennis got home, with the alarm set for five so I could get up and do the required maintenance on my Paper-Pushers' costume, so I didn't get the benefit of his comments on my new look. And Salla, of course, hadn't noticed. When she's doing her chat room / telephone / television multicommunications thing, I could strip stark naked and paint myself with green stripes and she wouldn't notice.

From comments I'd heard from other people who had real Paper-Pushers' jobs, I kind of expected the first few days to consist of thinking up lies to put on interminable forms and waiting for somebody to tell me what to do. Stephanie had other plans.

"Drop those in your cubicle, you can fill them out at home in your spare time," she snapped when I found my way to the Composition and Distribution Center clutching my inch-thick stack of green, white, yellow and pink forms.

I looked out over a maze of chin-high cardboard partitions. It looked like a large-scale version of something Salla had built for torturing white mice in a Science Fair project last year. The inmates of the cubicles looked kind of like the mice after Salla got through changing the maze structure on them for the fortieth time. Dazed. Uncomprehending. Quiet. And with a little light of madness in the eyes…

"This one's yours." Stephanie indicated a closet-sized space near her own desk, took the papers from my hands and dropped them on a desk that was already covered with manuals and diskettes. "And that's your first project. I'll bring you up to speed after the meeting."

"Um, don't I have to have an interview? I mean, I haven't actually been hired yet." I didn't think. The people in Personnel had been rather like Stephanie: so brisk and efficient that they didn't have time to tell you what was going on.

"A formality," Stephanie assured me. "We're des-I mean, we're in an aggressively up-hiring mode at the moment. Come on, you're late. The monthly Vision Statement Meeting is about to start and I want you to sit in, get you up to speed on Xycorp's philosophy. Don't worry, you won't have to say anything, just listen."

That sounded easy enough. I made a mental note of another Paper-Pushers' translation. Did "Aggressively up-hiring mode" translate to "Desperate, as in you can hold us up for an extra sack of gold zolkys," or just "Desperate, as in we don't really care what you know as long as you have a measurable pulse?" Probably the latter, I concluded as I followed Stephanie down long tunnels glowing with the eerie blue-tinged lights that Paper-Pushers favored for indoor spaces. That might be something to worry about. Back home, the second version of "desperate" amounted to sending untrained recruits out as sword-fodder while saving the skilled fighters for the second wave of the attack. What exactly did it mean here? Maybe I'd find out in the meeting.

Ha.

Within half an hour I was completely lost and unable to translate anything anybody said. It was a hallucinatory experience. The conference room looked real enough, with an expensive oval mahogany table, padded swivel chairs, and a computer console built into each place at the table. The people looked reasonably real and competent-for Paper-Pushers, anyway; Duke Zolkir could have taken out the entire roomful with no help from his Guild swordswomen, but Paper-Pushers didn't go in for that kind of battle. They fought with words instead-and the words that eddied and swirled around that table like happysmoke were so slippery I couldn't begin to get a grasp on them.

At the beginning I figured out a few things. "Vision Statement" didn't mean that they cared whether I or anybody else could see farther than six inches without glasses; it meant that they had to come up with some words describing what they were trying to do at this branch of the company. That sounded good to me; I could have used some explanation. "Write software to do stuff, write manuals describing how to use it to do stuff, sell it to people who want to do stuff," was all I'd gotten out of Stephanie's description of Xycorp.

But the words! "Leverage" was a favorite. I thought this had something to do with getting a stick under something you wanted to move and applying force to the other end of the stick. But these people planned to "leverage" information, services, resources, catalysts, solutions… Somebody wanted to make sure that the planning process proceeded proactively; me, I wanted him to say those four words twenty-five times quickly without stuttering. Somebody else insisted that the vision statement must include the words "high payoff," "low risk," and "return on investment." A third somebody insisted that the core paradigm was a matter of principle-centered market-driven infrastructures.

Oh, well, Stephanie had introduced me as a new hire who was just there to listen and get up to speed. After half an hour I figured I'd done enough of the listening part. People were starting to shout at each other; I sat back and fingered the computer console. Maybe I could do the "get up to speed" part now, find out through the computer just what this company actually did.

Wrong again. I didn't have the passwords to access any company files. Salla wouldn't have let a little thing like that stop her, but I didn't know how to circumvent the password system. Besides, it might be a bad idea to hack into the company's system while sitting in my very first official business meeting. But I needed to do something to take my mind off the spiky shoes, the engineer-constructed underwear, and the suspicion that my oily skin was slowly infiltrating the perfect mask of makeup Stephanie had instructed me to apply. Ah, an Internet connection! Never mind the company passwords; I gave it the key words for my home system and quietly logged on while two guys in suits yelled at each other about "innovative paradigms," and "mission-critical services." Perhaps I could look up Xycorp on the Net and at least find out what their software was supposed to do.